Combined with the other two concept pieces, I am confident that Rick has perfectly illustrated the game concepts as they exist within my mind. In fact, these three pieces have, in return, given me far more inspiration for the project than most of the previous media sources from which I’d been drawing (samurai movies, mostly).

I’m still neck-deep in this game’s pre-production process. Playtesting is sporadically underway, and while the process is slow, it is certainly gaining momentum.

Again, apologies for the watermark.

One of the game’s main themes involves investing current power into future options, and the choice between what works right now and what might work in a few moments. I’m going to keep with that theme when implementing maneuvers. Instead of just being able to activate them left and right at will, or placing artificial “only once per shindig” limitations upon them, I’m going to require that players actually use cards from their hand to activate them. Each maneuver will have an Activation Rank, starting at 10 and going down with character advancement. By sacrificing a card from your hand with a face rank higher than the maneuver’s activation, you can use that maneuver’s ability.

This enhances the strategy behind the conflict, and should hopefully work nicely with the innate risk vs reward setup. Players will have to choose between holding onto the higher cards for use against their opponent, or investing them into their maneuvers for immediate effect.

Now it just remains to be tested.

Initial player-established War details were wicked awesome: The war is an “undeclared foreign war” against “massive hordes of unwashed primitives.” Despite their side’s use of “rolling dreadnought tanks with massive 100+-member crews,” the war was ultimately lost, the home economy across the sea ravaged, and the soldiers were all stranded there with “nothing to go home to.” The locals are usually known by their derogative nickname, “the shitweeds.”

The First Founding featured four soldiers in a moment of crisis: The war is lost – do we follow the suicide charge orders, or do we retreat to live and fight another day? The Sergeant tried to convince everyone that this charge was their destiny, their duty as soldiers. The Recruit dissented, having a family back home, but was quickly insulted by the Sapper. This provoked the Recruit into lashing out, which spawned a vicious explosion-heavy fight between him and the Sapper. The Recruit ultimately took the Sapper’s head, but the fight was so traumatic that he then simply fell to his knees and wept as The Enemy ran him down. The Sergeant and the Veteran, meanwhile, finally agreed that this was indeed a waste of their lives, and they rode off into the night, retreating from the charge.

This resulted in their Pack’s First Founding being colored by the following three grabs: Desertion, Regicide, and Survivors. Ouch.

Character creation was next. Sarge and the Veteran remain in the pack today as Den Mother and Trail Blazer respectively, along with a new Leader (the Road Captain) and a Masked member from the local populace (The Enforcer). A nice variety of Bikes and Fighting Styles were chosen, although the group’s off-road capability is very, very limited.

Following that the players laid out the actual details of the Pack itself. Calling themselves the War Pigs, they all wear masks styled after demonic boars, which are required attire when astride their bikes. The leader’s command icon is an old bleached skull from a massive pig-monster which once almost wiped out the entire Pack. Called The Boar by the pack, each member has also secretly given it its own name that no one else knows. This skull is mounted as a standard on the leader’s chopper, and frequently adorned with trophies from fallen enemies. Attaching these trophies is called “feeding the Boar” and one of the Pack’s taboos is that the Boar must be regularly fed, or bad things happen to them. They ritually partake in copious amounts of drugs, frequently going on peyote-like spirit quests, guided by the Boar. They don’t care about hairstyles, as long as their facial hair is curled into Boar Tusks (one of them even has similar facial tattoos). Finally, they have a taboo against sleeping in the same bed twice, unless they are “on furlough.”

Their prospect-initiation ritual is rather gruesome. Upon being first allowed to ride as prospect, the newcomer must wear a mask made from an actual boar’s face, tanned and stinking. This mask must be worn until he makes his first solo kill of a marked enemy of the Pack. There was also discussion of the Prospect having to eventually stew and eat the mask, but I’m not sure if those details got hammered out and committed to Pack law.

I look forward to seeing The War Pigs in action in the coming sessions.

Post-Session Musings

The default “suicide charge” First Founding scene seems to work well enough, but I’m thinking it might not be fully apparent that committing to the charge doesn’t necessarily mean the characters are doomed to die. Believing that they are might factor into their decision.

The basic conflict mechanic worked out well, but needs some in-the-face clarification. I need to make a cheat sheet and print it on the character sheet itself, just a quick bullet list of things to consider (like the two ways in which Ki can be spent for bonus cards).

Some dragging aspects of the Pack Creation system were very immediately apparent. Sacrifices were too many, and took too long to come up with and then write down. Going forward, I’m changing it to a stripped-down, more group-inclusive process: define one sacrifice for yourself, and one each for the guys to your left and right.

There are too many initial Grabs. Revision: First Founding survivors get two free Grabs (those they inherited from the first scene). All characters get one free grab attached to each of their three Trappings (Role, Style, and Bike). The Pack as an entity itself has three Grabs as well, established at the end of the First Founding. Undecided if players can then nominate one last bonus Grab for the player next to them.

Also, the Rank bidding system is confusing and ultimately unnecessary. I’m stripping it out and replacing it with simple group discussion.

Thanks to Rick Marcks for delivering this piece of undistilled awesome.

(Watermark-free images will likely be available in the future.)

EDIT: I’ve updated the image for a much less overwhelming watermark.

So in the coming weeks, I’ll be posting more updates on this, but for now, I’m about two days into the revision and already over halfway done with the text. This time it’s a lot easier to write, because I’ve run this game so many times using the newer streamlined rules that they just make sense. This should be good.

As far as my table-topping goes, I’m in the middle of at least two games, with two more on the horizon. First is my Old School Palladium Fantasy sandbox game, which has had four gatherings so far and seems to be maintaining everyone’s excitement pretty nicely. This game is really doing a good job of reinvigorating me, both as an arbiter of events and as a creator of spontaneous content. I haven’t run this seat-of-the-pants in a long, long time, and it is quite simply titillating my gamer imagination. I go into each session with a mental picture of all the events happening in the world within a 20-mile radius of where the characters are, and as they move around, those events progress of their own accord. So far, the players have managed to hit up most of them quite nicely, and get themselves directly involved of their own volition. It’s wonderful.

Next is the Song of Ice and Fire game (loosely using the system, of the same name, by Green Ronin), for which the Torch of Arbitration has been passed on to my pal Sixten. We kicked of the new chunk of the campaign a coupla weekends back, and it looks like the next session is this coming weekend. I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes.

Also this weekend is a meet-and-greet session for potentially starting up a new Unknown Armies game. I don’t have much to say about that one just yet, because we haven’t discussed it as a group, but I want to see a story of normal folks from different walks of life brought together by mutual exposure to the Occult Underground. More on this as it unfolds.

Further down the road, probably after the Palladium games comes to its natural end, I’ve got an idea to try a Shadowrun variant in which all the magic is removed, and replaced with simple conspiracy. Magic has always been my biggest complaint about Shadowrun, as it just never seemed to fit right. I was introduced to the setting during the transition from First to Second Edition, and the art back then (some by the always-amazing Tim Bradstreet) depicted a far grittier thing than the more fantasy-inspired Shadowrun of today. Old School Shadowrun was like Ghost in the Shell, while modern Shadowrun feels more like Cutey Honey. My thought now is to remove all the magic from the setting, and replace it with mostly-unexplained conspiracy. Like the Great Ghost Dance, for example, wasn’t a magical event. For some reason a call came in from High Command to just let them go, and the US forces complied – and to this day, no one knows why. And Saeder-Krupp isn’t ruled by lofwyr, but merely an entity known as The Dragon. Is it a person? An AI? A cabal of conspirators? Something else?

All this Shadowrun-minus-magic is in my head thanks to my current obsession with the new Deus Ex: Human Revolution game, of course. Very few games have ever affected me as deeply, or tickled that Fun Spot so furiously, as this one. I’ve been taking a primarily non-violent, stealth-based approach to this game, but the story is so good and the characters so realistically portrayed, that there have been moments where in-game narrative events have successfully swayed my decision. “Fuck. That.” I’d say aloud, before switching from trust stun-zapper to armor-piercing guns and brutally taking out every last motherfucker in the room as an act of revenge that I didn’t know I wanted until only seconds before. The character Jenson radiates this almost-tangible aura of cool boredom that personifies him as the ultimate Gibsonian cyberpunk bad-ass. Every inch of the game emanates a complimentary coolness and enforces a setting-appropriate dirty dismalness, creating what I feel is the most amazing cyberpunk gaming experience to date.

Going back to the subject of Tabletop gaming for a monent, I want to take a moment and talk about two services which have revolutionized my game-scheduling: Agree-a-Date and Doodle. These are online tools that allow you to send out a poll of sorts to a group of people, letting them pick which of the arrayed dates are best available for their attendance. As an adult with a full-time job, an active social life, budding romances, and other hobbies, this makes scheduling gaming sessions much, much less of a headache. I’m moving away from Agree-a-date towards Doodle, because it’s less restrictive and not constantly advertising itself to me. But aide from that, Agree-a-Date has served me very well for small-gathering social functions.

I’ve recently set up a profile on RPGGeek, and have begun posting my plays there. Feel free to friend me.

Finally, the current design project codenamed Hagakure 66 has had some great new developments. I can’t share them just, yet, however. I want the revelation to be damn awesome. It’s on its way, though, most definitely.

One very valid concern that was raised during a recent design-jamming session is related to the very nature of the motorcycle pack. In this game, the characters are all members of an outlaw motorcycle gang, and along with that membership come several assumptions that could feasibly be made about their natures. With this game I am envisioning play going back-and-forth between scenes involving exploration of setting and situation, and scenes involving motorcycle samurai action – y’know, sword duels and motorcycle races and all-out gang-on-gang warfare.

Given the typically rugged, brutal, take-what-you-want-by-force nature of the typical outlaw gang, the question was poised: what is to stop the gang from just rolling into town at the beginning of the scenario, putting everyone to the sword, taking what they want, and leaving, without taking the time to explore and network?

While I don’t want to completely invalidate the above tactic – after all, that could definitely be a fun approach to a situation, right? – the question posed highlights the need for a definite pre-game “tutorial mode” which can introduce the players to the mechanics, without departing too heavily from their own situation.

To handle this, I’m now hammering out the rules for running an event I’m calling the First Founding. After sitting at the table and getting out all the usual pre-game chatter and sillies that invariably accompany gatherings within this hobby, the first real game-related thing that players of Hagakure ’66 will experience is the First Founding. In this event, the players act out the events of the war that initially sealed the founders together into what would become their post-war Pack.

The initial idea for the core conflict at hand is thus:

The battle is over, your forces are smashed, your leaders dead or captured. All around the battlefield you see the destruction that has been dealt to your side, and you hear the victory calls from the horns of your enemies. As far as you know, you seven are the last remaining fighters on your side. The question has been posed: do you run and hide in the hills, or do you make one last charge?

The seven mentioned above should of course be changed to fit the number of players in the group. The players are given choice to pick from several pre-made template characters, designed around archetypes that would have been common within the ranks during the war. The Grizzled Vet, the Brash Young Recruit, the Silent Scout, etc. They will then play out a scene in which their own characters argue and even fight to determine the final fate of their unit.

The idea here is for the game to begin with a moment of mutiny, which could potentially cloud the honor of the Pack’s founding. Some of them will want to fight, others will want to run, and the scene plays out until this conflict is resolved. Resolving the decision will end the scene, and move the game into actual character creation.

The scene is intended to be a deadly one. Elements will be involved that will put the characters’ lives as risk. Perhaps they will fight each other, perhaps they will be ambushed as they argue. Perhaps the players come to a quick unanimous decision, so we play it out a little further through the actual charge or retreat. Either way, there is a very strong chance for one or more characters to die, and this is intentional. The players should see the mechanics first-hand before the game begins, and they should be introduced to the deadliness of rash action from the onset of the game.

An idea here is to have there be multiple options for the nature of the First Founding conflict. I like the idea of mutiny and honor being at the core of it, but the Final Charge could be one of a handful of possibilities available. Others:

• Your lord general has decided to betray his own lord ruler, and has commanded all his troops to follow him and support the enemy. The time has come for the battle tide to change. Do you follow your lord general, or do you continue to fight for the original lord ruler?
• Your commander has sent your unit off on a mission that you all recognize as being a suicide run. Some among you believe that this is an unnecessary waste of your unit’s skills. The time has come to decide.

Again, the intention is to have the players take sides and resolve the situation, which will then be established as the event that sets the tone for the group’s first founding. After the resolution, the group will then go into actual character creation. Those who survive can stay on as pack elders, having made it through the war and stuck together to found their own Pack. Character attributes can be shifted and adapted to represent the passing of time, and other players can make new characters who have joined in the time that has passed since this event.