I finally managed to play a game of Xenos Rampant—two games in fact, it proved to be quick and easy to play. Xenos Rampant is written by Daniel Mersey and Richard Cowen, a wargame that takes Mersey’s Lion Rampant and brings it into the world of science fiction.
Xenos Rampant is a minis agnostic platoon sized game. A ‘standard’ game will probably be 4-6 units, but there is a lot of latitude. You will build your units from some core archetypes and a lot of customization. You can make fairly flavourful approximations of the sorts of units you would field in 40K. Units are typically 5 strength points, with each strength point typically referring to a single model in the unit. But the game lets you model things in a mix of ways, so a 5 strength point unit might be 5 Sisters of Battle, or a single Canoness who would track her strength points with a dice. One issue to me was that it’s easy for everything to feel a bit too similar. I ran Sisters of Battle and Evan, my wargaming compatriot, ran his weird kit-bashed AdMech / Imperial Guard minis. I built my Sisters Repentia, the chainsword wielding maniacs of the Sisters of Battle, as Berserk Infantry, with High Powered Blades, Unarmed (no guns), and *Fanatical Discipline as customizations of that unit type. There are lots of 40K units that might also be modelled exactly like this, even if you’d like them to feel more distinct. I imagine this game would work nicely as an alternative ruleset to the Horus Heresy, with Space Marines fighting Space Marines.
The game is very easy to play. Players take turns moving all their units, with a catch: you roll to activate units, and keep activating units till you fail or have activated them all. When that happens your opponent till take their turn, going through the same process. (This is similar to one of the greatest games ever, A Song of Blades and Heroes.) There are three actions a unit can take: Move, Shoot, or Attack (move into combat). In Xenos Rampant each unit has one action they can do without having to roll. After playing 2 games of Xenos Rampant I’m not sure I like the rule, the extra reliability felt overly impactful in our admittedly small sample size of games.
There is only one dice roll to resolve combat, whether you are shooting or fighting up close. You roll 10d6 if you’re at full strength, 5d6 if you’re less than half, and need to beat a target number. You need a number of successes equal the opposing units armour score to remove a strength point. There is no additional rolling or faffing about. A simple example: rolling 10 dice and getting 7 successes into a unit with 3 armour would remove 2 models (if that’s how you’re tracking strength points), the last success having no effect. Like Warcry and other games with simple resolution systems, this makes the game play super quick.
We didn’t dig into all the extra rules and advice for running the game in various settings. They have sample rules and advice for running games like Weird World War, Star Trek, etc. Between these extra rules and all the other customization, it really does feel like you could express any game or setting you wanted within this generic ruleset.
If I have one criticism it’s that the rules writing and organization of the rule book isn’t as clear or concise as I think it could be. The rule set turned out to be so simple and elegant, but I had put off playing for so long because I thought the game would be more fussy than it turned out to be. (By a long shot!) Rules sometimes don’t live where you would expect them to. The rules summary at the back of the book is missing details you would want. I plan to write up my own cheat sheet. (Maybe the act of doing so will humble me.)
Xenos Rampant is great. Evan mentioned that the Goonhammer review was so positive he didn’t think the game could live up to its hype, and yet it did! A game we will definitely return to. And yet, there is still something compelling about all that jank in actual 40K. A topic for another day.
Mothership’s play loop is pretty free-form and loose, like a lot of OSR games: describe a situation and have a conversation with your players till the situation is resolved. This loop is illustrated on page 27-28 of the Warden Manual in a neat and tidy spread. I like to run games this way as well, but I find left to my own devices my games drift towards some all vibes no rules FKR-ish nonsense.1 Forcing some structure on myself is helpful.
When I ran Gradient Descent using 0e Mothership, and Another Bug Hunt using the current rules, I never felt like I was really taking advantage of the stress and panic system. I don’t call for rolls that much, so there is less chance for people to gain stress through failure. I also don’t have a good habit for just doling stress out because it makes fictional sense.2 Folding gaining stress into the act of exploration seems like a reasonable approach for play. Here is a small update to my earlier attempt at moving the Hazard Die to Mothership:
Hazard Die
When exploring a dangerous environment roll a d10 each time the players perform a notable action (i.e. move between locations, carefully search a space, attempt to hack a computer, etc).
Encounter: roll on a random encounter table. Gain 1 stress. Environment: something about the players immediate surroundings change: lights go out, gravity fails, doors lock, etc. Perhaps there are hints of a future encounter. Gain 1 stress. Exhaustion: the characters are hungry or fatigued. They must rest or gain 1 stress. Expiration: batteries die, oxygen runs dangerously low, etc.
Easement: a moment of calm, the players may lose 1 stress, but never reducing it below the value they started the session with.
Mothership has real Alien vibes. In a horror games it feels like the general mood should always be “it’s quiet, too quiet.” Mothership’s typical 10% chance of a random encounter seems inline with that, so I left it alone. I merged what Brendan calls Percept & Locality into a single entry named Environment. I think the general intention is the same: hints at future badness. The big change from my previous table is that Encounter and Environment results tick up a players stress. As players explore a location they will slowly accrue stress.
The other results are unchanged from my previous iteration. Exhaustion forces players to pause unless they accept 1 stress. This result is only meaningful if strict time records are being kept. In Another Bug Hunt infected characters will eventually turn into bugs after enough time has passed: make sure you track that shit! If characters are being chased, this is another result that will likely result in them gaining stress as they can’t stop to chill out. In Mothership you don’t have torches, but there are lots of electronics that have a chance to break down. Expiration is the place for those failures to happen. Since we are doling out stress I thought there should be a chance for players to lose some of the exploration based stress they have earned.
Is this good? I’d have to play and see. With these sorts of rules you want to get the mouth feel just right. Maybe a violent encounter should result in d5 stress. Maybe this is way too much stress and your characters become broken husks without also tweaking the stress relief rules. I will report back.
The way I play is nonsense, not FKR, which I think is a very cool and interesting scene. ↩
How to dole out stress just because feels like something to dig into more. You don’t want to do so in a way that feels arbitrary, or takes away from the agency of the players. ↩
I reject the premise of his query: the OSR is and always has been experimental! That’s the whole point. The “R” stands for Renaissance. Of course I complained, like a maniac, and Thomas followed up his thinking on the matter:
The term OSR has a kind of nostalgic or backwards-looking bent to it. While that never applied to all individuals, it applied to some/enough. I think it’s natural for folks who break from that orientation to use different terms.
I agree that the OSR began with retroclones and people trying to reproduce the original D&D games, but that’s certainly the least interesting part of the OSR at this point.1 People quickly moved on from Retroclones. LotFP is 15 years old. DCC RPG is over a decade old. Troika is going to celebrate its 10th birthday this year. All games directly inspired by something older, pushed in new directions.
Old School Hack came out at the same time as LotFP. If it came out today people would call it “Post-OSR”, but it was released into the maelstrom because the OSR has always been more than just retroclones. Many of the replies to Thomas’s inquiry pointed him to Into the Odd, an important and influential game. Also one that’s a decade old and came out of the OSR scene on G+. Maze Rats is another example of an old influential OSR game that moves well past the world of 3D6 down the line. These games would go on to inspire games like the superlative Mausritter.
OSR modules have almost always been fresh and interesting, where a lot of the excitement in the scene has lived. Deep Carbon Observatory is over a decade old now. Brilliant writing, art, and fun to play! LotFP’s modules (boo, hiss, I know) didn’t attempt to ape TSR trade dress or vibes: they charted their own unique course. Think about how good Scenic Dunnsmouth is! On the flipside, DCC RPG modules prove you can do what TSR was doing, but better in every single way. In the Woods is ten years old now and remains one of the most beautiful games/adventures to come out of the OSR. Another example of something people would call Post-OSR if it came out today.
Reynaldo and Grey Wizard worked on Break!! for what must be a decade. A game that came out of the OSR scene, and certainly has OSR sensibilities, but feels innovative and fresh. Luke Gearing’s Swyvers is another game in this same vein. Its system feels decidedly retro, but somehow the whole game feels new—I guess because it is.
This is a lot of words to not actually answer Thomas’s question about “what’s new” and I have to apologize for that. I feel irrationally compelled to correct people when I see them parrot a definition of the OSR that I could imagine coming from the lips of the most reprobate members of this scene. Probably because it erases me, my friends, and our experience. The OSR didn’t begin and end with AD&D.
I would have called it the smallest part of the OSR, but then OSE came out and seems more popular than ever. I also shouldn’t malign the retroclones, that undercuts how big a deal they were at the time, and also misses the point that they existed so people could share their bananas adventures. I suspect most of the people that were really into OSRIC already owned AD&D 1e. ↩
Gus, Mr. Dungeon Crawling himself, asks the hard questions: why do most adventures suck? He suggests ways to improve the adventures you are writing (to sell for cash-money). Something he touches on, that gets glossed over in a lot of the discussions I see about writing and running adventures, is around that distinction between writing to be consumed by yourself versus writing to be consumed by others. You can run an amazing session with keys that look like the original keys for Dwimmermount. You don’t need fancy maps. You don’t need perfect prose. You need enough information to remind yourself of the amazing ideas in your head!
I met up with Emiel and Ava shortly after they arrived in Toronto for Breakout Con. I love to see my D&D friends in real life: that’s what it’s all about. (Our meetup also included Jon, the Retired Adventurer, who lives so close to me it’s embarrassing I only see him when Ava is in town.) I managed to see them a few times before they left, ending my convention crashing a game Ava ran of The Electrum Archive. We played through an adventure that was intended to be part of the second zine, but which was cut for space—the zine was already massive. The adventure was a lot of fun, so I’m looking forward to its release. In The Electrum Archive the typical dungeons are the crashed spaceships of an ancient people. Our characters were sent to find a missing posse of soldiers who were exploring one such ship. We would discover they had all been murdered like something out of Alien. The adventure included: someone gaining telepathy; the rest of the party not clueing into how that happened, and instead gaining random crap mutations; a giant mech suit that ended the session just hulk smashing stuff; lots of sphincters; blood, guts and gore. So, all the good stuff.
Nirvana on Fire: Expanded Edition is a 36 page module for Mothership written by David Kenny, featuring art by Jéromê Berthier and top-tier graphic design by Eric Hill. As the name suggests, this edition expands upon an earlier release, featuring additional writing, art, a nicer layout, etc. The pitch for Nirvana on Fire has the players responding to requests for help from a remote colony:
The power station on the moon Bodhisattva 2a is failing; without it, the inhabitants of Siddhartha’s Peace, the small Neo-Buddhist colony established there, will freeze to death. Abbot Benz-Shiroyuki requests aid. Print a new power converter at the Manufactory and as payment, receive salvage rights to the decommissioned Terraforming Tower at the top of the moon’s space elevator.
In his briefing, the abbot neglects to mention the tower’s AI has come to believe itself a manifestation of the deity Bishamonten. Pushed by Straylight LLC and the dire conditions in Siddhartha’s Peace, the AI is set on taking extreme measures to protect the colony, even if it requires feeding it to the flames of revolution.
I recall being sorely tempted by this book’s Kickstarter, the cover image is so bold and eye-catching. As usual, shipping was too expensive so I moved on with my life. This weekend I attended Breakout Con, where I saw the zine for sale in real life. Beautiful. When I went to pay, the lady working the stall said, “no pressure, but this also comes in a fancy box.” There is no world where I don’t buy the box.
The first party modules for Mothership are excellent and provide a strong template to follow when it comes to organizing your ideas for an adventure. Nirvana on Fire takes those lessons to heart. The module opens with a lot of information to help orient the GM to what’s going on in the scenario. The opening spread is a timeline of how the the colony on Bodhisattva 2a came to exist, how its problems have manifested. The following spread explains how you might use the module. David tells you how you could kick things off, and what “win” conditions might be. This is followed by an overview of the factions at play and the colony itself.
The graphic design of this module is top tier stuff: they should have put Eric Hill’s name on the cover. I didn’t recognize Hill’s name at first, but he’s the fellow that did the layout for Hull Breach. Of course this thing is going to look hot. Jéromê Berthier art is bold. Lots of reds and blacks. Thick lines. Together the pair take the book to another level.
There are two main adventuring sites in the initial version of this adventure. The first is the colony, Siddhartha’s Peace. It’s described in a single spread, with short descriptions for each of its 10 locations. The GM will roll on a corresponding random table as players move from location to location, which often make the locations a more dynamic. There is a revolution fomenting in the town. Some of the townspeople have become adherents of the AI Bishmamoten. A few encounters involve this tension. The last encounter on the table is “the revolution begins …”.
The “dungeon” in this module is a tower that sits atop the colony’s space elevator, the centre of their terraforming activities until the AI took over. This is 10 rooms, described over two spreads. I would have preferred if the map of the tower was less abstract: it is a simple flow chart, basically. Using the illustration of the exterior of the tower by Jéromê will help you picture the space in your head. As before, a random table provides encounters and colour as players move from location to location. The last encounter on this table is the sole monster that stalks the halls of the terraforming tower, the Spear of Bishmamonten. I was reminded of The God That Crawls or Deep Carbon Observatory, other adventures with a singular powerful monster hunting the party.
Two additional adventuring locations are included in this extended edition. They add more depth to the module. The shorter of two is an addition to the colony, written by Roy Leahy. Players can explore an abandoned Starlight facility, where the company was spying on the citizens and conducting creepy experiments. This location has a nice map. Once again the encounters table elevates the quiet space into something dynamic. The other adventuring location is Facility D-U8K81, written by Noora Masyk. This location reminded me of some of the first party adventures: descriptions are longer, keyed with bullet points. Unlike the other adventuring sites in this module, all the “monsters” to be encountered are described within the location keys. (In this adventure the random encounters table adds some colour.) Both adventuring sites are nice additions to what was already a solid module.
Nirvana on Fire has an amazing cover, and it’s honestly what got me to buy the book. But, contrary to popular belief, you usually can judge a book by its cover. This book is great: I would love to get it to the table. The boxed set comes with a pad of themed character sheets, a GM screen, some patches, and dice. I have zero regrets with my purchase, it’s honestly amazing, but it’s very decadent and certainly unnecessary. That said, these dice are great.
I love this post from Yochai about running a sandbox style game using his game Cairn and the advice and tools from its Dungeon Masters guide. I’m a big fan of people writing about how they actually prep and run games. I wrote briefly about the start of my Carcosa campaign, how I kicked it off, but never came back to talk about how it was going, or offer advice on running a hexcrawl. It’s something I keep meaning to do, and seeing this post makes me want to do so all the more.
I picked up Constant Downpour Remastered when I spotted it for sale over on Ratti Incantatti1. Constant Downpour is a survival hex-crawl for Mothership. The players crash land on Venus 3 during a routine mission. Unbeknownst to them someone had planned this crash as a hit. The players need to make it off the planet, before they go crazy or get beaten to death by the Venusians. The adventure was written by Marco Serano, and is inspired by the Ray Bradbury short story The Long Rain. David Simons is the main artist for the adventure.
There is a lot to love about this adventure. Exploring the wilderness is taxing. Marco links hex exploration to the Mothership rules for stress, to help capture the unrelenting nature of the rain, lack of sunlight, etc. There is a posse of mercenaries who crashed before the players, who will pursue them if they drag their feet. Giant Venusians who will try and kill them for being interlopers on their planet. There is the company the players are working for, who have secretly facilitated the crash, and a cabal within the company trying to bring it down from the inside. There are 17 keyed hexes, and some small dungeons. There is a lot happening on the world to draw the players in. The vibes are great.
There are clear procedures for play, something that if often lacking when it comes to running hex crawls. Characters gain stress for every two hexes they move through, forcing engagement with the panic system of Mothership. I like how simple and unrelenting the rules are. I had similar thoughts after I finished running Gradient Descent. There are additional procedures for crossing rivers, adding more depth to the activity.
There are four main factions. Potamo Major are the group that hired the party, and organized the crash. Poto Minor is a rebel group operating with Potamo Major trying to take them down. Crew 612 are another group sent to die on Venus 3—they are effectively a rival adventuring party. Finally there are the Venusians, the group indigenous to the planet. Each faction is detailed briefly, with key locations listed and the groups recent successes. There are descriptions of important NPCs following these descriptions. The Venusians or Crew 612 can be used to force the players into action when they get complacent or overly cautious.
There are 91 hexes in this adventure that have no descriptions. The GM will generate the descriptions for these hexes by rolling on random tables. For a jungle hex you roll a d10 to determine the type of jungle setting the players have encountered (dense foliage, natural walkways, complete darkness), and then another d10 for a random description of that location. There are 24 entries between those three tables. There are two d10 tables for descriptions of clearings, with 20 entries between them. Both types of wilderness have sounds and smells tables to add to their descriptions. Four rolls on various tables gives me: “A lattice of thick vines loop in the air. The vines look fleshier and bumpier than vines previously seen. The slap of large leaves echo in the thick sulfurous air. The vines ahead cross in near perfect plus signs.” I love these vibes, but this is more rolling than I want to do to generate what is effectively an empty hex.2
These tables could simply be used as inspiration, forgetting about all the rolling. Random tables are often used to communicate the nature of the world, even if you might only use one entry from the table in a game. Such tables encourages an open-ended view of the game world: there is nothing canonical. A prevalence of random tables is often a defining characteristic of OSR games and adventures. I worry people feel the need to include them where they don’t make much sense, or should be designed in a different way.3
One of the themes of the module is this idea of repetition, getting lost in the sameness of the world. In that way you could argue this approach to describing the wilderness reinforces that aspect of the adventure. If you roll up these descriptions you’ll see traces of what has come before. In Marco’s own words, “Weaponizing deja vu and melding grays work to reinforce the feeling of becoming lost to the environment.”
Travelling through these hexes in this game serves a purpose: they are a tax. Players gain stress as they move from hex to hex, and will always face an encounter. Marco has done a great job of using the mechanics of Mothership to feed into how the adventure works. There is always some amount of tension coming from each move through the wilderness the players make.
Marco’s suggestion for how to use these randomly generated hexes in play is also poor advice in my opinion:
When describing what is in front of players, it is beneficial to give two distinct descriptions. Example:
Warden: You finally see light as you break out of the complete darkness. Ahead is a clearing. The grass stands upright unaffected by the wind. It creates a mathematical curve .To the left the jungle continues and you see thousands of white orbs dangle from the branch extremities. Suddenly, the fruits fall, exploding on impact, hurling pebble sized seeds across the jungle floor. Which direction do you want to go?
It doesn’t actually matter which way you go! These are two random descriptions, and it’s likely you’ll move into a new hex with two random descriptions. Marco does a great job of placing clues, in-game maps, and geographic features throughout this module that will help the players put some thought into where they will explore in the game. This will make wandering the wilderness more meaningful. The advice given above undercuts the work he’s done.
If running this module I would generate all the hex descriptions and their encounters up front. I think seeing the encounters fixed in place might help create more connections between hexes. Where the players choose to go will be informed by what they’ve learned of the world so far. There is no need to roll two descriptions per hex. Marco has also included a lot of digital material that will help ease running a game. Every illustration is included by itself, making it easy to share with players as they encounter a Venusian Tank or a giant man-eating plant. There are six player facing ‘fog of war’ maps, and they can also be given to the players as the discover them through play. (By reaching certain locations or finding actual maps in the game.) There are even some recording you can play for your players, to make your game a little bit more immersive.
On the whole Constant Downpour Remastered is a solid adventure, and my gripes are minor compared to everything the adventure brings to the table. Constant Downpour takes some big swings. I didn’t even comment on the weird page numbering scheme or how cool the keyed hexes are! As I said at the start, there is a lot to love.
Carcosa is criticized for being repetitive with some of its hex descriptions. There are lots of hexes with a Shub-Niggurath to deal with, or yet another village. I tried to reverse engineer the setting based on the frequency of the hexes, and the details within those hexes, because it felt like there was a clear structure to copy. When I asked McKinney about this he said he placed monsters and villages where he wanted them, but used the tables found in the book to generate the monsters just like another GM might. What I like about Carcosa is McKinney doesn’t make the reader do any rolling to come up with a boring hex description: he wrote it out for you! In between all the boring is the stuff I love. I am also a firm believer that the pedestrian makes room and helps situate your own creativity in the setting. ↩
Zak wrote two good posts on random tables, 5 Kinds of Random Generators & What Makes Them Not Suck [2011] and Fast Tables & Slow Tables [2010]. Grimacing Emoji. ↩
The Bloggies have me thinking about blogging. As you well know, I am pro-blogging. I think everyone should write and share their thoughts. My personal blog has been chugging along for over 20 years! Social media is transient: blogs are forever. There is value in writing stuff down.
It is easy to feel like a topic has already been discussed, that it’s common knowledge. But common to who? My ideas about gaming are informed by the books and blogs I have read, the games I’ve played, and the friends I have made along the way. I talked to people on Google+ a long time ago and left with a sense of what I want from RPGs. There are lots of new blogs that are clearly great, but that I don’t find that interesting because they feel like they talk about topics I’m done with. But so what! Not everything needs to be for everyone. There is always someone new who will come along and not know what’s up. Maybe they find some obscure Goblin Punch post from a decade ago. More likely they read stuff being shared right now.
Clayton won the Bloggies with his post on puzzle monsters. He dubbed this idea the 1HP monster, riffing off an older forum post from stras. This is one of my favourite parts about an active blog scene. People taking ideas and running with them, learning from one and other. Clayton’s post also introduces stras’s decade old post to a new generation of gamers.
This blog is full of all sorts of posts of varying quality, and of varying interest to other people. I have a blog post about converting all the to-hit and AC scores in OD&D from descending to ascending AC, not because I thought it was revelatory, but because I didn’t want to have to work it out again. Sharing is caring, but the post was for me. There are lots of reasons to put stuff online. Perhaps the best is writing for yourself.
