Thrilling Combinations (Night's Black Agents)

 

Police Story (1984, Eng dub)

In Night's Black Agents main rules there's sections on Thrilling Chases, which later gets expanded to Thrilling (Any General Pool) in the Resource Book. There's enough high-octane action to keep anyone occupied. 

What happens if you try to combine two Thrilling possibilities?

Hong Kong action films are good for this. Last week I talked about Twilight of the Warriors, which has plenty of examples of Thrilling Combat combined in the same scene as a Thrilling Chase. Jackie Chan vehicle Police Story does much the same in this sequence, with a Chase mixed with Athletics and Hand-to-Hand plus a final Firearms confrontation - or Intimidate, depending on how you want to play that final showdown. 

If you, as Director, want a scene to flow like this, how would you go about it?

For starters, don't forget the existing Thriller Combat options like Feint, Evasive Maneuvers, Multiple Targets, Smashes and Throws. All these have their place in a Thrilling Sequence. If you want the players to make use of them, you may need to print out reminder cards with these rules printed out. It's easy to forget things like this in the heat of the moment. Players who're itching for Thrills may not need reminding but not every player lives for the moment when their agent get attacked by a machete gang.

The Raid: Redemption

Next, establish a Win condition for the scene.

This needs to be understood by all participants in the scene. With Police Story, the win condition for Jackie Chan is to capture the bad guys; the bad guys' win condition is to escape. In Raid, Rama's win condition is to escape; the machete gang's win condition is to kill Rama. It's easy to imagine a win condition of capture the McGuffin (a camera or hard drive with vital evidence, say), or survive until dawn (useful in a vampire game). Whatever that win condition is, everyone in the scene needs to know what it is. If it were me, I would state the win sequence right at the start.

There's a strong case for saying that the Players should have input on the win condition. The Players are responsible for Thrills; they should have a say in how those Thrills come about. Not all Players are confident enough to get involved at this stage. If yours aren't (and you know your players better than I do) you could state the win condition without their involvement. Still, you should ask. They're not going to get confident by constantly dodging their responsibilities. 

Next, establish which two Pools are going to be used.

I would stick with two. There's an argument to be made that more than two pools could be used, but then things get more complicated than they need to be and the folks at the table start losing track of who's doing what.

Take the Police Story scene. There are at least two pools in play: Athletics, and Martial Arts. Technically there's a very short Firearms sequence at the end, which could easily be replaced by Intimidation. Or the Raid sequence, where again the two abilities in play are Athletics and Martial Arts. 

There are some General Abilities which work well together. I can see a case for saying that Thrilling Infiltration and Thrilling Digital Intrusion go together like peanut butter and chocolate.  Or Thrilling Surveillance and Digital Intrusion. 

The Conversation Trailer

There are some scenes which aren't as immediately obvious, but which still work together. 

Let's say that a Network Contact with vital information turns up badly injured and close to death, and a hit team is on the Contact's trail. The agents bundle the Contact into a car (or steal an ambulance, or however you want this to work) and take off at high speed for the nearest hospital. In that case, the two likely pools are Driving and Medic, with the win condition being get the Contact to the hospital alive, or at least get the Contact to cough up the vital information before they die.

You could pull much the same thing with Driving and Shrink. In this example the Contact isn't physically injured but their mind is fried, and the agents aren't getting the Contact to a hospital but instead to the nearest location with Blocks to defend against vampires; a Catholic Church, say. The agents use Drive to keep one step ahead of the hit team and Shrink to get the Contact to cough up vital information before the end of the scene. 

Shooting and Infiltration: the Infiltration team are sneaking into an armed facility, and the team sniper is taking out opposition so the Infiltration team doesn't get spotted. 

Piloting and Driving: the agents are in hot pursuit, and the eye in the sky is keeping them updated as to the target's route. Or Surveillance and Piloting, same deal.

Now, there's a case to be made that Maneuvers do the same thing, and I would definitely agree. If a result of equivalent use can be achieved through a Maneuver, do that. However, I'm suggesting this be used on those occasions when the Thrilling option is more interesting to the group as a whole than boiling it down to one Maneuver and a die roll. 

OK: you've established a win condition and the pools to be used to achieve that win condition. Next: use both those pools as needed in the scene. Let the players decide which pool is more useful at a given moment. That pool is the Primary pool for any given roll, and the Secondary pool is used either to establish a Raise, to Swerve, or is saved for the next moment it's useful.

Let's say this is that moment in the Raid where Rama is running from the machete gang. The Primary pool is Athletics. Martial Arts is the Secondary pool. Rama is the pursued, and the machete gang are the pursuers. In any given check, Athletics is the Primary, but Rama has the option of spending Martial Arts to Raise the difficulty in the chase. Or Rama can save Martial Arts for a later moment in the same scene, where Martial Arts becomes the Primary pool and Rama can use Athletics to Raise the difficulty.

The win condition is for Rama to escape, so the mechanics are the same lead/chase mechanics used in any Thrilling Chase scene. With the difference that Rama can spend Martial Arts to Raise or Swerve, and has the option of switching at any time to make Martial Arts the Primary and Athletics the Secondary pool. 

The obvious caveat is that this gives the agents a larger pool to draw on, which in turn means the agents may be more likely to win any given Thrilling sequence. That's not a huge problem. The players should be expected to win most of the time. A story is no story if the hero fumbles at the first hurdle. 

Where this becomes interesting is towards the midpoint or the end of any given story arc, because at that point the agents have probably spent a fair number of points and taken advantage of any refreshes on offer. Now it's do or die time. They'll need all the help they can get. 

Time for some Thrills.

That's it for this week. Enjoy!  

 

Twilight of the Warriors (film, 2024) (Night's Black Agents)

 

How do you make a Shaw Brothers film without actually being a Shaw Brothers film?

You make this.

Highly recommended to all fans of action cinema. Seldom have I seen better fight sequences. The plot is vintage wuxia with a very modern overcoat but there was never anything wrong with the plot of those films. There are good guys. Bad guys. Conflict. You come in, sit down, get dazzled, and the ending comes with a crash. That's pretty much the entirety of Twilight, and it doesn't surprise me one bit that Johnnie To was once attached to this production. This is exactly the kind of thing he's good at.

I am still a little amazed that Sammo Hung plays Mr. Big, the main Triad villain. Sammo Hung! The wacky guy from Encounters of the Spooky Kind and the Jackie Chan films, the one with a hand in all the Mr. Vampire films. The top tier fight coordinator. Ye Gods. I did not even know that was him on screen. To still be doing this kind of thing in his 70s ... Louis Koo is a very charismatic Cyclone and German Cheung's AV kinda steals every scene he's in, though I think he's helped by that mask of his. It draws the eye. Philip Ng does well as King, the villain's villain - the fella biting that sword in half - but you've seen this character a thousand times before. He's there to betray and be hated. Not that this is a bad thing, far from it, and he's got that manic laugh down. All in all, not a bad actor in the bunch.

But the bit that caught my eye and lured me in was that the whole thing's set in Kowloon Walled City. 

The Walled City is what happens when nobody lays claim to a chunk of territory. Conceptually, it was bitcoin in architectural form, with all the madness and lack of governance that description implies. As nobody was in charge, practically speaking, everybody had a hand in it, and that includes criminal syndicates. It was called the City of Darkness and, while the title's evocative, it probably had more to do with the actual lack of light than any metaphysical or moral aspect.

South China Morning Post

Oddly it reminds me not a little of Corbusier and concepts based on his theories of design, like London's Barbican. Not because of its architecture but because it exemplifies one of his basic principles: you should have everything you need for work, housing and recreation within walking distance. That definitely applies here. You could spend your entire life inside the Walled City and never have a reason to set foot outside. 

The Walled City sees some play in games like Shadowrun: Hong Kong or Call of Duty but it doesn't often appear in tabletop, which is a shame. It's often a background for a fight scene. 

Let's play with that concept.

Of all the settings I could use, Night's Black Agents seems the most appropriate. A Thrilling Trace, let's say:

Trace missions are similar to Hunts, but with an object instead of a person. 

Key differences: Trace missions tend to reach a lot further back in time. 

The target of a Hunt is unlikely to have remained hidden for more than, say, 30 or 40 years (for that “former Cold Warrior who knows too much about the vampire program and retired to a garlic farm in the wilds of Montana” or “archaeology student who opened the wrong tomb and is now a tour guide in the Vatican so he can stay on holy ground as much as possible”). The object in a Trace operation might be decades or even centuries old.

So, start with the object. How portable is it? How fragile? How valuable? How rare? 

I'm not going to go into a lot of detail but I will describe this McGuffin as one-man portable, moderately fragile (as in you can drop it and it won't break, but it doesn't require Sauron's One Ring circumstances to destroy it) and unique. 

I will also say that it was located in the Walled City from the late 1940s, when refugees first established the squatter's town that came to be Kowloon Walled City, till the Walled City's demolition in 1994. That it was damaged but not destroyed in the 1950s fire, that it first came to Edom's attention during the police raids in the 1970s, and that it is known to have been one of the last things to be taken out before demolition. 

I will further posit that the players, and possibly the characters, can still access Kowloon Walled City in the modern day despite the demolition. Whether through dream, virtual reality, time travel, or having the players temporarily play characters who happened to be there at the time.

There was a Jackie Chan film, Crime Story, that used the Walled City in several scenes while it was deserted in 1993, before final demolition in 1994. That can be the last time anyone saw the McGuffin in Kowloon; some of the film crew saw it. 

Kowloon Ghosts

The characters are tasked with Tracing a vampire McGuffin that is known to have been in China and removed to Hong Kong sometime between 1945 and 1946. 

The relocation happened as a result of the Manchurian Invasion by the Soviets.  Military Science, Research, Occult Studies establishes this first link in the chain. Possible Interrogation or Interview opportunity: Professor Chernenko, a military history expert who once interviewed a Soviet soldier who saw the McGuffin first-hand. The Professor is currently working at the University of Milan.

The 1950s fire damaged but not destroyed the McGuffin. Research, Occult Studies, Criminology discovers that the McGuffin changed hands from the mystic society that brought it to Kowloon to one of the criminal syndicates that controlled the Walled City. The Wo Shing Wo took it and would keep it for the next few decades. Whether the triad understood what it was or what it could do is open to question. Possible Interrogation or Interview opportunity: Kirkland, a student of the Tao and a self-proclaimed inheritor of the mysteries practiced by the original holders of the McGuffin. Kirkland is currently in San Francisco, operating a herbalist's shop.

Edom first became aware of the McGuffin during the 1970s raids. Research, Occult Studies, Tradecraft discover the intricacies of failed Edom recovery mission Operation PERIDOT and as a bonus may discover what really murdered Hong Kong Police staff sergeant Bernard Wei during that operation. Potential Interrogation or Interview opportunity: Lucy Wei, Bernard's daughter, currently living in London. 

The McGuffin was last seen during the filming of Jackie Chan vehicle Crime Story in 1993. Some of the climactic scenes, including an explosive setpiece, were filmed in Kowloon Walled City. Research, Occult Studies, High Society, Photography discovers what happened next, or finds photographic proof of its existence and location at the time of filming. Possible Interrogation or Interview option: Andy Wong, one of the stunt actors, still hard at work in the Hong Kong film industry.

OPFOR: codename TIGER, a Jin-Gui who's seen it all through dead, black eyes. TIGER can send visions of Kowloon Walled City's past through its Send Dreams ability. TIGER uses its Illusion ability to masquerade as a family restaurant owner in Hong Kong (with zombies as the 'family'); the barbecue pork buns are to die for.

Current owner possibilities include: 

• Blackie Ko, one of the cast of Crime Story, now deceased. Ko took it as a souvenir. Ko died in 2003; presumably his estate has it?
• Edom's Pearl, who keeps it at a private estate in Mumbai.
• Professor Chernenko, who tracked it down and is studying it. Perhaps in a crumbling castle somewhere in Italy ...
• A Conspiracy Node which spirited it out of Hong Kong to Macao. A triad linked to Wo Shing Wo has nominal possession, but the Node has actual control over it and plans to use it in some nefarious deed or other.

That's it for this week! Enjoy.

Human Lanterns (film, Shaw Brothers)

 

Human Lanterns trailer

Two warring noble houses, each alike in dignity, find themselves played for suckers by a third party. The third party has a deep grudge against one of the nobles, and that noble, not realizing the depth of the third party's enmity, asks the third party to make him some fantastic lanterns so the noble can win a competition. 

The third party obliges ...

I've seen some peculiar films in my time but, brother, this one's a doozy. You think you know what's coming. Then you see what's coming. All of it. 

It's mostly shot in-studio on a handful of sets, and that allows the filmmakers to really lavish detail on their setpieces. The villain's lair is a horror-show. The main actors are some of the best, both in martial arts prowess and as actors. The villain's costume, which seems a little comical at first glance, works remarkably well and there are more than a few moments when that grinning death's head provokes an involuntary shudder. 

Definitely one to watch, on a cold Halloween night ...

But let's talk gamification. 

First, that lantern festival. Fantasy settings seldom have festivals, or parties of any kind, unless it's a celebration of the Hero's Victory or 'Christmas, but with Orcs.' Which is a shame, because festivals are a good excuse for inciting incidents and character development. The film doesn't go into a lot of detail about its festival, probably because the Shaw Brothers assumes most of the audience knew all about it. Given that it's a 2,000-year-old tradition drawing on a mix of folkloric and historic sources, there are all sorts of ingredients to choose from. 

I quite like the tradition of the lantern riddle:  "The lantern riddles are done by a host blocking one side of the lantern and pasting riddles on the remaining three sides of the lanterns. Participants will guess the blocked side by solving the riddles, which is called "breaking/solving lantern riddles"." If you guess correctly you get a small prize, but the bigger prize is prestige. 

In games like Dungeons and Dragons where riddle-tests are popular, you could easily sneak one of these into a festival and have the 'reward' be transportation to a small dungeon area, where the characters then have to find their way out again. Along the way they complete a minor quest of the riddle-makers choosing. 

Ravenloft's I'Cath setting would work well with a scenario seed like this one. The characters encounter the riddle-lantern as part of a festival in the dreaming world, and are pushed out of the dreaming world into the waking one with this quest: find a way to bring the riddle-maker's family out of I'Cath. There are some riddle lanterns in the waking world that will bring characters back to the dreaming one, but who knows who (or what) made those lanterns ...

Or in Swords of the Serpentine there could be a lantern festival organized either by a cult or some foreign faction, which is suddenly adopted as a fashionable craze by the aristocracy. Everyone flocks to the lantern makers for their latest creations, each noble house trying to outdo the other. The finest, most fantastical lanterns are prized possessions. But in a sorcerous twist, some of the best lanterns are Tainted ...

Next, the lantern maker. 

In the film it's heavily implied than the lanterns have some peculiar quality all their own, as a consequence of the method of their creation. Even knowing what they are, the hero calls them beautiful. Their luminous seductive image is the last thing he thinks of, when everything else is done.

The film doesn't answer the question, 'what happened to the lanterns?' It's set in nebulous before-times which, for the purpose of this discussion, I'm going to assume is 1800s-ish. Heavy on the ish, and probably closer to 1800 than 1850.

So in a Bookhounds game those lanterns are, perhaps, 80 years old.

Not that long at all, really. 

Antiquities with Bite

A customer of particular importance to the shop has gone Chinoiserie-mad. 

It all started with a glimpse of some antique lanterns in a Limehouse dealer's storefront. The customer, Martyn Bower, swears blind that they felt the power oozing off those lanterns, and they must have them. Except they couldn't persuade the shopkeeper to accept Martyn's bona fides and, wouldn't you know it, Martyn just didn't have the cash on them at the time. Won't the Hound do Martyn a favor and come with Martyn to the store, to help them convince the shopkeeper that Martyn's credit is good? 

Either the Hound does or does not do this. If they do, then Martyn cannot remember exactly where the shop is and they spend the rest of the day looking all over Limehouse for it. 

Disconsolate, Martyn spends the next few weeks moaning and kvetching about how those lanterns were almost theirs. Martyn seeks out anything to do with lantern making, which at least means the Hounds can pick up a few bob catering to Martyn's new craze. 

Then Martyn drops out of sight for a month or two, which at least means the Hounds don't have to listen to Martyn's whines.

When Martyn pops up again, they are looking for a particular book: The Daedalus Mysteries of Light and Art, 1743, English translation of a supposed Chinese original, author unknown, translator Dawes Hapson. Allegedly the original is a text from Shanghai but, as the only person who ever knew for certain is Hapson and he's long gone, tracing that legend is near-on impossible. 

Martyn says they got the lead on Hapson's work from his inquiries in Limehouse.

Option One:  Cult Activity. The text is real and moderately well-known to members of the Hsieh-Tzu Fan. In fact, it was one of the cult who first interested Martyn in all this: it was in the cultist's shop that Martyn saw the peculiar, bewitching lanterns. Now the cult is trying to ensnare Martyn by having Martyn create some lanterns of his own, but to do that they need to make sure that Martyn gets what he wants ... in as unsuspicious a manner as possible. Enter the Hounds.

Option Two: Dreamlands Adjacent. Martyn didn't see those lanterns in a shop in the waking world. Martyn saw them in the Dream and awoke so befuddled that he confused the Dreaming shop he saw them in with one he remembered in Limehouse. Ever since he's been trying to retrace his steps and, in so doing, treads a ritual path through London. He's on the verge of creating an Oernic Gate entirely by accident, and the Daedalus Mysteries are the final piece of the puzzle. If he gets that and makes the lanterns he's craving, London (or at least that bit of it containing the Hounds' shop) could be plunged into waking nightmare.

Option Three: Devilish Inspiration. Martyn has always been devil-obsessed. His feverish imagination has taken him a step too far. Now things are noticing him and ensnaring him in their machinations. The Daedalus Mysteries aren't about lantern making; that's just a cover. It's actually a text written by the astrologer-priests of Daoloth, who used lantern making as a metaphor - bending light itself to their own ends. The idea being to create the tiniest piece of Daoloth in this world, the most microscopic portion, which could then be used to illuminate a kind of lantern-oracle. One of the descendants of those astrologer-priests is using Martyn as a catspaw, to bring this about. Once the lantern is made, assuming Martyn survives the process, the astrologer-priest's descendant intends to take that lantern and use it in their own rituals.

That's it for this week. Enjoy!  

 

Discomfort (RPG All)

I recently took a final pass at a project that's been in gestation since 2021 (my God that seems like forever ago) and was reminded that, in that scenario, I mention a discomfiting subject: the Windrush Scandal. 

I often do these things. I will touch on a sensitive subject. I will acknowledge that racism exists, for example, and existed in a historical context. I live in a country shaped by racism; I can hardly ignore it, any more than I can ignore the air I breathe. 

I might touch on abortion rights next. The Americans put abortion on the ballot, after all, and that affects us directly. We're small; we lack facilities. If someone needs an abortion and we lack the ability to carry it out here, for whatever reason, then the next step is somewhere on the East Coast. Which will be a bit tricky if the East Coast is closed for business. 

I dislike forcing morality or mortal topics down anyone's throat, but I will say this: roleplay is one of the few arenas in which we can discuss discomfort at one (fictional) remove. We can explore ideas. We can see, and foresee, consequences. I think it is important that we do so. Without discussion, without discomfort, we do not examine our preconceptions. If we do not do that, then we carry blindly on doing whatever damage we do, without thought for the future. 

I have some sympathy for the argument that the gaming table is not the best place for political discussions. That this is where people come to relax, not debate. I would have a great deal more sympathy for that argument if I thought for a moment that the people who made it are, in fact, discussing and debating outside the gaming environment. They are not. They ignore. They stifle. They look the other way, and keeping the gaming table pure (and silent) is just one more part of a long-term campaign to keep everything else pure (and silent). 

I was reminded of this when reading a recent horror setting. I shan't name title or author. It's a fairly complex piece and, as I got to the end, I suddenly realized I hadn't seen a single mention of a black character of any kind. More than 200 pages, American location, and the one African American character I saw in the entire text is an alternate description of a named NPC. 

Pure. Silent. 

Perhaps I'm howling in the wind, but someone's got to. I admire Chris Spivey's work; I hope he has a long and distinguished career. I wish there were twenty more of him. It boggles me more than I can say that in this year of our Lord 2024 there aren't a surfeit of creators out there telling stories like these. 

There are some. Not nearly enough. 

Short post this week. Next week: stuff!

The Senses (RPG All)

First, a bit of housekeeping.

I shall be abroad next weekend, so no post. It's a bit of an unexpected trip for me but I need to see a tailor. No, really. A tailor. For lo, I am that in need of one, forsooth.

Now, on with the show.

I had intended to do a bit on Silent Hill 2, as the remake is out and, as a treat to self in October, I bought a copy. The plan - sinister and wicked, I'm sure you'll agree - was to play yesterday and talk about it today. I'd even intended to record some footage. 

Life had other plans. I couldn't get the damn thing to play. It hard crashed every time I left the cemetery, roundabout where Silent Hill Ranch is. I convinced myself it was a game problem, but in fact it was a me problem. I had to turn off my VPN. Once I did that, it worked a treat. However, the footage I'd been trying to shoot was lost to the void and it's difficult to get that 'first time' energy when I'd already seen the intro three or four times by that point. 

Still. What little I've seen so far is convincing. If you enjoy the genre and the series, it's worth your money and time. 

It does mean that I'm left with little to talk about. I haven't seen much beyond the first half hour or so. I haven't been to Neely's Bar. I can say that, while this is very like the original, it isn't exactly alike beat-for-beat. The game can still catch you by surprise, even if you - as I have - played the original, perhaps many times before. 

Let's talk about atmosphere and the senses. 

Touch. Sight. Taste. Smell. Hearing.

Let's use a stock location to explore options: an art gallery. Located in a not-quite-fashionable part of town. What used to be tenements and low-rent housing has become just that little bit gentrified, and this is the result. 

The sky is dark. Streetlamps gleam, little oases of light in inky darkness. The air is heavy and wet; a storm is coming. A brace of stars glimmer in a cloud's rent, the moon smothered. Not another soul on the street, but there are lights in some of the windows, a radio's buzz, laughter, a touch of warmth.

The gallery's doors are wide open.

The first piece that greets you as you walk in the door is a sculpture half the size of a man, twisted as if under a colossal weight or pressure, its tendons gleaming. The floor under your feet is somehow sticky; the soles of your shoes protest just a little every time you move. Peppermint. The antiseptic air is underlaid with the slightest whimper of peppermint. The sensation waters your mouth, just a little.

Touch, Sight. Taste. Smell. Hearing.

It's worth your while borrowing a trick from Dungeons and Dragons. In that system, and in BRPG to a degree though not as often, it's standard practice to write up a brief description of each room in the dungeon as the players enter it for the first time. 

Unfortunately, Dungeons and Dragons often wastes that opportunity by telling you the dimensions of the room or other trivia. As if it matters whether this room is 20 foot by 15. What matters is what the floor is made of, whether it's rough, smooth or something else, whether the air is fresh or foul.

If you've ever been into a house or office that's been shut up for a while, you know it instantly by how the air feels. A kind of trapped, heavy sensation, underlaid with a little damp or rot. If something died in here it decomposed long ago but there may still be a little reek, adding its stench to the mix. If you're sensitive, you may break out in hives or find it difficult to breathe. Your skin may reflexively prickle, as if touched by a thousand needles at once.

It's difficult to think of the right words, on the fly. Much easier to do as D&D does and write them down in advance. Which is what the Cameos and Stock Locations in GUMSHOE are for. They give you something to hang your ideas on; what you do after that is up to you.

Some ideas:

• Touch:  
• Slippery, twisting, a cat's reluctance.
• Sticky, its casing covered in fluids.
• Hot, just the wrong side of comfortable to the touch.
• Cold, as if it's been dipped in negative space.
• Sight:
• Far-off, just on the edge of perception.
• Somehow visible in every possible detail, to the least crevice and crack.
• Impossible to see completely, it fades in and out.
• Behind you - but you can see a portion out of the corner of your eye/
• Taste:
• Cloying, sweetness overpowering and omnipresent.
• Sharp, acrid, bitter, poisonous.
• Molten sunlight that lingers and vanishes.
• A sensory nail through the tongue that no amount of milk will kill.
• Smell:
• It rips through your nostrils demanding instant attention.
• Antiseptic, bitter, a thousand thousand hospital floors.
• The least hint of something, like daffodils in the Milky Way.
• Leaden absence of life, light, hope - dust, and nothing more.
• Hearing:
• A siren's bold wail, out of sight but drawing nearer.
• Laughter's warm spice, without malice, without shame.
• A sudden glimmer of caution, a warning just on the edge of perception.
• Battering and blowing, a gale demanding entrance.

That's it for this week. Enjoy!

Dungeons and Dragons Player's Handbook 2024

I am the first person to get one of these, on-island.

This according to the store owner, who ought to know.

Short version: this is about 60 pages longer than its predecessor, more or less, and feels as if there's not as much there. 

I'm guessing part of the extra length went on spell descriptions. That section is considerably chunkier, about 100 pages more or less compared to the previous book's 80-odd. However, most of the bulk seems to be character classes and their various subclasses, which has gone from 70-80 pages to about 130.

Gone are the extra creative fillips. Gone are the extracts from writers like Margaret Weis, Tracy Hickman, Erin Evans. Gone are the call-out boxes like Met With Mistrust (Tieflings) Excellent Ambassadors (Half-Elves, now extinct), Monastic Traditions, Druids and the Gods, the example characters Tika and Artemis, the paragraph of description at the start of every class section (A tall human tribesman strides through a blizzard, draped in fur and holding his axe ...). Gone is the list of recommended reading. 

Even the art is kinda gone. Don't get me wrong; there's still pretty things to look at, and plenty of them. But some of the best pieces (like a full page Ravenloft splash with the usual suspects facing off in Strahd's fortress) are taken from other books. The others ... standard stuff, I guess, but to my untrained eye it looked as if someone said 'we have six poses. Six. Don't go nuts. Stick to the six.'

'Oh, and put a smile on those faces. Everyone's having a good time, ok?' 

Not that they all grin like Joker, but there's an odd lack of genuine emotion across the board. Frankly, after a while it feels less like an exploration of epic fantasy and more like a stroll through the lobotomy ward. It's as if there were two emotional states available, neutral, and smiling. Rarely laughing. Just smiling. 

Except for the Ravenloft piece. Nobody's having a good time in Strahd's castle.

I don't mind the rules changes. It makes sense to me that, say, your stat boosts (to STR, WIS, CON and so on) are based on your background not your ra ... species. Someone who spends their entire life working as a farmer is bound to be marked by that experience. Though I will say that, if Wizards are going in that direction, they needed a lot more backgrounds. 

Particularly given that your starting Feat is also based on your background. I can see a time coming when the players say 'ok, this NPC is clearly a Criminal, so they almost certainly have the Alert feat ...'  

I don't mind the bland player character sheet. In this shiny modern day and age there'll be a dozen of those up on teh Internets in all the usual places before the week is out. Within a month there will be far better character sheets available for free than anything Wizards could put in the book.    

It should be simple enough to use existing books with this new manual. The actual changes are slight. It's the work of maybe a minute to take the information in Volo's about, say, Tabaxi, and translate that to this new ruleset. You'd need to rejig the special traits a little and ignore anything about a stat boost. That's about it. 

I don't doubt that there are some rules changes, some feat rewordings, which will cause many arguments at many tables. The one I spotted was Weapons Mastery. 

A weapon is just a stick with a sharp bit, if you don't know how to use it. If you do, you can unlock special actions like Nick, Cleave, Topple and others. The martial classes - fighter, barbarian, paladin and so on - get a kind of mastery for free at 1st level. They have the option of taking mastery in a particular weapon or weapons mentioned in their basekit (eg. paladins get simple and martial weapons at basekit, which covers a wide range of sticks with sharp bits) but they don't get mastery in every weapon they know. Just the one or two out of the basekit list that they pick. They have the option of changing that weapon mastery at Long Rest, so the paladin who was a master of the longsword can switch to being a master of the halberd, eg.

I can almost smell the arguments incoming. "But I can switch!" "Yeah, at Long Rest. Did you? No. You didn't say. You're stuck with that longsword mastery." Or "we're not having a Long Rest right now, there's too much to do." "But I want to change my master weapon!" Or "Hey! You just picked up that weapon, how come you have mastery in it?" "Oh, uh ... by pure chance I trained in this type of weapon at the last Long Rest." Or "If you just escaped from [prison/durance vile/whatever] with no weapons to train with, how come you have mastery in that one?" "Well, before we were captured, months ago, I trained in this weapon type and never lost mastery, so ..." 

Added to all that is the Weapon Master feat which is a different beast (4th level General feat) with roughly the same intended use, which might end up a feat without a user. The people most interested will be the martial classes but if they already have a form of mastery at basekit, why take the feat? There is a stat bonus attached, but there are plenty of ways to get a stat bonus that don't require wasting a feat slot.

Maybe non-martials will want it? But even rogues (damage dealers but not a natural front line weedwhacker) get the base weapon mastery at 1st level. Only the weedy wizard and suchlike don't. Maybe there's a caster build out there somewhere which wants a sub-par weapons feat? As a replacement for one of the much more useful, class-relevant feats out there?

All that said, I think the most telling changes are the switch in priorities.

In the prior edition the book goes from an Introduction (Worlds of Adventure! How to Play!) which is maybe a few pages long and then leaps straight into Character Creation, where who you are - Race, a little over 20 pages, followed by Classes, then a half a dozen pages on Personality and Background - is the important bit. It lures you in with bold, glittering ideas, followed by a spotlight on You, the Hero.

In the 2024 edition it tells you What You Need right from the jump, followed by a lengthy description of game mechanics. You're 48 pages in before it begins to talk about Classes. More than 180 pages in before it talks about Species, the new way to describe Races. 

This is a system where Who You Are is far less important than How You Play The Game. 

That could be a problem. This book, out of all the books in Dungeons and Dragons, is the ambassador. The carnival barker outside the tent, luring in the rubes. It's the one that everyone's going to own, whether player or dungeon master, experienced gamer or filthy casual. 

It needs to be persuasive. It needs to sell itself. 

I don't know that starting out with 30-odd pages of fairly esoteric rules and little significant flavor text is the way to go.

Maybe I was warned right from the jump when I saw the book had dropped all those fantasy novel quotes, the flavor text at the beginning of the class description, the recommended reading list. This is a book about the rules of the game. Not about its soul. 

That's what I meant earlier when I said it felt as if there was less here than before. Reading this is like wandering through an empty house. You see where all the furniture was, once upon a time. Nothing there now.

Ultimately, I can't judge it. Its companion volume, the DMG, isn't out yet; the Tweedledee to its Tweedledum. 

We'll see. 

I blame Greg Tito, that base, villainous dastard, for getting me back into Dungeons and Dragons. I worked with Greg at the Escapist. I remember his enthusiasm for gaming, the way his little chipmunk face would light up talking about Dungeons and Dragons. It was his persuasive spiel that lured me into Ravenloft and from there to other things. I wonder what he's up to these days ... 

       

Floating Scenes (RPG All)

I've talked in the past about having information ready for an improv moment. I said:

There’s no accounting for taste. Players get all sorts of ideas in their heads. You can’t anticipate them. They might decide to forge their own copy of the [McGuffin], or steal a copy from somewhere else, or murder all those disappointed customers. Anything’s possible.  

This is where improv comes in. I’m sure I don’t need to describe improv to you. The basic point is this: you need to have just enough random facts at your disposal that you can deploy them as necessary in a yes, and situation. If this becomes a crime scene, you need to have some stats for cops. If this becomes a fight, you need some stats for mooks, monsters, what have you. If this becomes a criminal conspiracy, you need some criminals, and so on. 

The great thing about these improv stats is, you don’t need them for one scenario. You need them for all scenarios. Which means you can re-use them as needed.

I went on to say:

When [the opposition] Acts, they take the initiative. In this case, they do a thing that complicates the scene. 

When [the opposition] Reacts, they take the back seat. Because you complicated the scene, they had to do something.

Improv Stats: in which everyone can be classified as Clever, Industrious, Lazy, or Stupid, with the qualifier Hostile, Indifferent or Friendly.

I've already discussed what that looks like for NPCs.

What does that look like in a Scene?

Just what is a Floating Scene, anyway?

Briefly, a Floating Scene is a Scene which you have sketched out in advance and deploy, as needed, in a plotline that wasn't anticipating whatever it was that the players did to start this scene. 

Say that your plot requires the characters to talk to a particular NPC and get information from them. Instead, the players decide to steal the NPC's wallet, or beat them up, or take some other hostile action that removes any and all possibility that the NPC will cooperate with them. 

Or, say they knock out a particularly important bridge.

Viva la Dirt League

That's when you need a Floating Scene. To cover those moments when you don't have anything else handy. The rabbit lurking in your hat. 

In this example, I'm going to use law enforcement as the opposition. 

Most settings that aren't overrun by zombies have some form of law enforcement. It may be very rudimentary; Dogberry and his mates roaming around with billhooks, for instance. It may be sophisticated. It may be automated, or run by magic, or depend entirely on the whims of Heaven, but there will be some poor shmoe (or group of shmoes) tasked with making sure society doesn't crumble overnight and things which have not yet been stolen remain in the hands of their lawful owners. 

The great thing about this is, because law enforcement of some kind or other exists in almost all systems, you can use the same floating scenes in different systems. The physical stats and powers will change, but a floating scene doesn't depend on stats and powers. It depends on roleplay and motivations.  

For purposes of this example, the opposition is tagged as Indifferent and Clever. By that I mean, they're clever enough not to fall for obvious ploys and they have no particular reason to favor or harm the player characters. Just doing their job. 

There are two possibilities: they Act, or they React. 

If they Act, then they were probably called into the scene by someone else. That means they have some information about what to expect when they get there. Not a lot, and it may be misleading, but the hypothetical 911 may have said something along the lines of 'shots fired!' or 'there's intruders in my house!' In the worst case they may have already been surveilling the scene from a distance, for whatever reason, and chose this moment to intervene. In that case they probably know exactly what to expect when they get to the scene.

If they React, then they stumbled into the scene. They were on patrol, or whatever the equivalent of patrol is, saw something suspicious and decided to do something. They know little or nothing about what to expect when they get there. They may overreact, or they may take the wrong action altogether. 

Much Ado About Nothing

Police Act: Medium Threat: Code 3

A police group medium threat arrive on scene. Their order of action is:

1. Arrest, if a crime is obviously taking place.
2. Shut down whatever's going on and close off the scene.
3. Investigate the scene of the crime, if a crime has obviously taken place but is not ongoing.
4. Interrogate any witnesses.

Personality: veterans at end of shift, tired but cautious. 

Resources: arms, armor, ability to summon backup (another medium threat).

Four Things:

• Someone named [insert superior's name/rank here] is very important to them and they keep referencing this person (eg. 'the captain's gonna be all smiles tonight.')
• They're grumpy about having to extend their shift and will be on the lookout for coffee or similar.
• They will not rush into combat but won't back down from a fight either.
• ROME [whatever Rome is, this time out.]

OK, so most of that should be self-explanatory. Medium threat means that they pose a medium level threat to the protagonists. You already know that they're Clever and their tactics should reflect that. They're Indifferent, so some kind of negotiation or bluff is possible but not likely.  

Police React: Medium Threat: 11-54 

A police group medium threat stumble onto the scene. 11-54 is Suspicious vehicle but really the inciting incident could be anything. Their course of action is:

1. Assert their authority.
2. Ask questions.
3. Detain any suspicious characters for further interrogation back at the station.
4. Any reasonable excuse or bluff gets them to leave the scene.

Personality: veterans at end of shift, tired but cautious. 

Resources: arms, armor, ability to summon backup (another medium threat).

Four Things:

• Someone named [insert superior's name/rank here] is very important to them and they keep referencing this person (eg. 'the captain's gonna be pissed if we don't get a move on.')
• They're grumpy about having to extend their shift and will be on the lookout for coffee or similar.
• They will not rush into combat but won't back down from a fight either.
• ROME [whatever Rome is, this time out.]

See how little changes? Exactly the same four things. The same personality, resources. The course of action is the only variable. 

OK, that's a couple of Floating Scenes involving law enforcement. There are no stats, because those will change depending on the system. The scenes are designed to be used in any system. There's not a lot of meat on the bones but that's because these are Floating; a designed scene has props, scenery, clues, but this is something you're doing on the fly, so you have to leave a lot up to chance and the situation at the table on the day.

Suppose it's not law enforcement?

If this is a horror setting, for example, it's reasonable to expect supernatural activity of some kind. Probably death, or a series of deaths, both recent and long past. Something moody and mysterious.

Supernatural Act: Medium Threat: Restless

A supernatural manifestation. A swarm of [whatever fits, rat-equivalent] invade the scene. 

If not attacked or interrupted the swarm moves in an ordered, ritualistic way, forming strange patterns and moving in absolute union. As they do so, a melody plays; the music seems unconnected with the swarm but the player/instrument cannot be seen. POTENTIAL SAN/STABILITY/EQUIVALENT loss.

If attacked or interrupted the swarm becomes an undead/infernal/equivalent version of its current form and attacks the person who attacked or interrupted it. The swarm will concentrate on that target(s); anyone who did not attack or interrupt is left alone unless that person engages them. The melody becomes a screeching cacophony.   POTENTIAL SAN/STABILITY/EQUIVALENT loss.

Once the encounter is dealt with / left to play out, a CLUE is left behind as to the nature of ROME or the mission objective, whichever best suits.

Supernatural React: Medium Threat: Restless

A supernatural reaction. A swarm of [whatever fits, rat-equivalent] are attracted to the scene.

This may be deliberate (eg. someone let the lab animals out of their cages, someone laid bait for the swarm) or accidental.

The first few of the swarm move aimlessly, like cockroaches caught in light. They can be avoided or crushed quickly. If either of those two things happen, the encounter stops at that point.

If left to their own devices, then within a number of (combat rounds or the equivalent) the full swarm gathers, and this plays out as Supernatural Act: Restless.

In situations like this you don't really need Four Things. You can have them, don't get me wrong. It will be useful to have them if there's a risk of this becoming a roleplay encounter. However, in a situation like this the more likely result is a brief combat moment and if that happens then the Four Things become basically irrelevant.

How many of these do you need? Well, how many do you think you'll use? After all, the whole point is to have these on hand for those moments when the players ski off-piste. You know your players best; how often is that likely to happen? A lot? Then you need a good variety of floating scenes. Once or twice a session? Then about half-a-dozen is a good number, to allow a choice of options. Almost never? Then you could get away with one or two prepped.

Don't forget you can re-use these as often as you like. Particularly if you play with different groups or in different settings. A Cop encounter in Elizabethan London is going to look very different from a Cop encounter in 2016 Berlin, even if the basic script is the same.

That's it for this week. Enjoy!      

PS if I were to write a list of floating scenes for DriveThru, would there be takers?