Getting to Observe Gaming from the Other Side of the Table

 Playing a lot more recently has afforded me a chance to think about what it is that I have been enjoying (and not enjoying) out of RPGs recently, with the added advantage of feeling less pressure to prep material for games ongoing. As of right now, I am many sessions in to a Gaslight era Call of Cthulhu 7E campaign, three sessions in to a Pathfinder 2E campaign, and I have just wrapped a D&D 5E campaign (which will eventually return), with tentative plans to start a Pathfinder for Savage Worlds campaign to try it out when I return from summer vacation. Meanwhile Mothership is there, and we play it when all parties can find themselves in the right moment to set the time aside....but that's really tough, it turns out, to do more than once a month.

So here's what I've noticed so far:

First and most important, as a player I can be picky, or at least I used to be, but these days I am just enjoying not having to drive the game forward so am happy to play the role, regardless of the game subject. So while I might have some notions of what I'd like to play (and I will be straight up on this, my player interests are still trapped in the early nineties in terms of what sort of game experience would make me happy) I am at this point just happy to be playing so the scenarios in action are good enough. Likewise, I applaud my cohorts who are currently GMing, as I feel their pain, acutely.

Now, I love Call of Cthulhu as both player and Keeper, so I have no issues there. We did experiment with Pulp Cthulhu for a time (not my fave), but its since been largely redacted as I think the Keeper realized it didn't really mesh so well as one might like. Pulp Cthulhu exists, and there are no doubt strong advocates for it, but I felt like playing with the Pulp rules was putting the game on "cheat" mode a bit and am happy to see it dialed back to more normal Cthulhu rules these days.

Lesson learned: I do like it when the game is tougher and expects you to know that being careful is important.

Now, in three sessions of Pathfinder 2E I have simultaneously come to appreciate that PF2E was most definitely written by game designers who wanted to both make the GM's life easier and put uppity players in their place. They also were obsessed with balance, to some weird degrees. And the action point system...it feels like its a malevolent social experiment designed to tempt players to poke fate and learn the hard way that second and third iterative attacks, at least in PF2E, are borderline traps, quick pathways to failure. 

It's all kind of interesting to see this not from the angle of the GM, for whom I will argue the mechanical aspects of PF2E are actually simpler than the player facing mechanics, but to really feel it hammered home that the game weighs odds against the players every step of the way. We're even using a published Pathfinder adventure path, and the GM is very by the book, so I know he's running the scenarios exactly as presented. It's brutal, and part of my likes it, but another part of me realizes that Pathfinder 2E, from both sides of the screen, has some profound flaws in design. 

I have already decided that while I will continue to play PF2E, no problem, I am done with it as a GM (well, in theory)....I just think there are so many other, better game systems out there that fit my own style and tastes better. I thought PF2E would cut it, but over time my love of it has soured badly, I guess.

With no immediate games that I need to plan for in the future (except for Savage Pathfinder which is in the can and waiting for when I am ready to run it), I have had ample time to think about what I really want to do with the many game books I have purely for my own amusement. So far, there has been one clear, out-of-the-park winner: GURPS. I've been designing stuff for a hypothetical GURPS Space campaign, filling out NPCs and pregens for my planned GURPS Egypt campaign, finally taking a serious look at what I could do with Dungeon Fantasy RPG, and reading through the many, many PDFs of GURPS I have acquired over the years. 

I'm also still intrigued to do more with D&D 3.5 down the road, but when and where I have no idea. Both D&D 3.5 and GURPS appear to be calling back to a sweet spot in gaming for me, a period from roughly 1992-2006* during which I ran mostly one of these two systems, only occasionally breaking out into other territories. My middle agedness is showing, I guess. 

Ultimately, to run GURPS again I need to get buy-in from my players. Some of them I can count on, others I think might see the perceived complexity of GURPS as a nightmare from which they can never escape. GURPS comes from an older era of design that assumed a level of focus and attention which I think is hard for a lot of gamers (anyone, really) to sustain today. If I run it, I am going to need to do all the heavy lifting at first, including providing lots of pregens, or restrict them to GURPS Lite for a while. We'll see.

Still, we may be able to play some games on our lengthy vacation that is about to start, and I am debating dragging GURPS along for personal fun, and Savage Worlds along because it will be easy to teach to the family members (mostly kids along with my son). Savage Worlds has a wonderful simplicity to it, and its inherent physicality with the card decks, bennie chips, dice as stats and so forth make it a fun game to teach kids. But who knows....usually there's never any actual time on these summer vacations to game (its just me deluding myself) so I should really just pack a handful of things I think I might actually find time to read. We shall see.

*For a lot of that time it was still AD&D 2E, but it was the AD&D 2E with tons of bloated splatbooks and the "2.5" rulebooks, all of which desperately made us crave a cleaned up, newer ruleset, which of course WotC eventually graced us with. And for 2000-2003ish it was the 3.0 version of those rules, which I loved dearly even if I can't go back to them after the 3.5 fixed so much.

SECOND NOTE: If you look at my post prior to this, outlining five campaign ideas, notice how while those are all fine ideas for any old campaign, they would be really cool in a GURPS campaign. Just saying.....I'm not kidding when I say I have that GURPS thing on the brain.

Campaign Suggestions - for the future

Thought I'd post this for fun....sending some brief ideas out to the group for the future planned Savage Worlds Pathfinder game. It's going to take place in an ongoing setting, which is a fantasy analog to the post-Roman collapse period of Europe, but with some key changes to mix it up, such as an analog for Egypt's Middle Kingdoms Bronze Age Dynasties still existing in some form (Khafra) even as a post Sassanid era "evil sword & sorcery kingdom" arises to threaten them (Hepaste); a world where post-classical "not Greece" was brutalized by the empire, and so on and so forth. I will have to post more on this setting some time, it's grown a lot in the last two years.

THE EDGE OF CIVILISATION:  You are all part of a small local tribe in northern Selentar near Tymorath's Wall, beyond which lies the threat of the Dendric Wilderness. The theme would be life in a very "celtic" style society on the frontier, as far away from civilization as one can get.

Themes: community issues, oppressive wilderness, Dendric threat, foreigners interposing, here there be monsters

BUILDING A MERCHANT EMPIRE: You are all more cultured members of a civilized region, such as the old imperial capitol of Drautha or one of the Eormic cities of the mainland; thematically you will all have a house affiliation and be tied in to expanding on trade and mercantile interests for the family.

Themes: building the house, sailing to build trade relations, finding new markets, pirates, competition

THE PROTECTION OF THE PHARAOH:  You are artisans, laborers, and soldiers in the distant lands of Khafra, working to the benefit of your regent who protects the kingdom from northern barbarians,, who faces difficult times in the southern River Kingdom as the warlords of Hepaste grow impertinent and refuse to pay tribute, forcing you as a group to deal with a turbulent potential war.

Themes: loyalty to Pharaoh, warfare, scouting, seeking allies, assassination (both thwarting and instigating), seeking out lost magic to help the cause

THE FORGING OF THE SILK ROAD:  You are members of an eastern city in Nauricam. You are part of a trading house seeking to forge a trade route to the west now that the years have shed away all remnants of the Empire, which once sought to conquer Nauricam as the last hold-out to its reign. You could also be seeking to explore the undisovered eastern lands. 

Themes: travel, bandits, diplomatic relations with remote cities and civilizations, discovery of unknown wonders and new resources along the way, cultural conflicts

RECOVERING YOUR LOST CULTURE:  You are all from a city in Satra, where you are rebuilding government and life post-Empire, seeking to restore the old ways by digging into the ruins of old to learn of the lost gods so effectively suppressed by the Ironvast Empire for centuries. You are scavengers of lore and seekers of lost wisdom, employed by wealthy patricians who wish to recover Satra's buried history.

Themes: A deeply oppressed society is freed, and seeks to recover its lost heritage and beliefs; tombs and temples to explore, old imperial families with stolen artifacts to find and repatriate from, building new monuments to old gods, dealing with foreigners who oppose this reclamation of lost knowledge

Curse of the Crimson Throne and Advanced Player's Guide coming to Pathfinder for Savage Worlds

 I haven't found a direct page to link to, but in my email newsletter from Pinnacle Entertainment they indicated that a new Kickstarter is coming for the Savage Worlds edition of Pathfinder, and its a doozy, with the following items to be included in this new Kickstarter (copy/pasted from the email):

• Pathfinder® for Savage Worlds: Advanced Player’s Guide
• Pathfinder® for Savage Worlds: Curse of the Crimson Throne – Book 1
• Pathfinder® for Savage Worlds: Curse of the Crimson Throne – Book 2
• Pathfinder® for Savage Worlds: Curse of the Crimson Throne – Book 3
• Pathfinder® for Savage Worlds: Curse of the Crimson Throne – Book 4
• Pathfinder® for Savage Worlds: Curse of the Crimson Throne – Book 5
• Pathfinder® for Savage Worlds: Curse of the Crimson Throne – Book 6
• Pathfinder® for Savage Worlds: Guide to Korvosa
• Pathfinder® for Savage Worlds: Crimson Throne Handouts
• Pathfinder® for Savage Worlds: Harrow Deck
• Pathfinder® for Savage Worlds: Crimson Throne Adversary Cards Set
• Pathfinder® for Savage Worlds: Archetype Set 3
• Pathfinder® for Savage Worlds: Archetype Set 4
• Pathfinder® for Savage Worlds: Curse of the Crimson Throne Poster Map
• Pathfinder® for Savage Worlds: Ally and Adversary Cards Set 2
• Pathfinder® for Savage Worlds: Ally and Adversary Cards Set 3
• Pathfinder® for Savage Worlds Advanced Power Cards

That's a lot of Pathfinder goodness, and gives me keen hopes that Pathfinder for Savage Worlds isn't just a useful book set for the SWADE rules, but will have viable legs in its own right as a "D&Desque" system that provides a distinctly alternative ruleset to the now very long in the tooth legacy of D20 era RPGs.

The Advanced Player's Guide in particular will include inquisitors, witches, oracles, alchemists, cavaliers and summoners as new edge classes (SWPF treats classes as uniquely packaged starting edges). That's going to greatly expand the available flavors to the system. Now fingers crossed they will eventually include a Savaged up Bestiary 2!

Mothership - Ships of Madness

 So yes, last night's game was a load of fun. I am doing something a bit unorthodox (but I have used this style before), in which the story is told from two opposing angles, and the players are literally playing two different groups of characters. That meant, essentially, that last night's session as really two two-hour long sessions, one for each group.

When I last did this in D&D, it was with the knowledge neither group was going to meet; the story just got to play out from two different angles and regions of the game. But this scenario is assuming both groups are in close proximity and may eventually meet. I am not a huge fan of saddling the players with multiple PCs, however, so the expectation is that the two groups will have potentially high attrition by the time they converge, and then the players can see who survives. Its almost like a more ornate version of the DCC style funnel crawl.

Anyway....as expected, last night was a great game, and I appreciate Mothership as it reminds me every time that I am indeed deeply invested in it, and enjoy GMing, I just need to accept that it can be perfectly okay to park D&D sometimes and let that battery recharge, so to speak.

The Mothership Cure-All

 Posting yesterday was mildly cathartic, let me assemble some thoughts I had otherwise not given substance to into a form I could correlate with. One thing that came out of all that, plus following the enjoyable D&D game last night, was that it's best for me to chase the muse, the thing which draws my attention. The D&D game is set in a game world I am enjoying exploring; should just do more of that (but maybe at a slower pace so I have time to catch up with the scenario as the players rip through content). More importantly...there is tonight, and Mothership!

I really have to say, Mothership is deeply cathartic for me as well. Mothership is the dark echo of a corner of the SF genre that has been with me since I first saw Alien in the theaters as a kid. Tonight's game will be a send-off of sorts (part 1 of such) for a player who must depart from our week night games due to scheduling for a while, so I figure we should make this really go out with a bang, Mothership is a perfect vessel for this....it strongly, almost intrinsically encourages the Warden (GM) to dive deep into the most gruesome and dark corners of the horror/SF mashup and it likewise encourages the players to accept their fates and learn to enjoy it. The fact that the game, mechanically, aligns so well with my own sensibilities and expectations in game design is just a huge plus.

Anyway, after this grand finale story arc for one PC is over I'll post the grim details and scenarios. It's gonna be a horrific ride....here's an image or two that I will be using in tonight's game for certain NPC illustrations, nothing "given away" I hope....if any of the players in tonight's game read this, scrub your brains of the memory!

Building a Break into the Routine, and Looking Hard at What I Want to Run (and Play!)

 More random Deathbat musings. So one thing I have come to accept is what I have really known for years now: I am burned out on GMing games 1-3 times a week. I am also burned out on Roll20, but it does make life easier so I'll give it a pass.

One friend of mine has stepped up to start running a game in my place on Saturday night, which is great. I was running a 5E/Spelljammer sort of deal and it hammered home my issue: I was enjoying it in the moment, but dreading the time between games, having to find the time to prep and get motivated. When I am not motivated, excited for the game at hand, that to me is a clear sign of burnout. 

Locally, only a few people in my gaming circle ever GM or try their hand at it. For the vast majority of it, I end up as GM. This is at least partially my own fault, because for most of my decades of gaming I have generally preferred to be the GM as much as possible....I liked the job a great deal for so many years, and as a result I had a lot of players who also liked being players. Gamers who maybe liked to GM a lot? They found other game groups. So my selection over time leaned heavily toward 1 GM and lots of players who like being players.

Over the years, on occasion I'd feel the burnout but some player could step in and guest GM for a while, but it wasn't too often....just enough for me to get the break I needed and rekindle my enthusiasm for the process. 

But in the last few years, for various obvious reasons, I am hitting a hard wall. I want to enjoy the game as I have, but there has been fewer opportunities for guest GMing (especially in the VTT era where that requires more than the usual planning) and so I haven't gotten a break, at all. Thankfully that is changing a bit. It is also a bit harder, because I think two other things are happening that I need to consider carefully.

The first item is that I may have run so much D&D over so long a period that it's just not as engaging for me, anymore. In fact, its been easy to just show up and run a game on what borders on auto-pilot, a part of me so conditioned to run it that it is why I feel like I can have fun "in the moment" while otherwise utterly dreading the task in the time between sessions. In the old days I varied gaming a lot more than I do today. Indeed, GURPS used to be my main system, and as both GM and player I had a small but very dedicated group that was up for whatever; and that system let us do the Whatever part quite well. But in recent years....outside of Cthulhu and Cypher, its not very different, and there are a dearth of the old style of more subtle, investigative and historical/SF games I used to run going on. Some of this, admittedly, is that I have different players with different styles and expectations....and I also feel there is some merit to the suggestion that how players engage with a scenario has changed over time (possibly due to the influence of video games), but that is another blog post in its own right

The other part is best summarized, I feel, as old age. I am 51 now, and there's still years to go with every bit getting worse, but I can feel it in my bones: I am just not as energetic as I used to be. Maybe 3+ nights of gaming a week with me as GM is just no longer a thing I can do, or necessarily want to do! Maybe one night a week might be better....and maybe I need to make that a live night, just to force myself to get out of the house and not sit, for yet more hours, in front of a computer screen. So yeah, I think age has a lot to do with it. Unfortunately age gets us all, and I know some players and ex-GMs who stopped running games for much the same reason. 

So for now, solutions I have include:

1. Game fewer nights as GM, get others to take up role more often. Try being a player more, its a welcome relief to be worrying about just one character for once.

2. Look at my games, and put more time (quality) over quantity into what I really want to do; find players who are also in to it. Finish that GURPS Egypt campaign and run it. Start that Cypher Godforsaken campaign when I am good and ready. Prepare the next Cthulhu or Delta Green story arc. Do the stuff that I feel personally more invested in these days.

3. Give D&D a long, hard break. Also, its cousins and heartbreaker buddies, whatever they may be (PF2E, OSE, etc.).

Things to ponder!

EDIT: This post feels awfully doom and gloom at the moment, but I admit I am riding a fun high from running tonight's game. Still, we have a plan of sorts, and it involves Pathfinder for Savage Worlds soon. 

The Slow Burn: Wanting to play more Old-School Essentials....

When I wrapped my foray into Old-School Essentials RPG a month or two back, it was with a couple observations. One of those was that, at times, I felt like the game was hitting too low on the complexity bar for my tastes, but it was also admittedly a lot of fun and exceedingly easy to adjudicate. Realizing (somehow, after all these decades) that abilities like "Open Door" can just be reskinned as "athletics" and "listen to door" is just a Listen skill check....Detect Secret Door is just "Spot..." it was a bit of a surprise to me that I never considered that back in the day. Probably because, if you roll back to actual AD&D, the measurement and enforcing text in the rules gets wonkier and more specific. But for OSE--yeah, they are totally athletics, listen and spot. 

Anyway, after running more D&D 5E for a while (and having fun doing it), along with diving in to the latest hardcover release fo Pathfinder 2E (Book of the Dead), I find myself drawn back to the elegant simplicity of OSE. I want to run more of it, and preferably sooner than later. This is even in the face of my current other major obsession: Pathfinder Savage Worlds! PFSW is itself an amazing pairing.

Anyway, no idea what to make of this or where to go with it, but I feel now like my only real mistake with the idea of continuing the OSE game in space was simply not finding the best OSE resource to crib content from. I'm snagging a copy of Solar Blades & Cosmic Spells, for example, and also reconsidering if maybe I can use just the core rules of White Star and ignore the Galaxy edition. These could all be viable solutions. Heck, I can just crib from my Spelljammer books, which I'm already doing for 5E, although I concede my vision for the OSE in space game was to have actual technology and science-fantasy in the style of Starfinder, just without all the thousands of pages of excessive rules. 

Well, got plenty on my plate as it is, and my main game night (Saturday) is likely stuck doing D&D 5E for a good long time now. My Tuesday night group is aware of my interest in trying out Savage Pathfinder, though. As to where I fit more OSE in.....good question! But I keep thinking about it, so I need to do it.

The Deathbat Reading List for May (so far): Ryuutama, Pathfinder for Savage Worlds, Star Trek Adventures Tricorder Collector's Edition

This month I've had the opportunity to dive deep into some newer games which I have found myself quite intrigued with, and indeed, dare I say it, even creatively motivated, which is all I as a GM can really ask for! Here's some of the cool stuff I've been exploring:

Ryuutama

This fantastic little Japanese RPG has been translated into English and has a fine premise: you play the average folk of a town or village who find themelves on a grand adventure. Its distinct anime/manga style art is evocative of the genre and it really leans in to an organic tabletop rendering of certain kinds of JRPGs, the kind where you play more ordinary folk who become great explorers and adventurers in their time (or even just well regarded but ordinary folk). It's loaded with everything you need to have fun, relaxing adventures with less emphasis on grimdark and more emphasis on exploration, discovery and personality. I hesitate to call this a fun game for kids because its also a very fun game for adults who might enjoy exploring elements of the fantasy genre that aren't all about sticking swords in things all the time (although that can happen in Ryuutama as well).

Pathfinder for Savage Worlds

This long delayed Kickstarter finally arrived at my doorstep and it was well worth the wait. Using assets and style guides from the 1st edition of Pathfinder, this adaptation to Savage Worlds is a complete game by itself, customizing the Savage World Adventure Edition (SWADE) for Pathfinder gaming. The underlying assumption is you can use it with Golarion, but the rules are 100% suitable for any type of D&Desque/Pathfinderish fantasy setting you want to use it for. The core rules and Bestiary are all you need to do your own thing, but the Companion has a nice guide to Golarion as well as useful artifacts in the back, and there's a GM screen and module as well as a metric ton of cards, tokens, templates and other stuff. The entire Rise of the Runelords series was also ported over, though I did not get that since I tend to rarely use published modules.....that said, the Hollow's Last Hope module included with the GM screen is organized and presented more nicely than the original, so I may take a look at Rise of the Runelords for Savage Pathfinder to see if it's revision/restructuring fits with my own style for modules better.

Either way, Savage Pathfinder has the distinct appeal of capturing the style and variety of content and monsters I like in a D&D/PF game, but using the Savage Worlds rules, which I think might just be that thing I need to really revitalize my interest in the D&D-like genre. We shall see!

Star Trek Adventures Tricorder Edition

Sapping all of my time and energy away from my other SF campaign plans, the Star Trek Adventures Tricorder collector's set has been my accidental gateway drug back into the deep dive of Star Trek lore and fan madness. It may not be evident, but for many, many years I was a pretty big fan of Star Trek. I would not qualify myself as a Trekkie, as I don't go to conventions, argue about the canon and non canon lore of Trek online, cosplay or anything like that. But I am the kind of Trek fan who watched every episode of each series (and recently subbed to Paramount+ to catch up on current shows), and I ran a lot of Star Trek back in the day when it was still with Last Unicorn Games. The 2D20 edition of the system from Modiphius is a generally more accessible edition, and the digest edition of the rules that comes with the Tricorder Set is an easy read, with a nice reframing of the rules entirely from the perspective of The Original Series in terms of its assumed setting and appearance. The fact that it comes with a mini campaign, lots of TOS character and ship cards, dice, and counters all packaged in case that looks (and pops open) like a classic era tricorder is just a huge bonus. It even has a shoulder strap! 

If I carry this around like an actual tricorder does that count as cosplay? Hmmm.

Either way, I am extremely keen on trying out some Star Trek Adventures soon, most likely set in the Original Series timeline, maybe in the intervening years following Kirk's five year voyage but before the V'Ger incident so I can take advantage of those lost years as a framework for adventures. I may or may not try to extrapolate from the weird mess that is Discovery (still plowing through that) but the new series, Strange New Worlds, looks extremely promising.

For those wondering, the Digest Rulebook is complete, and has some small but welcome changes mechanically. It's not a shrunken typefont, either, so perfectly readable. The book is its own thing, apart from the bigger rulebook, but is a full set of rules....just highly tailored to the 2265-2269 era, although some of the story and lore bits throughout the book address things from Enterprise, time travel episodes or episodes of later series which introduced retroactive material or the first six movies (ex: Breen were not a thing in TOS, but were retroactively identified as having been around for a long time in TNG and DS9), and so forth. It also alludes to some bits of the craziness in Discovery in spots, but mainly focuses on content as relates to TOS.

Anyway.....yeah, so Star Trek is apparently back on my obsession menu after a really long absence.

Cypher Space

 This might be a genuinely short post....I often claim that, but this one will endeavor to do so as its quite late and I need to get to bed. I'm back to eyeballing Cypher System as the resource for my next SF campaign, once more. The Stars are Fire sourcebook is a fine SF resource. The Cypher System rules allow for the most character flexibility in terms of interesting and exotic (and supported) design decisions, and it is almost impossible for a player to go through char gen in Cypher and end up on the other side with something that isn't at least interesting. Meanwhile its really the best game ever (yes, it is) in terms of the GM side of the operation....this is the level of mechanical depth I am craving.

The question is....what exactly should I aim for? Resume the "Starship Zhuul" campaign, but powered by Cypher instead of OSE or Starfinder? Adapt my Savage Space campaign to Cypher (Cypher Space, ahem)? Evolve my far-future campaign setting in which humanity is a diaspora which survived the fall of an empire but also lost earth? Ideas, ideas....and that is what is so great about Cypher, it supports all of these ideas exceedingly well and with minimal special effort on my part other than to bring creative thoughts to the process. 

These days my most successful recent games have all been non-fantasy genres*, or fantasy heavily blended. Mothership has been a great success. Every Cypher game I've run has been great (despite feeling like advancement can be too quick, and still wrapping my head around the power levels of high rank PCs). Call of Cthulhu has been a real pleasure to run lately. I'm having fun playing D&D (and PF2E), but it's not precisely in my wheel house of visceral entertainment anymore....I likely have just, well, played too much of it, to be honest, and that's okay. At least I am mixing it up for Saturday by diving deep into the Spelljammer/fantasy space aspects of it (well, working on it....the group is being very cautious in their preparation to do so). 

Dinoplex Cataclysm Finale - Mothership Thursday

 Mothership's periodic Thursday game last night wrapped the Dinoplex Cataclysm (which had an entire session of just enjoying the park) with a huge bang.

The group, which had a medley of successful survivors from prior adventures, ended up with a 60% PC murder rate which is pretty out there. Almost everyone died in the first shot. So, the tally was....

One death by Titanoboa

One death by Megalodon bite

One stress-induced bout of heart failure following a terminal maxed out roll on the panic chart

Some of the players had kept their PCs alive since pretty much session one, but I think with the deliberate lethality of Mothership that just means they were overdue. Either way.....crazy night! Three new PCs to join the party next session (including my wife, who is rolling a scientist it sounds like). 

One of the victims had in a prior scenario purchased a backup body, a "resleeve" on another stop point. We determined his new body would awaken, but no memories leading up to his death were transmitted, so at some future date a clone of that PC will awaken by default with a big question as to what happened to his gene donor.

Another character's mind and partially degraded memories were downloaded to the ship AI by the android captain, whose player decided to see if she could pull this off. So that player gets to roll a new PC, but now he's an android with a fragmented post-mortem memory of who he was. Good times! Only in Mothership does this stuff work so well.