Minireview: Compass of Celestial Directions Vol. III: Yu-Shan

Yu-Shan is the third book in Exalted’s “Compass of Celestial Directions” supplement line, detailing various “extraplanar” locales (using the word “locale” very loosely) for the game. The first book detailed the Blessed Isle – and as such was a somewhat weird start, since the Blessed Isle is a very concrete location in Creation. Maybe it was a reference to the fact that it’s the center, in both the physical and metaphysical sense, dunno. The second book detailed the Wyld (where the Fair Folk exist), and now we have Yu-Shan, the city of the gods.

That’s one of the many things to love in Exalted: where many fantasy games have gods, and the concept of a “heaven” (or “plane”) where they live, those locales are usually left abstract and undetailed; usually for the reason that gods are so far above “mere mortals” that such detail is unnecessary. However, since even beginning Exalted characters have the ability to kick (minor) god ass or at least talk to it as an equal, the game needs to be much more specific with regards to gods and their abode. So… Yu-Shan, the magnificent city where the Celestial gods live.

As an Exalted GM, I love this book. It brings tons of detail to what up to now has been a fairly loosely detailed location, and contains tons of plot hooks all over the place. You’re really forced to to face the fact that it’s a city… not an abstract one, but a very concrete and vast one, with many of the problems you would expect to find in a huge city. Crime, unemployment, traffic problems, you name it (yes, unemployed gods exist in droves, and provide plot hooks galore). We get detail on the (deadly) constant bureaucratic infighting, the personalities involved, and the historical reasons of how things have gotten to the messy state they are in. We also get a lot of background on the limits the Sidereals have to operate under, and of the multitude of still-extant legal loopholes and rights available for Solars; should they ever find out about those rights, things could get very interesting fast. One of the oft-encountered setting questions in Exalted has always been “why don’t the Sidereals just kill all the Solars, they seem to have the power for it?”. Well, we’ve already gotten a lot of the reasons “why not” in previous books, but here we get even more. The Sidereals are constrained (screwed, even) in a multitude of ways, and in ways that make sense given the history of things.

So, lots to love here if you’re running an Exalted game. While a Sidereal campaign set in Yu-Shan would obviously get the most mileage out of this, I can see it being very useful in a more “generic” game, too. Solars will encounter gods now and then, and may find their way to Yu-Shan too… and then there’s always the Carnival of Meeting, which you can use to introduce Heavenly politics into pretty much any type of game. […]

Minireview: Scroll of Kings

Scroll of Kings is one of the batch of new Exalted books that arrived recently – due to various delays at White Wolf’s end lots of books got pushed forward in time until now, so now we get a pile of new books in one fell swoop. Fine by me.

This book is about warfare in Creation (Exalted’s game world), and goes to detail about how the various cultures think about warfare and extend that thinking into practice. I wasn’t expecting too much from this book, afraid that if would mostly just consist of army lists and dry “crunch” like that. I was happy to be proved wrong; this book is more of a “military gazeteer” of Creation, and goes into detail of how the various war gods think of war, how this affects mortal nations, and how the environment also affects thinking and practical matters.

The book is divided into sections by geographical direction. We get information about the varied forms of warfare in the East, the fast-moving skirmish mentality of the South, the naval paradigms of the West, the commando raid mentality of the North, and the traditional massive army paradigm of the Realm. While the organization mostly works nicely, it has the downside of spreading the rules crunch over the whole book in a semi-random fashion. Said crunch has to do with extensions to the mass combat rules in Exalted, which I have yet to use in practice. Didn’t bother me, but more crunch-oriented readers may find this type of organization very frustrating, especially combined with White Wolf’s traditional total lack of index and bare-bones table of contents. There is literally no way of searching for anything, other than by leafing through the thing.

Despite small organizatorial niggles, I liked the book quite a bit. While it could not focus on any area for very many pages (Creation is huge), it did add lots of useful information and nice local color all over the place. The writeup on the Linowan managed to not conflict with stuff I had created for that area, amazingly enough (though that’s mostly because the Linowan chapter was very short). Each described location/nation gets one or two sample statted mass combat units, which is probably very useful if you intend to use the mass combat rules – examples always help.

The end of the book lists some new large-scale weapons (steam cannons, yay!), stats for various vehicles, ships and flying thingies, and ends with a list of (mundane) traps that soldiers might create or encounter, with some required skills for creation and other details. Nice. […]

The (cold) land down under

I’ve been reading some Antarctica-related stuff lately, centering around Chaosium’s massive Beyond the Mountains of Madness campaign book. I’m about halfway through at the moment, and… wow, it’s quite something. Insane amount of detail, and very inspired expansion on the original short stories “At the Mountains of Madness” (Lovecraft) and “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket” (Poe). I’m still not sure I’ll be up to running this at any point – it would take a lot of time, and a group of players willing to put up with lots of 1930’s period detail and a fairly slow, deliberate pace; not all that much pulp-style heroics here. It’s something I’ll have to think about some more.

In any case, the sheer amount of background detail in the campaign book is mind-boggling, the appendixes themselves take up about 150 pages. It’s also very well written, and shows a deep love for the subject material. As an adventure, it also feels like it should play well – there are some bits I would tweak and some railroady bits, but on the whole it has a nice flow to it, with lots of plot twists. It’s no wonder that this thing is often nominated when talking about the all-time best roleplaying campaigns; it’s right up there with Warhammer’s “The Enemy Within” and other classics of the genre (with the caveat that I haven’t actually read Enemy Within yet, I’m just told that it’s really really good).

In order to get even more background detail, I’m also reading The Lost Men, the real-life story of Shackleton’s ill-fated Ross Sea supply expedition of 1914-1916. Fascinating stuff, and in parts unbelievable; it seems a miracle, and testament to pure human spirit, that there were any survivors considering all the poor planning and supplies. The whole “we don’t need to prepare, we’re British gentlemen!” thing seems quite alien to my modern mindset, especially since I’ve done a bit of traveling in difficult conditions myself. The thought of going into a virtually unknown, utterly deadly locale with piss-poor planning and sad lack of proper supplies seems suicidal. And was, apparently.

Another sort-of game prep book I’m thinking of getting is Mountains of Madness: A Scientist’s Odyssey in Antarctica, an account of a modern-day paleontologist’s journey to the real-world site of Lovecraft’s story. Might be interesting.

It would be nice to visit Antarctica one day. So many other interesting spots to see also, of course, so hard to say if I’ll ever get around to it – but I’ve always had a fascination for the more barren and hostile areas of the world.

In other news… we had another Exalted session, a bit dungeon-crawly but that was by intention, and was fun for a change of pace and as a chance to get more to grips with the combat system. We still didn’t get it quite right, I forgot about minimum “ping” damage and about natural soak values. Duh. Oh well, next time…

This weekend had me in Turku again, at yet another knife technique seminar. This time time around we spent the weekend practicing the care and feeding of the bali-song (butterfly knife). Apparently the damn things feed on blood, judging by the amount of nicks and cuts we accumulated – at one point we joked that we should have a “sponsored by Hansaplast!” sticker somewhere. Had fun, though. As a weapon the butterfly knife is not that hot; it’s sadly lacking in speed and ease of use compared to modern folding knives, and offers no real benefits of any kind technically. Sure, you can use some of the opening techniques as secondary attacks, but that’s pretty borderline. On the other hand, in more primitive times it was a folding knife that you could (with practice) open with one hand, something that’s quite a feat without modern-day mechanical production skills and tolerances. In the modern day, its main point is “it looks really cool”, and it acts as a fun stress toy and finger nimbleness exercise. One that needs focus to play with, of course, unless you actually like the sight of your own blood.

Considering that I had never played with one before, I’m pretty happy with getting some (very basic) proficiency in ten or so of the basic opening styles over the weekend, and with only getting one cut that required bandages during the process. […]

Raiders of the lost leech god

Had another fun session of running Exalted last Sunday, I was a bit worried pregame whether I had prepped enough stuff but it turned out I needn’t have worried – as so often happens, many things took more time than anticipated. Don’t get me wrong, this is a good thing, and I like winging extra stuff on top of what I had planned. At the moment I’m using bits and pieces of various pregen material, and maybe half pure self-generated material. It’s slowly coming together, and the characters are getting more fleshed out and acquiring personalities. Mika’s ‘Khamyn’ makes an excellent leader and focus point for things, especially since he doesn’t hog the spotlight and everyone gets to do stuff. In the beginning (during chargen) I was a bit worried about Janne’s Dragonblood getting overshadowed by the Solars, but at least up to now if anything it’s been the other way round. The Water Aspect abilities plus Immaculate training have proven to be very helpful.

We’ll see how it goes, the party is heading up north, one sidetrack at a time. They are now the proud owners of the recently “liberated” good ship ‘Cottonmouth’, and have full intention of kicking some leech god ass next, for daring to kidnap their cultists. Don’t steal cultists, kids, the owners may come knocking.

Gamemastering Exalted is very much like herding cats. Big, glowing cats with superhuman speed, strength and ninja powers, of course. Plotting can be tricky, since the characters are able to twist even the most sturdy stretch of railroad into a prezel. Which is not a bad thing, as such, not at all.

There’s a “happened so far” available, but it’s not updated with the latest session yet.

Here’s a pic from Janne, depicting his recently-completed set of minis for the characters. From the left: Khamyn (fearless leader and god-king in training), Arashi (Lookshy ninja-sorcerer), Wanderer (ex-Immaculate Monk), White Noise (ex-Realm bureaucrat and aspiring capitalist) and Damien (the best swordsman in the world, in training).

[…]

It's a tough job being a god

Just finished the latest session of my Exalted game (working title “Cold Dawn”), I had a lot of fun running it. It’s been a while since the last session, and in any case we haven’t had time to play all that much; the initial plan was for one game a month but with summer intervening, it’s been even less. In addition, since I’m trying to run this in a pretty freeform fashion, I (again) had a hell of a time deciding what to prep and what to wing on the fly.

Anyway, things went fine and once again partly according to what I had envisioned, partly nothing like. Exalted is tricky, it’s one hell of a complex world, and bringing the interesting parts of the game world to focus without falling back on needless exposition is a bit of a tightrope walk. I like the game a lot, especially the world (Creation)… but it’s very, very complicated. That’s one reason why I like it, of course, I’m a sucker for complex (but internally coherent) settings.

I’m running this game with a slowish start, on purpose. The power level has been pretty low so far, but will probably escalate as the characters start discovering what they can do, and what they need to do in order to survive. Things are on the move, only a small part of them visible to the characters (or players, so far).

In any case, our band of stalwart (or not) heroes are slowly wending their way up North, sailing up the River of Tears towards Sijan as a waypoint to Rubylak and territories even more unknown. Today’s session involved friendly but clueless cultists, friendly merchant-sorcerers from Lookshy, neutral river gods, reputedly dark-dwelling bloodsuckers who are presumed hostile, and the proper use of air elementals.

I’m not sure one of the players knew what he was getting into when he chose the Cult background… […]

Friday, yay!

Been feeling a bit under the weather, maybe some shade of a flu coming on. Nothing serious. just feeling more tired than normal.

I think I’ll try to get at least some part of the BM pictures done this weekend, and there’s also some prep for the next Exalted game to be done. Still not sure when we’ll manage to play, people have been having some calendar problems (what else is new :), but anyway. Should also take a look at the new car and see if I could fix the glove compartment latch thing and a couple of other things. Depends a bit on the weather, too, if it’s dark and/or rainy, I’m not twiddling with the car or anything else outside, if I can help it.

Found someone (actually, a couple of someones) who are interested in the old car, which is nice. That should sort itself out within the week.

I suspect the hood mechanism repair on the new Cabriolet will require a shop that knows Peugeot tech, so that means either the main importer (Automaa) or a Peugeot-specialist shop. Found one of those, Autochic Oy in Lauttasaari, but it gave the impression of being very expensive and a quite Google resulted in some forum comments about it being in the same price range as official repair shops, so…

If anyone knows of a good shop that does Peugeot repairs in the Helsinki/Espoo area, please let me know. Some of the stuff I can do “wherever”, of course, but it’s good to have options.

I’ll probably wait till next month to schedule shop time, my salary just came and went via my account, the last big part of our USA/BM trip (car rentals, etc) took care of emptying my cash register. Will have to be semi-poor for a while here.

I’ve lately been thinking of running some other game(s) “on the side”, besides the Exalted game. Maybe with a (partly) different set of players, to help with the calendar problems. Dunno what, though, the problem is too many great games. The are a couple of game systems I’m interested in trying out in practice – Burning Wheel and Reign – so maybe something fantasy-oriented using those (since both are fantasy rulesets). One option I’ve been toying with is a short game set in Freeport, using Burning Wheel rules. Pirates, evil cults, swords, mayhem… all that good stuff. Might be fun. […]

Fear and loathing in Russia, with demons

Well, despite a semi-hectic real life schedule leading me to not get as much prep work done as I would have liked, I’ve managed to run a few non-horrible rpg sessions. After a long while of not running anything, it’s slowly coming back. I guess GM:ing is sort of riding a bike – you can get better at it over time, but once learned you never really forget the skill. Also like the bike, now and then you crash and fall in a spectacular fashion no matter how good you are…

Anyway, last Tuesday we had the first proper session of an Exalted game. The story starts in Nexus, and I had a bunch of plot threads semi-ready and went with what the players decided to do. Mostly things went in expected directions, but there were quite a few surprises to keep me on my toes. Apparently things seemed to progress in a logical fashion, which is nice, considering that behind the scenes I was desperately trying to integrate multiple fast-mutating plot threads together. We’ll see how this goes; at the moment the characters have recovered a few (apparently minor) artifacts and are trying to figure out the meaning of a symbol which gives some of them foreboding flashbacks from the past. Things are made interesting by the fact that the party isn’t exactly in agreement about how best to proceed… White Noise’s stealthy and paranoid approach to things is not quite in synch with Khamyn’s “go forth my followers and fetch me information!” deal. Oh, and they have a First Circle demon in their basement, happily building a nest from various spiky bits. Will the Dragon-Bloods come gunning after the party looking for stolen loot? Will the Wanderer decide to go “fuck this” and revert back to the Immaculate faith? Will Damien the Black Sword decide to pay the brothel another visit (“to gather some more info!”)? Stay tuned.

On Sunday I ran the one-shot scenario Machine Tractor Station Kharkov-37 to a bunch of people, with good results. As expected, the scenario worked very well and the pregen characters had just the right amount of built-in friction and mutual paranoia to keep things from being too easy. Most of the game went in a straightforward fashion, with creepy stuff getting discovered bit by bit and the characters going into “oh shit, let’s leave now” mode (smart of them). Things took a sudden and Paranoia-style turn at the end, when the TASS leader decided that the Commissar knew too much and tried to discreetly execute him. The keen-sensed Commissar threw a spanner into the works, however, by partially dodging the bullet (literally) and running for the trucks, trailing blood and shouting “help, he’s gone mad!”. At the same time, the TASS leader was shouting something to the tune of “stop, traitor!” and confusion reigned supreme. Things wound up with the Red Army medic blowing the TASS thug’s head off with a rifle and with the Red Army group doing a “tactical retreat” from the spot. All in all, a grim but fun DeltaGreen-meets-Paranoia game session. I also used the game as an excuse to test Stolze and Detwiller’s Nemesis game system instead of using BRP, and it worked pretty well. Needs some tweaking, the stock skill list isn’t that hot and this one is probably much better – but overall is seems like a solid engine for low-power horror games. Seeing as the same engine is used in the superhero game Wild Talents, it apparently also works for high-power stuff. Oh, and Stolze is working on Reign, which uses the same “ORE” system to drive some sort of political fantasy game. It’s pretty versatile, though of course needs tweaks depending on what sort of game you want to run.

In any case, I think this became my system of choice for Cthulhu-type games, it works and is lightweight enough. The next time I use it I’ll probably give the alternate combat rules a try, they sound like they might work (even) better than the default ones – which aren’t bad by any means.

On Thursday we’ll be doing Exalted again. I’ll have to find some time today to prepare a bit, since tomorrow night I’ll probably be playing VTES at Valter Cafe – Andrea of EC2006 organizing fame is coming to Finland (from Italy) and we’ve promised him gaming company. […]

Sword of Caine and other stuff

Just to remind people: the Sword of Caine prerelease is approaching fast, be there this Saturday (17.3.) at 10am or miss out. An entry fee of 20e gets you 12 boosters (6 x SoC, 6 x 3rd ed), the tournament deck will be build (only) from these cards. Three rounds, no finals. More info on the VTES page.

Should be a fun event, the new cards look pretty cool. More power for the Black Hand… what’s not to like? There are also a couple of cards in there with interesting mechanics, they let you ambush vampires who hunt without it being an action, and do damage to vampires who have previously cast a lot of votes. Hunting with massive stealth is no longer all that safe (or even a way to cycle stealth), and the old Awe + Voter Cap combo just got a small bit riskier. We’ll see if these have any effect on the metagame.

Lots of stuff happening around here. Yesterday I spent 6 hours doing rapier, and then joined the others to check out a house that’s on sale (yes, we’re shopping for a house). Didn’t like the house, but did leave an offer for another one that we did like, now we’re waiting to see how the seller reacts. A bit scary, but fun. No details here yet, sorry, I’ll post links if and only if the deal finalizes :).

In other news, a bunch of games coming up. Tomorrow we’re (finally) playing a bit of Exalted, then on Sunday I’m running the Machine Tractor Station Kharkov-37 scenario for a bunch of friends (cabbage soup and vodka optional), and next week’s Thursday is again allocated for Exalted.

Oh, and I have a new computer – or to be more precise, a new combination of new and old parts. Working very well except for some memory issues, I’m getting some faster memory today which should fix things. More on this later, when everything is running smoothly (one hopes). […]

The high cost of living

Hmph, my decision to minimize spending so I could zero my Visa debt at some point is off to a rocky start. First in the line of “give me money!” events is my dentist – a recent chipped tooth prompted me to finally go to a checkup after lots of procrastination. Result: two new fillings and some cleanup work, and a hefty dental bill. It’s a private clinic, very nice but costly even though Kela does pay a part of that bill back later.

By the way, starting the day with a visit to the dentist isn’t that bad. Usually, the rest of the day seems quite rosy in comparison.

Next up in the cash sink department is my (home) computer. It’s been getting steadily worse, and all signs point to a motherboard error; “something somewhere has broken down”. Now, it’s an old mobo and processor and has been my performance bottleneck for quite a while now. On the other hand, I had hoped to limp along with it for a while yet, that’s why I recently upgraded my graphics card to a modern card with an AGP connector… and now a card with a PCI-e connector would be much easier to fit in. Oh well.

I looked over my options, and with some help from Jari found a set of components that should upgrade my computer to something relatively modern: a nice backward-compatible ASRock microATX mobo, E6400 Core 2 Duo processor, Antec HTPC microATX case, Zalman cpu fan, Seagate 320g SATA drive, and some cabling and replacement 120mm fans for the case. The cost wasn’t bad, 540e for the whole pile, and the result should be a nice, fast computer with a small(ish) form factor and low heat. The new mobo can use my (old) DDR400 memory, so no need to upgrade those. Being able to throw away the broken old mobo, Atlon XP and crappy ATA drives will be nice. Well, maybe not literally “throw away” except for the mobo, but still.

Like the dentist thing, this isn’t really an optional purchase, having a working computer at home is pretty much a must for me and this was the close to the cheapest compromise I could think of. Sure, I could have shaved some more euros here and there, but it didn’t seem worth it. On the plus side, maybe now my graphics card can perform like it’s supposed to, the old processor was a big bottleneck for a lot of stuff. We’ll see. right now the critical thing is getting a computer that works and is stable. Performance is just a nice extra.

I’ll have to struggle along with the old computer for at least a week, still, some of the components will take Verkkokauppa a bit of time to get.

… and of course, just when I decided to cut down on purchases, Amazon and Chaosium both decided to deliver piles of books I had ordered quite some time ago and almost forgotten about. Oh well, they are already paid for, can’t complain. More stuff on the (rpg) reading pile:

• Machine Tractor Station Kharkov-37: a Chaosium monograph detailing a Cthulhu scenario set in Stalin’s USSR. Read this over the weekend and liked it, seems like a fun (and grim) oneshot scenario to run for a bunch of comrades. Vodka optional.

• End Time: another monograph, this one about a future where the stars have become (almost) “right” and the Old Ones have done their thing. The last remnants of humanity huddle on Mars, and things are generally not going well. This isn’t a “ready” product, it’s a snapshot of the things that got written for a discontinued Pagan book. Some interesting ideas here, though it’s a jumble and typoes and other mistakes abound. Could be used as the framework for a “Cthulhu on Mars” game.

• The Complete Masks of Nyarlathotep: a hardcover reprint of the old classic campaign. Haven’t read this yet, but it’s supposed to be pretty good. Too bad I missed out on the reprint of Beyond the Mountains of Madness, there’s supposed to be another reprint on the way but we’ll see…

• Compass of Celestial Directions I: The Blessed Isle: the only 2nd ed Exalted sourcebook I was missing. So far, all the 2nd ed books have been really good. Overall, the are much better organized and written more clearly than the 1st ed books. The first edition does win out on flavor, sometimes, so I’ve also read most of those just for the “fluff”, even the ones that have been superceded by the new books. Read Aspect Book: Fire over the weekend and it proved to be yet another good read. Some people hate the caste/aspect books because they are “only” tales told from the perspective of 5 different characters, with minimal “crunch”. I like them for precisely that reason, I find they make the world come alive much better than pages of dry explanation text. Then again, I’m one of those people who actually enjoys gaming fiction, so take this with a grain of salt (or two). YMMV.

• Pandora’s Book and Strange Alchemies: the two continuation books for Promethean. The core book made such a positive impression on me that I want to read more. Interesting game, if quite strange in several ways.

So… maybe now I get back to “spend less money”. One can always hope. […]