Read
Brave Zenith, a cartoony upbeat post apocalyptic game. PC species are humans, cat people and slimes. Reminds me of Adventure Time
The Free League SRD. I was curious about how the Stress dice in alien compare to the Ammo dice in Twilight 2000, and how the dice step option compares to the dice pool. This 40 page document does a great job of bringing all the various FL Year Zero Engine games together in one place. It's nice and complete. I could happily run straight from this.
Forbidden Lands. Dry, uninspiring.
Play
Delta Green - Impossible Landscapes. Still loving this game and it's campaign. We are approaching the end game now, I think I have finally found a route to Carcosa. Just as well we are nearly done, my PC only has about 6% sanity left. Scheduling this game fortnightly means that when we miss a session it hurts twice as much though. Can't imagine how people manage monthly gaming.
GM
13th Age is finally back on. Due to technical issues my players didn't hear all of my dream vision recap of the first 30 sessions which then flowed into a vision of the near future, so I wrote it all up since the last session and have them a 2000 word world history, game recap and future vision, all written from the perspective of a cat seer. Can't wait for Monday!
Alien - Destroyer of Worlds. The game is great. The Free League system is solid and fun and the stress dice system added for Alien brings so much to play. The scenario pack though, sucks. There is just far too much going on and a lot of it is nonsense. I've had to do a lot of trimming down to hack a good game out of it. The big maps for the table are nice though.
Read
Salvage Union arrived in hardback form (I've had the PDFs for ages, but there's something real nice about sitting down with an actual book, especially one as chunky as this). Still not entirely sold on the layout in places, but I'd very much like to get this to the table, and have started writing a little test adventure.
Alien - I'm almost at the point where I think I have a scenario ready to run, so just re-familiarising myself with the finer points before I make the Natura1s play it.
Play
I've fallen waaaay off the horse, as far as being a player in things goes. If anyone's going to run Salvage Union, though, let me know.
GM
Still just D&D, but I've told my online Thursday group that once we're done with Rime of the Frostmaiden, I'm gonna take a break from 5e and run Dragonbane for a while. They're an immensely chaotic group, so I suspect they'll get along with it really well. As a bonus, it doesn't (seem to) suffer from the power creep of the dragon game, so I hopefully won't have to deal with a lot of stuff that their weirdo multiclass builds usually make me put up with. 
A few things I've forgotten about or needed to check up on with Alien:
- Once or twice a session remind your players that they can push rolls for more successes
- Similarly many guns can be fired full auto (at least, if you have pulse rifles in the mix)
- Close Combat attacks can be resisted with an opposing roll
- Androids don't gain stress, can't push rolls and have their own critical damage table a few pages further in
Honestly though, I've found the system really clear. The search function works well in the pdf too because it's not a very wordy book.
If anyone's going to run Salvage Union, though, let me know.
What day(s) work best for you?
Monday or Wednesday is all I've got free regularly at the moment.
Honestly though, I've found the system really clear. The search function works well in the pdf too because it's not a very wordy book.
I've printed out a reference for all the different skill stunts, but yeah, as a base system it seems pretty straightforward.
Monday or Wednesday is all I've got free regularly at the moment.
I've got stuff on Monday evenings (hopefully, it was cancelled this week) but let me see who else might be around for a Wednesday night Salvage slot.
I wrapped up my Alien game last night. The session opened with an alien eating the brains of the corp NPC the group had with them. It set the tone for the evening. One PC got their head popped by an alien queen. Another jumped off a gantry to attack the queen with a pipe, melted their leg, got paralysed by a soldier, impregnated by a facehugger and finally, spaced. The third PC returned, on the other side now and beat PC 4 into critical damage before having a heart attack. PC 5 killed PC 3 with a knife then got killed with a precision headshot by an evil Android. PC 6, the good android, then beats up the evil Android which takes ages.
Weyland-Yutani then show up and the PC tries to convince them that he is the evil Android uploaded into a different body and they should totally rescue him and PC 4, currently held together by duck tape and hope. This plan is excellent and works really well for about a minute till the player asks a dumb question, (right before I was about to fade out too!) And the W-Y Mercs gun down the Android and space the surviving marine.
End
Running Alien tonight. No idea if I've prepped half as much as I should have, or if I've completely overdone it. Should be fine. It'll be fine.
It'll be fine.
If it's anything like the Alien games I've played in, the party will be too terrified to do anything of consequence for the first session anyway.
In my first session of Alien my players explored a bar, a spaceport, a police station and had a gun battle in an old refinery. I probably had to roleplay 15 NPCs.
I don't know if I'm doing something wrong, but I'm feeling like Salvage Union isn't quite clicking in practice.
Maybe it's that I'm used to having a lot more RP and social stuff than the party encountered so far (might have to up the population a bit, though that feels antithetical to the setting?), maybe it's the relative brutality of the combat (and the dearth of resources available to pilots at low tech levels), but the first session I ran this week felt rather draining.
Coming hot on the heels of a couple of very fun Dragonbane sessions, it was very dispiriting.
But then, the first Dragonbane encounter was also an eye-opening experience from the GM side, so maybe I just need to accept it's going to take a minute to find the groove.
Maybe lean into the more procedural aspects of the desert scavenging? I feel that it’s generally best to lean in to the primary purpose of any particular rpg, rather than fighting against it. That way, even if it isn’t anyone’s favourite game you get a different experience and you’ll know you’ve explored that RPG’s potential.
What was interesting about the first Dragonbane encounter?
Maybe lean into the more procedural aspects of the desert scavenging?
There doesn't seem to be that much meat on the bones, though. I don't generally run a lot of procedural stuff – my comfort zone is definitely in the "give the players a situation and react to it", but a lot of my muscle memory there is about how NPCs react, and Salvage Union really doesn't have that scaffold.
I guess I just haven't figured out, yet, how to make "you find a thing" interesting after the third or fourth time they find a thing, and having already shredded the player mechs' EP with the very first encounter I'm reluctant to throw a lot more combat at them yet.
As I'm writing this, I'm also wondering how much of that staleness I'm worried about is coming from the resolution mechanic – anything the players want to accomplish that's not using a specific piece of gear uses the exact same flat d20 roll, with the exact same success/failure point. There's only so many times I can ask them to make a Core Mechanic Roll before I start feeling like we're in a bit of a rut.
What was interesting about the first Dragonbane encounter?
I'd been through it as a player, but as GM the balance point just wasn't where I thought it'd be – the party took a couple of big hits that almost resulted in a TPK, and the adventure's suggested backup plan (having some NPCs come help) felt like it would rob the party of agency. I ended up having to rebalance a few things on the fly, but everything worked out in the end.
It's the first pre-gen thing I've run as written in a long time (maybe ever?), so that probably put me on the back foot a little.
Alien went pretty well! It was very much intended as a single-session one-shot, and I pitched the length pretty much bang-on. There was some decent, tense combat, a couple of character deaths, and several points where the players all just sat starting into the middle distance in fear - so basically perfect.
Gods, but the Stress mechanic is SO GOOD.
The Alien stress dice are fantastic. I'm a big fan of Mothership and its Stress system too but they are actually different enough that it's worth killing them both handy.
One player was an absolute adrenaline junkie, just repeatedly pushing rolls and refusing to do anything to reduce stress; at one point I think he was rolling with 5 or 6 stress dice, and yet somehow managed to avoid panicking almost entirely.
I had one player really pushing it as well. He rolled the "catatonic" condition three times. We decided he was having heart attacks and his callsign was "Hammer" because everyone else could hear his heartbeat.
