Cypher System Rising

 As the weeks have gone by I've begun to settle on a system with consistency: Cypher System. I mean sure, I've run this plenty in the past, but I've honestly not run it in a good while and I think maybe now it would be the ideal solution to my doldrums. 

Cypher System does have some warts, though. It's a player-roll facing system, meaning the GM never really needs to roll dice except maybe for some random cypher charts or something. 99% of the time the players roll to attack, roll to defend, roll to take action, etc. So this does mean that the core conceits of the system depend on player honesty and understanding of this mechanic. A player who unfaithfully does not report a roll of a 1 which incurs a GM intrusion, for example, is defeating a key story-telling element of the game. 

The second issue with Cypher is really user-dependent: the system's dice pool methodology has some "numbers that mean other numbers, and ways of making tasks reduce in difficulty that also mean converting to numbers" sort of approach that can seem simple enough to some, and can be oddly baffling to others. I know that when I first got Cypher System I sat on it for like a year or two because the core conceit of the system seemed so counter-intuitive to me, and felt like it would be a real hassle to teach people. I eventually pushed past that (long, long ago) and quickly grokked and loved the mechanics for what they are, but this has always proven to be a problem for at least two of my regular players. One of them has actually expressed keen interest in playing it though, despite my recalling she was very frustrated with the system in the past.....so maybe she (like me) suddenly grokked it. 

The third and final issue I have always had with Cypher (and other players of the system as well) is that XP gain is pretty quick, and the rules as written make it that way. Your characters advance over 6 tiers of play, the system's version of leveling and in each tier you have four advances which cost 4 XP. In addition, there are a range of temporary and circumstantial benefits that can be gained by spending XP. In the past, and this tends to reflect the first edition of Cypher, it was easy to see PCs gain power creep by advancing fairly quickly in tiers (especially if they horde XP for long term advancement, as that only takes 16 XP to hit a tier cap). This led to a problem where the PCs were improving overall power level faster than the GM could readily account for it (a polite way of saying that you could plot out threats that in a matter of sessions become trivial and inconsequential for the players to overcome). 

My first few campaigns of Cypher System (all in the first edition) ran into this issue, as I would tend to hand out enough XP through GM intrusions along with 1-2 XP at the end of the session, and the players hoarded XP so they tended to tier up every 4 sessions or so. After 20 sessions the PCs were approaching tier 5 and the storyline (and my newbie GM experience at the time) meant my plot was pacing for a group about half that power level, and they were already hitting what felt to me like godlike levels of performance with boosted Edges, talent pools and effort levels. In Cypher System, higher stat values often simply mean that difficult tasks at tier 1 by tier 4-6 often become "descriptive sentences in which the GM explains how cool you are" as you step past a task...unless of course the GM wants to drop an intrusion on you.  

Under the Revised rules there's more wiggle room baked in to how one goes about handing out and allowing XP to be spent, so I think this will pose less of an issue. The new rules emphasize options such as requiring players to spend XP awarded in-game to be spent in game, and XP between sessions (so end of game, for goals met, story arcs progressed, etc.) to be retained for tier advancement. The GM can award XP at a slower pace as well by focusing only on XP gained through character arc advancement, and between-game awards amending that total for specific "group/plot" goals. They give the GM a lot of leeway, in other words.

In addition, as the group levels up I have since wrapped my own head around the idea that higher level threats and concerns in Cypher System are (and should be) more about discovery, cosmic revelation, and existential threats of unusual nature, and the things which were of dire nature at tier 1 are now just footnotes along the way. 

Either way, I am looking forward to this planned excursion, and I have been pretty exclusively focused on what I can do with Cypher next. I am still mulling over the idea of Numenera vs. one of the Cypher genre settings (or maybe Magnus Archive which is rather cool), but its definitely going to be this. 

2021 Gaming Plans

 For 2020 my gaming plans went through hoops of fire as the pandemic changed how my game tables worked. The FLGs where we all met could no longer host (and still can't under current lockdown rules), and was shut down for lengthy periods. The gamers in my group ranged in age from 30 to 60+ and enough of us fit the "older, with complications" category to not want to risk casual exposure for gaming. 

Early on, like the week my state (New Mexico) shut down everything back in March/April I researched online virtual tabletop (VTT) options and settled on Roll20 as a primary venue, with Astral as my backup. 

For Astral I have so far only interfaced with it as a player. Onebookshelf graciously offered a one year premium subscription to publishers on Drivethrrpg.com I think to stimulate us all to produce content that was compatible with Astral, which has a fairly limited content set compared to Roll20 or Fantasy Grounds. So far my experience with Astral has been Call of Cthulhu-centric, and it handles the game just fine. Quirks include: lack of voice support, an odd way of delivering handouts to PCs, and a background music option that can be fun and annoying at the same time.

For Roll20 I have invested heavily, which means I'm pretty well committed, so good thing I enjoy using it for the most part. I feel it could handle "spontaneous" content a bit better (trying to type in or click to set up complicated dice rolls is annoying in all of these systems so far) but it's approach for me as a GM works well. The problem with Roll20 is that it handles games for which it has some level of support generally quite well, but if no one has bothered to build content in the Roll20 charactermancer or the publisher hasn't arranged to set up purchasable support in the shop for its ruleset then the only games you can run without that support are those for which you will find the rules/mechanics to handle adequately on the baseline support of Roll20. As an example, I ran Cypher System and Call of Cthulhu using just the available character sheet from their free Quickstart product and otherwise used my physical rulebooks for the campaign I ran just fine....and while even the free level of support is enough to run, say, D&D 5E easily in Roll20, I think I'm hesitant to run Savage Worlds without some compendium data, and I wouldn't even bother with Traveller right now, which appears to have no support for the modern edition of the game on Roll20 at all (that I can find).

I ruled out Fantasy Grounds for one reason: cost. Too much cost, unfortunately. After two years of paying for Roll20 I might have spent as much on it as I would just getting the foundation necessary on Fantasy Grounds, but I'm kinda hoping we're back to physical tabletops by 2022 you know? Gotta dream!

So this is a long way of saying: what I plan to run for 2021 is driven by what I can manage to run in either Roll20 or Astral Tabletop. Right now, that list is pretty tightly defined to:

D&D 5E

Pathfinder 2nd Edition

Starfinder

Cypher System (even though no rulesets are available, the cards all are, and the charactermancer sheet works great)

Call of Cthulhu

I also have Scum & Villany RPG's setup on Roll20, may try to run that at some point.

I can readily run (thanks to available compendiums, when I am willing to buy them if I think they would be helpful):

Alien RPG

Esper Genesis (the core rules just released as a compendium)

Warhammer Fantasy

Zweihander (the core player rules are free!)

So yeah, that's essentially "what I can run" without taking precious free time to try and learn to code in the charactermancer. So...in a nutshell, these are the games I have on the table, so to speak, for Roll20 gaming this year.

Now for Astral Tabletop, aside from the ongoing games in which I am a player I might well use it this year as a GM to try one of these games that I am interested in: Cyberpunk Red, Sword Chronicles (more on that one in a future post!) and maybe GURPS. I have a campaign for GURPS set in ancient Egypt I've been working on for months now, and I really want to run more GURPS this year, it's a game system that fits my current mood for gaming well these days. All I need is a group of like-minded players who find an historically accurate campaign in the late bronze age to be tantalizing and I'm set!

So, for 2021 so far, my plans look like this:

Saturday Group: this is the "long haul" group that can remain focused and benefits from a GM who is not frayed from midweek work stress. As such, it tends to be better at long term campaign commitments.

1. Get the group through their current D&D 5E campaign. I am expecting they will like to grow it to a logical conclusion that ends around level 10-12, but we'll see. 

2. Get the group back to a new Pathfinder 2E campaign as soon as possible and never look back at D&D again.

3. Alternatively, get at least a 10-20 session Cypher System campaign using Godforsaken to run Realms of Chirak going as soon as feasible.

4. Propose Esper Genesis at some point.

Wednesday Group: this is the group with more "stressors," including a GM who is harried and overworked midweek but liked having the midweek game because it sometimes helps me decompress (but sometimes work won't let me and sessions are missed). It has at least one player who can only attend every other week, but we've stopped trying to run alternating campaigns for my own sanity and he instead makes characters which can have an excuse for their lack of presence every other session. Because it is hard to focus on this week, I tend to prefer running shorter and sometimes more experimental campaigns on Wednesday nights. I frequently fantasize about someone else running on this night, but know I'd probably not want to play if it isn't GURPS or Call of Cthulhu (the only two systems I seem to enjoy as a player). For this night the plan is:

1. Run Starfinder's Fly Free or Die adventure path to its natural conclusion. This will last until at least June I predict. By running a programmed module series I have taken some of the burden off my shoulders.

2. Look at what I can run after that that fits the same "easy to prep" approach I've got right now. Probably will run a Call of Cthulhu campaign after the Starfinder adventure path concludes. Maybe the Alien RPG? A possibility!

My Wishlist....things I'd still like to do but don't know where they fit in, include:

GURPS Egypt campaign

A Numenera Campaign

A nostalgic revisitation of D&D 3rd edition (don't ask; I'll elaborate in a future blog post)

So...we'll see what time and the unique nature of VTT permit for 2021! Can't wait to revisit this post in twelve months.

Numenera Humble Bundle $15 for 28 PDFs or $1 for core

I can't hide my love of Cypher System, and while I haven't directly run a Numenera game yet, I have mined deeply into its many sourcebooks to do my own weird SF/fantasy mashup through Cypher System. I definitely plan to run Numenera "as is" soon enough....but for now, if you'd like a cheap gateway into checking the system and setting out you can get the core books for the newest edition for $1 or get 28 PDFs (the whole kit and kaboodle) for only $15 over at Humble Bundle. This is well worth the price of entry! Yes, I am biased....but this is one of the best new game systems and settings to come out in the last decade, and frankly beats out a lot of competition for the last four decades.

2018 RPGs in Review

This was a strange year for gaming in my household. Notable this year was my son's reaching an age where gaming "clicked" for him; dad reached a unique level of gaming burn-out even as son hits his first stride; all of my top gaming discoveries this year were older games for the most part; and I significantly reduced my game collection earlier in the year via ebay.

Wrestling with what has felt to me like close to a year of burn-out has been tough. Part of me is certain the burn-out is tied to the exponential increase in my responsibilities at my business, which does indeed take much more time out of my life than it ever has before. Some of it is a more general genre burn-out, and discovering a game like Cypher System which let me break out of the D&D box a bit actually framed just how long I had been running D&D, and perhaps how uninspired I was now feeling as a result.

However, I have a great crew of long time friends and family I can game with, and that alone makes it all worthwhile. I have (due to work and other issues) taken more time off than usual this year on gaming nights, but with any lucky 2019 will be less arduous and I will rekindle my creative juices.

So in looking at 2018 in review, it's hard to pick out five or six things to address that are topically new. Instead, I'll do a "this was important to me this year" list instead.

#5: Starfinder

This year I tried running Starfinder multiple times, managed a campaign on an off day for a few months, and got several stalled games running that I wish could have gone further. The general consensus is that Starfinder has a great premise and style, and manages to pull off a fun game in a Pathfinder frame. However, due to my difficulties this year it has been very hard to remain committed to Starfinder for the lengthy period that it deserves.

#4: Call of cthulhu 7E

My campaign for 7E CoC wrapped earlier in the year, and it was a truly spectacular event. Call of Cthulhu's latest editions has captured my attention and this was a highlight of gaming for me in the last two years (the campaign started in 2017). I definitely need to run more CoC in 2019.

#3: Dungeons & Dragons 5E

Despite being burned out on it, D&D 5E remains an important staple for me in gaming. Two events keep me inspired going in to 2019: first, my son has active characters (see an earlier post on this) and we are really enjoying this very simple, very straight-forward 5E game. I actually hope it will help me to start enjoying the game more generally again. I am also inspired by the Ravnica setting which WotC released. This is the first genuinely new setting for D&D in a very long time, and I hope it does well; D&D needs new and innovative going forward; it's got the "classic stuff" well covered already, perhaps too much so.

#2: Numenera

I haven't run it yet, but Numenera as a setting is one of the single most unique and fun settings I have encountered in a long time. It's material is inspirational for any fantasy or SF setting, and I have pilfered from it for my Cypher System games. I hope to finish reading through Discovery and Destiny (the new edition of the game) and have a a campaign lined up for this next year.

#1: Cypher System

Discovering and then figuring out Cypher System was a major revelation to me. Just as I found myself getting tired of the old classics (or 5E's version of the game genre), while finding myself without the time or energy to wrangle the more sophisticated modern offerings (Pathfinder, Starfinder) or the dedication to learn new and unfamiliar things (Genesys Core), Cypher System arrives just in time for me. A game designed to be player-facing, loaded with things for players to tinker with while being written specifically with the time-limited or lazy GM in mind who wants to use RPGs for creative release but maybe isn't too interested in the stat block mini game, Cypher System is the best game find I've discovered in the last twenty years.

...So, going in to 2019, I realize I have some interesting things to consider. I want to keep running Cypher System, for both my fantasy-SF campaign I designed for it as well as my super hero setting and more I am working on. But I also want to run Numenera (same game system, so doing this is all about absorbing the volumes of content for the Ninth World), and really want to get back to Call of Cthulhu. I frequently feel a desire to return to Traveller, or something like it....and a couple oddities such as the Everywhen RPG and Fantasy AGE still command my interest.

It is possible, outside of my family game, that I might actually be able to stay away from D&D for a while. We'll see....a few more books like Ravnica and I will probably cave and dive back in.

Games not yet released, or games I am in the process of reading and thinking about using, could finally get some time next year. I still would like to run Cold & Dark, for example. I'd like to experience Elite Dangerous RPG, which looks really interesting in a "totally like yet not Traveller" way. Kult will eventually show up in print one day, and that is a game I very much enjoyed back in it's 1st and 2nd edition days.

A couple new games next year: the "new" Fantasy Trip, for example, deserve attention. Cypher System 2nd edition, of course! Over The Edge 3rd edition. I could easily get derailed with any of these three. But beyond this? I think I may be set, honestly. Such is life as an older gamer....getting stuck in my rut, if you will!

Cypher System Session Seven and Friday Starfinder; How One System's Style Bleeds into Another

Slidikin and other beasts from Numenera are sneaking their way in to the campaign.....there's a lot of cool stuff in Numenera, and if ever I will run a prepublished setting, it's going to be this one. I recently received my copies of Numenera: Destiny and Discovery, the massive two-volume second edition of the setting, and in a few weeks or months when I finally find the time to properly read it all and run a campaign, I suspect I will.

Until then, I have my ongoing Ensaria campaign, which is walking a fine line between classic high fantasy and weird science fantasy. This allows me to liberally borrow from sourcebooks for both Numenera and The Strange with impunity.

I don't know yet if my current obsession with Cypher System will last forever, but I have to say I think it's got some very long term prospects.

Meanwhile, Fridays have resumed with Starfinder and we had a more or less full group for once. Running Starfinder before Cypher is a good idea; I spend less time questioning why D&D-style systems have to embrace escalating damage and hit point values, and more time just playing it straight....albeit without minis lately. I'm more or less convinced right now that the best way to enjoy the overall D&D style game (or Starfinder, or anything else) as I want it, at least, is without minis.

I know not everyone agrees; on Wednesday nights, where I run my D&D ongoing Chirak campaign, the entire downstairs is filled with Adventure League games, with GMs who often go through painstaking effort to lay out terrain for carefully modulated adventures. D&D can work great that way, I am sure.....but the sorts of games I run make that really difficult, because I often have no idea what direction the players are going to go....and as such, I have to show up with loads of maps and minis to cover any possibility. Moreover, it seems inevitable that the entire pace/flow of the game changes, and not for the better I feel, when you have to start laying everything out.

So for Starfinder and D&D, although I didn't precisely call it as "short/long" range for terminology purposes, I have dramatically encouraged players to think in terms of more fluid movements. "Can I get to this guy?" is a yes/no situation with closing being more relevant to the general headspace of the story flow; it is not as important for the scenario that "PC A" have to spend two rounds moving to close for an attack than it is that he gets there and makes the attack. Doing it this way made for a better integration of combat and narrative; now only the ridiculously high hit point totals and need to land repeated blows over many rounds get in the way of a smooth experience.

That did, of course, leave me with thoughts on how I bet Starfinder could work great with a health system sort of like Savage Worlds; but even as the thought arises, I still feel like the full experience works best as intended, even if its narratively intrusive at times (well, all the time). The simple fact is, part of Starfinder's charm is watching how much damage the operator, soldier or solarian can manage to dish out in one round, so a system where total damage became more static seems...ah....counter productive to the game's spiritual intent.

Anyway.

Lot's of good inspiration across the board for both Cypher and Starfinder. I'll see if I can post some of it next week!

The Golden Skeleton in the Crystal Coffin at Cueva de los Tayos (Inspiration from Modern myth)

Over at Skeptoid there's a new article on the "mystery" behind the Cueva de los Tayos and the Lost Metal Library....a fun read about a modern myth turned into something literally Too Good to Be True by UFOlogy and von Daniken, as usual. What's fun about this, though is that the descriptions von Daniken used to hype the location of an ancient cave with a lost trove of alien lore sounds like a fantastic setting for a D&D, Call of Cthulhu or Numenera game. From the article, this quote stands out:

"...von Däniken wrote of fabulous discoveries almost beyond description. The cave itself was cut and polished with advanced machinery to perfect right angles and smooth surfaces. They found furniture made of plastic and gold. There were countless fantastic artifacts and treasures, including lifelike statues of humans and animals, rooms plastered with precious stones, and a golden skeleton in a crystal sarcophagus. And at the heart of the cave, the metal library itself — consisting of thousands of metal and crystal plates, 96x48cm, precisely etched in an alien language and recording 250,000 years of history — and guarded by an elaborate system of active laser beams."

I really want to drop that description in to a game soon, and explore the nature of that golden skeleton, in it's ancient immortal sarcophagus of crystal, protected by an "elaborate system of active laser beams."

Maybe the only problem with von Daniken was he hadn't discovered RPGs? I sometimes feel like UFOlogy in general is a grand an elaborate LARP in which everyone willingly engages in self deception.

Cypher System Notes on the Actual Play Experience

Technically this is our second night trying out Cypher System, but the first night exclusively dedicated to the new system. I'm using the actual Cypher System (generic ruleset) as opposed to Numenera or The Strange, but based on reading all the giant mess of rule systems together it's pretty clear that the experience of one iteration of Cypher is fairly applicable across the table.

Anyway, Cypher System is striking me as one of the simplest game systems, mechanically, that I've encountered out side of the OSR experience, especially for the GM side of the table. The gamemaster experience for Cypher System is completely different from the player experience. Here's an example:

A Player in Cypher needs to do the following:
--manage his resource pool of stats to advantage; don't use up too much, don't hoard too much
--Keep an eye on effort and edge and apply them
--track skills and modifiers which provide assets to your checks
--roll for all attacks and all defenses (in Cypher, all dice are rolled by the player for game actions; the GM pretty much has to roll percentiles on encounter dice and cypher tables and that's it)

A GM does the following:
--figure out creature level and apply any creature abilities
--Adjudicate the level of difficulty for tasks and apply specific spot rules (falling, drowning, etc.)
--run the story

"Sure," you say, "but running the story takes a lot more time and effort in RPGs than anything a player does." But nope, you'd be wrong.....Cypher System actually strips away so much of the mechanical element normally handed to the GM in other games (like, as in most RPGs) that this game's GM-facing rules feel almost anemic.

At one point during the Saturday night game a question of recover arose the pool cost for a task, and the players were explaining it, so I had to remind them that it didn't matter....this was an NPC so the rule of thumb for the GM is "Do what is needed and makes sense for the story, and eyeball the level of the creature if in doubt."

I haven't seen another game system with such a simplified creature mechanic since Tunnels & Trolls. Seriously. T&T has at its most essential one monster stat: the Monster Rating. You define the monster's hit points, attack dice and adds from this number, and essentially that's all you need. In Cypher System it uses the monster level, which gives you it's health, damage and attack/defense target number....and is all you essentially need. Both systems let you add special abilities and details, but the base stat is completely derived from a single number.

Players are on the opposite end of this, with a mess of pools, edges, an effort stat, skills, abilities, limits and other features which all work toward a point-spending resource depletion mechanic in which you can choose whether or not to spend resources (at the risk of not having them later) in exchange for making tasks easier. It has some advantages and some flaws I can already detect from a couple play sessions as follows.

Players don't need to spend resources unless they feel the need; if you have the sort of players who are low-risk, or who are more worried about keeping health high (health comes from the same pool as other actions) then they may not feel motivated to push the envelope and as a result a game could feel a lot like just rolling D20s and hitting the GM-set target numbers.

There's also a lot of disincentivization to spend your pools of points. When you take damage, it comes out of your might, speed and intellect pools. So spending these points to improve your odds of success is, for Cypher System, literally spending your hit points....you succeed, in a manner of speaking, by taking damage to yourself. Special abilities (such as magic like effects) also cost pool points (usually intellect) thus making this an issue on every level.

The game's focus on risk assessment means you rarely have static modifiers (but gaining some skills will count). With so few static modifiers, there's a problem, to some degree, with how you visualize your character. If you assume a lot of Might in your pool equals a strong character, but that strong character is played "safe" and fails a lot of rolls for failure to exert effort, then what's really going on here? In some ways the mechanic is inventive genius....a resolution mechanic with fatigue/stress inherently baked in to the game itself in a manner that can not be ignored and is also sufficiently easy to grasp that it doesn't feel like a chore as most fatigue/encumbrance systems tend to.

Something I also thought about was the problem of cheating on die rolls. As a GM I roll up front and for all to see, but I don't enforce that of my players at the table. If you think there's a cheater, it may show up in this game system more prominently if you have the occasional player who suddenly hits every time, dodges every time, and always somehow manages to win. And since the book-keeping is entirely on the player side, it can mean the GM must demonstrate a lot of trust in the accuracy (and honesty) of their players. Conversely, the players must "know" the system well enough to understand what they are doing and not muck up how pool, edge and effort work together.

Cypher System also emphasizes a mechanical process that aims at descriptors, types and foci that are used to identify characters and provide the operational packages with which characters function. It seems to provide a lot of stuff for players to pick from and work with, but time will tell if that is enough choice for my veteran gamers to enjoy building their PCs. Some criticism I have read of the system is that it is a "wide but shallow" experience. I don't know what those reviewers were comparing it to....right now on the face of it Cypher System seems to offer more overall content and character design options than most other recent popular RPGs do (that aren't D&D or Pathfinder, anyway).

The biggest concern I have after our two sessions of play so far comes down to the fact that as a GM I am really used to game systems built around verisimilitude. Cypher System is a mechanical experience designed to emulate a stories, which is great, but it's the kind of game where you, as GM, have to prefer to say "I know how this goes down," for the GM-controlled elements of play, and not instead say, "I'd like to see what the system determines here." It's a subtle point, and one I seem to be comfortable experimenting with right now, but for me it was a bit weird not having some die-determinants in more of my story options. As a GM I can see where Cypher System was built from the ground up to remove as much perceived work from the GM's table as possible. It's a very different experience from D20 systems, to contrast. But I really like verisimilitude in my games, and it's really interesting (and a bit outside my comfort zone) to play a game like this where every game element feels like a suggestion or inference rather than a hard-coded example.

Anyway, I'm running Cypher System on the weekends for the foreseeable future, using it for a fantasy campaign with sci fi elements, and plan to keep playing it until (like Genesys Core before) I feel I have decided I like it, love it, hate it, or just want to go on to the next shiny new system. We'll see what happens.....but I am cautiously optimistic here. I like how it liberates the GM, but wonder if after 10-20 games the simplicity of creatures and NPCs will leave me wishing I had more mechanical elements or procedural verisimilitude at my fingertips to let the system surprise me as well as the players. We'll see.

Monte Cook's Cypher System gets its own rulebook

This is actually some really interesting news for fans of generic systems that let you make your own settings: Monte Cook's Cypher System will get a generic core rulebook. These are the rules used for The Strange and Numenera. If you are like me, you may have found the system to be intriguing but the effort it takes to absorb the settings for use at the table to be a bit much. I'll definitely pick this one up when it comes out.

What I'm Purchasing...

I want to say "what I'm reading" but I haven't had much time for reading anything lately. I did miraculously manage to run a BRP modern zombie one-shot for an old friend and his girlfriend this weekend, who is spanking new to RPGs (the girlfriend, not the old buddy). We got a convert, and I had a great time playing something that was not Pathfinder for once...! I think I've been running too much Pathfinder. But it was nice to play a game with very mortal, fallible characters trying hard to survive terrible circumstances, and for whom something as simple as a zombie bite was a big deal.

I got Runequest Monster Island in print along with Conspiracy X 2.0: Conspiracies in the mail from frpgames.com at last. Excellent! I shall now add them to my enormous pile of "to be read soon" followed by adding them to my "wish I could find time and players to run games for soon" pile.

That pile includes Numenera, as well as the first three releases for Void. I've actually been plowing through Void a bit...it's got all the bells and whistles I want and is an easy read. Not sure I'd qualify it as "hard SF" though the Cthulhu part is spot on. Hard SF doesn't just mean "we lack FTL and it's set in our solar system." Hard SF also means things like "researching how we could theoretically colonize Venus in a manner consistent with the time, effort and cost of a near-future society is likely to invest in such an effort." Underground cities on Venus are actually a much costlier and more difficult undertaking than one could conceivably imagine, and any hard SF future might look more realistically at something in orbit, or the atmosphere instead....but in the universe of Void they've got underground colonies on Venus. There are other examples, but this one annoys me (would have helped if they'd tried to explain why underground colonies on Venus were cheaper in the Voidverse to make than orbital or atmospheric colonies). Despite issues like this I do like Void and what it sets out to do.*

With work in such a state of flux (long story short I jumped ship from one employer to another who made me a more compelling offer, but with the caveat that I was going to earn every penny) it may be a while before I get any reading done, but we shall see....

*It's also worth noting that I realize that a hard SF fan's objections are extremely particular, bordering on the pedantic in contrast to what a more ordinary SF fan might worry about. To this I say "don't use the hard SF label unless you're ready to be judged by it." But Void isn't that bad, it just has little things that annoy. So far.

My Latest RPG Buying Frenzy

I ordered quite a haul this last week...maybe once I have these books in hand, in the far future I will get a chance to read them...even --gasp!--- play them!

First up I put an order in for Numenera, which from all I have read is sounding increasingly interesting and fresh. There's a serious glut on the market right now for "games that look and feel a lot like D&D," and it's nice to see an RPG out there that might be fantasy yet not a D&D-like.

I attached to that order Fear Itself, a Gumshoe-powered game system with an emphasis on one-shot horror gaming with a high body count. The retailer also had copies of Advanced Recon and I've always wanted to check that game out so I threw it into the basket, too.

Over at rpgnow.com I caved in and picked up Void Core and it's first two expansions. Made by the people behind Cthulhutech, Void Core looks to me like the game I wanted Cthulhutech to be--a quasi hard SF Cthulhu Mythos experience. It also looks more robust in terms of game mechanics and design than the last game I picked up with a similar thematic (Maschine Zeit), and since the core rules are entirely free (i.e. pay what you want) it was all I needed to explore the game and decide a physical copy was destined for my collection.

Lastly I have Mythic Adventures for Pathfinder waiting for pick-up, will be checking that out later today. I am uncertain as to whether it's going to be an amazing book full of new larger than life campaign ideas or a gimmick that gets ignored. I'll let you know more once I have it.

All of this is to compensate for not being able to attend GenCon, although a friend and his wife did indeed go there and even picked up two copies of the Ghosts of Dragonspear Castle, one of which they will be sending me. Joy!