The Weird West: Character sampler

When I write vignettes, I tend to write very little about the central protagonist, they are after all the point of view by which I want to show the world I am writing about, and generally the camera cannot see itself. Character and motivations can be inferred from how they speak and what they do in the scene, but I don’t spend time and effort to describe them physically and rarely do I state any overt motivation. I prefer show don’t tell. This allows the reader to project themselves and their ideas about the POV character. John Scalzi did something rather clever with his Lock In series’ main character (which if you haven’t read, I won’t spoil things here. GO READ THEM) but I’m not attempting that level of writing talent. I like writing the short teasers and paragraph intros that begin a chapter, give you a taste of the world and context before diving into the mechanics of a game. 

Having said all that, I do need to work on my characterizations. So here’s some write ups about some characters concepts from the Weird West setting, including some from the teaser post. I’m also going to try and write in the vernacular and ‘voice’ of the people of this setting, as if they were describing each other in their own way. No game stats here, but I instead provide qualitative statements about their abilities and talents which should be easily translatable into whatever game engine they could appear in.

Malcolm Solomani, Arcanist and Wayfarer

Malcolm has been a wanderer his entire life. His earliest memories are of riding in the back of a wagon train and never seeing the same town twice. He remembers his guardian, whom he called ‘Grandfather,’ teaching him rituals and arcane secrets. His last memory of Grandfather was helping with a ritual and something going very wrong. Wrong as in explosions, memory loss, and waking up alone somewhere entirely different. Malcolm has been searching for answers to what happened since. 

Malcolm is a talented Arcanist, and Wayfarer. He is a seasoned traveller, camper and rider. He has a talent for languages and has traveled far and wide across the Territories. He has a strong sense of right and wrong and hates injustice. 

Grunner Brock, the Sturmgunner

Grunner is a recent emigree to the new world, but things he has said imply his native lands are not the same old world that most other people know of; His skill with exotic Volt-based technologies surpass just about anyone else’s yet he claims only mediocre knowledge of the science. When he speaks of his past, which is rare, he’ll sometimes mention a recent war that doesn’t match up with common knowledge of history; That he was a soldier in that war, and it was in that conflict he learned to tinker with sturmtech as he calls it. Grunner is large man of germanic descent, his speech is thick with a Deutchlander accent and he often slips fully into his native tongue. He can initially come off as standoffish, but warms up considerably once he has learned to trust someone. He travels the Territories hunting, prospecting for minerals and crystals, and helping those he deems in need. His compatriots gather in their travels with him that Grunner is eternally seeking redemption for something that happened in the past, but he has never spoken of what that event (or events) were. 

Grunner has a soldier’s field skills for camping and survival. He is an excellent marksman, especially with his charge-rifle, and is constantly tinkering with various Volt-tech devices which he can cobble together into useful gadgets. 

Red Feather, the shifter scout

Red Feather comes from a tribe of semi-nomadic people who regularly travel between a small range of Territories as the seasons change. Red Feather is a Shifter; he can turn into animals that he has formed a special bond with via ritual taught to him by the medicine people of his tribe. He is on his Wandering, which is a coming-of-age experience for youths of his people: he is to travel far and wide and return when he has learned something profound to bring back to his people. Red Feather is young, energetic and occasionally reckless, but always well meaning and positive in attitude. He loves good stories and is learning to write with the intent of bringing back not only literacy to his people, but also many more good stories to tell around the campfires.

Red Feather is young, but already an excellent scout, rider and hunter. His preferred tools are bow and spear, but he’s learning how to use firearms.

Irinia Gardenia, former farmer with a grudge

Irinia Gardenia has what she thought of as an ideal life. She had married an earnest man who offered her the challenge of raising a farm and family in a new settlement. It had been hard but rewarding work, and the addition of their first child was a welcome complication. Then the war happened, and their Territory became a battleground. Soldiers occupied their farm, did unspeakable things before she blacked out.

When she awoke the farm house had been burned to the ground but it seemed to have happened a long time ago. Now there is a voice in her head, urging her to find those responsible. Promising to help her make them pay. Whispers secrets to her. When she does what the voice wants, she gets stronger. Weirder. 

To all appearances, Irinia looks like an average young frontier woman. She’s had experience raising animals and keeping a household in order, but little beyond that. However in truth she’s made a pact with a spirit of vengeance, which grants her tremendous strength and speed when it wishes to, among other dark powers. The more she uses these powers, and gives in to its insidious goading, the stronger it gets. One day she will come to a line in the sand: will she retain any shred of humanity left and turn against this demon within her, or will she give in and be destroyed in the process.

Kerrigan “Kerry” Goodhand, Gambler and trickster

“Kerry” has a long history of trouble. With family, with the law, with the laws of probability itself it seems. To get out of a forced marriage, Kerrigan Godfry became ‘Kerry Goodhand’ and stole away on a caravan from New London deeper into the Territories. ‘He’ soon discovered he had a talent for playing card games, games of chance, really anything that involved luck and has made a living as a gambler and con artist since. There’s actually a bounty to return “Kerrigan” home, but he has changed looks so often he doesn’t recognize the portrait in the wanted posters.

“Kerry” presents as a svelte man, impeccably dressed. Kerry is an expert gambler and experienced traveler. He knows how to fight with fists and knives, and while can use guns doesn’t like them. They are also skilled at disguise and fashion.

Kerry’s Gift is that he has incredible luck. When he concentrates, he can pretty much dictate the outcome of the roll of dice, or draw of cards. It’s exhausting and the more he uses this power, the worse the karmic balance comes later to bite him on the ass.

Padre Esteban, Buckshot priest

Esteban Villenova always believed. He left home early to pursue seminary and returned home an ordained padre. However the home he returned to was now beset by horrors and unnatural happenings. One night as he led his congregation in prayers for protection from the things clawing at the church’s doors, he had a vision of an angel of the creator who handed him a gun. Awakening from his enlightenment, Padre Esteban got himself two shotguns just in time as the walking dead broke down the church’s doors. Padre Esteban learned that day that faith and prayer will get you far, and for the rest you need double-o buckshot.

Padre Esteban is a stoic and supportive person, freely offering benediction and jovial advice together. He possesses a righteous fury however, and fearlessly rightens wrongs, choosing to send unrepentant sinners and threats to his community ‘to the creator, so they can be judged.’

Esteban’s gift is his faith. He honestly and truthfully believes in a benevolent creator who acts through boons to the faithful and answers prayers. He alone can invoke some impressive effects, but when he gets a congregation to pray together, miracles can and have happened. It’s a difficult path he walks, but he does it proudly.

Hazel Moonseer, Planeswitch with a ferncat familiar

Hazel comes from a long line of witches. Her family just happens to have moved out to the frontier Territories instead of staying back east with the established covens. She’s old enough that her elders are starting to pressure her to settle down and start the next generation. Hazel isn’t sure she’s ready for her Matron years. Having finally come of age and level of skill she thinks she’s ready to experience the world beyond her home plots and make a difference. After all, if her ancestors could thrive in these wild lands, how is she going to show her worthiness? 

Hazel is a young and talented arcanist and herbalist. She’s experienced with frontier life and can hunt and shoot and camp. She prefers pants and vests over dresses, and her grimoire and herbalist kit are never far from her grasp.

Willowisp, her ferncat familiar, is a green feline about the size of a Serval cat (up to 24” tall and 20 to 40 lbs. in weight ). Ferncats aren’t plants, but their luxurious green fir naturally forms fern-like structures and thus their name was given. Willowisp is very clever and sociable, but is also a cat, so don’t expect human-rational responses. Willowisp is an excellent hunter, guardian and scout. She’s very intelligent and can understand the intent of human speech, but not complex ideas (she’ll understand ‘Fetch the red bag,’ but not ‘Go get the dynamite and blasting caps.’). Hazel and Willowisp know where each other is at all times, and they constantly know each other’s emotional and physical well being as well. When Hazel concentrates, she can sense what Willowisp can.

Vernian Wells, Wandering Hexorcist

Vernian is a wandering hex breaking exorcist. He could teach volumes on what he knows about supernatural evils and how to defeat them at the major religious institutes, if he weren’t ex-communique for breaking their rules. Vernian doesn’t give a damn, he’s got work to do. The scar-like patterns branded into his arms itch and burn and glow in the presence of evil spirits and demons. Ghosts from his past drive him to keep scouring the Territories and he cannot stop while he feels the itch in his scars. Hunting and destroying evil magic and spirits is both his curse, and his salvation.

Vernian Wells appears as a gaunt man in well worn travel clothes. While skilled at shooting and fighting his best skills are in knowledge of the supernatural, rituals of binding and breaking spells and hexes, and making fetishes and trinkets for protection and utility against non-human threats. 

Tisiphone “Tish” Allegloria, Frontier Alchemist and brewmeister

The Allegloria’s are a famous, if small, family of brewmeisters and vinters. “Tish” is the prodigal daughter of the family, having left the comforts of Nuova Toscana to bring the family's products and name brand to the new world. She’s also on a personal mission to discover what herbal and floral opportunities lay unknown in the Territories. She's eager to uncover their potential uses, both alchemical and alchoholic. Tish is a glorious being of energy and reckless enthusiasm. Seemingly irrepressible in spirit, even her ‘low’ moments are soon replaced with joyous highs that the future hold for her. Tish is not only a skilled brewmaster and vinter, but also a very talented alchemist. She's never without a pouch of tinctures, potions, and brews. She’s new frontier life, but she’s got the financial backing of her clan so is always prepared, even if she doesn’t know one end of a rifle from the other. 

The Weird West: A setting teaser

 “They took her,” Mama Berthold wept as I finished placing the last bandage on Paw Berthold’s wounds. He’d be down a few days, maybe a week, but he’d be laid up the entire time.

“Sweet little Mayabelle?” I asked and she nodded miserably.

The Bertholds were good people. Farmers who made their plot with a handful of other families in the Wind River Territory. They always had some spare food and a place to home your mount for the night for travelers. They didn’t deserve this.

“Tell me about them. The ones who took Mayabelle.”

The Territories -that is what people generally call them- are overlapping pockets of reality. The more arcane minded might call them ‘interconnected demiplanes’, and those with a more natural philosophical training would say something about ‘liminal spaces’. Some are tiny, little more than a meadow or a mountain pass, others so large their edges have yet been found. In some Territories people ride Raptors and rely on ‘Brontos as beasts of burden, in others you’ll find that herds of Diremares dominate the lands (imagine a draft horse combined with a T-Rex and you’re almost right). Those who live in the Territories call them various descriptive and ontological names. E.g. “The Red Steppes,” “Great Eagles’ Mountain,” “The Evernight Glades,” “Banners Hold” and so on. 

The kidnappers were ex-Westos soldiers who’d turned to banditry after The War ended. The Berthold’s had offered them some food and fodder for their ‘mares out of common courtesy, trading for stories and rumors from outside Wind River. Later that evening the bandits had returned with sour intent, beaten Paw Berthold and kidnapped young Mayabelle. She had been a child the last time I had been by this way, but she was a maiden now. A temptation too great for hungry men without a nation to marshall them.

The bandits had left tracks that Heelnipper could easily follow, leading to the edge of the Wind River Territory and seemingly stopped at the edge of a forest. There was a Way here, and not one of the normal ones into or out of Wind River. I dismounted from Heelnipper and poked around until I felt the edge of the hidden Way. 

Wayfinding is difficult to explain to those without the Gift. Each Wayfinder does it a little differently. For myself, I’ll feel something out of place. In this case it was the smell: the air suddenly smelled differently. Rather than the pine and mossy grounds of Wind River, I smelled sandstone and dryness. That was my clue to how this particular Way works. 

The New World was colonized by refugees, pilgrims and explorers who braved the great ocean west of the Old World for the promise of freedom and opportunity. What they discovered was that while the eastern parts of the New World were static, the farther west you went the … stranger the land got. If there’s a west coast to this continent, nobody’s claimed to have found it yet, but plenty have set out to and have never returned. Some Territories could be walked to and between easily enough, and well-established trails and roads were established. Other Territories required more esoteric means to traverse, known as Ways. Finding and using rare Ways what Wayfarers have the gift for.

Opening the Way was simple once I knew the clue: I found the sandstones that lay next to each other that were out of place in the Wind River Territory. They were oblate round rocks. The larger one had a scratched flat space upon its top and the smaller was flat on the bottom. Stacking the smaller one on the larger triggered the Way. The air between two great trees shimmered, and rocky canyon lands could be seen beyond the veil between Territories.

People of all kinds, colors and creeds live in the Territories. They mostly live peacefully in their chosen Territories, but banditry, tribal rivalry and other common human frictions abound. A decade ago the Great War ended, and nothing approaching the size and scope of that conflict has happened since. Some Territories still bear the scars of that vast and terrible conflict. 

The various Peoples of the Territories often have magical gifts. There are Shamans who talk to the spirits of the land; Elementalists who bend forces of fire, earth, air and water; Arcanists who perform highly esoteric magic rituals; Shifters who can turn into animals. Just to name a few. Wayfarers have the gift of finding the Ways between Territories.

I didn’t recognize the Territory beyond, but it was like many other canyonlands I had visited before. Grunner muttered in his Old World tongue something annoyed about sand. When I looked at him, he shrugged his huge shoulders and said in common with his thick Deutchlander accent: “I hate sand in my boots.”

Red Feather, our tracker friend, chuckled. “Don’t worry about sand, my big friend” he said, spurring his mount forward, “Watch for snakes instead! They like sleeping in warm boots at night.”

Grunner spurred his mount to follow, growling aloud: “Then let’s not take all day to do this.”

We rode into the canyonlands.

It is also an age of technological advancement and industrialization: steam and lighting engines power vehicles and factories, gunpowder and zapcaps empower firearms like revolvers and chain-rifles (chained lighting that is); telegraph lines and babbage machines connect one end of a Territory to the other with nearly instant communication, but couriers are still needed between Territories. 

The bandits were camped in a cul-de-sac offshoot of the winding canyons. Grunner and I lay on the top of the rocky walls surrounding their encampment, watching from above. A lone eagle soared overhead, circling. It had been morning when we entered the canyonlands, and now night was not long off. The bandits had posted no sentries, no guards at the entrance to their hiding place. They clearly had great confidence in the difficulty of finding this Territory, let alone their little corner among the rocks. But there were more of them than I expected. The bunch that had assaulted the Bertholds had been but a small raiding party. There was probably a whole platoon down there.

The eagle glid down somewhere behind us, but it was Red Feather who quietly snuck up to join us. “Many fighting men. They corral their horses in the back of the canyon. The only tent that is guarded is in the middle. The girl is probably there,” he reported. 

I nodded. We needed a plan, and I had a few ideas brewing.

“Grunner, get that electric rifle of yours. Setup up here and be ready to cover us. Red Feather, you and I are going to sneak into the camp, cause a diversion - I’m thinking a stampede off their horses- free the girl and then we all get the hell out of here.”

They both nodded.

“Good. Let’s get going.” 

Intro to the '52 in 2025' project

Since I want to become a better writer, I have to write more. A lot. Practice makes perfect and all that. So for 2025, I’m taking on a project of writing and posting an article every week for all of 2025. Thus this “52 in 2025” project was coined. My hope is to hone my writing reflexes and skills, so that I am able to draw upon them more on demand, rather than depend on luck and inspiration to make progress. 

And since I am a gamer, it makes sense to write stuff about gaming: Settings, Mechanics, Characters, Locales and so on. At this point of planning, I have over thirty posts planned, and I’ll be adding more to the to-do list as time goes by (i’ll need at least two dozen more to meet my goal by the end of the year). While I am mostly a sci-fi kinda guy, I am also trying to expand my fantasy and modern writing experience, so things will skip around a lot. Game systems will also vary a lot; I am a systems junkie and love encountering and learning new gaming systems.

As for you, my audience, please like and comment as you see fit. I thrive on feedback and support, even simple ‘likes.’ That and any ideas/requests that you come up with, please share.

Thanks in advance.

Citizen Shenanigans #1

So. Star Citizen. It may be in Alpha, but it sure is a game. A game where you have a ton of tools and interacting game mechanic systems and ways to make them interact that I don’t think the designers pre-considered what you could do with them. And that makes it amazing. Even when you’re a tired dumbass. Especially when you’re a tired dumbass.

Your character must eat and drink in this game. You must remove your helmet to do so (what, no food nipples?). Nothing. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING reminds you to put your helmet back on.

So I’m making a speculative trade gold run. That is, flying nearly 60 million kilometers across a solar system to a mining colony to fill my ship with gold with a plan to fly 60mKm back to sell it for the best price to the in-game equivalent to Micro$oft. I’ve done it before. It’s the best legal way to make money at the moment for me. For once, this late into the evening, there’s enough to completely fill my cargo hold, and I have the funds to invest in it all. It will be a massive payoff if I can make this run safely.

My character is hungry and thirsty, so before launching from my starting point, I down the equivalent of a protein shake. I then get into my ship, power up, and take off for the mining colony. Ten, twelve minutes later my ship arrives. I hop out of the ship, dash to the hab where I can buy the gold. I don’t notice I don’t have a helmet on and this isn’t a sustainable environment; it won’t kill you instantly, but your life is measured in seconds. I manage to get to the sales hab without noticing this. I fill my ship’s hold with gold (using most of my available funds). Then i decide to explore the other habs for loot. Again, without thinking about my helmet. Without checking my health status. I bound across the landscape and make it to the next hab, only to suddenly expire in the airlock before it can cycle. I am shocked. It’s an ‘Armistice’ zone so nobody can shoot me. Then I realize I’m not wearing a helmet and that i had died from exposure. Dumbass. I sit stunned. I can respawn, but it will be 60mKm away and my ship -full of gold!- is sitting here at the mining camp. I can file an insurance claim and effectively reclaim/respawn my ship where I will respawn, but I don't know what will happen to the gold in the hold.

But I have another ship. A tiny one-seater with no cargo. It’s fast, but has a small fuel tank and I’ll have to refuel halfway to the mining camp. But then I can leave the tiny ship, get back into my cargo hauler, and recover the precious gold. So I do so. I leave my tiny ship at the mining camp (the insurance claim on it is much cheaper and faster than on my hauler), and take my cargo hauler back to the place to sell the cargo.

And when I get to the destination, I crash my ship. In the hangar bay. I’m tired. I’m distracted. I hit ‘boost’ instead of ‘stop’ as I try to land it and slam into the wall of the hanger bay at over 100mps. My ship blows up. Cargo scatters across the bay. Once again I sit there, stupefied again.

But I can respawn immediately and nearby. I do so, run -sprint- to the hangar bay, and start the respawn clock on my cargo hauler (it takes thirteen minutes). When a ship is destroyed, half its cargo is destroyed, the rest spawns around the crash site. Half my gold is still there. In my addled, desperate brain, I come up with a plan: Respawn my ship: If I can, re-land my ship in the same hanger bay and reload the cargo. If I can’t re-land at the same hanger, I can throw the cargo containers outside the hanger, land in the field and recover the cargo. With my hand-held tractor beam I wrangle the cargo containers to the corner of the bay, hoping no other player gets to use this bay before my ship respawns and if they do, they don’t recognize the cargo containers for what they are. Thirteen minutes later, my luck holds: my ship respawns in the same bay I crashed in. Where the gold is. I am able to throw the remaining cargo containers in the back, store the ship, then go sell what I have left on the market. Then I log out for the evening, stupid tired.

All in all, I still lost a ton of money, but not so much as I would have if I had lost all the cargo.

So lessons learned: Don’t fly when tired. 

And don’t forget your helmet.

Returning to Crunchy design systems

 So i said 'hell with it' and pulled out my Mekton Zeta books and starting stating out mecha and ship designs for a theoretical game, because sometimes you just gotta crunch some numbers.

I pulled some pics from Pinterest that looked interesting and started writing some setting-fluff and then designs inspired by the artwork. [We'll ignore for now the issues of piracy and using others artwork for personal benefit; the short of it is as long as I am not making money and can give the artists credit, i feel fine about this.] This spun into more worldbuilding ideas, and then a major side-quest of creating a sub-design workflow that made things simpler. Mekton is a system that can be as simple as you want, or as complex as you want. It recognizes that most supporting and background mecha don't need as much detail as the 'hero' units, and thus can do with less crunchy detail. 

And then I realized I was going in the wrong direction; over twenty-four 'supporting' mecha designs (mostly capital ships and support craft) to two -two- 'hero' units written up so far. The focus had shifted from a setting with an emphasis on a few Hero units to huge capital ships and fleet composition. The original idea was to have lightly detailed units that support the setting, but now I worry I've gone too far down this rabbit hole. So, do I scrap what I have and start over? Take what I got so far and just change focus? The stuff I have written up so far is good within its own framework, I think. But I'm not sure its what I was originally going for. This is partially because of the variety of inspiring artwork, drawing from vastly different genres and settings. Trying to create a cohesive setting from highly disparate sources means a hodgepodge of elements. If I were planning to commercialize this setting, I'd either redo all the artwork myself, or commission some artists for new art.

This reminds me of the importance of 'setting bibles' and vision statements; writing down the vision and goal then referring to it later to check course and progress. Or, acknowledging that your initial idea needed some modification.

All this crunch, however, leads to the next step: actually playing a crunchy game systems. The point of lower-complexity designs for non-Hero units is to make the GM's life easier. Let the players have full-page sheets of details to track for their lone Hero units; the GM needs to track everyone else in the scene. That's what the side-quest was for: create a streamlined system for designing and using these supporting units; as GM I want to track an NPC unit on a 3x5 card, or half a page at most.

Review: Till the Last Gasp

 Do you love improv acting? Do you like really getting into the motivation and mood of a character to walk and talk as if you were them? Or do you want to get more into improv and acting then your normal gaming gathering normally has going on? Then Till the Last Gasp is worth looking into.

Till The Last Gasp is a tabletop game by Darrington Press that is all about dramatic one-on-one confrontations. With a dozen pre-generated characters and nine battlefield maps that cross many genres and settings there’s loads of replay value with the base game. However you can also create your own characters (but not locations), by answering a set of purely descriptive questions about each character. There are no attributes, levels, skills, feats, talents to worry about. Characters can fight with weapons, rhetoric, superpowers, magic, ultratech, psychic powers, or trained monsters, it all possible. 

As for the mechanics themselves there is a bit of a learning curve. The mechanical layer exists to set the pace and tempo of the conflict. There’s definitely a ‘tactical’ level to this game, as you juggle your stance card versus the allocation of dice to defense and offense. Using the battlefield is key to every Objective card and each of the locations on the maps offer their own opportunities for narrative and tactical play. There’s no rolling-to-hit or rolling for damage here. Each combatant chooses a set of Objectives that are their victory conditions. First player to achieve three objectives then gets the chance to ‘end the duel decisively.’ 

While you could play TtLG purely for the tactical ‘win,’ like you would MtG, you’d be skipping out on the biggest part of playing: The dramatic improv acting and storytelling. Your character’s traits are all narrative and motivational. Your Objectives prompt you to describe or enact your character’s actions, thoughts and feelings, and just as often prompt your opponent to do the same. Locations on the battlefield will do this too, as will Drama cards that are drawn often and throughout the duel to add more narrative flavor. Your character will be affected by these moments and revelations. The game encourages this, which is why the stakes of the conflict will change as the game progresses. A friendly bout to prove who’s the better may turn deadly as egos are triggered and tempers flare; a duel to the death may instead result in a change in someone’s allegiances. Rivals become deadly enemies … or lovers. It's all in how the cards, dice, and player choices turn out during the course of the game.  (As a side note, this reminds me a lot of the concepts behind Thirsty Sword Lesbians and the kind of drama that game seeks to enact.) All this hinges on the player’s abilities to emote their characters. If you leave the table without a sense of having experienced a dramatic encounter that changes the character’s lives forever, you’re doing it wrong.

Till The Last Gasp has all the benefits of what I'll call ‘modern gaming culture.’ There is a heavy emphasis on cooperation, collaboration, respecting boundaries (This is the first game I’ve encountered that ships with an X card). At any time either player can de-escalate the stakes of the conflict, but it takes both players agreeing to raise the stakes. The official last step of the game is to shake hands and leave the table as friends.

The production values for this boxed game are impressive; From the folding player boards, to the ‘battlefield’ maps, dice, cards and tokens, everything is well made and made to last. One can tell that the makers of the game are gamers themselves because of the attention to details present. There are ziplock bags for all the components! The only thing that would make it perfect were if the box it all came in were designed for reuse, like with a hinged lid rather than the classic clamshell pieces design.

One hope I had for this game was the possibility to use it as a kind of ‘mini game’ in concert with other game systems/engines for when the normal rules couldn’t handle such a dramatic confrontation as well as one might like. After reviewing the rules as written and discussion with fellow gamers, I’d say TtLG mostly accomplishes this goal. While it might be tempting to tweak the rules as written to give a combat-focused character some form of edge over a non-combat character, from a purely narrative point of view that’s unnecessary here. Character motivation is more important than ‘skill’ in TtLG, and that should be embraced when playing it. The plucky and determined courtier has just as good a chance as the bitter duelist hired to silence them. The only thing I’d like to see is how to make new battlefields for your duels, but the basics of how they work are straightforward and easy to use or re-use for your custom settings.  

If you’re a skilled improv actor, you’ll get this game play right away. If you want to get better at improv, this is a good game for you. If you want your battles to be meaningful, emotionally impactful to those involved, and memorable for the ebb and flow of drama, this game is for you. If you just want to kick down doors, slay orcs and count gold pieces, this isn’t for you.

So ... Cypher.

So... the Cypher system from Monte Cook. I have a love-hate thing about this game system.

With the explosion of upcoming Cypher games about to drop - the wildly successful Old Gods of Appalachia and Adventures in the Cypher System Kickstarter projects - I figure I better resolve my issues and maybe plan some house rules, because I see great potential in the Cypher system, but I also have some very bitter and jagged issues with the system.

Overall, I immensely appreciate the simplicity and elegance of the level mechanic for monsters and other threats. “It’s a level 4 Orc” tells you what you need to know about hitting it, and avoid being hit by it, and even how many times you need to hit it (if its HP is based on its level, though most monsters detailed in the various Cypher books don’t follow the formula exactly); Anything else the monster can do is a special entry in its writeup, but they’re generally pretty simple to use. (I am using the term ‘monster’ here very broadly: meaning any threat, opponent or entity challenging the PCs) I appreciate that the Players do the majority of rolling in Cypher: roll to succeed, roll to hit, roll to avoid being hit, etc… 

The three Attributes Pools.

Might, Speed and Mind. I appreciate the brevity and archetypes here. Could there be room for additional or alternative approaches? Body, Mind, Soul? HOWEVER: The idea that using your powers makes you weaker and closer to defeat by drawing from the same pools that serve as your ‘hp’ seems counterintuitive. When doing something cool and powerful is equivalent to taking a hit from a monster, one has to do the evaluation if your action is worth it. I have a workaround for this, so see House Rules later for my 'fix' for this issue.

Character Types, a.k.a. Classes

The core character ‘classes’ or Types as they are called in the core book are kinda weak IMHO, especially in their progression. I don't have a quick fix for this. Maybe replacing character Types with a broader application of the Adjective Noun that Verbs structure could work, but I am getting ahead of myself ...

"I am an Adjective Noun who Verbs" rocks

What Cypher has really inspires me with is the phrase “I am an Adjective Noun who Verbs.” In Cypher, you combine a Descriptor (Adjective), a Type (Noun) and a Focus (Verb) to create your character. It’s sorta like the equivalent of your Alignment + Race + Class in D&D. However, Cypher limits your characters to one such combination. Now granted in Cypher these are big defining elements. “I am a Swift Warrior who Dual Wields” embodies everything those words encompass. However it makes for rather one - dimensional characters.

I’m seriously interested in using the ‘Adjective Noun that Verbs’ structure as a Skill-based system instead:

• Let the Adjective be the level of experience/training (Novice, Expert, Master, etc…).
• The Noun is the skill, career or job title.
• And the Verbs is a specialization within that broader Noun.

(For simplicity I’ll refer to ‘Adjective Noun who Verbs’ as ‘ANV’ from here on.)

So for example you could have a Novice Marksman who Snipes, but alternatively be Expert Marksman who Dual Wields. You don’t have to have a Specialization. The trick here is that the Noun has to be simultaneously broad enough to encompass a clear set of actions /activities/ knowledge, but also narrow enough not to be abused as a catch-all for everything the character attempts to do.

The Adjective/level of experience would be the effective 'level' in that skill. In core Cypher rules: 'Novice' would give you a baseline chance to succeed. 'Trained' would give you a one step difficulty in your favor, and 'Specialized' would give you two difficulty steps in your favor. In other game systems your Adj level could determine how many dice to roll, etc ...

The Specialization would give a boon to actions in specific circumstances. These could be detailed written up abilities, or a free difficulty boon, or grant types of actions that wouldn't be possible without the Specialization.

E.g. You gotta be a Brilliant Doctor who's a Brain Surgeon to try to replace Spock's brain.

You could also use the ANV for things like social traits, reputations, titles, etc., where the Adj is the level/rank/notoriety, the Noun is the title, rank or position, and the Verb instead details the organization. A Junior Knight of the Order of the Rose, A Special Agent of the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit, a Notorious Enforcer of the Mendez Cartel.

A character would realistically be a collection of these ANV combinations, advancing in skill level and gaining specializations as they grow from experience, as well as gaining new ANV traits.