Entries sorted by date:
16-Aug-2010
13-Aug-2010
11-Aug-2010
04-Aug-2010
02-Aug-2010
30-Jul-2010
26-Jul-2010
24-Jul-2010
05-Jul-2010
26-Jun-2010
25-Jun-2010
22-Jun-2010
05-Jun-2010
01-Jun-2010
16-Aug-2010:
Deus Ex 2: Invisible War
Square Enix is pushing new fancy trailers of the upcoming Deus Ex 3 and thus inspired, I decided to take another look at Deus Ex 2: The Inivisible War. So, off to Steam we go and I've been playing the game for a hours now, currently prowling the alleys of Medina village in Cairo (wtf?). DX2 looks dated but not impossibly so. Reminds me of the Russian scifi adventure games I used to buy from Gamersgate. Reminds me of them quite a lot, actually.
DEX is of course a sequel to the legendary Deus Ex 1 and often derided for being a horrible letdown and a franchise killer. And true enough, there is a of things wrong this game. As a shooter, it is atrocious. And whoever designed the inventory system should be skinned alive. The whole thing screams of poor production quality and rushed finish. But as an adventure game it is okay. There is nothing wrong with the plot and if you are a fan of the old Lucasfilm games, going around talking to people and collecting codes, items and small side tasks feels right at home. So, it is a nifty scifi-adventure game with some misguided shooting sequences.
Shooting is awkward, slow, beset by dead angles and range limitations on weapons which means that a shot that hits dead on from 20 metres does not even ricochet out of anything at 21 metres. Enemies also have this tendency not to keel over and die when hit with a burst of high-explosive fragmentation ammo. The amount of hit points per enemy is insane but the circle strafing battles are impossible because enemy hits and misses are based on dice rolling instead of actually modelling the shots. Well, me being what I am I dug up the *.ini files and increased player-to-NPC damage five-fold. And now it feels normal. I shoot at a guy a few times with a pistol and he dies. He shoots at me a couple of times and I die. That's how it is supposed to go if you can't model an actual run-and-gun battle. What the hell were the designers thinking?
Judging by the inventory system, they weren't.
There are 10 item slots, 5 in the quickbelt and 5 otherwise. You can't drag and drop items into them, so if you want to move an item from slot 5 to slot 1, you have to drop the items in both slots, then pick up the item you want into slot 1 first. You have upgrade options for your weapons which is kind of nice but I've since learned to hate my submachinegun. Finally, the designers' idea of roleplaying is to limit you to 6 cybernetic superpower slots with three options for each. I went for a sneaker-assassin-hacker type of setup but how the powers work is explained very poorly, if at all.
Deus Ex as a franchise deals with global conspiracies in the dark future and DX 2 is not an exception. My character is supposedly travelling around the world, balancing between two factions (and I hate both) as she selects the mission objectives she wants to complete. This is what we did already in Deus Ex 1, as I am sure everybody remembers. However, Deus Ex 1 really feels like a global conspiracy of epic proportions. Deus Ex 2 feels about as epic as eating pizza in my living room and it kind of deflates the whole conspiracy aspect. This is largely due to bad level design.
DX2 came out also on consoles but I have seen what the original Xbox could do with Oddworld: Stranger and there is simply no excuse for mucking up the levels this bad. Basically, the game starts with a cutscene of a nanoterrorist attack destroying Chicago and how cool (if also stupid) you cyborgs are. After that you are placed into a room and lo and behold! The entire game occurs in rooms or corridors connecting them! First I am supposed to be Seattle but it is a maze of rooms and corridors in what feels to be effectively a single building. Then I fly to a ballistic research lab somewhere in the wilderness and the most outdoor they have to offer is a very tightly fenced-in roof. Then I am suddenly going to Cairo and find myself inside an arkology, i.e. rooms connected with corridors. Then I leave the arkology to go outside to the village of Medina (wtf?) and it is a set of corridors and rooms with sometimes the night sky as a ceiling. Usually there is no one about, not even in the busiest Seattle. And if there is, they must all be members of the Westboro Baptist Church because they all look alike.
Maybe designers thought the insane combat balancing was alright because all combat occurs at a point blank range. So far I've had one occasion to use my sniper rifle because my submachinegun could not hit a target from 30 metres.
I can't understand how Warren Spector could have missed the concept of "epic" so bad. If you look at DX1, it starts from Liberty Island, with the fucking decapitated Statue of Liberty standing in the middle. That is an instantly recognizable and a highly symbolic place, even with all the limitations of the engine. Then you find yourself in the slums of the Battery Park. It is gently snowing, there are bums around and the whole city of New York is your horizon. Then off to New York we go and you wouldn't believe how nice it is to have buildings and streets instead of a single huge dungeon.
Yes, this is a decent B-rated adventure game set in a dark future. It is fun and I recommended for old-school scifi adventure game fans everywhere. But if I didn't know better, I would have assumed DX2 was made by some Siberian pirate outift without a proper license and trying to cash in on the Deus Ex fandom (this would also explain why the looks and atmosphere of all the locations was so off). The fact that this is the real deal, the actual game Warren Spector *intended* to succeed Deus Ex 1... it beggars belief.
13-Aug-2010:
BZ: Stalker Underworld
I am on a roll. Here is a (huge) map of the Berlin underground in Berlin Zero. The map is so large because I could not find a high-resolution base to make it from and I wanted to keep the names readable.
Berlin Zero: Stalker Underworld
The ends of the lines are on the outskirts of the city, reachable by foot on the surface. Those entrances not overrun by mutants and turned into Radnests usually have Stalker Outposts. It is nothing to boast about, 20-100 people, some basic goods and lively trade of recent loot that relies heavily on personal relations. From the outposts, you can usually traverse the tunnels for a few stations inward and you might even find vehicles for it: cross-country motorbikes or railcars with some kind of engine bolted on them. Stations close to the outpost often have small camps as well, basically a fortified shelter for tight spots. Sealed and defended metro cars are a popular option and even if no one is there, stalkers try to keep a small stock of food and medicinal goodies there in case one of them manages crawl back to them after getting in trouble somewhere deeper in the network.
But sooner or later, the road is blocked. Novice stalkers or those unfamiliar with the territory see a ruin, a collapsed station, tunnels clogged with so much debris it would take dynamite to get through them again. These are indicated by dark dots on the station circles. The only obvious way is either back the way you came, or up to the deadly surface. But if you know what you are doing, you also realise that the underworld is like the blood vessels of a body. Subway tunnels are the arteries but there are always ways forward, shortcuts from one line to another, underground backdoors bypassing mutant nests and hazard zones. There are sewers, maintenance tunnels, ventilation shafts, auxiliary passages, emergency exits, secret corridors from the Cold War days or even before. Some passages close because of debris and structural shifts. Others will open when intervening walls are worn down or some monster digs its way through.
Collapsed stations also mark the limits or boundaries of influence. While mutants can be found anywhere, the fiercest predators rarely venture past the blocked stations. And while you have some hope of rescue on the same side of the tunnel as Stalker Outpost, once past a blocked station you are mostly on your own. Other hazards included flooded passages, structural weaknesses, irradiated spots, toxic spills and... trogs.
The Berlin Underground connects to a host of underground facilities, complexes and bunkers of all shapes and sizes. There are probably more of them hidden somewhere in the darkness. Some of them were population shelters used during and right after the Flash. Nobody knows what exactly happened to them but they are now trogs, ghostly white humanoid mutants, with elongated and clawed arms, sharp teeth and various malformities. Most trogs are blind but they have excellent hearing. Many of them have no eyes. They live in primitive tribes hostile to outsiders but many tribes worship the Monks as gods. Monks sometimes use their superior technology to create superior specimens of Trogs with cybernetic implants and weaponry. Intrusive (and very visible) brain surgery by Monks can enable trogs to operate, if not understand, complex machinery. Trogs like to scavenge food and other goods from the ruins and sometimes even from other Trog tribes. However, their preferences are pretty basic, concentrating on food and simple weapons and tools they can understand. They clash with and sometimes hunt other mutants in the underworld and view outsiders, mostly stalkers, as food and source of shiny objects.
Daylight or any light of similar intensity causes Trogs physical pain. Exposure to direct sunlight kills them within hours.
Not every facility has trogs in it. Some have been taken over by mutant predators too fierce for troggs to evict, or turned into Monk Shrines of superior technology, biomechanical machines, mutant guards and ghastly traps. Some are highly contaminated and others are... haunted.
Anomalies, or "haunting" in the wasteland slang is an inexplicable phenomenon usually attributed to the ghosts of the dead. There are corridors that can make anyone entering them crazy, or strange disembodied lights that kill anything they touch. There can even be gravitic or kinetic anomalies, unusually warm spots with pools of lava and so on. Put on your Stalker RPG thinking cap and you know how it works. Haunted places are usually avoided by anyone but some Stalkers prefer them just because the odds of encountering anything else are low. The stalkers who do this and survive are usually somewhat eccentric. Or philosophical.
Stalkers operating close to the outposts collect basic metals or even ceramic tiles. It is strip-salvage rather than scavenging and takes a lot of manpower. Those operating deeper in Berlin move in small groups and either try to reach probably locations of valuable goods on the surface via the underground, or target trog camps and underground facilities for Cold War stockpiles and Monk Loot. The labyrinth of tunnels underneath Berlin connects with almost every block in the city and especially public buildings like hospitals and police stations. While the streets glow with face-melting radiation and there are mutants everywhere, the interiors of the more intact buildings are usually less hazardous. Nevertheless, stalkers tend to avoid spending any more time above the ground than they absolutely have to.
Oh, one final thing. The lighting. Berlin Underground is not all pitch black. There are glowing mosses, algae and mushrooms. Here and there monks or other stalkers have fixed some of the infrastructure and you even get the occasional light burning. In places radiation makes certain compounds glow and mists tend to be very dangerous. And finally much of the Berlin subway system is fairly close to the street level, allowing shafts of light to poke through where the tunnel ceilings have cracked.
Of course, when it is dark, it tends to be pitch black. Stalkers love night vision Goggles because they don't draw the mutants to you like a flashlight would. Flashlights have a limited range of illumination but the light itself is visible for miles.
11-Aug-2010:
Berlin Zero Thread
I put all Berlin Zero content to its thread on the official Atomic Highway forum. There is also the part 2 of the BZ fan fiction in that thread and if I write any more of them that is where they will go. I really screwed up by writing that story and that is why it is no longer here. However, I did not delete it permanently since there is still a chance I could write myself out of this pit. And screw it, I should really be hammering away at Häirikkötehdas.
I just got myself a new display card, Asus 460. Metro 2033 looks really cool now and the game actually runs faster on High graphics than on Normal. Call of Pripyat is also supposed to benefit from the upgrade but frankly, launching the game was depressing. To facilitate the huge landscapes, Call of Pripyat doesn't really do ground textures. So after having just played Shadow of Chernobyl with every graphical knob set to the max, the contrast was almost too much to bear. Frankly, Call of Pripyat looks like shit. It is a great game, there are even greater mods coming for it and 15 minutes in you don't care anymore. But still, objectively, it looks like shit.
Oh, why the hell can't Metro 2033 be an open-world title? And why can't I edit the enemy values. Hit effects on mutants are crap, they have hit points, they move really fast and there is always a lot of them. In combat I mostly blast away at random and every now and then one of the critters keels over. Combat against monsters is not rewarding and that is a big, big problem in a post-apocalyptic shooter. I wonder how it handles on consoles? Lots of aiming aids? Slower-paced monsters?
Anyway... Brink, Rage, Deus Ex 3, Tier One, Fallout: New Vegas, here I come!
04-Aug-2010:
Helsinki Zero?
Yes, it did cross my mind but now, it is not going to happen. Creating Berlin Zero, I started with a vision of the activities and reality level I wanted to achieve: Old-school Fallout (F1 & F2) with grit and autowarfare, in Europe, or "Roadwars Europe" if you will. I briefly considered Moscow as the city but then settled on Berlin; it is in europe, it has history, there are plenty of pictures of bombed-out Berlin and you can't really resist nazis. More importantly, the city was large enough to matter, there was a beatiful spider's web of excellent roads around it and at 10-kilometre bar scale it was packed with small towns. I could just pick and choose where I wanted to have my enclaves and other settlements, while leaving everything else as battlegrounds and ruins to be explored.
Now go open Google Maps, centre it on Helsinki and use the same zoom level.
Looks like crap, doesn't it? The city itself is about one quarter of Berlin and when you remove the county lines you can see it is sort of spread out along the coastline. The road network simply isn't there and it has like one-tenth of the placenames compared to the Berlin Map. Even if you get out of the built-up areas, you are in suburbs. Frankly, the Helsinki capital area has frankly shitloads of suburbs and many of the smaller towns are basically shopping malls for the surburbs around. It is much easier to built fortified towns in the medieval burgs than a suburban checkerboard from the 70'ies. The Zero concept just isn't happening. The power level of Helsinki Wasteland is just not enough.
Of course, this does not mean that Helsinki would not exist in the Berlin Zero universe. It is there, it was Flashed in the War and it is hairy. Just bring the zoom level closer, to about 2 kilometre bar. One fifth of the Berlin Map. Already, Helsinki Capital Area is starting to look much, much better.
Boom!
The Flash happens high above Pasila trainyard and the heat pulse descends on the ugly-ass office blocks like a giant foot. It compresses but does not exactly level them. Heat pulse sets everything exposed and flammable on fire between Espoonlahti and Sipoo. Anyone caught outside gets the shadow-on-the-wall or scorched bones treatment. Those caught in the immediate fallout get the radiation-sickness-with-a-decent-probability-for-mutations programme and a most of the early survivors painfully degenerate and transform into monstrosities. Through luck and occasional immunity, some 20% of the survivors don't change species. About half of them die from long-term fallout (your standard radiation poisoning) and the nuclear winter that followed. Thousands of them flee north, to relatives and summer cottages with misplaced faith on their outdoor skills.
Twenty years later, the capital area is a swampy wasteland. Gloomy clouds drag curtains of rain across a devastated landscape and rainwater is opaque with dust, soot and radioactive particles. Keeping the rainwater out of food and drinking water is a daily struggle for the survivors. Oh yes, there are some. Family communities, gangs. No larger than steads and holed in defensible positions above and underground. Outside the barricades they can hear mutants moving about at night, mostly bestial but sometimes human. During the day, raiding and looting parties set out for prospects but when the night falls, they either find their way back to trust to find a defensible hideout, for night in Helsinki Zero is murder.
The road network is destroyed, collapsed and blocked by debris. An off-road motorcycle is the heaviest vehicle around. Other than that, transportation relies on backpacks and healthy feet. There is no industry, apart from what can be handcrafted and in twenty years and using modern tools the survivors are getting pretty good at that. Still, competition over resources can and often does result in hostility. And if this was an Italian B-movie, the gangs would be fighting over women as well. However, we are in the Nordics and desperately equal, even if there are some who believe women should focus on having children if they can. In an environment this hostile fertility is not given. Nor is it a laughing matter for any community that wants continuity.
There are no barterowns but there are fixers. All you need to become one is a stockpile of goods, a defensible position, hired guns to keep it yours and phenomenal skill at barterin and evaluating things. By now they are like Mafia dons, whose modus operandi varies case by case from honest trades to extortion. Some may hope to build an empire of dependents but the realisation of such dreams remains far off when you are in danger of being wiped out by a single mutant attack.
There are two types of raiders. Inland, raiders are typically gangs that have gone off the bend, often lead by some charismatic murderer or an apocalyptic cult leader. At sea, there are pirates moving with methanol-driven powerboats looking for loot and slaves. These are taken south and may end up, among other things, to work the coalmines of the Reich. Cult raiders can trade with fixers. Pirates are everybody's enemy.
Both of these threats pale in comparison to the mutant menace. Finland is a wasteland of mutant wilderness. Not only is the mutant population of the capital area sizable, more venture in from the northern woods all the time. Whilst the beast can be deadly, the true competition to humans comes from mutant tribes. Many of them were once survivors or even witnesses to the Flash. They are gibbering madmen twisted in both body and soul but still possessing enough cunning to wield tools and weapons. There are different levels of mutants based on their reasoning. The very top are almost human and can wield firearms but the most are restricted to cruel melee weapons or are little more than trained apes. There are rumours of mutant shamans who can command mutant monsters and perform great feats with their highly toxic brews. Whatever the truth, there seems to be some kind of non-hostility pact between humanoid and non-humanoid mutants.
Hmm. Needs work but you get the picture. Berlin Zero has pockets of mutant menace guarding science fiction treasures. Helsinki Zero has pockets of humans clinging on to remnants of technology while mutant monsters and medieval warriors conspire to wipe them out once and for all. Hmm. The human societal structure is very simple compared to Berlin Zero. Maybe I have to find a way to introduce stragglers or something into this concept. Or make Helsinki a straggler capital, where the original survivors are degenerate trogdolytes striking out from the man-made caves underneath the city centre and there are enclaves far out in the countryside, coming to the city to trade with the pirates...
Hmmyeah, this definitely needs work.
02-Aug-2010:
Bad Form
Sometimes I get carried away.
30-Jul-2010:
Berlin Zero
I got a bit carried away planning my Atomic Highway adventure this week and made an "Official Intro Site" for it. It is really just the bare bones of the setting but at least you can see what I will be building on. Following the Old Skool tradition, I will make up more stuff as I go and if I am not feeling lazy, some of that might appear here as well. Perhaps as adventure seeds.
Just remember that this is not an advert to any publication of mine (Atomic Highway was actually written by Colin Chapman) and that I hereby declare Berlin Zero public domain (it is fundamentally system-independent). To me, BZ is a tribute to Colin and something fun I planned to do with my friends this weekend. If anyone else finds it useful or inspiring, great! Go get them!
To The Official Berlin Zero Intro Website
26-Jul-2010:
I Am Going To Nuke Berlin
Oh damn it. I had plans! I had things figured out! I would write a mini-rpg and run a cyberpunk adventure in Terminal Complex for the folks back home (one of our friends moved in so I guess this makes Myyrmäki HQ officially a commune). I have been thinking about HAX day in and day out, so surely a roleplaying adventure in it would be a walk in the park?
Unfortunately, Ropecon threw a major wrench into the works and here I am, writhing in agony over a "wrong" inspiration. It is that fucking Atomic Highway I picked up from the Fantasiapelit booth. I am a long-time post-holocaust fan and never pretended to be anything else. Somehow that game, all 130 pages of it, punched me below the belt. I have bought post-holocaust RPGs before and never paid any attention to them after the first read-through but something is different with this one.
Maybe the obvious eagerness of the writer is contagious? Or the nifty dice pool mechanism (V6 engine) calls to me as I actually have limited experience of playing with dice pools. Colin Chapman was even sweet enough to include the probability tables at the end of the book. It is a small and easily missed contribution that actually helps quite a bit if you plan to bring in house rules or additional mechanisms.
Atomic Highway is a roleplaying game of roadwarriors, cars with guns bolted onto them and drooling mutant cannibals crawling out of sewers that spew green mist. It is like Fallout 3 meets Car Wars and the author is laughing at the face of realism (although the Fallout supertech is nowhere to be found). The setting says something vague about a nuclear holocaust in North America but there is no map and the whole thing feels like it was awkward to write. I have absolutely zero interest in post-holocaust US of A so I need an alternative setting. I tried to find a useful and sufficiently gamey map of post-holocaust Europe. You know, major roads, some terrain features, dots for post-nuclear townships and big radiation signs for where the bombs fell and everybody died or turned mutant.
Unfortunately I couldn't find any and since I can't draw even a straight line, I have to do something else. Some post-holocaust RPGs focus on a fairly small area, like "post-nuclear california" or "Death Valley Free Prison". Since I couldn't go big I am going to pick a special area of my own, something complete with roads, townships, rural patches turned wastelands and a big metropolis I irradiate the shit out of.
I am going to nuke Berlin.
BOOM!
There! A giant radiation hazard sign in the middle, crawling with mutants and glowing in the dark on calm nights. The action is all around it but foolhardy scavengers known as "stalkers" also venture into Berlin using the pre-war subway system. Outside the city remnants of civilization, anti-tech tribes and a free-roaming Guild of Traders are struggling to survive, fighting against gangs, mutants and each other over limited resources. Slavers from the east sometimes raid the settlements, while ragged bands of refugees trickle in from the south, lured by the promise of something better up north (and passing into Neuhanse once they get through my map).
Since we are in post-nuclear Germany, we must have Nazis (thanks, Iron Sky!). A militant enclave of neo-nazis from the Fourth Reich, with distinct uniforms, is slowly but surely conquering the map, oppressing and enslaving the living crap out of everyone not up to their übermensch standards. With mutants around, also as characters, there are plenty of people to be "putsched". And now that we are at it, how about some mysterious high-tech band of monks or priests in the centre of Berlin, using super-science and psychic powers to organize the mutants into army and getting ready to sweep away the remnants of Old World once and for all!
Let's top it off with ice-cool roadwarriors (the bastard offspring of Mad Max and Han Solo) roaming the autobahns in their souped-up killing machines and taking out bandits, nazis, muties and each other. Yeah... I can already see one of them checking out the wanted posters on the billboard of some bartertown. Sure, he could drive right out of my map in a few hours but there is nothing out there. Just other spots specced out by other Atomic Highway and Neuhanse players and their gamemasters aren't here.
Trust me, Berlin Zero is where the action is. At least for those living in Myyrmäki HQ.
24-Jul-2010:
Ropecon, Friday
I removed the HAX redirect because this stuff will be exclusively about pen & paper and there is plenty more to come.
So, Ropecon, on Friday and finally, finally, the first solid release of Neuhanse by Mert Sasioglu and some other people who are even worse at branding themselves than he is. The game is a freely downloadable PDF and very much a work-in-progress (they've actually labelled this version Beta 1.0). Fortunately they did have some paper copies with them and thought I was sufficiently awesome to receive one of those. I've been reading it through again and again, so here is my take on Neuhanse Beta 1.0.
It is short, it is clearly incomplete (the whole thing is set around Baltic and yet the sea does not really feature in the setting description) and you can tell the writers haven't had much experience. It also lacks a focus, offering only a selection of suggested campaign types rather than a solid core from which to expand into other modes. But with all that said, I like what I see and could imagine gamemastering this game or setting. I especially like the rules which capture the intent of Code/X really well. I am afraid they will be ruined, though. The authors did not think them as very important and the audience was bombarding them with complexity-adding suggestions ranging from combat action cards to resource pools.
What would I do? I would change the range of attribute values to 0..+2 and the skill value range to +1...+3. For the most part these changes would cancel each other out but players typically prefer a wider skill value range. Then I would make it clear that a number of things simply cannot be attempted (at least in any way effectively) without at least +1 in the proper skill. Finally, I would add the attack's margin of success to any damage roll but the shock test would only be made when hit and not in the beginning of every successive round. As written, the rules would make your average barroom brawl look really, really odd. But that's just me and if Mert and the boys are really contemplating removing or isolating the system from the setting all this is academic. I would not do it but it is not my game.
So, I would make some changes. And perhaps I will. I have been looking for a quick and dirty dice system for my upcoming Terminal Complex Roleplaying Game (a personal product for an RPG campaign I want to run). This could be it, with the right mods. There is already enough resemblance to Stalker/FLOW so conversion should be easy.
But honestly, when presenting a game project at Ropecon it is not enough to have the game. You must also have the balls (or ovaries) to stand behind your creation, demo it to the public and generally make noise about it. Don't tell us that you haven't really tested any of this stuff. And... for all the gods' sake, if someone had told me what happened I would not have believed him. Unfortunately, I was right there. The authors told the audience that they are not running the game at Ropecon because they feel neither the game nor they themselves are up for it.
If this is the case what the fuck are you doing on stage at Ropecon, Mert? Why the fuck are we even listening to you? I honestly liked Neuhanse but as release presentations go this was a fuck-up! Ilmari Virtanen (THOGS) would wipe the floor with you lot and his game is a joke compared to yours!
*sigh*
Neuhanse Beta 1.0 is here. Download it, read it, run it and let the guys know what you think. I think it is a very good base of a game and the guys deserve a pat on the back. However, what they need is a kick in the ass.
My other purchase, one that I had discussed with the author already at Finncon, was Lamentations of the Flame Princess by James Raggi. The small box kicks ass, being small, sturdy and pretty to look at. Unfortunately the aesthetics do not extend to the contents. Besides that this is, well, Dungeons&Dragons right down to the rules. Raggi is one of the leading authors in Old School Renaissance (which has nothing to do with the Old Skool I am part of) and the justification for releasing this unabashed copy of old D&D is that if a player wants to start roleplaying with same kind of games that Raggi himself started, LOTFP fits the bill. I don't know any reason besides nostalgia why anybody would want to start with D&D as opposed to Runequest, Cyberpunk 2020, Stormbringer or Praedor. Then again, I am about as far removed from the target audience as you can possiblyget. I am sure the game itself works just fine.
Atomic Highway is a post-holocaust game in the traditional Car Wars style and honestly, this is baby is done right. This is post-apocalyptic vehicle combat porn and I love it! I don't know if I could build an entire campaign around the concept but Colin Chapman apparently thinks so and I swear I smell gasoline every time I open the book. I have always missed the balls-to-wall attitude of Games Workshop's long-gone miniatures car game Dark Future. This has it, or at least can be converted into something approaching that level of bold badassitude. On the other hand, if the Roadwarrior truck chase turns you on, you will be reading this rulebook with one hand only.
Finally, I bought the hardcover version of Eclipse Phase. I already had the pdf from one of the webstore bundles but as we all know, nobody takes a full-length PDF game seriously. The rulebook looks gorgeous and the game is transhumanist science fiction set in our Solar System. Transhuman Space comes to mind except that the EP layout is not crap and the system is something I could seriously consider playing myself. The game makes a clear distinction between the character's ego (consciousness or persona) and morph (physical or digital body), presumably allowing the player switch from one morph to another as needed. I don't know for sure as I haven't really read the 300+ page monster yet.
I concluded my Friday with Mikki Rautalahti's presentation on Alan Wake (he is the second writer). It was a good one, although much of the stuff was familiar to me either through similar work or from earlier Alan Wake presentations by various people from Remedy. Still, Mikki's anecdotes were pure gold and his comparative analysis of videogames and roleplaying games was quite interesting. Like the rest of the world, I am angry at Remedy for abandoning the PC as a development platform even if I am more aware of the economic realities behind it than most. Still, I think Alan Wake is an impressive piece of work by an equally impressive bunch of people.
06-Jul-2010:
Writing Break
I am leaving for a 10-day retreat in the Northern Wilderness tomorrow and taking my laptop with me. I need to finish Häirikkötehdas once and for all and this might be a good opportunity to do it. After that it is back to fiction, which unfortunately also means writing non-commissioned works. My pseudo-factbooks have been a "sure thing" as authoring goes. They were commissioned by their respective publishers. I've never written something completely on my own.
Another big elephant in the room is what I should do with this website and blog. Obviously haxgame.com and its dev blog is going to take most of my blogging time and energy from now on and Burger Games as such is not going to do anything drastic while the HAX development continues. And if all goes well, HAX development never really ends. It will just lead on to expansions, supplemental material and other bigger and better things.
And all the while, nothing much is happening here and apart from Neuhansa (whose author contacted me and told him he had requested the smaller presentation room at Ropecon thus arousing serious doubts about his sanity) nothing that interesting is happening the RPG scene either. Apart from the impending English translation of Stalker RPG, that is.
I don't know if I am really going to pull the plug on this thing and having Burger Games around is occasionally useful for billing projects. But don't be surprised if the Designer's Notebook goes on something of a hiatus. Check out the dev blog at www.haxgame.com instead.
05-Jul-2010: WWW.HAXGAME.COM
...and we are out of the closet! The website URL is in the header and the facebook group is HAX if you search for it. The game itself will be out before the end of this year (if I could put an exact date on it I would make a press release instead of a blog entry). The website tells all the basics and we will be adding a forum shortly. The Facebook group is there because things like these are supposed to have Facebook groups.
There. The picture will act as a link. I will be adding more stuff to the Facebook gallery over the next couple of days and then flee to the Arctic Circle. And as soon as the Tracon presentation is available somewhere, it gets added to the Media section of the website. I just wish I had given the presentation in English. HAX has its own dev blog that competes with this one for my time and effort. Right now the dev blog is winning because while HAX is in development, Burger Games exclusives will be on the back burner.
26-Jun-2010:
What? Again?
God damn it, Ropecon programme team! I tore you a new one for this already in 2008 but I guess that wasn't enough. While the Ropecon programme chart isn't officially out yet, the The Burger Games Intelligence Service (BGIS) has found out that the launch presentation of Neuhanse will be in the fucking Klondyke Room instead of the Auditorium. Even better, there is nothing else marked down for Auditorium while this is happening. This is moronic! I haven't forgiven you for putting the Stalker Launch presentation in Ropecon 2008 into Room 25 with the result that not everyone could fit in. Meanwhile the Society of Nordic Roleplaying did its best to entertain a two-thirds-empty auditorium. Being a launch platform for new Finnish RPG titles is perhaps the most important function Ropecon has but you suck at it!
Now, if I had booked my HAX presentation for Ropecon instead of Tracon, Klondyke would be the perfect place for that. As it stands, my HAX presentation will be at an indeterminate moment in Keltsu to an audience averaging about four. Mikko Rautalahti is going to speak at story writing for Alan Wake at Ropecon, though. I might be watching. I have also been asked for an open session of Stalker at some point. That too will be happening in Keltsu, if it happens at all.
Other than the preliminary reports indicate that most or almost all of the stuff I am interested in at Ropecon will happen on Friday. That's a bit of a bummer.
25-Jun-2010:
It Is Finished...
...unfortunately I was only referring to my Tracon 2010 presentation materials. There is a ton of important unfinished stuff lying about in my mental space, from cleaning up my studio at home to finishing that god-damn book Häirikkötehdas.
I should really fix my bad habit of starting a book with the foreword as they rarely end up being exactly what I first envisioned. In this case my early plans were actually guesses more than actual plans of anything. Häirikkötehdas is turning out to be some kind of weird geek biography with a strong but not exclusive focus on experiences with and in educational facilities. That still makes more sense than the publisher's early definition for it but I swear, honest to the Great Hippopotamus, that this is absolutely the last autobiography I will ever write. I am hoping to make it fun, easy and opinionated as my "factbooks" tend to be. If you liked Elämäpeli, odds are that you'll like Häirikkötehdas as well but I am glad I am not the one who has to figure out to whom this thing is to be marketed and how.
I envy Mike Pohjola's relationship with his publisher, Johnny Kniga. I don't know what their deal really is but at least he gets to write fiction all the time. I seem to be stuck with pseudofactbooks on game development or general geekery. It could be worse but factbooks are basically about things that have already happened or are otherwise out there for everyone to see and experience. Fiction, whether it is literature, roleplaying games or video games, lets you experience something entirely new and unattainable. It is also its weakness. In one of the game studios I have worked in the past I was told by more than one people that they hated fiction (and one of them reserved a special hatred for science fiction) because "it is all just lies told by some dude for money". I have hard time reconciling that attitude with working in the creative industries as a developer. Then again, I like my job. Maybe they hated theirs but stayed on because... big bucks? Stress-free environment? Steady employment and financially stable employers?
Mind boggles.
P.S.
Yes, the HAX lead artist has also done work for Stalker RPG in the early years. After all, the game was years in the making, remember.
22-Jun-2010:
Yes, It's Been A While
But I didn't want to write more until I had something new to show you.
This is a small part of the world intro that will be on the HAX website. It is also a good example of the webcomic-style narrative used to carry the plot and storyline missions forward. We are making progress and while the lead programmer busted his arm and has been climbing on walls with frustration, the techside team has actually cleared a couple of major hurdles (from my perspective as a designer I would consider them The Greatest Hurdles) we've had with the code: the detection and stealth. If they were not working, nothing else would have mattered. By the way, if you are getting bored with the HAX and tech talk, you are in luck: in about two weeks we will open the official HAX website and my dev blog technobabble will move there. I'll give you the URL when the time comes.
In other news, whenever you hear really bad mixing and sound quality and rock festivals, blame Ari. This is not anyone I know but during the Suburban Tribe soundcheck I learned that there was someone called Ari in the mixer tent of Myötätuulirock. And oh boy, did Ari fuck things up! It is true that you don't really get a CD-quality experience on most rock festivals but there are limits as to how low-fi you can go! On Friday, Tarot was completely drowned out by their Bass Guitar which sounded like someone playing Vuvuzela in super slow-motion. Marco did open his mouth but whether he was singing or gasping for breath I really can't tell. Los Bastardos Finlandeses were drowned out by its lead guitar distortion. If I wasn't a fan and didn't have all the albums it would have been impossible to tell what song was what. Suburban Tribe, which I don't know, was either an atonal orchestral or also mixed to hell and back.
Fortunately, some things worked. Kiuas sounded okay and Mustasch, wow! I didn't know either of these bands but Mustasch rocked my socks off and not least because the mixing had gone accidentally right and I am all the more bitter for it now since I know what the sound quality could have been like. Amorphis closed off the festival but I think Mustasch had most to give. As much as I like Skyforger (by Amorphis), it is not something you should hear in an outdoor festival. Book the Finlandia House or the Helsinki Opera and play it there instead as a concert, without the disruptions and idiots.
Low attendance by the way. I wonder how Myötätuulirock is doing financially?
P.S.
Although North Korean got crushed playing against Portugal, I still respect them more than the French team.
05-Jun-2010:
Plague and CyberFlow
My girlfriend and I fell ill with stomach troubles at about the same time. Half a week has passed and while she is recovering well, I'm going downhill. I still have vivid memories from the campylo-infection I had two years ago that ended up costing me most of my summer vacation. If I am not getting better tomorrow, off to the doctor we go (probably for some antibiotics once they figure out what bacteria it is). With my interesting history of exotic diseases, my personal guesses range from Plague to Typhus. As outer space begins at 10 metres from the closest lavatory, I've been working from home, writing HAX in the evenings. Progress is slow but I want my storyline missions to be interesting, if simple to execute. They often involve world exposition and if put together, would make a fairly good cyberpunk comic book.
Meanwhile, Sami Koponen wrote a piece on his attempts to bend FLOW into other genres. I would love to recommend this article but to me it seems like he is actually struggling with some fundamental flaws of, well, thinking.
FLOW is built around a challenge system. By definition, it is meant to resolve challenges, i.e. player actions with a set goal but involving significant risk of failure or incomplete results. Choosing whether to climb up a wall or take the stairs is not a challenge; it is a decision and does not involve game mechanics. But once that decision is made and the player wants his character to climb up the wall, the action of climbing the wall is a challenge. Maybe it is part of Forge philosophy or something to involve the rules in absolutely everything but FLOW is an Old Skool system. It treats the game mechanics as a toolbox where the gamemaster can take out a tool when he wants to and put it back when it is no longer needed. Between the obvious challenges or when the player deliberately wants to use a game mechanic to influence something, the system "does not exist". As a result, the system does not exist in roughly 95% of the time.
That said, I've had my own troubles in converting it into other genres. My babblings about HAX have lead to a small resurgence of interest on CyberFlow. I am my own worst enemy as far as that project is concerned. Cyberpunk roleplaying has been sold to Finnish gamers in a specific, micromanagement-centric way and I am not an exception. CP2020, Shadowrun, various smaller games in between; they are all based on micromanagement of resources, be they implants, weapons, body armour, drugs, spells etc. That does not fly with FLOW. Here my attempts to produce a diceless Old Skool system for ordinary gamers falls apart.
While FLOW most likely does a better job at emulating literary and movie-based cyberpunk settings than either vanilla SR or CP do, it cannot emulate the kind of playstyle offered by those games and what has become the genre standard for roleplayers. Even if you didn't change anything in the setting, forcing FLOW on Night City would necessitate a major rethink of the gameplay methodology. I am of course supposed to be in favor of this but frankly, it may not be what modern gamers would be looking for in a cyberpunk roleplaying game. So I am back at re-branding my strain of cyberpunk into street scifi.
My design process is setting-centric. I don't like doing generic stuff and usually fail when I try. In short, no setting inspiration means no game. CyberFlow is based on "Terminal", the wider setting for HAX. Hax is but one of the many street cultures in Terminal Complex (I would love to say "shadow cultures" but I don't want to step on Shadowrun's turf). These are not character classes but cultures, with their own ideological constructs, power hierarchies etc. Maybe I should call them Street Nations? Some of them coexist with or even form part of the mainstream, much like big religions and moderate ethnic identities do today. This does not mean the co-existence would be problem-free. With the advent of trans- and post-humanist street cultures there is more than enough opportunities for racist or even speciest undertones and ideologies. But by and large, they are all part of the larger society.
Others like Zyncs or Mekas are peaceful even if they are incompatible with the rest of the society. They can still form their own communities or even microstates in the patchwork of Street Sectors, limiting interchange with other cultures to levels they are comfortable with. Then Hax and the like exist in the grey area. Not all Hax are criminals and the subculture has adherents in related industries and media. But the more extreme end, the one featured in HAX is criminal and parasitic. The mainstream would wipe them out if they could.
Completely hostile cultures are usually short-lived, highly secret and from the mainstream's point of view, slightly insane. This includes death cults (think Thugees in the 19th century India) or political groups so opposed to the dominant cultures that they are at war with it. Think Al-Qaeda and the modern West. These cultures can coexist with more dominant cultures as secret organizations or sleeper cells. And they are not exclusive to Street Sectors.
Much of the higher politics of the Cartel is driven by the competition of secret organizations within the Cartel Elite. And while the Singularity Cloud is poorly understood, it does have its equivalent ideological clusters and competing trends, much like a human being can have conflicting goals and personality traits. Their goals can be very much at odds with the interests of the mainstream, at least in the short term. This is all great for someone writing a book, or making a computer game where complex interactions with other players are recommended but not enforced.
Traditionally, the literary genre of cyberpunk is all about lone wolves or at most small groups of lone wolves temporarily united by some shared interest, even if their goals remain different. Loneliness in the dark future society is part of the future shock cliche. Humans are herd animals and ties to social groups and hierarchies are part of our fundamental needs. Even in the novels, these lone-wolf protagonists stand apart from the mainstream cultures surrounding them. That makes them exceptional but also leaves them struggling to cope with whatever adversities they are facing. This is easy to replicate a video game but a roleplaying game is a social event and for Old Skool gamers like myself, interactions and social developments within the group over a longer period of time form a big part of the fun in campaign play. This forms a dilemma that CP2020 could never really resolve.
Shadowrun could. In retrospect, I am wondering if that contributed to its success more than the rather superficial fantasy elements usually cited as a reason. Characters had their own racial and professional backgrounds or scenes. "Shadowrunners" (runner being a commonly used term for any kind of dark future adventurer in this genre) were a subculture within the higher level cultures. Characters would come from their home cultures, join together for a shadowrun op, reap the rewards and return to their respective cultures. In some cases their social circles within the home cultures would have been unaware that the character was a shadowrunner.
My games are known for adventurer cultures that exist and sometimes even compete with the mainstream. But they are still static structures: very few praedors or stalkers have a meaningful social existence outside their identities as adventurers. This way, becoming an adventurer involves a heavy sacrifice. It is a rite of passage, taking the character from the world of familiar comforts and responsibilities into something new, dangerous and unknown. It also reduces the significance of those mainstream cultures in the setting as a whole. Shadowrunning, as portrayed in the previous paragraph, does not. Maybe instead of looking at old cyberpunk roleplaying games for an adventurer model I should look into espionage and conspiracy games like CORPS?
The characters would have real lives as part of their respective social backgrounds and street cultures. Running, shadows or not, would be an activity or a part-time subculture at most. You could even play a Hax in a group if you wanted. The ghost runner activities, the stuff featured in HAX the Game, would be part of the background this particular character is coming from. It would give him resources to use when adventuring as part of the group and once the adventure is over, he would return to his netrocentric culture and acquire more resources for the next adventure. But his ghost running would not be part of the session gameplay and therefore the traditional netrunner problems would not exist.
P.S.
Have you all downloaded Machete Girl #1?
And check out Deus Ex 3!
01-Jun-2010:
Summertime
Have you all already downloaded the Machete Girl e-zine? Because if you haven't but you are still reading this, you are out of excuses. Now Get!
Nuurori asked at majatalo.org (before it went down) why won't people like me publish their stuff for free in PDF format. Simple: if a product has no cost, the general public automatically assumes it does not have any real value. Second, nobody uses pdf rulebooks for real. I myself bought a shitload of stuff from DriveThroughRPG when they had their big sell-off and haven't read any of it, nor has anyone else I know who did the same. A magazine, especially if it is well-written and edited with suitably small chunks of text, now that I might read just like I might read a webcomic. Some say Machete Girl is still looking for its editing style but hell, *I* am not complaining.
So, it is Summer. And I started it by falling over in the shower and busting my leg. My leg feels numb, the rest of my body is tensing up and my head feels stupid. On the plus side, I have now scripted and specced 9 of the 16 storyline missions for HAX. On the roleplaying front absolutely nothing is happening. I am buried in projects, one of my Stalker players is in a hospital (mauled by an anomaly) and Häirikkötehdas could use a new chapter or two. Man, and I thought Elämäpeli was difficult to write.