Fingers in the pie(s)

I have the next session of our 40K campaign in the breech and ready to fire, and my Godlike adventure for DDC is also ready to go now as well – all I’m doing with it now is tinkering with bits of it (fiddling with the handouts, etc.), but I could run it now with no further prep necessary.

And since it’s winter, again I find myself full of restless gaming energy. I have that long-talked-about Underground adventure on the front burner and I plan to run it for the Friday night crew later this month if I can get it ready in time. Shouldn’t be too hard.

I’m also thinking about another big Godlike “spectacular” – the North Africa LRDG game I mentioned before. I have the basic idea for the mission. Now I need to think about the enemy Talents’ll be bringing to the show. But this game won’t be for a long while yet. If it happens this year, it will happen later this year.

Finally, I am flirting with the idea of going Old School and running a game of 1st edition Warhammer FRP.

Wild Talents

Wild Talents is one of those games you can play without thinking too much about the mechanic, and it’s also one of those games where if you really want to get under the hood and mess with the gubbins inside, you can.

I’ve been working up some characters for a proposed game of Underground, using the ORE in Wild Talents. The rules for creating powers and so on are daunting at first, but now that I’ve created a “Boosted Veteran” powers template, and having done a lot with Godlike, I’m slapping characters together at a pretty fast clip. The more I work with the ORE in Wild Talents, the more I like it. You really can create anything and quantify it within the bounds of the system.

I’m usually not one to settle in with one single system for everything, but for superhero stuff the ORE is the best system I’ve seen. I wouldn’t touch Champions with a ten-foot pole, but Wild Talents does the job in a way that makes loads of sense and does it with a very elegant and clean system.

So here’s the archetype for a Boosted Veteran in the Underground setting:

Archetype: Boosted Veteran

Source: Alien / Genetic / Technological (10 pts)

Permissions: Power Theme (Genetic) (5 pts)

Intrinsics: Psychosis (-5 pts)

Total: 10 pts

Goin’ Underground

Well, the prep for my 40K campaign is pretty much done. I may draw some maps or tweak a few things before game day but the nuts and bolts are all in place.

While I wait for that to go off, my thoughts turn to Underground, the old dystopian superhero game from 1993. The game to run this with now is Wild Talents, so I grabbed that off the shelf and worked up a boosted vet, a 7 1/2 foot tall mountain of muscle who can shrug off bullets (sorta) and make things explode when he punches them (stealing some Panzerkunst moves from Battle Angel Alita, yes indeed). And he can regenerate.

This being Underground, naturally this vet is a mess in the head (not saying veterans are all crazy, but in Underground most of them are ). So, he’s got a week’s supply of anti-psychotics and when he runs out who knows where it’ll end up (a body bag most likely).

In Underground, the streets of Los Angeles are like Mogadishu on meth and crack all the time, and people sling 20mm pistols like waterguns (sold to them cheap by the gun manufacturers). The rich literally eat the poor and everyone is fucking everyone over as hard as they can for profit. Yeah, Underground is sorta like a radical-leftist’s nightmare come true, and the politics is laid on thick at times, but there you go.

Anyway! I’m going to crank out a few more characters – Wild Talents really is great for superheroes! – and beef up an adventure I brainstormed a while ago (the one with the garbage collectors’ strike causing riots). Once it’s in some sort of ready-to-go state I’ll run it for the Crew or as a oneshot at Endgame.