Why Does Professor Apocalypse Hate Me?

Now that the 4th of July holiday is over, back to blogging!

The title of this entry may seem a little odd, but bear with me. Recently, I was brainstorming ways to start a group of fairly advanced characters off together without resorting to the tired old cliche of "You all meet in a bar" or "You've all been recruited by the same shadowy government agency." Not only are both of them horribly cliched, but I've actually got some players who were burned by the latter once upon a time and I don't want to spool them. (Get it? Shadow government agency? Spook?)

With that in mind, I turned to what Raymond Chandler advised: When the plot slows down, have two guys with guns kick in the door and start shooting. That is to say: When you can't figure anything else out, pick an option that throws the PCs right into the action.

The game in question is Savage TORG, which I may have mentioned in passing once or twice before. Now that I'm getting ready to run my third full campaign of TORG, I find that I can't rely on the hook I used the first two times without feeling like a hack. For both of those campaigns (the first one used d20 Modern, the second one Savage Worlds), I had both groups be composed mainly of Core Earth characters who happened to be in New York the day the maelstrom bridges fell. Putting together a survivor group trying to escape New York in the aftermath of the Living Land invasion is tense, action-packed, and immersive. Heck, it's how the TORG novels open up!

Still, I want to do something different for this campaign. More than anything else, I want to offer my group the broad, wide-open character creation ability that a mature TORG campaign offers. A year into the storyline, you have characters from all of the invading realms, a bunch of random ones, and people who have converted between realms (for stuff like human shamans of Lanala and edeinos bikers). That gonzo feel is quintessential TORG, and I've partially sacrificed it both previous times I've run the setting.

As I was walking around tonight, the solution came to me: They've been kidnapped by a common enemy who wants revenge. My players are all moderately experienced with the setting, and they're building Seasoned characters, so it stands to reason they would all have an enemy who has the power and motivation to capture them.

But why wouldn't he just kill them? Because he's from the Nile Empire, the reality of pulp action-adventure! Raymond Chandler would be proud, indeed. So, now we've got a common enemy in a pulp setting who would rather capture the heroes and throw them into a deathtrap than just outright kill them, giving them the opportunity to bond under difficult circumstances and work as a team.

A guy like that needs a cool, imposing name. Doctor Doomsday? Nah, too alliterative and comic book. Something classier. I could just use Pharaoh Mobius, but he's a major player in the Nile Empire and I want to get some extra mileage out of him. This guy strikes me as below the pharaoh but above some common thug. As I was mouthing out sounds, the word "Professor" aspirated at the end to "Professor-a", and I jumped to bad-guy words that started with "A."

Thus, Professor Apocalypse was born. A little thinking led me to dub him Professor Jonah Apocalypse, PhD. I remembered that the excellent comic Atomic Robo had an arc called "Why Doctor Dinosaur Hates Atomic Robo," and from there the idea of letting the PCs pick their poison was born.

Now, I've got the character questionnaires I do before any lengthy campaign handy. For this one, there's an extra question at the end: "Why does Professor Apocalypse hate me?" I expect some inventive answers, knowing my bunch. They're all going to wake up in a brightly-lit room with killbots on the other side of the door, just waiting to put Mr. Chandler's axiom into effect.

I suppose the tl;dr version of today's blog post is this: When deciding how to put a group together, pick the option that throws them right into the action of the setting. That forces them to work together as well as giving them a great ground-level view of what they'll be dealing with right off the bat. Also, whenever possible, give the players investment in what they're doing at the beginning of the campaign. It helps immersion as well as a sense of cooperation with the GM.

Sound the Guns!

Over on the Goodman Games forums, they were discussing adding guns to your fantasy campaign, and there were people adding in that guns should be super-rare or super-expensive or super-lethal. It occurred to me that I had never gotten to rant about my feelings about this particular treatment of guns in fantasy, so I let it all out. And here's my thoughts about it, reposted in blog form:


My great complaints about fantasy worlds that decide to introduce firearms are the ideas that firearms:

1) follow the exact same form of development as in the real world;

2) are more powerful than existing weapons; and

3) are ridiculously expensive (usually to "balance out" how much more powerful they are than standard weapons).

Good News and Bad News

The good news is that I'm still alive! The bad news is that between a bruised sciatic nerve, a bout with pneumonia, and some problems with layout and formatting, "Playground of the Damned" isn't ready yet. A little more good news is that I got accepted into graduate school! Now, I just need to pick up an assistantship and find a job for the summer, and I'm pretty well set.

I've got some various things to post up here over the next few days, including the intro text for PotD and a new setting I've been idly working on: Blood and Diesel, a dieselpunk game set in the late 1930s, drawing on sources like Metropolis, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Carnivale, and Bunraku.

Let's see if we can't get this show back on the road!

Collection Services

To make up for the long drought, here's a campaign idea I came up with a little while back, called Collection Services.


Making deals with the devil is easy--after all, the devil wants people to make deals, since it's just about the only way for him to collect human souls at death. Only the absolute worst of humanity goes to hell naturally, so there's a premium on human souls. Various demons offer various things for souls: wishes, vengeance, wealth, money, fame, power, any number of things. The terms of the deal are just as varied: souls collected in one year, ten years, one hundred years, at the moment of death, soul of a firstborn child, and so on.

Unfortunately, many of those people wish for things that they then use to try and cheat the devil of his due. When that happens, the collectors are called in. Collectors are former humans, shaped and twisted by the powers of hell and sent back to earth to act as the agents of demons, who cannot directly affect mortals due to ancient pacts with the Creator. Collectors are sent in small, elite teams that can make quick judgment calls in the field on how to go about the collection, whether to be subtle or blatant, violent or diplomatic, and so on.

In between missions, collectors are given leave on earth to act as they will--rape, murder, pillage, have a happy home and family life, whatever. When the call comes, though, they must drop everything to meet with their collection agent, a demon who gives them their assignments. Fail an assignment, and it's back to the pit. Keep succeeding and damning others, and it's high living for as long as you keep up the "good work." Sometimes, that means sending an absolute sack of garbage screaming into the flames. Sometimes, that means stealing a crying woman's baby, or scraping up what's left of a life of charity and good works after a moment of horrible weakness.

You are a collector, one of hell's repo-men. May god have mercy on you, because your employer certainly won't.

More on Marikuhl soon!

New Design and Development Blog

Since all the cool kids in the gaming industry are doing it now, I figured that I should start up my own design and development blog. This little space on the internet will take up my commentary on my games at home, the work I'm doing in the industry, my trials and travails as a freelancer, and the random ideas for games and game-related projects that come into my head. Hopefully, this will turn out to be a useful web space and not fall into some sort of ugly obsolescence.

Right now, I'm sitting at home and relaxing, putting together the notes for the next system update for my homebrew. I'll try to put up some of the work for it later tonight while I'm on the job. Really, this post exists mainly to inaugurate my shiny new blog. Woo!