NPC Art

One of the advantages of the enormous library of material in the BattleTech cannon is the rather large collection of art assets that comes with it.  This upside has become even better since the advent of widely-distributed PDF copies of sourcebooks, making it very easy to extract and re-use character pictures from even older sourcebooks.  Even some of the action shots, properly cropped, can provide an excellent dossier image for any old NPC you might want.

Obviously the books with explicit personnel entries (Dossiers, unit books, historicals, and the like) are excellent, but there are a number of other pictures I've found throughout my searches that might be helpful when you need a pretty (or pretty ugly) face.

Men
Page 76 of Book 35303 - Jihad Conspiracies  This picture is a two-fer; a very generic-looking flag officer, and a shadowy assassin whose face and body are almost entirely concealed.

Page 81of Book 35303 - Jihad Conspiracies  This again has a set of anonymous characters (although you can puzzle out who might be in the group from the text), and provides some good head shots if carefully cropped.

Page 87 of Book 35303 - Jihad Conspiracies  A scout on this page provides and excellent full-body picture that is easily removable if you need it.


Page 103 of Book 35303 - Jihad Conspiracies  The scruffy man on the right of this frame looks out of place in the original work, but removed looks like a classic profile picture.

Page 99 of Book 35204 - Handbook House Liao This page has a picture of an officer receiving a decoration. An excellent stand-in for an officer who is up-and-coming.

Page 113 of Book 35204 - Handbook House Liao Several different classes of civilian ready for use.

Women
Page 154 of Book 35204 - Handbook House Liao Good headshot available from the image on this page.


Page 63 of Book 35024 - Handbook House Davion Waist-up shot available on this page.

Page 159 of Book 35019 - Handbook House Marik Aerospace pilot.

Page 15 of Book 1715 - MechWarrior Third Edition Headshot of technician.

Page 53 of Book 1715 - MechWarrior Third Edition Waist-up shot of woman with sword.

Page 192 of Book 1715 - MechWarrior Third Edition Waist-up shot of female covert operative.

Those are just a few examples, but a few general trends to note:

I've ignored named characters here.  If you use a character with a name, one of your characters might recognize the picture and presume that that NPC is actually the canon character in disguise.  You'll never hear the end of the conspiracy theories.

Among anonymous characters, men are wildly more common than women in the books, and this difference gets magnified in more recent works -- the artists aren't drawing anonymous female characters, they're kicking out huge numbers of anonymous male characters, so be prepared to do considerably more digging through books for female art assets.

I am.  I need a picture for Dr. Jefferies.

Bioweapons Big Bad

Something that's occurred to me as I flesh out the Bioweapons plotline is that the story could use an actual antagonist.  Right now the "bad guy" in this arc is a division of the Word of Blake, which while reasonable for a sourcebook, provides very little workable material for a party of player characters.  A group like this is not practical for the party to dismantle; while hunting down every person who was a part of this group makes for interesting literature, it isn't terribly practical in the context of a tabletop campaign.  So I need to designate a specific person the party can deal with to end the threat this facility and its membership poses.

Fortunately, going back through my GM notes, there's a reference to an authority figure on the project in one of the documents I gave to the Terran party way back during their first session.  One of the transmissions Alexei gave to Simon was from a Dr. Sandra Jefferies, demanding additional food, presumably to feed the Branths.  She's clearly on-site and actively working on the project.  The email she was sending went to a Precentor Robyn Jellico, apparently the administrative overseer of the project.  Either of these individuals would make an excellent target for the party's anger.  Dr. Jefferies is probably the better choice, since she in on-site and the party might realistically encounter her.

I can weave Dr. Jefferies into the story with a few more in-game documents.  I have to be careful about actually showing her "on-stage" as it were during the next session as some characters (such as Shin) might shoot her without regard to consequences; as such, I need to be a bit cagey with her fictional security.  More on this character's build as the week progresses.

Also, this is the 100th post of Ten Years on Terra.  I am long-winded.

Tracking Tactical Movement

Back when I was playing Battlespace and Aerotech 2 on my MondoMat, we always drew a line on the battlemat when a ship moved.  This was critical information for us; last turn's movement was this turn's inertia.  At the end of the game, we invariably had these very pretty line patterns draw out that showed the entire course of the game, neatly laid out and numbered.

When we ran the arrest scenario in Montana, we did something similar, only because the only printout of the map that I had was too small to properly handle coins for each player.  The result is now I have a well-detailed and laid out record of that session.  I'm considering my accidental discovery here, and thinking about how I can enhance what I did to make it work better.

Obviously, a bigger sheet of paper would be nice for the players, but anything larger than about A4 won't fit nicely in my GM binder.  Making sure I have a pen or marker color for each PC and a black one for the NPCs would be good -- in our test case, I just used different symbols (Circle, Triangle, Square, and X) for each PC.

It is possible that this technique will track well into online A Time of War games, but I'll leave that consideration for GMs better briefed on that medium.

On A Clock

Based on the in-game combat we've had, I've been trying to think about where we could shave time.  My first impulse was calculating to-hit numbers, but really, that hasn't been so bad.  Certainly, looking up the melee combat rules every time we get down to that part is a pain, so I may have to write up a cheat sheet for those.  The bulk of the time my players spend in these fights is waiting for each other, and the reason they're waiting is because of decision making time.

Now, I've tried running games on a stopwatch before.  I've played in games on a stopwatch.  What I find is that players don't much care for it; despite the feeling of frantic intercommunication that tends to emerge as the players are working out their moves adds to the experience, the resulting turn resolution, that takes several times long, tends to destroy the flow of  the session; you just end up with a game swapping between fast-paced and very slow-paced, and it makes the slower sections seem all the more painful for it.

The last time I tried this particular tactic was when I ran my WarShips game in 2006.  The premise was each player was either the Captain or the CAG of a Star League WarShip.  Our initial way of running combat was to have the battlemat laid out, and each captain has a set of command counters for his ship, and each CAG had a set for their fighter squadrons.  I gave the PC's 60 seconds to discuss their tactics and place their command counters, and then I called the turn and ran the turn with the commands on the table.

What I found was that this severely punished some players.  A number of my players didn't think quickly on their feet; they enjoyed the table top because they could ponder their move.  The response was split, but those who liked the new system also liked the old system, and those who didn't like the new system preferred the old system, so we went back on the second session.  I'm worried about the same thing happening if I started playing stupid games like that with A Time of War, which has no provision for simultaneous turn resolution at all (players always have maximum information possible at the point of action due to initiative ordering), I fear I'd just be asking for trouble.

High Holidays

On Friday two of my players had to bail out of Sunday's session due to the Jewish High Holidays approaching, taking our game below quorum and pushing the session out two weeks.  On the upside, I don't have to truncate this session, and I can run the entire sequence in Montana in one session.  

Re-aligning  the adventure to take place in one three-hour block will mean reducing the combat aspect of it; I can't fit a three-hour fight into a one-hour third act.  Creating a 1-hour fight in this system with all five combatants should actually be an interesting challenge, and I'll be focusing a great deal of my efforts this week on that task.

Short Session

A new complication has arisen; a family gathering got rescheduled meaning I need to truncate my session on Sunday to only two hours.  I can think of two options for how to reduce this session; break it into a smaller piece, or find good cliffhanger.  So how can I cut this down?

Basically, the session has two major pieces; the time approaching the Word of Blake cordon, and the time infiltrating it, either by entering the quarantine zone or by investigating clues outside.  It makes sense to me that the session should have an introduction, a first non-combat encounter with the Word, then a more relaxed exploration segment, then end on the edge of an obvious combat.  This actually structures Sunday's session a bit more for me; I have three distinct scenes, one of which might have two forms (inside and outside the quarantine zone.)  Now I just need to create a few NPC's to populate the world I created and I'm all set.

First, I need a guard to give them the cover story -- that a Terran Resistance group set of a large explosive in the village, and that the Word has the place locked down while they search for evidence.   Then, I need the hint that something is wrong -- the trailers full of microbiologists and the presence of the Word's NBC group.  Finally, I need something to push them into investigating further -- the remains of a Branth that was clearly shot being transported in a biomedical containment unit.

These three clues to should encourage them to believe that not all is as it seems, and push them to investigate.  A few more in-game documents, a map to the Bioweapons facility, and some suggestion of what time they might be able to enter it.  Finally, as they get the last clue, a Word of Blake guard finds them, and we end session on that note.

Keiran, Montana

More planning and effort has produced this map of Sunday's engagement area.  I am still slightly stung by the lack of modern building clipart, but I think this map gets the message across.  I elected to use 900m hexes to give a sense of scale for the map, although it makes the mountains looks a little silly by comparison; there didn't seem to be a good way to do canyons in Campaign Cartographer.

The map shows no trees on the inside of the valley, an effect I intended to represent the blast there wiping the area clean of tall vegetation.  I'm not sure that comes across in this map, so I may have to describe the scene to my PC's, and consider how I might communicate that to them visually in the future.

The Pieces Of Montana

On Sunday the party will be investigating a mysterious explosion about 100km east of the site they were recently investigating in Montana.  Their adventure will bring them into contact with the Word of Blake Bioweapons division, and the party will discover that the division isn't weaponizing the Branths themselves, but developing a plague virus.  The explosion was the result of a Branth being shot and killed in the town, and subsequently releasing the virus into the population.  The Word Militia dealt swiftly and decisively with the situation.

When the party arrives, they'll find the valley where the village is to be cordoned off.   The 8th Division will have the location encircled, conducting "rescue" operations.  In fact, they are letting the virus die off and shooting any wildlife that might be carrying it out of the quarantine zone.  The party is refused access, but any observe the Word MASH vehicles nearby with technicians in full biohazard suits.  This is their first indication that not all is as it appears.

Possibly the party breaks through the quarantine and finds the inner operation, where WoB scientists are observing the effect of the virus and gathering strategic data from what's left of the town.  Here they obtain a map to the Word of Blake Bioweapons facility where the Branths are being bred and held.  I need a closer as they escape the quarantine zone; that might be combat, or some kind of navigational challenge.

The other possibility is that the party doesn't try to break the quarantine, and rather goes after the facilities outside the quarantine zone.  That will have similar rewards from a plot perspective, but is much more likely to result in a combat encounter as the 8th Division keeps a very close eye on the PC's.

That's the outline for Session 9.  More details and perhaps another map soon.

Employment

If you're like me, a data fiend, it is easy to get wrapped up in the minutiae of your PC's lives.  One item that's become quite relevant as this campaign has rolled forward has been how much money the party has available, and how fast they are accumulating more.  The ComStar personnel have finally settled into the acceptance that rescue is not coming, and they've been slouching long enough.  As such, they decided on the eve of the game's first major time jump to find work during that period.

None of them were willing to enlist with the Word of Blake or TerraSec, which made their major Career skill (Soldier) rather irrelevant.  At Clark's suggestion, Alex and David became pest hunters, shooting mule deer and the like for local ranchers.  They each make about 50 C-Bills a week doing that.  Both of them seemed very happy with the choice.

Shin was more inclined to use his tremendous bulk to do construction work.  As unskilled labor, I took the Administrator pay from A Time of War and halved it, to 320 C-Bills a month, or about 80 C-Bills a week.  He also seems quite content in his role.

After adjusting for taxes, house, utilities, and such (which only Clark and Simon are paying, since the ComStar personnel are mooching off of Clark), it turns out that while Clark still has the highest net income in the group (more than any other two combined, in fact), Simon has now fallen to the lowest income in the group, having only 118 C-Bills of spending money each month.  Even the lowly Alex and David are keep 140.  So far this hasn't come up, and Simon has the advantage of having his own home if things at the ranch become untenable for any reason, so he hasn't complained.

The practical upshot is that the party has a budget of a bit over 1,400 C-Bills a month to play with.  They obviously aren't buying a BattleMech on that kind of money, but they have been looking into ways to stretch their funds.  I find this one of the most rewarding elements of this kind of open-ended play; watching players try to do the most with what they have.

One of their plans most recently was to lease an AgroMech and retrofit it to be a small BattleMech.  This proved beyond their means (and demonstrated to me how hard it is to find out how much an AgroMech costs on short notice) but it was an interesting aside that the players had a lot of fun with.

If we get more tails of creative accounting, I'll be sure to post them.

Alexei's Apartment

An equipment shortfall prevented me from running the session and mini-game I had planned (it turns out both large maps of California and large compasses are non-trivial things to find retail.)  The session was still a considerable success, perhaps because I enhanced the story development in Alexei's apartment.  Rather than one document, I created four, the remaining three of which introduced a new actor on the scene: a Terran Resistance cell with a decidedly less subtle approach to resisting the Word of Blake.

The party started with David Cho returning from Europe, where he had been while his player, Henry, was on an international trip.  He returned with the details of David Alsace's family's death, as given in the BattleCorps fiction story To Serve and Protect.  The party was distressed to learn they would likely not be able to frame TerraSec for their deaths.

The party then proceeded to their plan to break in Alexei's old apartment to ascertain some idea of his location.  They were unable to do so directly, but found a number of documents referring to things they cared about.  First off, they found a not indicting Alexei had left for somewhere called "Site A", and would return in the spring.  It is unclear if he was referring to the spring of 3068 or 3069.

They found a second document giving details about an attack on a Word of Blake facility in St. Louis, in which thirteen people were killed and computer hardware was stolen.  A third document questioned whether the group operating in Denver (i.e., the player characters) were behind this attack.

Finally, there was a document of unknown origin that had a picture of Simon, Clark, Alexei, and Alexei's accomplice Chad as they were moving documents out the storage facility very early in the game.  The caption on the document suggested one of the individuals in the picture was a war criminal, but didn't say which was the accusation was being leveled against.

The rest of the session was spent with the party sitting down to put together all the puzzle pieces of plot they had been given into some semblance of a narrative.  A great deal of discussion happened, of which I won't go into detail here, but suffice to say it was a useful exercise.  After that, the party prepared to make their first large time leap, into October of 3068, when the Bioweapons plot picks back up.

We computed downtime, and the ComStar members found menial work to occupy their times and take some of the load off of Clark, who until now had been shouldering the bulk of the expenses in keeping the party fed.  Again, a question of the exact mechanics of the XP system came up, and we logged and spent a fair bounty of experience before the next session.

Homing In

So here are the rules for the new homing challenge I'm going to try to run this weekend.  The goal of this encounter is to find a transmitter that the players know the frequency of.  The players, however, do not have access to a radio direction finder, so they are forced to play a game of warmer/colder across the search zone (in this case, California.)

For each "turn" of the air search, the party will attempt to ascertain the distance to the beacon (+1/50km, round down).  The check will be a Communications/Conventional check, with difficulty set by their actual distance from the beacon.  A success will give them a band that is (20 + 2D6)% of the distance to the beacon, divided by the Margin of Success (0 is consider 1 MoS for these purposes) wide, and the beacon will lie somewhere in that band.  Divide the band width by 10, and roll 1D10 to determine which sub-band of the return band the beacon is in, and give minimum and maximum ranges accordingly.

Failure is handled the same way, but with the final return values having 10% * 1D6 added to them.

I understand the above may be confusing, so let's walk through an example.

Randall is attempting to locate a beacon some 200 km distant.  He makes a +4 check (200 km/50 km) against Communications/Conventional (he has it at +3).  He rolls a 9, for a total result of 12.  The target is 11, so he succeeds by 1.  The GM rolls 2D6 for a result of 3, meaning the band Randall detects the beacon in is 23% of 200km wide, or about 46 km.  The GM then divides the 46km band into 10 sub-bands and rolls 1D6 with a result of 2.  That means the beacon is in the middle of the second 4.6-km-wide sub-band.  The GM reports that the beacon is between 193 km (200 km minus the 1.5 4.6-km sub-bands) and 239km (200km plus the 8.5 4.6-km sub-bands.)


Randall now moves closer (by accident, since he doesn't know where on the circle the beacon is), and his new position is only 100km out from the target (which Randall knows to be somewhere in the 46-km-wide band he saw before.)  Randall now rolls again, with a +2 modifier (100km/50km).  He rolls a 3, for a total  result of 6, failing the roll by three.  The GM again rolls 2D6, for a result of 10, which gives the band the beacon is in a 10-km width (20+10)/MoF.  The GM then divides the 30-km band by 10, and rolls 1D10 for a seven, meaning the "base" band is between 93 km (100 km - 7.5 * 1km) and 103 km (100 km + 2.5 * 1km).  The GM then rolls another D6 for a 1, representing the error.  Both the short and the long range have 10% added to them, giving a final band of 102km to 113km.  Note that the actual beacon does not lie in this band, despite the fact that the band is quite tight.


It occurs to me that if that example didn't intimidate you, you've probably played a lot of BattleTech.  One of the advantages of this system is that if you fail by a great deal the band you get back get more and more specific about being wrong.

Obviously, the math here is a bit dense, but not overly so.   Finding distance on a sphere is about as complicated, and a quick bit of code will go a long way.  The real trick here is that the GM can't tell the characters their MoS or MoF, because knowing the modifier will give them a hard bracket to range the beacon and help eliminate areas picked up by close failures.

So that's the bulk of Sunday's session, if the players do what I expect them to do.  Now I need a map of California and a compass.

Chasing Alexei

My attempts to reach out to my players have (sort of) succeeded, and it appears the party will be pursuing Alexei in the next encounter.  This actually gives us an opportunity to engage the Sarna plot while continuing to use the other preparations I have made for Alexei, potentially resulting in a very fun session.

The party's Plan A, as it were, is to raid Alexei's old apartment.  I'll get them in and out, and give them a lead that takes them to California, where Alexei's resistance cell is attempting to locate the Sarna HPG that's been weaponized.  The upshot will be that the party homes in on a beacon frequency they find among Alexei's personal effects.  It leads them to the HPG, where they find Alexei and his squad members taken captive.  Session expected to end there.

The bulk of the session will be a non-combat encounter of the party trying to track down Alexei's beacon.  I'm thinking on doing this by hand, using a map of California as the board.   By using a compass and a computer, I believe I can relatively easily make an interesting skill-based challenge for the party.  Tomorrow I'll document the rules of that challenge.

Otherwise the session should be pretty straightforward -- sacking an apartment, and flying around California.  To planning!

Preparing for the Unknown

We're getting pretty close to our next session and there's still been no word from the players on what they're planning to do next session.  So today I'm thinking about how to fudge a little bit.

It is possible that the party will elect for the several month jump forward to the next part of the Bioweapons plot line.  It is also possible they will try to scout out Galveston for the Wyrm plotline, and it equally possible they'll go to California to pursue the Sarna plotline.  Finally, they might do something else entirely; an equipment raid or something similar.  They might pursue Alexei somehow.  They might bake a cake.  I have no idea.

Presuming they follow one of the existing leads, though, I need to take inventory of what assets I have available to run those sessions.  At present, the list is depressingly short in terms of maps and scenarios.  I really should have one session written for each plot, but realistically, I have none.  How to hedge?

Seat-of-the-pants running is rarely a good idea, unless you have your entire game loaded into your head before you sit down, and frankly, that's not going to happen for a Sunday Morning game.  So today I'm going back over my session notes and trying to decide what the most likely next session for each plot line is, when it is, and what plot points I need to make.

The Bioweapons plot is the easiest, since that is the one I've been working on.  The next step is for the party to find out about the Word's program in Montana, and to investigate it by raiding their "public" office.  Inside they'll discover that Clark's research into the Branth directly lead to this program, and by extension, the development of the Alarion plague.  I just need to type up some in-game documents for that and create another office building map.

The Wyrm plot I've put less thought into, but given that the next session of that fires in January of 3069, after the October 3068 Bioweapons event, I'm less worried about having this event ready.

That leaves the Sarna plot.  This I'm actually thinking about making a big non-combat skill challenge based around ground navigation and finding the site.  I want it to be more complicated than a regular encounter, so I can close out the session before they actually enter the facility (which I won't have prepared if I properly work out the Bioweapons plot ahead of time.)  This will require me to put on my game designer hat, but I think will work out pretty keenly if I can get it right.  More on that later this week.

Overall, I really can't get out of my game prep this week, but I can focus on the most probably culprits and hope that those are the sessions that we end up running.  Incidentally, I sent out an email kindly asking the party to give me a hint as to where to focus my effort.  Perhaps that will turn up something...

Music

One item that I have had a number of GM's use in session but I've never really gotten the hang of is using background music to set the tone of a session.  I've noticed a number of upsides and downsides to this technique, so I'll talk a bit about that today.

The goal when using music in a game session to to help invoke an ambient effect, usually some emotional bias, to the scene that's being played out.  Doing this requires a number of preparations above and beyond the normal requirements.  First, you need some kind of device to play music on.  I've never heard of the GM playing the music live, and that would introduce a whole new set of logistical issues, so I'll overlook that option for the moment.  Fortunately, music-playing equipment usually isn't an enormous challenge to get your hands on.  Second, you need to determine what music you're going to associate with which scenes.  If you already have a piece in mind, this is usually pretty simple, but if not, music selection can be a huge chore.

In the few circumstances I've seen music used in a tabletop session, there has always been the issue of length.  An RPG tabletop session can last from 20 minutes to a few hours in most systems, and if you want the music to  make it all the way through, you generally need to take one of two approaches; first, create a playlist of similar songs so that they can rotate through without getting too repetitious or draw attention when they change tracks. Second, you might choose music that's intended to be played in long-running loops.  Music composed for video games, which often face a similar problem in terms of predicting timing, is often useful in this regard.

My personal experience with GM's using music in their session has been that most of the time it is a wash emotionally, but poor selection or volume management can cause the music to interfere with players hearing the GM or each other; the volume must be kept down.  Once or twice I've seen music really make a difference in a specific scene, but didn't particularly help the rest of the game.

I have, on occasion, used sound equipment to create other ambient sound; a thunderstorm or a river running to help set a scene.  The film and theatre tech in me really wants to adjust the lighting in the room, too, everytime I do something like that, but it simply isn't feasible most of the time.  Lighting is for another post, though.

All told, I've found music during session a dubious prospect; it is just as likely to distract as to engage, so I tend to leave that particular tool in the toolbox.  That said, I know that a few GM's have had excellent scenes enhanced by having music, so I expect having it on standby for a few moments across the campaign could work very well.  I leave those possibilities to your experimentation.

The Days March On

Another weekend with no session, sadly.  Truly, the mechanics of scheduling are a bear, although this time it was my fault that we didn't have session -- I had a houseguest in from several thousand miles away for the weekend, and didn't wish to interrupt her visit with a four-hour game first thing Sunday morning.

That said, this game is having a very positive effect on my scheduling skills, in particular, this blog.  Having to produce a few paragraphs of hopefully interesting prose every weekday is not a challenge I've had since I was in school, and having the ability to do it free-form and precompose articles for later distribution makes it rather easier now than I remember it being back then.  That said, I have far more demands on my time than I did as a student, so perhaps I'm just trading one challenge for another.

Unfortunately, I am not a particularly gifted blogger, and I sometimes find myself struggling to come up with a topic.  If you have a particular question of implementation or protocol, please, leave a comment and I'll try to address it in a post.  As we run through slow periods in the cycle of sessions for Ten Years on Terra, I can probably be more interesting commenting on your thoughts and concerns than hashing out my own.

Interconnections

Connecting the storyline of a game into one massive kuzdu is a perpetual debate in my corner of the Roleplaying Games community.  Whether individual subplots should really be separate with little or no effect on each other, or if the trail should lead back inexorably to the campaign's primary antagonist.  There are two schools of thought here, so I'll try to describe both of them before putting in my own opinions on how this applies to Ten Years on Terra.

First, there's the concept of each subplot being a story unto itself.  Certainly, there is more freedom for the GM in this circumstance; new plots can be cut out of whole cloth, with little regard to how they impact the other plots that are occurring.  In a large and sprawling world, there are many actors trying to achieve various goals, none or few of whom are actively collaborating with each other.  The practical result is that players feel like the world they are playing in really is an enormous place, full of different characters doing whatever they think is best.

The counterpoint is that a campaign is a story, and for maximum integrity in that narrative, everything should be relevant to the primary arc.  The subplots should contribute to the story's primary tale, by exploring alternate ways in which the main plot affects other people, or to support or build the antagonist's character, organization, or motivations.

In Ten Years on Terra, there is an obvious antagonistic organization that ties together all of the subplots; the Word of Blake.  That said, the Word of Blake is a many-headed beast, often at odds with itself during the Jihad.  You can make strong arguments that different groups within the Word are really different antagonists; the Word Militia is encountering friction with the Manei Domini, and TerraSec is arguably doing what they've always done, just for a different authority.

At the beginning of this campaign, I decided that the ultimate Big Bad for the campaign wouldn't be The Master or Cameron St. Jaimes, but rather David Alsace, so while the side-arcs are interesting in that they deal with non-TerraSec operations the party would like to interfere with as the ComStar party continues their mission to disrupt the Word's operations on Terra, they don't contribute to the main goal of safeguarding the party from the law enforcement officers attempting to apprehend them.

As a result, most of my subplots are free-standing, but they lead back to a "Bad Guy" the party knew from the start -- the Word.  Which method of storyline connection I'm using really depends on if you see the Word of Blake as a single entity, or as a collection of independent groups.

It also occurs to me as I write this that there are a number of different ways my players might be interpreting the behavior of the Word of Blake, and they might try to convert TerraSec rather than escape them, but I'll have to cross that bridge when I come to it.

Box Text

I am a wargamer by tradition, one of the reasons I first embraced the BattleTech franchise. Wargaming comes with a certain amount of baggage when you transition into RPG, though, and some of it I haven't entirely cleared. One of my biggest issues is creating evocative environments. I have an almost inoperable case of just simply pointing out tactically relevant features of the terrain and perhaps describing tactically relevant environmental effects, such as the weather discussed last week. I may give a color to certain things, but that's the extent of the non-mechanical attributes of an object I'm like to describe. I'm only marginally better about NPC's, for whom I may describe the clothes even if those clothes yield no appreciable BAR.

I recently had it suggested to me that I should take the time to write box text for my environments ahead of time. Now, I'm a huge fan of box text as a rule when I run pre-built modules for D&D or somesuch, but largely because I get to read it in the voice of the mission briefing narrator from Warcraft II, so I didn't put too much stock in this suggestion outright. On reflection, though, I think it might be something that could get me a bit more mileage and do a bit more for mood setting in a campaign that sometimes slips to the silly, and could help some of my players who are better at roleplaying get further into that part of the game.

This post is more an announcement of my intent to try this new method. Expect a follow-up post in several weeks about how I think I'm doing with it.

Notes

One place that I've identified as a spot of improvement for myself is taking notes on campaign activity. I generally write down the date of the session start, locations, and such, but even significant metadata about the session, such as which characters are present, is often missing. I've been considering what information, exactly, I should be recording as a matter of course, as opposed to what I do now, which is write down information I suspect I might want to refer to in the future.

As I've mentioned before, I run very timeline-centric games; the date and time of any particular action is important to me, especially when running in a documented in-universe time and place, like Terra during the Jihad. I'm usually very good about referencing the date in-session events occur in my notes. That, however, is not enough.

Really, I should be noting every time the "scene" changes. Some RPG's have a much more explicit meaning of the term "scene", but I find it a useful concept even in A Time of War. A scene is a set of interactions the PCs take in a certain place for a contiguous stretch of time. At a bare minimum, I want to be recording each scene, the place and date it occurs in, and what major plot or mechanical developments occur there. Thus far, I only sometimes do this, and it leads to a broken narrative when I try to go back to my notes.

Also, generally speaking, I believe anything that occasions a modification to the character's sheet occasions a note in my notebook. Again, I'm bad about this, but that is the standard to which I am now striving. Edge is the most pertinent element here -- when a point of Edge is spent, it is generally on something worth putting in my notes anyways. Also, combat hits, and standard damage -- in a system as deadly as A Time of War, these should come up infrequently enough to merit a note.

Finally, major finds that the characters make that aren't recorded on an in-universe document. This includes conversations with NPC's, and exploration discoveries, especially off-the-cuff additions that weren't in the session plan. These are perhaps the most important, because there is nowhere else for this information to be collected. Right now this section constitutes the bulk of my notes, and while it is important, I need much of the other information I've mentioned here to really give it the context it needs.

The Next Stages of the Branth Plotline

Now that the Branth plotline has completed its mini-arc, I'm thinking about how to next introduce it. Now that Clark suspects Branths of being in Montana, he's upped his Internet presence in-game to try to attract attention of whomever is keeping them. I'm planning to use this in October of 3068 to have a journalist investigating the attacks contact him with more information on the Word of Blake presence in the area, and asking about his involvement.

By giving the players no leads to the next section of this plot, I've inserted a stop that will force them to play out some of the prodigious amount of time this campaign takes up in-universe. If I can do likewise for the other plotlines, I've put the players in something of a reactive mode, but we'll be advancing the story within the confines of the universe's timeline.

All Tied Up

I ended up not running the one-shot this weekend after all, but instead ran an abbreviated regular session to help clean up some of the loose ends from the previous session. This was an interesting one just because I had very little preparation done, and I was running in a convention's main hall, as opposed to my comfortable and well-equipped dining room. As a result I ran a little more loosely than I normally do, but because this session was something of a coda to the previous one, I could get away with it.

In this session, we picked up with Alex and Shin having completed their interrogation of the two captured TerraSec officers, and arguing over their fate. Eventually they decided to drug them and leave them in some kind of natural shelter well north of their current position, to hopefully allow them to be rescued without giving away their position. A handful of Driving, Acting, and MedTech rolls later, they had deposited the still-bound police officers and had a misleading conversation in front of them in pretended accents.

Then the party drove off a bit to find a motel, where they checked in for a few hours so Clark could treat Alex's hand, which had been hit twice in the firefight. This run through the healing rules was fairly enlightening, but did involve a bit of Edge when Clark failed to fully repair the damage the first time he operated. Having made the necessary checks, though, the party left and drove on through the night to make it back to the ranch the following day, where they all slept into the afternoon.

Now the party wants to wait for Henry to get back from a trip abroad which has kept him and his character (David) away before plotting their next move. I am hoping to make a long jump in time between sessions here (this was session 7, and we're only in mid-April 3068.) We'll be conversing via email to decide what happens between sessions.

Running a One-Shot

There are obviously a variety of ways to run a One-Shot A Time of War adventure, so I'm going to cover the ways I would use if I run this weekend. First, assembling a player group.

Sometimes you know in advance who your players are going to be. In the case of this convention, though, there is a set of boards set up in which a GM writes down the name, time, and location of their game, and puts down a blank line for every PC slot in his game. Attendees then sign up on the board, so the GM has no idea who is going to be coming to his game, or what their experience level will be. In addition, there is no opportunity to do character creation with the players, as we established before, A Time of War's character creation process takes far too long, especially with newbie players.

So when a player arrives at the game, he finds all the character sheets that haven't been taken laid out before him, and a brief, one-line entry on what the character does (Expert Sniper, Demolitions Specialist, Medic, etc.) Once everybody has a seat and a sheet, we go around the table and do introductions, and then I explain to the party what the situation is, and what their goals will be. I also do a quick rundown of the rules they're likely to encounter, and hopefully hand them a cheat sheet. I have the map pre-drawn infront of them, so I can indicate important features as I talk.

In this case, the players spend perhaps five minutes discussing strategy, initial placement, and the Demolitions expert decides where to place his charges. Once that is accomplished, we being the adventure proper.

I presume most of my players will not be terribly familiar with the A Time of War rules, so the first several shots they take I'll step them through. Within four or five shots, though, most of them will understand the process (there's always one that lags a bit.) Once they've gotten the hang of mowing down mooks, I start with the special events.

Likely the first event to be rolled out would be the enemy sniper -- because this threat is among the lowest of the special problems, and can persist as other threats appear. He takes his first shot, then spends two or three rounds aiming again.

After a few more rounds, I ramp up the storm a bit, and decrease visibility, allowing the NPC's to creep closer to the house, and take it under fire with their assault rifles. This is where the players should begin to sweat, and possible start taking hits. The Medic finds himself with much to do. The Demolitions guy also likely gets his moment in the sun here.

Finally, when most of those enemies have been eliminated, we roll out "the Boss", the light vehicle they have in support. For this I'll likely borrow a large miniature from another GM -- something to make it clear that this is a scary thing coming at them. The players scuttle to deal with the oncoming threat, and manage to bring the monster down just before it breaches the house. The storm starts to clear, the surviving bandits retreat, and the scenario ends in victory.

The real trick here, as with any session, is working around the problems that might arise during the run. Mechanically, there's little you can do -- if a PC gets hit by a lucky shot from an NPC and they're out of Edge, down they do. More important is sensing the mood of the table. If you're lucky, everybody's feeling the same thing; then you can simply cater to what they're looking for. If they feel like they're on top of the world, send in more bad guys. If they feel like the game is crashing down around them, ease up a bit, or give them an easy win to increase morale (like the Demolitions man blowing up a whole platoon of enemy troops.)

Your players don't know what to expect, and will often have wildly different expectations for how the session will go from you, and from one another. Challenge is good, fear is good, frustration is not good. The party should always feel like they're making progress, like they understand how what they're doing is getting them to their goal.

In the event of a massive deviation between what the players want and what the GM has planned, the GM ideally is the one to change. If you feel you can roll with the changing winds at the table, do it. A word of warning, though: it is easy to put yourself or your PC's in an unwinnable position by playing too fast and loose with the statistics and probabilities. When in doubt, err on the side of too few opponents.

As of this writing, it looks like I'll have a regular session of Ten Years on Terra on Saturday, but since I've already written it, I may run this one-shot anyways. I'll let you know next week how things play out.

Preparing a One-Shot

Preparing a One-Shot is considerably easier than preparing a campaign, but often harder than preparing your average session. In this case, I'm going to cheat a little bit in that I'm going to take materials from my campaign to save myself time on creating the one-shot.

Most one-shots, at least for A Time of War and its predecessors, focus on a combat engagement. These are rather easier to come across than battles in campaigns, since you don't need to give the PC's the choice to engage in combat; you just drop them into a hot zone. In order to create one of these single-engagement one-shots, though, you need three things: PC's, and OpForce, and Terrain.

In A Time of War, PC's take a long time to create -- at least 40 minutes each, even for an experienced player -- in my experience. Fortunately, for a One-Shot PC, you don't need "backstory" or "non-combat skills". Pfft! What you need is Small Arms at a reasonable number, some martial arts, and a gun.

Well, it isn't quite that simple. Generally speaking, the players take care of party composition for you when they're doing character creation. In this circumstance, you as the GM need to handle creating the characters and making sure that the party is balanced -- you'll just be handing out sheets at run-time. As such, we need to look a bit at the mechanical needs of a party, as well as the psychology of your players for a moment.

In the interests of full disclosure here, this is based on my experience, not scientific observation; I have a degree in Computer Science, not Psychology, so take this for what you will.

Most players when they play in an RPG will want to operate as a team, but they want their character to be unique or special in some way. A player wants a circumstance to arise in the game where everybody turns to them and says "Do your thing," and they get to stand up and be awesome. In campaigns, there are often whole sessions dedicated to these moments. In one-shots, you'll have a few minutes at the outside. Even so, when we're building characters, we want to make sure each character has a unique ability, and we want to make sure that ability has a chance to be showcased during the scenario. So what abilities do we have?

In this scenario, there's going to be a lot of gunplay; more than I want to do with only one specialized gun character; everybody should have Small Arms and a way to contribute. That said, it may make sense to have one sniper character, who can target especially important NPC's and eliminate them from the second floor of the house. That will give us one specialty.

A healer is a necessity in any combat game, and A Time of War is no exception; a character with MedTech and perhaps Surgery will not go amiss.

One of the most horrifying things for a group of players to come up against in A Time of War is vehicles; their armor just works differently and far more effectively than the player's, and it makes for a great "Oh Crap" moment when a small vehicle that would be laughed off the field in BattleTech makes an appearance in A Time of War. As such, we'll want at least one character with Support Weapons so that when we throw a vehicle at the party, they'll pay attention.

Martial Arts and Melee Weapons can also be niche skills; a massed charge of grunts across an open plain to get to the house will allow players with machine guns and assault rifles to kill most of them, but if a few get through, you can have your Melee expert dispatch them in close-quartered combat inside the house.

Finally, there's Archery, Demolitions, and Thrown Weapons. The first and the third are potentially, but not certainly, useful to this operation. Demolitions, though, provides two opportunities; a grenadier, and pre-positioned traps for the NPC's. Both of these will be very satisfying the for the player using them, since they have immediate "bang" effects that dramatically impact the battle.

Next, the terrain. For a siege like this, we want something somewhat defensible -- wooden walls should do the job. The internal arrangement of the house can be fairly simple. Three rooms should provide the need for characters to reposition to get lines of fire on new threats, but not become cumbersome in tracking. The existing map for Clark's ranch should work nicely as a terrain set. I can combine both of these together and render them on a MondoMat for the game itself.

Finally, the Opposing Force. Again, your rank-and-file baddies can be torn directly from the pages of A Time of War. The trick will be not over-equipping them -- these guys are supposed to take many losses for each one the PC's take, so they should have plausible but impractical weapons for their attack. Assault rifles, for instance, have their Medium/Long Range break at 75m, about the distance between Clark's Ranch and the nearest practical cover. By giving the NPC's assault rifles as their primary weapon, we can greatly reduce their effectiveness when shooting from cover, while still being a credible attack force. A laser rifle, on the other hand, will give the players pause and possibly occasion some attention from their sniper.

I recommend drawing up a few generic soldiers with varying loadouts and deploying them as you see fit; if the players are having too easy a time, add more enemies, if they're starting to drown, dial back on reinforcements. The flow of these grunts towards the PC's is the flow which the major events of the one-shot will sit on.

We need one pre-planned event for each PC type. I'm going with these:

Sniper Duel (Sniper): There's an enemy sniper who is peppering the party with fire. He has a high stealth check, so the party's sniper has the not-inconsiderable task of finding him. The enemy sniper isn't placed on the board, but only has his position indicated when one of the PC's makes and opposed Perception/Stealth check against him. Every two or three rounds he goes undetected, he takes a carefully aimed shot, with a much better chance of hitting a PC. The PC's should fear this character, but be relying on their own sniper to eliminate him. There is also an opportunity here for a scripted friendly NPC to be shot and require medical assistance, both to drive home the danger the sniper represents, as well as give the Medic a guaranteed chance to practice her skill.

Man Down! (Medic): I don't expect to have to engineer this one: at some point a PC is going to be hit, and the Medic will have to tend to that character. As noted above, an NPC can be provided to guarantee the need for this skill, especially if the mission is to protect that NPC.

The Big Guns (Support Weapons): Near the end of the encounter, the bad guys roll out their ace in the hole: an assault vehicle. This would be a light attack vehicle, likely a scout or similar in a BattleTech role. If we presume this is Terra in the early-to-mid 3070's, something like the Minion Advanced Tactical Vehicle (Technical Readout 3067, p. 8) might be a bit out of place from a strictly canon perspective, but fills the role we need. While the rest of the party takes cover from the pulse lasers, the Support Weapons character takes out the vehicle.

It's A Trap! (Demolitions): This is more player-driven. Allow the Demolitions character to pre-position command-detonated mines on the map before the siege, and let them to trigger them. This can be made into a scripted even by forming a large, potentially overwhelming attack that runs right over the planted charges. Boom. The day is saved, thanks to our friend, the Demoman.

Of course, there's the minutiae of actually writing up the sheets for the OpForce and the PC's, but this has already gotten rather long. Tomorrow, runtime considerations!