The Pathfinder 2nd Edition Remaster Project

 Well this is a fascinating announcement from Paizo. Details are still to come for the most part, but it looks like Paizo is going to redo the first four books in the Pathfinder 2E lineup, and try rebranding them without (I assume) making them look like an edition 2.5 or 3. This also lets them rebrand and remake some material to fit their new ORC license and move entirely away from the old OGL. 

I'm interested to see what they do here, even though I've written Pathfinder 2E off for my own purposes as a viable system of play. I burned out so hard on Pathfinder 2E that it may have killed some of my love for the "D&D genre" at large due to its excessive obsession with meticulous balance in the numbers, which is a real shame because on the level of GM I really do enjoy running the game, but I have very few players (including myself when I play) who seem to actually enjoy it. The game is obsessed with incremental and marginal bonuses as well as a skew toward lower probabilities of success under the misguided notion that increased risk of failure (and critical failure) induces a sense of tactical tension, but then fails at every level to meaningfully provide players* with a sense of reward in its design. 

Though D&D 5E has its issues, the ability to run a game and craft a story through emergent gameplay and improv in D&D is much easier than in Pathfinder 2E, where the game's structured and balanced approach means you just can't be as relaxed when playing, or the play experience will suffer. For players, Pathfinder 2E simply doesn't seem to want players to have fun, and the original core book was endemic of this problem, so I can tell that they are trying to fix that with this newly announced remastered edition....I bet they've seen a lot of feedback to this effect.

There are lots of other complaints I could make about Pathfinder 2E, and I doubt most of these will be addressed in a remastered edition that is really, by the sounds of it, just an effort to remix and restate the rules in a manner friendlier to new gamers. But who knows! I could be surprised by this remaster. But....I will leave everyone with this one thought: Pathfinder 2E has been compared by some to D&D 4th edition, chiefly for its over emphasis on number balance and the fact that its tight design caters best to specific interpretations of the game. As we all recall, 4E had a very mixed reception, and midway in its lifecycle it, too, got a refresh in the form of the Dungeons & Dragons Essentials books, which tried to remaster that edition into something that felt more passable for the broader gaming audience.

So....yeah. Just saying, it seems interesting that Pathfinder 2E is about to get its own Essentials edition. This is quietly adding a lot of weight to the notion that Pathfinder 2E, by design, really did neglect a broader portion of its base in favor of a narrow design than it should have. But...time will tell. We'll see what these remastered rulesets look like when they release. 

Afterthought: There's one way they could shock and impress me with this remaster, and that would be to adopt the "proficiency without level" rules from the Gamemastery Guide. Look it up! It solves literally 95% of my complaints about Pathfinder 2E and moves it from a rigorous, faux-tactical engine with the illusion of choice to a genuinely useful RPG with a window for both tactics and storytelling in a flexible way. It would also remain technically retrocompatible with existing books (in the most technical way possible, sure). Will this happen? Probably not, but I can dream! If they did this I would totally jump back in to Pathfinder.

*Players here being "most of the players I know" as the system seems to cater to a really specific subset; I do have two players who have mastered the level of tactical acumen PF2E demands, but they are two among about 10 people I game with, and even they are quite adamant that the game was written specifically to punish most players rather than make things fun.

The First Vaesen Scenario is Done

 Saturday heralded the end of a three session Vaesen campaign. My group, which vacillated between 5 and 7 players per session with everyone choosing to use the randomized character generator in the back of the book. I think they favored that for two reasons: it made figuring out a PC very easy, and it helped generate a back story, particularly useful for players not overly familiar with what a 19th century Swedish investigator should look like.

Players had few issues by and far; Roll20 has a decent character sheet which includes a D66 button and it seemed to calculate things just fine. The odds of getting a success in the incredibly simple Vaesen edition of the Year Zero Engine are generally pretty good unless you're rolling a suboptimal skill, so much of the system's emphasis on only rolling when really needed is predicated on this notion, I suspect. Unlike other Year Zero Engine games, though, Vaesen doesn't have some sort of willpower or mutation mechanic that is predicated on pushing the rolls to generate useful points.

As a GM, some oddities cropped up during play, as follows:

The Preamble Phase - There is a preparation phase of the game, early on during the initial introduction to the mystery. In actual play I realized this was a bit more convoluted to approach than I expected, in that the book didn't give as much useful advice on how to execute it as I would have liked, and I will need to study the prepublished modules to see if they offer any suggested direction.

Issues of Setting - During play we got into a vigorous discussion on Swedish naming conventions of the era. Apparently surnames beyond "Thorson" type nomenclature were not in common use in the 19th century, but none of the "historical name generators" I used talked about this, nor did any of my research (or the Vaesen campaign section) address this. The intent in Vaesen is for this to be a pseudohistorical Sweden that you make your own, but sometimes players (and GMs) crave that specificity or verisimilitude and this did cause a teensy bit of a hiccup during the initial game session. We got over it, though....and ironically much of the game was set in Turku, Finland anyway.

Initiative and Roll20 - Roll20 does not support the kind of deck that works for initiative in Vaesen, and if you can craft such a deck in Roll20 I do not know how to do so. We made do with a regular deck of cards and winged it.

During the course of game play I got a pretty good feel for the base game mechanics. If we play again we'll be exploring more of how the group can explore and develop their castle in Upsala, the core setting for the investigators in the game. It's reminiscent of the way the Cthulhu by Gaslight sourcebooks for Hudson & Brand handle things, where the campaign revolves around 33 Golden Circle and the legacy of the erstwhile investigators. It proved a useful setup nonetheless, as I relied entirely on the expected starting point of the core book to get the PC introductions and purposes out of the way. 

Very little actual violence happened, with one brief shoot-out in session two. The vaesen encountered, while potentially very threatening, were approached with a level of circumspection by the PCs and as such they were leaning heavily into a problem-solving approach and no violence (beyond some errant NPCs in the mix) was had. The potential for any encounter with the vaesen to turn lethal was pretty obvious, though.

After my first session I was feeling a bit unconvinced I wanted to continue, but by the end of session two I had found a bit of a groove, treating it a bit like the way AD&D 2nd Edition used to let you play in a sort of gothic European setting in the Masque of the Red Death for Ravenloft, except with the PCs being very fragile and the vaesen being in their own ways just as bewildered and conflicted about humans as the humans (who could see or believe in them) were about vaesen. The end result felt a lot more to me like a dark fantasy tale with a sprinkling of gothic horror and some victorian investigative procedurals than anything else; the book itself seems to imply you could (or should) lean hard into the enigmatic horror of the vaesen, but its really hard to do...especially if you were, like me, a kid growing up with stories about tomte (nisse) and other creatures. Making them feel scary or mysterious can be a bit of a task, though I think I pulled it off.

For my group I think it was a nice change of pace; horror that wasn't too horrifying, and an historical setting that was also vaguely mythic, while still being mostly grounded. A lack of overall familiarity with the  Nordic19th century didn't overly impair us, though it as a side effect led me down a rabbit hole learning about the Lapps, better known as Mani, of whom I have family ancestry. That was entirely due to one of the online sourcebooks Free League lets fans publish, but it in turn got me reading extensively elsewhere about the mani and their marginalized existence....interesting stuff.

My group overall had fun. I think I may run it again, down the road, but who knows. The system is incredibly simple, and I am more interested in trying the more complex versions of the Year Zero Engine to be found in Forbidden Lands and Mutant Year Zero now, to see how it holds up when extra layers of complexity are added to the mix. This might sound odd to those who prefer simpler mechanics, but maybe think of what I am referring to less as "complexity" and more as "nuance," and I like nuance in my rule systems. I will say this much: I am now more motivated to get a Kult game together. 

Next up we will at last give Death in Space a shot. I'll write more about that soon.

Gamer Burnout Solutions

 In contemplating the prior post I realize that it actually makes lots of sense I am burned out. Some of the problem, for better or worse, is due to the way the pandemic changed the face of gaming: adding VTTs into the mix created a unique new sort of fatigue in the process, while simultaneously making gaming easier and more accessible. This perspective may not apply to everyone, but it does apply to me. To wit:

Since 2020 going VTT on Roll20 and other platforms meant that there was a reduction in travel time, and reduction in the physicality of gaming; in exchange, the demands of specific VTT platforms would consume some of that time as well as transform how prep work must be handled. For example, in a tabletop game I might content myself to draw some maps and maybe print out an illustration or two. I may carry a lot of books and campaign paperwork with the notion that I will have whatever is needed, potentially, just in case. In a VTT digital access makes it much quicker to look stuff up, but the need to lay out content in the medium of the VTT environment for use means that spontaneous battles (in those games where maps and minis are expected) are going to be more difficult. Not impossible, but difficult.

Running games on the VTT takes on a different kind of fatigue, as you have a reduction in social interaction. Voices, all sharing one channel with equal intensity are now normal, so side conversations require special tools such as text whispering. Some players who may dominate conversationally at a game table will absolutely stomp all over the verbal competition in a VTT. More mellow players used to waiting their turn may find a reduction in interaction, especially if the GM is more accustomed to scanning the room of faces to identify who is invested, who is waiting for their turn, and who appears to be tuned out and does not require engagement. In a VTT its whomever is most efficient at commanding the voice channel.

Returning to live gaming made me realize how much "work" it takes to make a live game happen. There's a need to understand the rules and your character more, and a lot of newer gamers* appear to only know the game through a digital platform like D&D Beyond now, and require more hand holding and cajoling to get them up to speed. These are commitment actions, though: prep game, get up, pack bags, drive to meeting spot, set up stuff, play game. But the reward is a more direct social interaction in the process, and the ability to make our old meat muscle brains remember how to play without using our digital brain substitutes for the task (ymmv). 

In writing this I free-associated to get somewhere and just realized I didn't get close. What I was aiming for (and missed) was that VTTs make it technically easy enough to play that you can end up letting it overwhelm your evening's free time. In doing so, your reservoir of creativity, which we will say for my purposes has room for 1 or 2 games at the most these days, is running dry because I am in various ways engaged with 2 nights as GM and up to 4 nights (many bi-weekly or rotating with my GM time) as a player. That is a lot more gaming time than my creativity cup has juice to cover for.

My ideal solution is to pare it all back down to what I know I can handle. There was a time in the past when I found once a week on Wednesdays and every other week on Saturdays to be a very satisfying schedule. Somehow, at some point, I got very much off the rails on that fine schedule. As a result, my ability to prep for my own games is saturated now, and the time I spend as a player takes away time I could spend prepping as a GM or, honestly, literally doing all the other hobbies I have (despite this blog being mostly about gaming, I am quite keen on enjoying video games, watching movies, reading books and comics, collecting obscure music on Bandcamp, and focusing heavily on reading all Japanese literature I can get my hands on).  It's really hard to find time for anything when 90% of my free time ties in to hours and hours of gaming that I am not feeling overly excited about, chiefly because it is time stretched too thin for me to invest in at any given moment.

So! I need to figure out how to fix this. I haven't yet got an adequate solution because, as mentioned last post, I am keenly aware that these games are all part of a highly specific social fabric that I am tied in to. But I will find a way, somehow. Just need to give it time.

*I'd say "younger gamers" instead but the truth is the phenomenon of a player who doesn't know the rules or their own character is a time-honored tradition that transcends age. The new phenomenon is a person who has never bought a D&D book in their life but has a paid D&D Beyond subscription through which they get all their game content, and who has never actually read any of it beyond the char gen process.

GM Burnout - It's a Thing! (Or maybe I'm just getting really old)

 I've started to admit to myself that I may have a new, special level of generalized burnout that goes way beyond the normal levels. For the record, the normal levels have, in the past, boiled down to the following:

--GM is burned out because the cool campaign has run its course and is now on autopilot;

--GM is burned out because he lacks time and energy to properly prepare a game, but would be happy to run if time was more readily secured;

--GM has played out a genre or game system to the point where it is not motivating him, but cure is to find a different genre or game;

--GM is bored with whatever is currently going on and wants a change of pace, but can't decide what it is.

For the record, all things I have experienced at one time or another. But lately, there's a new layer to this, one which I think has been percolating for months now, but I am only recently beginning to concede may be an entirely new form of GM burnout:

--GM is really burned out on the entire hobby, but realizes his friend group is tied to RPG nights so keeps chugging along despite that fact that picking up a game book and thinking about running not only doesn't elicit a sense of enjoyment but even causes mild stress/pain.

So yeah, I am going through a bout of this right now, which is really frustrating, because a side effect of realizing I am extremely burned out on the hobby in general is the recognition that a lot of my social life is tied in to it in a way which does not allow for easy escape without causing a collapse in the network.

Looking at a lot of what I have run lately only makes me less excited. My D&D burnout is beyond adequate analysis at this point....I am running a live game of D&D 5E but it is by the books and the moment that plot comes to a close I am putting D&D down for a while, I need to give it a break. On Saturday I am running Vaesen, and that has been interesting (but difficult) to accomplish. Not the system; its a very easy game to run, but rather the era the game is set in, getting a sense of what Sweden in the 19th century was like, and wrapping my head around the concept space of the game. It's been successful so far, but not precisely my cup of tea I now realize. The players are enjoying it, though, which is good!

The good news, at least, is that I am enjoying being GM (or a player) "in the moment" which is to say, actually sitting down to play or run a game is fun and enjoyable. It's just that, once its over, I find the "between session" time I need to prepare for a future game or even thinking about it to be entirely unpleasant.

I am eyeing my collection with thoughts on what takes the Least Effort to prepare and read. This is leading to me eyeballing shorter RPGs again, and Mothership is high on the list for obvious reasons. Another RPG of note is "Dancing with Bullets under a Neon Sun," a wildly minimalist Cyberpunk RPG with enough meat to make a good game, but short enough that I can read and run in an hour or less. There is also "Death in Space" which is a fun, existential and metaphysical romp through a universe being slowly devoured by the void, a kind of stylized variation on the scifi horror genre aimed at emphasizing a campaign setting of a specific sort....not quite as much my cup of tea as Mothership's more procedural take on space truckers, but intriguing nonetheless....and right now, intriguing is something I am desperately clinging to in the face of my general burnout.  

For fantasy gaming and other genres I think I can find some satisfaction in Basic Roleplaying, especially now that it has received an actual revision from Chaosium, suggesting at last that the BRP rules are not going to be neglected outside of Call of Cthulhu and Runequest. There is also Magic World, now in POD format, which along with all BRP-powered engines I find capable of penetrating the malaise that permeates this new level of burnout I am dealing with.

So not all is lost....I just need to figure out what will break the unending spell of discontent that has overcome me of late! BRP, Mothership, and unique zinerpgs seem to be in the right general space for what I need right now. 

Sensitive Content!

 I honestly don't know whether to be horrified or excited at getting a "sensitive warning" notification on one of my posts. The post has been online for over a decade, and is a short bit describing the fable of the Endreti Trolls of the World of Lingusia....a fairytale, if you will, of a D&D campaign world. The original post is here if you're curious, and I believe that same story was previously shared back on rpgnet, so its likely a dead thread over there, too. 

The blogger content moderation guidelines are perfectly clear and make sense to me, but I am utterly uncertain as to what the strike is for. There was, long ago, an illustration I linked to the post but that link has been broken for ages so I removed it. The content does describe a rather unhealthy transmogrification of an elf and deals with another famous fictional entity: Tsthagghua, who is not a creation of mine but gets co-opted in fantasy worlds frequently (and is a veritable mascot for Frog God Games). Nothing in the text struck me as weird in a way that might mark a violation. I am just kind of floored, to be honest. I mean....I've written weirder stuff! 

The key takeaway from this is that after close to 14 years posting here someone, somewhere, apparently took umbrage with the post. I assume they read it and did not understand the context? If so, my bad....many of my posts intrinsically assume the reader is here because they are in to RPGs, but I'd imagine someone arriving without context might be confused, I suppose. But offended? I am genuinely weirded out. 

Either way, I removed the dead link, added a line of clarification that this is related to D&D, and shall await a follow up response on the moderation. Curious if someone is able and willing to clarify what in the post is wrong....I really don't know. Indeed, after reviewing the content guidelines, I am even more confused as frankly just reading the content guidelines was more distressing to me than that post could or ever should be. There's a lot of restrictions that make sense, but those all strike me as relevant to genuinely concerning stuff, not mild fairytales that are at best describing fictional mythology suitable for Lord of the Rings. So....yeah. Weird.

EDIT: the resubmitted post was approved, so either what I did made a difference, or a pair of live eyes reviewed it and realized there was no offensive content. Yay!

More Classics Return: Swords & Wizardry Complete, Revised Kickstarter!

 First, the Kickstarter is here. I'm kind of excited about this. While I rather like Old-School Essentials, I admit to having had the most overall fun with Swords & Wizardry Complete. I'm not a minimalist OSR guy, so the S&W Complete edition is important for me to capture the state of gaming as I experienced it at the start in 1981. It's not perfect (my core experience was pure AD&D 1E), but it gets close. OSRIC is nice, but its a very utilitarian experience.....S&W Complete has a style that is evocative of the times and which I find quite inspiring.* The fact that it works well with 0E D&D, 1E AD&D and B/X content all at once is a big plus, too. 

Anyway, with the new S&W Complete KS going I poked around a bit and noticed something: the new edition is a return to form through Mythmere games, Matt Finch's original publishing label, and it looks like S&W is back in his hands. When you go to Frog God Games it appears that S&W has been de-emphasized (I had to search a bit) and they also mention OSE now.  I have no idea why this change happened....and no time recently to probe the depths of the internet to see if anyone knows, so if you happen to know why feel free to post here and let me know. Maybe Matt just wanted to have control over a new edition.

Either way, I did some comparing of Shadowdark RPG to Swords & Wizardry Complete Revised and decided I have enough 5E variants to last me a lifetime, but I'd love that nice print leatherette cover design and a revised S&W Complete for the shelf, or maybe even a future campaign. Time to break out my old S&W Complete Otus cover edition again and think about what I could do with it. 

OSE is still a great take on OSR gaming, and I admit it does some things much better in terms of rule organization and how it mixes classic B/X with Advanced content....but I look forward to seeing what a revised S&W looks like, and also enjoying the distinctly visceral, always engaging, and inspiring feel of S&W can once more bring to the table.

*It's also the only OSR retroclone (barring Castles & Crusades, if you consider it as such) that I have done any self-publishing for. 

Most Exciting News of 2023: Basic Roleplaying Returns!

 I just got the Ab Chaos newsletter from Chaosium this morning and here was the announcement:

Holy cats....a new release of the BRP book in April, with print to follow! Just when I thought Chaosium had all but abandoned BRP as a generic game system. 

Questions do abound, though. Will this revision reflect the 7th edition Call of Cthulhu changes? Will it be a truly big book with enough core content to let a GM devise their own games, or will it mostly be a framework with the intent that it spark lots of open content, as it will fall under the open content license Chaosium has set up? How much of it will reflect Chaosium today vs. the Chaosium of prior eras? The old Gold Book covers "Old Chaosium" well enough, so if this one is mostly focused on the current edition of the system as reflected between Runequest and Call of Cthulhu I think I would be fine with that.  The lighter resource for BRP previously released free online is probably the new template for this book, I presume, which is a good thing....it is an excellent modern iteration of BRP.

Either way, this is the best news and the thing I am most looking forward to in 2023 now (next to Mothership 1E finally being released).

In the Works: Vaesen

It looks like the Pathfinder 2E campaign (Extinction Curse) is coming to another pause soon. We're on....um, I think it's the end of the second module in the Path, but we're already like level 8 so I am not really entirely sure, maybe we plowed on in to the third adventure path. Who knows! I am a good player and simply do not cheat and look at modules I am playing in. 

But that means I'll be back to running again soon. I've been running a live ongoing high level D&D 5E campaign on Wednesdays, but I've pleasantly avoided running anything on VTT lately. I have been messing around with the prospect of Foundry at last, and I think I could do it....Foundry has a lot of potential, although it also has some curiously rough spots as well, things which, say, Roll20 does exceedingly well but which Foundry does not (and the reverse is also true). 

I threw out a mess of ideas to the player group, and the one which seems to have the most traction is Vaesen. It's not hard to see why: it has an exotic historical setting (19th century Sweden), an entirely new and different approach to horror (the monsters of Swedish myth and folklore), and an interesting game system with a robust and easy way to make genre-appropriate characters without needing to be intimately familiar with Sweden in the 1850's-1860's. 

My biggest road block at the moment is grasping how to make Vaesen as scary as much of its descriptive text promises. It has some decent background and setup for the GM to work with, but when I get to actually reading some of the monster descriptions they sound entertaining....but maybe not as scary or weird as I'd like? The art, based on a famous book of illustrations on Vaesen in Sweden, is almost adorable in its modest cartoonish style, giving me a "children's spooky stories for kids" vibe, which --I'll be honest-- is going to be hard for me to work with, because these illustrations generally aren't evocative of adult horror. 

There's got to be something I am missing, some spooky and unknowable element I am overlooking throughout the process. Maybe I am just ruined by more grim and dark horror like Call of Cthulhu and Kult (a game which I can readily, almost immediately see the full and dark potential of)? Maybe my poor old brain has been too deeply influenced by decades of obsession with Cosmic Horror to find itself able to wallow in traditional spooky old folklore. "It needs something truly weird, really out there," my old brain is thinking. "It can't really just be an angry fairy that's curdling milk (and maybe the milk maid is being curdled, too)."

Still, I am going to give it the old college try and see how it goes. Everyone is prepped with main and backup characters already, and the player enthusiasm is strong, so I must feed from that for my own. 

I mean, hey, at least its not yet another D&D game! More on that and my extreme D&D burnout in a future post, though.

Operation Blackwatch - A Savage Worlds Supers/Horror Mashup

 I ran this in the older edition of Savage Worlds a few years ago, it was a lot of fun and I am thinking of revisiting this campaign again soon:

Operation Blackwatch Campaign

A Savage Worlds Horror/Supers Mashup (but would work with GURPS, Hero System, Cypher, etc. just fine) inspired by the likes of Hellboy, Creature Commandos, X-Files and all those faddish Zombie/Superhero What If Tales)

Premise:

A top-secret international covert ops organization named Operation Blackwatch is founded in 1946 after it is discovered that atomic bomb testing has resulted in a weakening of the fabric of reality’s walls….the “universe’s skin” has been damaged and something from somewhere else has begun to bleed through in to the physical world.

Initial encounters with the phenomenon proved deadly, and reports were enigmatic….the first appearance of “aliens” in Roswell, the appearance of enigmatic, Aryan figures in “sky chariots” to hapless drivers in the night, all seemed to have some connection to the opening phenomenon which materialized in the New Mexico desert a year after the initial tests were successful….a night which left dozens dead and three ghost towns in its wake. Demons in one location, aliens in another, and angels or gods of old in a third, all appearing within months of one another.

While the government instituted smokescreens such as Project Sign and Bluebook to disguise what was really going on, A covert team of specialists were assigned to study the aftermath of the “Old Organ” incident, especially specimens which had been recovered in the battle. The first team called these things demons, but settled on a more familiar term to the locals: skin walkers. The reason was simple: each creature appeared to have ripped its way out of the skin of the humans they seemed to inhabit, transforming them into brutal monsters.

Over several decades Blackwatch worked behind the scenes with other organizations, including Majestic-12 which was established by the US to coordinate negotiations with non-hostile “outsiders” as the term came to be for these beings which spontaneously appeared. Of the few who were willing to work with groups such as MJ-12 and Blackwatch, the so-called Vegans (three entities who suggested they were divine angels from the planet Vega) and the “little green men” of Roswell who never admitted to being aliens or otherwise, but would attempt to dominate human minds with psionic control at any turn if they weren’t kept unconscious with an oxygen rich formula, left the investigative teams suspect as to the intentions and contradictory stories of these beings. In 1951 in Korea a being called a Gunung manifested at the October 1950 incursion allegedly aided by the Chinese. The Gunung was so called because local Korean soldiers on both sides saw it as a manifestation of a brutal war god of old mythology, and it turned the tide against South Korean forces aided by the US.

The Gunung was the first concrete evidence of powerful manifestations outside the US. In a secret charter the Blackwatch Covert Operations Teams were reappointed as a agency under international UN jurisdiction to investigate any supernatural manifestations that happened worldwide. Within five years a dozen major manifestations had been reported. The most notable of these was recorded in The Soviet Union of all places, when a disturbance in Tsarskoye Selo (now Pushkin) revealed what appeared to be Grigori Rasputin, reanimated and undead, brought back by the supernatural energies. Aiding him was a manifestation straight out of mythic Russian nightmares: the fowl-legged hut of the legendary witch Baba Yaga, who had materialized in the flesh. The stories go that it took Soviet forces, including tanks and hundreds of men to drive the witch and her hut back into the woods with Rasputin, where they lost all trace of them….for a time. The two continued to haunt the Soviet Union for decades to come, as they appeared to take great umbrage at the Communist regime in charge of their country.

The Soviets allegedly formed their own group to study the supernatural phenomenon manifesting in the hinterlands of their country as well. Called the Night Watch (the Nochnoy Dozor), it would have multiple run-ins and conflicts with the UN’s own top secret Blackwatch over the coming decades. The Nochnoy Dozor continues to function in a modified role right to the present, and holds as many as one hundred supernaturally enhanced agents.

The practice of recruiting the “enhanced” began in the late fifties when the first humans who appeared to manifest unusual abilities as a result of an encounter with or exposure to supernatural elements first appeared. Some projects (such as MK Ultra) tried to exploit these enhanced for their own purposes to mixed results, but Blackwatch was uniquely qualified to recruit, train, and deploy these agents in to the field, using their own experience and abilities to counter and contain dangerous supernatural phenomenon.

Over the decades the incursions of the supernatural have grown. There were several hundred reported incidents from 1946-1960, but by 1990 there were another one thousand documented incidents world-wide, and by 2000 the number of cases had doubled. News stories were out of control, and it was only luck that prevented the public from being directly exposed to these manifestations in a manner that could lead to panic social unrest. By 2019 it is believed that there are over 5,000 humans and entities masquerading as human documented on record, and as many as 15,000 cases worldwide that have been records; Blackwatch can no longer keep up. A social engineering program in the early 00’s aimed at normalizing the concept of superhumans to the public and through film and other media this has had mixed success. Blackwatch remains an unknown operation, but a public group named Operation Skywatch ( a tribute to the days when most phenomena were perceived as UFO events) now seeks to identify and contain or train certain selected enhanced manifestations as part of a public program, and the operation openly implies that the powers of these individuals come from aliens.

In 2019, Blackwatch continues to fight from the shadows seeking containment of dangerous threats, while Skywatch seeks to create a public face to the increasingly hard to disguise presence of supernatural beings and humans who have been enhanced by this presence. Behind the scenes though the fight is getting more desperate, and Blackwatch realizes it may have overlooked a powerful hidden movement behind the scenes; the malignant and dangerous beings, the ones labeled demons and monsters, appear to have been forging their own alliances and working on their own agendas.

Threats and Secrets:

Blackwatch knows that there are hidden sources of order among some of the foes they have encountered. Study of these creatures, when captured, has revealed that they have formed “cabals” and “coteries” working to share knowledge and resources. Some of these groups are larger and more well organized; lots of evidence from Russia suggests that Rasputin and his patron saint of evil, Baba Yaga, are working behind the scenes to influence the heart of Russian politics and power, for example.

One recurring thread however is that the beings are growing more complicated, more insidious and manipulative. Most of the beings seem to manifest as identifiable creatures ripped from folklore, film, nightmare and myth. However, they all share the following hierarchy of traits:

1.      First Stage or “Primal” manifestations are beings which appeared the year following the atomic testing, and which appeared with consistency, usually a year or so later after additional atomic tests. It wasn’t until 1963 that Blackwatch, working through the UN, convinced the major world powers to agree to a test ban when they confirmed conclusively that the atomic testing was the actual source and cause of the manifestations.

The Primal First Stage Manifestations are the most terrifying and other-worldly. They seem to take on the most distinct and unrecognizable forms, as if they had not yet assimilated the appearance of horrors known to their first victims, though some rapidly changed and shifted, either into parodies or precise copies of those same victims. To this day Blackwatch has found less than ten of the estimated three hundred beings that appeared in 1946. These creatures, when found, are considered the most dangerous. It is believed that Baba Yaga is one of them, though it is suspected her power is what brought Rasputin back to life.

2.      Second Stage Possessors or “Inhabited” manifestations are more common, and start with a supernatural event manifesting in the region of a likely host subject. The individuals exposed to the “radiation” of supernatural energy from the bleed in the wall or reality rapidly degenerate and either mutate or become transformed by entities who seek a host organism in which to reside. These beings usually twist and mutate the host human in horrible ways, and sometimes are not successful in making the host viable. They seem able to abandon a host form to attempt to gain control of another body at times, though if this happens they seem unable to return to the old host form. Survivors of this sort of possession almost always manifest enhanced gifts….if they survive.

3.      Third Stage manifestations are known more commonly as Incursions as they seem to be creatures who claim to have come from some source of mythology, religion, fiction or nightmare in our world and seem to appear whole cloth. They are regarded as dangerous as their behavior seems to be dictated more by what people expect them to do as the beings they appear as rather than hold fast to any more common-sense agenda. Some early manifestations such as the Korean Gunung and the Vegans fit this description. These are often considered the most dangerous manifestations, but they can be hard to distinguish from Primal Manifestations or Possessors who have had time to shape their form and take on an identify unless you catch them at the moment they appear. The Vegans, for example, attempted to demonstrate their origin from a distant star by sending several agents to that location….their bodies were later discovered in orbit by observant sources.

One common agreement with study of the Incursions is this: they seem to need to take on forms chosen by the humans they intend to manipulate, terrorize or kill and feed off of. They are unable to survive without this “fear contact.” Certain classified experiments with captured Incursions have demonstrated that they seem to come apart and go insane, eventually killing themselves or dying when kept in isolation.

4.      Fourth Stage manifestations are identified by a Tibetan term and are called Tulpas. These entities are unique as it appears they are formed from others….including talented humans who have learned how, and are effectively simulacra of people. Tulpas can be complex or simple depending on the effort and energy invested in their creation, and some tulpas forged by powerful manifestations have enhanced powers and shapeshifting skills. The tulpa has become a significant danger in the spycraft of the modern era, as it is possible for a talented agent to kill and replace a target with a perfect duplicate, sometimes fooling the enemy for years. Tulpas almost never seem to manifest without being coaxed; but there are few exceptions to every rule and Blackwatch keeps a file on known tulpas for whom no creator as ever identified.

Blackwatch’s most dangerous foe in this game is the entity known simply as The Cabal, though it often has local titles going by whatever vernacular the creatures see fit to use. In the United States the Cabal is believed to be fairly strong and have infiltrated a portion of the government, with an unknown number of prominent organizers behind it, possibly all either hidden manifestations, enhanced humans sympathetic to the monsters, or tulpas in their service. The faceless leader of the Cabal is a being called the Tempest, and it is considered a great failing that no one in Blackwatch has gotten close to identifying who or what Tempest is.

In 1987 the Cabal forged a force of its own and thanks to some good luck and critical mistakes by certain agents the Cabal learned of a Blackwatch Operations Center and infiltrated then destroyed it in a raid, killing over one hundred agents and personnel in the process. Since this day Blackwatch moved to a more distributed operations network of cells spread throughout the world to avoid any one compromised Control Center from impacting the others. From 1988 to 2010 there were only four identified attacks on these cells. From 2011 to the present that tripled to 13 known attacks, and it is believed that the Cabal is getting better at infiltrating.

On occasion agents of the Cabal have been captured and interrogated. The most successful interrogation was with a Primal Manifestation which called itself the Grimjack, a gray, ghost-like being that had been working as a serial killer in the backwoods of Montana for decades. The Grimjack initially appeared incapable of speech beyond small mimicry, but when given paper and pen began to write furiously, producing a mixture of apocalyptic prophecy and occasional moments of lucidity. It was through this writing that the researchers learned that the Cabal’s leader could be a Primal Manifestation, one with strong influence over its kind. It was clear too from the writing that the apocalyptic descriptions of the Grimjack were not of our world’s future…yet….but of another world entirely, possibly one he had come from through the Bleed between universes.

Then, one day, the Grimjack spoke. “This is not the first time we’ve been here,” he told the stunned interrogators. “But this will be the last.” It was moments later that the Grimjack broke free and killed most of the researchers in the complex before disappearing. Rumors today suggest he is somewhere in South Texas, but local cells have yet to pin him down.

The Defectors

Almost all of the so-called Defectors are either Incursions which, though the adoption or their forms and “minds” have appeared as beings empathetic to humanity’s survival, or as victims of Possessors who have managed to survive the experience with enhancements. Defectors are unique in that they are by definition creatures of “the other side” or have been touched by them, but appear to have the best interests of humanity at heart. Angelic beings, demonic beings and other more disturbing entities who somehow found themselves with an undeniable soft spot for humanity have cushioned out the ranks of the Blackwatch. Long before they are considered for field duty as operators these beings undergo rigorous examination and testing to confirm they are not plants of the Cabal. So far, about one hundred such beings have made agent status.

Of interesting note about these defectors: each tends to firmly believe it is a correct and true manifestation of whatever supernatural element it presents itself as. However, in each case these beings seem to have strange “blank spots” in their memory that seem oddly to not bother them, but which constitute the rift in any memories that might lead to confusion about their natures. An angelic incursion, for example, might not remember its appearance on earth and instead think it descended from Heaven, but claim in its mortal form to have little more than feelings or impressions of what Heaven was like. Such beings, if interrogated too closely about their true natures, sometimes seem to go mad and may spontaneously change at that time to more hostile forms. Blackwatch’s interrogators have perfected a method by which they can attempt to force such reactions out of Defectors; if the defector resists and does not succumb to madness, or acknowledges it recognizes its existence as a manifestation of human creation then it has passed the test.

Reviewing the Backbone One - The Portability Firehose

 I recently decided to complicate my life slightly more by picking up a Backbone One, a funky and slightly overpriced device that attaches controllers to your iPhone, turning it in to a kind of portable game console. It's a $99.95 device, which is about $30-40 more than most PS5 and Xbox Series X controllers cost right now. On the plus side, it has an audio jack which is like gold in the phone world these days. There is a subscription based app which then makes it look and act like you're in a console environment while using it, though that is an entirely unnecessary product (with the caveat that it really does make it easier to connect to Xbox's Cloud streaming service than using Safari). It otherwise acts as a hub for various streaming apps, allowing me to connect to the PS5 and stream from the machine, or to my home PC to stream from my Steam library. It also works with a lot of games natively in the Apple Games store, and Apple's subscription service.

Until now, I have largely ignored gaming on phones for two key reasons: the general assumption that most (not all, but most) mobile gaming apps are predatory in some way therefore best avoided; and the fact that mobile gaming requires using the touch screen of the phone, which can be an awkward experience at best in most cases. As a result, the sorts of games that work best on phones with a touch screen are not ones I care for. Now, even with the Backbone handy, I think that by and large both of these statements remain true, but the situation changes a bit. 

Now it is already the case that I can readily identify and play games on the phone  (also, iPad) which work well with a remote controller. Sure, I could connect an Xbox controller via bluetooth before, but its not easy using that with an iPad let alone an iPhone. As for the predatory game design, in which the game is hyper monetized: easy solution there is, of course, to avoid those games which demand money be spent. This isn't too hard as the Apple store still contains lots of perfectly good or even great games with one time purchases (plenty of good RPGs, for example), or limited additional purchases (Dead Cells, for example, can be had for one base purchase plus three DLCs that are reasonably priced). Something else I noticed: there simply isn't as much hype around mobile releases. Mobile games tend to stick around for much longer, and fade when interest wanes or compatibility issues overwhelm it. The hype train of the Newest and Latest is mysteriously absent in the world of "free to download" apps.  

So, at least from a practical use case, my desire to avoid over-monetized and predatory games while finding games that work with the backbone is fairly easy to achieve. What I didn't expect with the Backbone was that streaming games I own from devices I own or in the cloud is a much better experience than I have been led to believe. Like...worlds better. As long, of course, as you have decent internet.

So far I have played some lengthy sessions in games like Outriders (on Xbox Series X) and The Division 2 (on PS5) and it was a very satisfactory experience. The only real issue to be honest is that I have the iPhone 13 mini, which is a smaller screen even than my Switch Lite, so this is not something you do without good eyes, or having some reading glasses handy. But I am shocked at how good the streaming is. I am lucky on this, though. Streaming at home: piece of cake, I am well set up for it. It's weird (and unnecessary) to play on the phone when my 42 inch OLED monitor is waiting for me to use it with whatever console I am streaming from, of course, but the experience is superior even to the Steam deck because the actual next gen console is doing the heavy lifting. The only issue would be latency in the controller itself, and I have noticed none at all at home.

I tried it at work, where I have a very good high speed internet arrangement (including a high speed public wifi for my employees) and it works great here as well, even with connecting online. It is better, or at least easier, to use the Xbox Cloud Streaming service in this case....my home consoles were more likely to have hiccups, I noticed.....but it worked really well. 

I tried it in some less suitable circumstances. I connected to the public wifi at a Chili's while having lunch with my wife and it worked okay, but you could see a bit of upside/downside lag. It was still weird playing my cloud saves on a game like Outriders at a Chilis, though. (FYI I could play Outriders on the Steam Deck if I picked it up through Steam, but I own it on the Xbox Series X so that's why I am testing a lot with this game). 

In the end, the phone+Backbone combination is letting me do the following: play (and resume playing) titles I already own on existing saves I have on my PS5 and Xbox Series X, which none of my other devices can do right now (I think I could accomplish this on the Steam deck with some effort at figuring out how to access Xbox on Linux, though); I can download and play native android games from the iPhone store that also work offline if needed (I have loaded Dead Cells, Hyperlight Drifter, Diablo Immortal, and a few RPGs that are backbone friendly); and I can also stream my Steam collection if desired. 

The Backbone+phone combo has two key limiters: you need good internet for the streaming, and you must accept the size of your phone screen. On the plus side, with a small phone and the backbone having a pretty low profile, this is as easy to slip into a pocket as the Switch Lite. It somehow manages to also have a more comfortable grip arrangement than the Switch Lite (which honestly kills my hands after playing for a while). I've had no hand-comfort issues at all with the Backbone. 

Now, for the reason I think that I (in my particular circumstances) may find that the phone+Backbone combo is actually what I needed all along for portable gaming: 

The thing is, I have over the last few years accrued the following devices. We won't go back to days of yore on this; my first post Atari 2600 console purchase was an original Gameboy when in college, which I used to play exactly two games: Castlevania and Metroid. No, this list is only of the current, relevant stuff (so my PS Vita stays in storage):

A Switch OLED; a Switch Lite; Steam Deck; Evercade EXP (plus prior original Evercade).

This is a pathetically small list of portable consoles compared to the average Youtuber who talks about portable consoles; I follow some of these vloggers who get into the portability and the retro/emulator elements, and they have sometimes dozens of imported, often cheap emulator handhelds, portable PC competitors to the Steam deck, and more. But for me, having access to four handhelds is a lot.

When I got the original Switch it was less for the portability and more for the sake of completeness to have all the current consoles on the market. What I discovered was that it was really fun to have a multipurpose portable console experience. Since that original Switch I moved to the OLED model as the screen quality is so much nicer, but when I travel the Switch Lite tends to be what I throw in the bag for ease of access. The reality is that outside of some rare occasions I never generally have an opportunity to pull the Switch Lite out for its actual intended purpose. It's more like an ornament, or a safety cord I can "pull in case of extreme boredom."

The Evercade series is likewise more for novelty than anything else. I like it a lot, especially the latest one, the Evercade EXP, but I am not throwing this in to my pocket on a regular basis for on the go gaming. It's more a novelty, a chance to occasionally revisit old classic 80's and 90's arcade games when I feel like it, and to introduce my son to them. But I think I've already logged more hours on my Backbone than I have on the Evercade EXP....so, yeah.

Steam Deck is a beast, and its a fascinating piece of hardware to have on hand. It's the one device these days I am most likely to throw in to a travel bag for a trip, but its impractical to say, throw in my work case because the thing is just too big for practical everyday hauling around. You can't fit it in a pocket, is what I am saying, and you can't play it for too long without having a way to recharge handy, so its better to have when you're going on a trip and staying at a hotel but maybe don't want to haul a laptop along for the ride.

Ultimately, what I have learned is that for daily portability it is nice to have something small and easy to use, which gives you just enough to handle those odd quiet moments when some actual portable gaming can be done. I bet if I were younger and not part of the rapidly growing elderly Gen X crowd that I might be able to find more free time slots for portable gaming....but I am an old guy now, like it or not, with a company to run and a family to wrangle, and portable gaming slips in when it can, not when I would like it to. As a result, throwing the Backbone in to my work bag or even for travel is an ideal and preferable alternative to what I have been doing (sorry Switch Lite!) for day to day access. 

Switch still has purpose, of course. I have designs on finishing Bayonetta 3, replaying after many years Metroid Prime, and Front Mission One of course. But its just not quite as impressive as what the iPhone 13 can run natively, I realize....Switch is looking old, now. And Steam Deck of course is amazing, an artifact of the future, but it needs a slimmer model to compete in the space we're talking about here, which is what can fit in my pants' pocket or my jacket's inner pocket. So going forward: it's just my iPhone as usual, but now with the Backbone One handy for whenever the moment takes me.

If this interests you but you have Android, the good news is a Backbone for Android should be out soon. Note that the current Backbone One is set up to plug in via the proprietary iPhone cable (lightning), so depending on how Apple's migration to USB-C goes that could end up requiring an adapter down the road. My iPad is already USB-C ready so I need an adapter for that when I plug the Backbone in to it to use as a regular controller (you can do that, it just feels a bit like holding an actual bone compared to a full size controller when holding it this way).