Full-Spectrum Powers

by on July 8, 2016 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: GURPS

GURPS Powers: Enhanced Senses is an interesting project. Technically, it looks at all the possibilities for perceiving the universe, and shows how to represent them in-game by re-packaging the existing abilities. In actuality, it mostly limits itself to what is biologically plausible, and leaves much of the truly fantastic to other products; this still covers a fantastic amount of ground.

Since this is a Powers book, it starts with a look at Sources that (with Foci—generally senses or a sense organ here) define a Power in GURPS. This ranges from ‘natural’ enhanced senses, to hypercognition (concentrating your brain to nothing but the information already coming in), to implants, to actual superpowers. I’m a bit leery of the 5% cost break allowed natural biological passive senses here; this is given for “technological countermeasures ranging from TL0 herbs to advanced nanotechnology”, but since Perception rolls (including opposed ones for hiding, etc.) are part of the game definition of how senses work, this makes me a bit uncomfortable. But it does meet the system definitions for getting a such a break, and it’s a pretty tiny one.

There is then a good discussion of different qualities of senses, from Vague, to Discriminatory, and Precise, and other terms that have already been in use in GURPS. It’s a very good discussion, but stops short of being great in two ways: First, I’m not entirely happy with how the hierarchy works out, especially when Basic splits into three separate paths. But this is caused by working inside the structure of advantages already given. Second, I find the discussion, and the following section of modifiers easy to mix up. The general description of what a Precise sense is is in the middle of page 7, the modifier to make something a Precise sense is near the bottom of page 8, and I usually find myself looking for the former when needing to reference the latter. I think it would have been much better to put all the information about a particular term, what it means, and the modifier used for it, all in one place. Also, I think a short ‘under the hood’ box, spelling out in one place the definition of each standard human sense, would help with thinking about how modifying them works (i.e., ‘Hearing is a Basic sense, with intermediate-range in a 360° arc’). Of course, there’s already a couple of boxed sections in here, which do not help with the sense of a jumbled presentation.

Along the way, there’s still more useful information, such as a treatment of senses that can deal damage (an electric eel is mostly sensing his environment through his electric field; the shock it delivers is an extra). Active Electroreception (eels again) gets a write up under Vibration Sense, Infravision gets split into near infrared (modern active IR equipment) and thermal infrared (poor resolution, but you see radiated body heat), and a couple more. There’s even an entire page of skill bonuses from various sense types.

And then we get to the bulk of the book. I count about 85 ability write ups categorized by what they sense: electromagnetic radiation, electricity and magnetism, acoustics and vibrations, and the ever-popular ‘miscellaneous’ (which goes far afield, from chi to gravitational waves). This is the worked-out part of the book after the first parts establish the tools to be used. Most of these these are counted as ‘supersenses’, not really possible, but tend to show up in fiction, with almost equal numbers of ‘sensor implants’ (electronic devices) and ‘enhanced senses’ (modeled after actual abilities seen in nature, plus some that are obvious how they’d work even if they haven’t been seen). It’s a very impressive list, and I doubt I’ll ever touch the vast majority of it. Those parts I do end up using will be very handy though, and the fact that they’re part of a larger set of possibilities makes it easier to understand their niche.

As a focused product, you are generally going to be interested or not, but GURPS players not wanting to worry about outre senses may still be interested in the extra crunch given to the existing hearing distances (giving their equivalent decibel levels as a way of generating modifiers at different ranges), and the table showing just how much light corresponds to the various darkness penalties. The crunch focus keeps its usefulness down for the non-GURPS player, but the extensive listing of biological and superscience abilities could be inspirational for anyone writing up aliens and the like.

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Out of the Pass

by on July 4, 2016 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: D&D

The Bloodstone adventure series came to a conclusion with H4 The Throne of Bloodstone in 1988. While nowhere near as elaborate a production as H1, with its thin box, BattleSystem counters and 3D-Adventure buildings, it was still more elaborate than the usual module with a 96 page book, and a poster-sized sheet with various maps, including a sprawling one of Orcus’ citadel in the Abyss. At this point, it went fully over to Forgotten Realms trade dress with the standard narrow frame around the cover, and the large gold-and-stone logo.

Taking ‘high level’ to new heights, the module advertises as being for levels 18-100, which brought it in for a fair amount of knee-jerk criticism. However, as an introductory section rightly points out, at least if you follow the AD&D rules as written, there’s just not a lot of difference between a level 100 character and a level-25 character as the various ‘to hit’ and saving throw tables shut down in the late teens to twenties, and past the level 29 limit of the spell tables, the only thing that continues to go up is hit points, at a somewhat modest +1 to +3 per level. Of course… that is assuming that the people playing games that have characters going that high didn’t just extend the various tables as they went. But as an official TSR product, the authors have the luxury of assuming use of the official AD&D rules without variants. There’s actually some good advice for high-level play that recommends paying attention to the rules for magic item destruction and the time for magic-types to recharge their spells (70 hours for a Magic-User to get all his spells back…). Also, several fights in the later parts of the module are actually scaled to the party’s levels.

The module begins right where H3 left off, with a war between Bloodstone and Vaasa that has stalemated at the Ford of Goliad. The Vaasan army is too big to fight (short of unexpected clever PC ideas… though that’s pretty well sledgehammered away) and can’t get past the ford (too far away from its base of power to keep all the undead going). So the DM is to present the players with the idea of sneaking into the citadel of the Witch-King Zhengyi to destroy his base of power. Since he is obviously backed by Orcus, this will also entail finding a way to confront and defeat Orcus as well.

(Warning: I keep descriptions very general, but if you wish to avoid knowing anything at all about the contents/plot of the module, skip down to the Conclusion.)

The Witch-King’s citadel is actually fairly small, and unusual in form. The DM is invited to show the players a full-page illustration of the citadel, but unfortunately it’s not very good as the artist didn’t get a description to go with the cutaway view of the citadel and drew it as the cutaway showed it (i.e., among other errors, it shows a pair of small towers to either side instead of a wall surrounding it). There’s only about 20 areas split across several levels (not the administrative hub of a large kingdom…), but is designed to present the party with a stiff mix of tough enemies (Zhengyi himself is a 30th level M-U Lich) and deadly puzzles. Once successfully negotiated, the party is confronted with a gate to the Abyss, which should look familiar after the end of H2, and a deus ex machina to egg them on to the Abyss to challenge Orcus and take and destroy the Wand of Orcus so that he will be unable to interfere with the Prime Material Plane for the next hundred years.

This  is where the module gets frustrating. The party gets dumped on the first layer of the Abyss, the realm of Pazuzu, “Palace of 1,001 Closets”. Or at least 665 of them, as there’s conduits to all the other layers of the Abyss scattered around, and the party is left to try them at random until they finally find their destination. So… Orcus is influencing the Realms through the gate the PCs just came through, and there’s no signs of traffic from his conduit to the gate? No trail? No command posts? No checkpoints on any of the conduits, letting things go through Pazuzu’s realm at will? Pretty close. Going through a conduit is somewhat difficult, and the party may encounter Pazuzu himself (along with random patrols of demons), but they’re mostly free to try things at random until getting it right. Worse, there’s no immediate way to know when they have reached Orcus’ realm (though the increased numbers of undead encountered should be a good clue).

Wandering around the Abyss and Orcus’ realm serve two purposes: exhausting the party, and challenging them with the trap of steady alignment change towards chaotic evil. There are some possibilities for a group to gather some allies (there’s a good number of demons who’d like to pull someone as powerful as Orcus down), but not nearly as many as might be thought, and they generally lead to the alignment change problem (there’s a certain amount of Lawful Stupid in force in the module).

The map of Orcus’ palace takes up the bulk of the poster sheet, making it inconvenient for the DM to lay out and refer to. However, much of what’s presented is visible to the outside, so there’s a pair of pages in the module designed to be overlayed on the map to present a full outside view to the players (not as good as could be hoped, but an interesting idea). Again, the design is inventive, and straight down the gonzo sensibilities of AD&D (hey, it’s the Abyss!), and does a nice job not telling players they can’t dodge obstacles, just that it’s tougher than it looks. I’d say inventive players will both be rewarded and suitably frustrated.

There is both more and less than might be expected after dealing with Orcus, including a pit arena fight against Tiamat, and then because two evils make a good, evil destroys evil, uh… well. The party gets to plant the White Tree of Gondor Bloodstone to protect the valley from Orcus even after he reforges his wand. There’s a very nice pair of pages at the end giving different ideas of where to go from here for further adventuring, including some that deal with native Forgotten Realms concerns, and one that concentrates on running the kingdom trough the D&D Companion Set rules.

Conclusion

The module has a lot to recommend it. The design of the various places the party goes to is inventive, major monsters/NPCs get ‘capsule’ descriptions that give the DM ‘hooks’ into running them, and if they aren’t utterly devoted to ending the PCs lives, describe how they might be negotiated with. I’ll also note that any reference I see to the module from people who played it is very positive. The climax of a high-level AD&D story deserves to be over the top, and the module not only delivers, but presents a nicely alien environment. Players who go through this should rightly feel they’ve done something special.

But I will note that despite being larger, it feels more confined than the previous modules. H1-H3 all feature a relatively straightforward story, but have sections where the players are free to find their own way to reach the goal. H1 has the players finding ways to gain the confidence of, and train as militia, the residents of Bloodstone Pass. The battles are more-or-less scheduled, but what the players meet them with is up to them. H2 is largely dungeon crawl, but turns the party loose a couple times to deal with life in the pass and explore the Underdark. H3 has a fairly scripted war, but with just a little effort, it can present them with rich options of maneuver. Better yet, that module starts out letting the players loose to solve the challenge of converting mined bloodstone into cash, and deciding what to do with this budget. Even H2, with it’s large dungeon crawl eating up much of the module, felt like it had a bit more going on than this.

The tendency of the H-series to highlight the latest major release continues here. This time, it is the Manual of the Planes. It is pointed out that demons are more powerful on their home plane, and that Orcus is much more powerful where he’s the Prime Power, and stats are noted as being adjusted to match. There’s a nice bit of using player knowledge as PC knowledge, where the DM is invited to let the players look through relevant sections of the Manual of the Planes during the initial briefing, and after that what the players remember is what the PCs know. BattleSystem does not even get mentioned in the blurb or introduction to the module, though it gets suddenly recommended to run a couple of the larger fights.

In all, it’s a good, if frustrating, end to a good, if frustrating, series. The original Bloodstone Pass is easily the highlight of the series with its attempt at doing something truly different. Throne of Bloodstone completes the series’ transition back to regular adventuring, running full-tilt away from the political realm of running the kingdom that is put together through the series, but H1 and H4 are the modules in the set that need the least playing around with to run well.

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Blenheim: Battle for Europe

by on June 30, 2016 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Charles Spenser is certainly correct in his assertion that the Battle of Blenheim is one of the more important battles of history that is not well remembered today. This is more surprising in the English-speaking world since it was an English commander in charge, and English troops played an important part in the battle.

I’m not so sure how much I can go for his subtitle, “How Two Men Stopped The French Conquest Of Europe“, however. It’s not just a tag put on by the publisher, as it is certainly an idea present in his book, but it’s not that well supported. The immediate consequences of a (likely) French victory in the War of Spanish Succession are obvious enough, but after some good analysis of  internal French troubles one wonders just how well they could have done. Finally, I felt through the entire book that the story of the second man, Prince Eugène of Savoy, was not very well served by the narrative.

In fact, Blenheim suffers most from being too close to typical English accounts of the battle, instead being much more about the story of Marlborough than anything else. There are good reasons for this, but I was hoping that the book would move its center of gravity a little further away from the instinctual ‘how great our man is’ mode.

Thankfully, the book is at the same time much more than that, and very handy for the casual history reader. Spenser does spend quite a bit of time laying the groundwork, presenting the career of Louis XIV as whole, as well as William of Orange’s resistance to his territorial aims in the Low Countries, and an account of the War of the League of Augsburg. So the background is very good, and takes up a fair chunk of the book.

The War of Spanish Succession itself is centered around Marlborough’s campaigning, and isn’t an account of the war as a whole; coverage after Blenheim drops off dramatically. That said, as with much else with the book, what is there is well done, and the Marlborough’s move from the Low Countries to the Danube is handled very well.

As a casual history book, centered around Marlborough, it’s very good, and other viewpoints from contemporary diaries are included to good effect, and I recommend it, but on that basis only. Prince Eugène’s story is given, but not in as much detail. As a history of the War of Spanish Succession it fails from not giving proper attention to the rest of the war, and as a history of the Battle of Blenheim, it spends too much time on the rest.

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Revel Bay

by on June 26, 2016 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Patch came over yesterday to try out GMT’s Flying Colors series through my copy of Blue Cross, White Ensign. I discovered at the last minute that I had missed a sheet while punching and clipping it, so I was a little under-prepared, and picked the Battle of Revel as a relatively short battle with relatively few units. It features a Russian fleet at anchor as a much larger Swedish force sails towards it (with over half the fleet trailing off off-map to enter along the same line as the at-start fleet). After a little back-and-forth, Patch ended up taking the outnumbered Russians.

My initial plan was to continue on course, and then turn to break the Russian line between the first and second ships and then… well, I wasn’t too sure what I’d do once through, since the edge of the bay would be right there, but the continued string of Sweedish ships would keep coming to let me concentrate power at that forward point.

Revel-1
After the end of the first turn. I’ve backed sails a couple times with the lead ships to have a more solid ‘punch’ once I started getting into range. Note that the light blue are shallows, and the even lighter blue areas are automatic grounding (effectively the coast).

That plan started going wrong on the second turn, when the wind turned two point (120°) clockwise, meaning that my line was now beating against the wind (thanks to the breezy conditions, this meant a speed of three for the entire line). Since the wind was now coming from the rear of the Russian fleet, there was no way to turn to make speed, since the only options would carry me away from the Russians. Only one ship got in range on turn two, and the range didn’t start getting close until turn 4. Patch had been content to sit and let things develop, but slipped anchor on his rearmost three ships at this point, and started sailing them towards the emerging melee.

During all of this, most of the marked Russian advantages started showing themselves. In this scenario, Audacity is 2 for the Russians and 0 for the Swedes, so Patch was generally firing two columns higher, and being at anchor gave him a +2 for all the die rolls. Also, the Russians have a special rule that allows them to fire twice out the same side, so long as they don’t do it in the same activation. All this is fairly needed in their situation, but it did mean that each ship was firing twice when mine could only fire once. Finally, as I was firing into the wind, I was generally firing at the rigging against anchored ships just to improve my odds of hitting anything, while Patch was firing at the hull.

Revel-4
End of Turn 4. My lead ship would anchor on the next turn to deliver broadsides while partially out of the Russian’s arc.

I abandoned formation on turn 5, leaving the forward commander to control by proximity for the rest of the game. I slowly fed in ships, getting them beaten up, as Patch broke off a second squadron to slip anchor and sail towards the fight that I was already losing. On turn eight, the wind finally shifted again, after five turns of staying steady, turning another point clockwise to put the entire Swedish line In Irons! Most ships turned to port to beat against the wind toward the rear of the Russian line, while Patch’s advancing squadrons were slowed by needing to beat against the wind themselves.

Revel-9
End of Turn 9. One ship has struck it’s colors and another will follow in a couple turns. This one will get captured by Patch.

The last Russian advantage is that they have two 1st Rate ships, while everything else present is 3rd or lower. Neither of them  is near the front of the line, but when Patch’s mobile squadrons came up, I started taking an even higher firepower drubbing (though it was nice to be getting fire that wasn’t constantly at +3). I forgot to check to see if my fleet broke off after my first ship struck it’s colors, but at least it’s low odds (I had plenty of undamaged ships) and it was getting near the end of the scenario anyway.

Revel-12
End of Turn 12/Game. Yes, those are my ships on fire, though Kir Ioann was on fire for a couple turns.

I think I did better than the Swedes did historically (a ‘handful’ of Russian casualties), but still did not actually get to the point of dismasting or flipping any Russian ships over as ‘damaged’ (some were getting close). The wind just absolutely killed my ability to do much; I needed mobility and didn’t have any. The Russians got 22 VPs:

Dristigheten – Captured
Dygden – Sunk
Riksens Stander – Sunk
Gota Lejon – Struck
Aran – Damaged
Camila – Damaged
Froja – Damaged

About a third of the Swedish fleet never got to the combat, and another third never even got on the board, as they have to enter in one place, in one direction, and the wind was directly against it for the end.

Patch says he enjoyed the game and would like to play again, which makes me very glad. He’s never really had the naval bug, and this is the first time he’s played a Age of Sail game. I certainly enjoyed it a lot, though it got depressing towards the end as more and more Russian ships got involved, and I just couldn’t do anything. I’ve been wanting to try out my set for the last month or so, and am happy I finally did.

However, there are a surprising number of places where the rules and charts still need some clean up. The sequence of play is never given in the charts (just near the beginning of the rules), and the various parts of the end-of-turn status checks are hidden in other rules rather than put where one can find them for that particular segment. A number of modifiers on the charts could do with an explicit reference to it’s particular rule. The modifier for a black or white background on the rate is looks like it says ‘+1 [to] Rate value’ instead of ‘+1 [if] Rate value…’ at first glance (I’d say “White­ background Rate value if base­ fire­powe­r is shade­d”, or better, “Shaded base firepower with white background Rate value”). Actually, I’d like a cheat sheet of all the various different symbols associated with the relative rate value. Finally, taking 6 hull hits increases the relative rate by one, but the counters say ‘-1’ and only start at 7 hull hits (I suspect it used to be a -1 firepower modifier instead of +1 rate, but the counters need updating).

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The Magic of Points

by on June 23, 2016 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: GURPS

As GURPS initially evolved, a few different subsystems started getting added on to the core attribute-advantage-skill package. One of the very early ones was the magic system in GURPS Fantasy that added spells as a complex series of skills with other spells as prerequisite dependencies, a need for an advantage to be able to use them, and so on. This would grow, and be elaborated on, until Fourth Edition’s version of Magic was a 240-page book with a couple of PDF supplements adding even more spells.

Meanwhile, the concept of advantages grew, and became more nuanced and complex, especially with GURPS Supers 2e, which introduced modifiers to advantages. In Fourth Edition the entire system got overhauled and made as complete and flexible as possible. One of the results has been a number of ideas floating around as to how to do magic using the advantage system instead of as a series of skills. SJG finally released an official product in 2015 that used this approach: GURPS Thaumatology: Sorcery. (I find it interesting that Sorcery gets put in the Thaumatology line, even though it’s a spells-as-powers system, while the related concept of magic-as-patron in Divine Favor was put in the Powers line.)

Sorcery starts off laying out some very clear ground rules: All sorcerers need to have a new Sorcerous Empowerment advantage (…which is actually built off of existing abilities, and a side note talks about how) and should probably take the related talent that boosts all rolls with sorcery. Then, each spell the sorcerer knows must be bought, at one-fifth the normal cost (i.e., if it was a normal ability instead of one of many possible spells), but the Empowerment ability must be able to cover the full cost. All of this is relatively expensive (given spell costs are from 4 to 98 points with many leveled ones capable of going higher), and will keep beginning mages in a ‘normal’ 150-point campaign either relatively low-powered, or fairly specialized into sorcery (which is not exactly against genre expectations…). Costs can increase even further as a sorcerer can only have one spell ‘going’ at a time, but can get around this by paying full cost for his most expensive spell.

Further ground rules are established with eight keywords used to define how particular spells work with consistent mechanisms instead of redefining effects, resistance, etc., every time. Since ‘obvious’ is one of the keywords, this also allows the system to easily mark which spells are easy to identify as being cast by a particular person. All spells are defined as requiring at least one second (plus one second to switch between spells) and 1 Fatigue Point to cast (with a few needing more than that, and many of the underlying advantages needed modification to bring into line), and an option is presented of speaking and gesturing instead of the fatigue cost, with the idea that character would then need to do any two of the three (so, speaking and spending fatigued while bound, etc.). Finally, a sorcerer is actually able to improvise spells (to make up for the limited options at high cost), easily if they’ve spent ten times as many points on Empowerment than what the spell requires, or ‘hardcore improvisation’ involves spending 3 FP and a Will roll to cast any spell once that would be valid to learn with his current Empowerment. This could allow casting effects not covered by any spell, but it’s noted that the GM has final say, and could declare that only existing spells can be improvised (in fact, the author’s intent is more to allow a completely new spell only if the GM decides that it’s one that should already exist in the game world, but just hasn’t been written up yet).

The bulk of the book is taken up with the write-ups of 48 spells under this system (all adaptations of spells from Magic). While that is a good number to start with, it actually works out to about two spells per college in the normal skill-based system (and these are categorized in accordance with that), so no one subject gets very much attention, and building a specialist mage (rules for which are given) would be difficult currently. The surprising part is that the attack spells tend to be the cheapest, while ‘utility’ spells tend to be expensive; if you consider GURPS advantage pricing to be reasonably well balanced, this perfectly fine, but it is surprising when you’re used to systems that keep the nasty magical hurt people abilities under the lock and key of higher spell levels.

Surprisingly, there is also a six-page section on enchanting items, with another page on economics giving the wages of an enchanter at various Tech Levels (which affects the item prices!). There’s already been a couple of different systems for enchanting in GURPS, including an extensive one in Magic. That one I never cared for, as it’s geared around making very weak magic items, or making it so hard to do (so players don’t just make everything themselves) that it seems unlikely anyone would bother. This system is more flexible (Magic gives what kind of item each spell can be enchanted into, while Sorcery lets the enchanter choose his materials), but still tries to put some interesting brakes on PC enchanters by requiring more powerful items be made from more valuable items. It’s still costly, using “Spending of Yourself” in Thaumatology to require a few character points to be spent on creating non-trivial items as well as a decent amount of time. My main problem with the system is that it still assumes that any spell can be enchanted into an item, and anything that isn’t a spell can’t. However, with the points-based costs of everything, it would not be hard to work around this. A smaller problem I have is that it is assumed an existing item is being enchanted, and there’s still no support for enchantment through the act of creation, which is popular in a lot of fiction.

Conclusion

As a drop-in-and-play system, Sorcery is still underdeveloped, as the relatively low number of specific spells quickly becomes a problem. Hopefully, we will see sequels dedicated to rounding out the system some more (it should be noted here that an early version of this system appeared in Pyramid Vol 3, #63, and it has eighteen fire spells that aren’t in the current volume; also, Pyramid Vol 3 #82 included two more spells and a full sorcerer template for use with the Dungeon Fantasy line). Even if/when there are further volumes, an eager GM is going to need to make multiple purchases (of course, Google searches for other GM’s spells will help); I think this could be a great place for an eventual package deal.

That said, it’s a great book for tinkering GURPS GMs on two levels: First, all the mechanics are explained (though often kept out of the way in clearly marked boxes) so it is not hard to start making new spells on your own with just Basic Set (though Powers would help a lot). Second, the solutions for how to build some of the spell effects are very inventive, and there are ideas to be stolen here that can be used in completely different contexts.

As a magic system, it provides a very different feel to the standard GURPS solutions as there are no magic skill rolls. An attack spell still needs a ‘to-hit’ roll, and the target gets a defense roll, but normally a mage has to make a skill roll to cast the spell before even getting to that point. Most of the systems in Thaumatology don’t change this basic fact, but merely reduce the number of skills in use from dozens for the standard magic system (up to hundreds for a ‘know-it-all’ mage) to about a dozen in Path/Book, Syntactic, and related systems. Here, the relatively high expenditure of points declares this to be something the character can reliably do, and the initial point of failure is removed.

Also, since there’s no need for the logical prerequisite chains of the skill-based system, it’s possible for a GM to create a spell set that has deliberate holes in it. The standard skill-based system was built around mages learning small effects and working up to large ones, with enough prerequisites drawing from other areas to cause trouble if a GM wanted to disallow one college. Most of the other systems have enough flexibility that a mage can always do a small spell (light a fire) if he has a large spell. Only Path/Book and Sorcery can say A does not imply B (and Path/Book is built around longer rituals and hidden effects instead of the endless potential for flashiness in Sorcery).

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