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Wednesday, November 21

Hunted Magician OpenQuest Character Concept


I must admit to my "house rules" concerning the casting of magic in the design of my OpenQuest Fantasy campaigns.

The core rules require a successful roll against your magic skill for your spell to be cast and take effect. If you fail your skill roll the spell does not take effect and you suffer a single magic point loss.

With an unmodified 33%-36% average starting Battle Magic skill level many character creation points need to to be invested to give any starting spells a decent chance of success.

A character who pursues Sorcery at character creation can expect to see up to +40 free character creation points in which to bump up their starting skill roll added in, but you are still looking at a steep price to pay for a reasonable chance of your spell casting to take effect.

In my campaigns I prefer a known spell to be automatically successful (excepting fumbles on 99,00) while a "successful" skill roll will cut the magic point cost of the spell in half. Therefore a magnitude 4 spell costs 4 magic points to cast, but if you roll a successful skill roll this cost is only 2. Fumbles can cause up to double the magic point cost and the possibility of other damaging effects. To give sorcery a more grim and darker aspect spell casters may sacrifice a living being during spell preparation to avoid any deadly effects from the result of a fumble roll.

This should create a magic system where methods of using magic points other than your characters own would be sought with hideous desire. Spells which took advantage of the spilt blood of sacrifice as well as protect the caster greater sought still.

Xagyg's Guide to Celestial Protraction is the name of the curious tome our Hunted Magician has had for many years. He has discovered at least two spells of sorcery buried in its complicated formula as well as the mastery of potions which cloud the judgement of the mind. It is his most prized possession and his shop is known for quality love elixirs and mind altering brews.

I sink the six magic points given at character creation into both Battle Magic and Sorcery. Battle Magic is a school of magic open to all characters at creation and I choose "Create Potion" and "Enhance Skill Influence" at two points each. The remaining two points are spent in the school of magic known as "Sorcery". These spells are completely made up and one is offensive and the other is defensive. Flame of Obru and Skin of Plazar are crafted to allow the spell caster to travel with some protection through other worldly planes. In the fantasy realm which our character finds himself these two spells create a devastating blast or a skin tight layer of physical protection.

The plot hooks which can be devised from arcane formula and obscure text should be endless for the enterprising GM. The need to protect a fragile vessel such as a parchment bound book should provide he charcter with endless motivation.

But why is this magician hunted? OpenQuest encourages you to begin character creation with a character concept. For the Hunted Magician I rolled on a table from Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque for some type of afflication. This ended up with a gambling addiction which has racked up an impressive debt in one of the lowest gaming houses of the starting sandbox city. The PC's debt is so far past due that there is no chance of squaring it except through the most magnificent sums. The criminals who the PC owes the debt have contracted assassins to kill you as an example to others. If your secret was exposed your small, successful alchemy business in the city would be ruined.


I have house ruled OpenQuest character creation some and the method is described in this post.

Sunday, November 18

Retired Gladiator, a Character Concept for OpenQuest







The OpenQuest rule set makes for robust fighter character types especially with the application of Battle Magic to increase the players lethality in combat.

My post Magic for Non Magic Users discusses ways to apply the Battle Magic points available at character creation to customize the PC you want with the expenditure of six magic points of magnitude.

For this robust mountain of muscle I decide the Battle Magic points are to be spent towards "Gladiator School", and choose the magic spells Coordination and Enhance Skill Close Combat. Both at magnitude 3.

This will give our combatant a spurt of deadly energy in which to tap when the need arises. Since I house rule automatic spell casting success and magic point reduction for successful skill roles, successful skill roles have the benefit of allowing the Retired Gladiator to continue his murderous show far longer.

This is another reason why I've house ruled for automatic casting success. A fighting character should be able to rely on his ready sword arm at a moments notice, even if after a few combat rounds it leaves the PC exhausted and weary.

To complete our character concept a character background story is suggested, so here is ours:

Young, he was a slave since birth. Knowing little outside of the hell holes he grew up in and the gladiator school he defended his life in he has survived as an accomplished killer and showman. By earning the respect of the crowd and winning the grand tournament of gladiators he won the money to pay for his freedom.

By dumping generous points into Athletics, Dodge, Streetwise, Close Combat, and Unarmed Combat we have a one man wrecking machine.

By sticking him in the Foul Sand looking for something to do with his new found freedom and his new found small fortune in silver coins he should be a wanted member of any new forming adventure party.

Saturday, November 10

OpenQuest Character Creation; Cashiered Ranger

Further utilizing the material found on the blog Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque I will create the next ill fated player character for OpenQuest Fantasy Adventure Campaign #2.

This character of country birth worked as a scout in the army, but has been recently let go. Missing a cleverly set ambush while out on patrol many soldiers died. Only your savage fight for survival against grim odds spared your court martial. Back here in the city far from any one you know you are beginning to desire the safety of the wilderness.

OpenQuest Fantasy Adventure Campaign #2 is predicated on a dark fantasy setting with players urged to use human characters. This character is designed with the ability to function well in the wilderness surrounding the campaign's starting point.

Significant points are invested in the Combat Skills as well as Perception and Riding. As a ranger you carry very few personal possessions. What you have is usually tied in the bedroll at your feet. What few points you have in craft are intended for the repair of your outdoor gear and weapons.

Taking advantage of OpenQuest's suggested rules for Background, Appearance and Personality I give this poor mercenary an intriguing map with unknown inscriptions. Maybe one of his more learned friends could aid you in deciphering it?

All starting OpenQuest player characters receive six points worth of Magic Magnitude. These six points allow you to further customize and design the PC you have in mind.

For the ranger I keep it simple; a small package of abilities I will name "Ranger Lore", abilities he picked up growing up in the untamed northern forests. Clear Path (4 magnitude) is the ability to move through dense undergrowth as if it was clear terrain. The points of magnitude of the spell determines how many people the ranger can effect within 10 meters. A Heal (2 magnitude) spell will be extremely useful when it comes to weathering the extremes of wilderness adventuring.

While I have incorporated OpenQuest's magic requirements into the character creation process, you can see how I have not necessarily given the ranger an overtly wizardly nature. While the initial expenditure of magic points may seem an awkward mechanic for innate class like skills, consider the adventure implications of devices, quests, etc. which would enable the player to acquire magic point stores or otherwise overcome the built in limitations.


Wednesday, October 31

USRPS/Champions Superhero Mash Up Conclusion

As I mentioned in the initial post regarding using USR to role play a supers campaign, I am going to use the Champions books Sharper Than a Serpent's Tooth and Millennium City to create the starting campaign setting. Armed with some highlighters I skimmed STST looking for the adventure's important points.

Dr. Timothy Blank, the Viper scientist, was pretty necessary as his diabolical plans drive the plot. His desire to unleash a virus in a major metropolitan city after leaving the Viper Nest in the deserts of New Mexico helps establish Millennium City as our convenient home base for PC's.

The initial ghost town amusement park as cover for the Viper Nest hidden in the desert did not appeal to me. The thought of having the deranged mad scientist completely absent from the Nest in the opening acts seemed too much of a plot weakness for me as well. So I jettisoned both. However the PC's are "hooked" into being in the vicinity of Snake Gulch it will be at the same time Dr. Blank is making his explosive escape from the Nest with his breakthrough discovery: the Coil Gene. There is plenty of good info on the tension between the Nest Leader and Dr. Blank for a GM to fashion dramatic scenes of double crossing agents, compromised villains, and buffaloed heroes.

The aftermath of the first scenario can have PC heroes following leads back to Millennium City or returning to the city to lick their wounds.

With my initial PC's I created and their intertwined back story's it was a cinch to establish a time traveling accident in the desert, a Viper Nest confrontation, and return to the city in search of answers and aid.

Millennium City provides plenty of locations to play out the next chapters in the adventure as well as supporting NPC's fair and foul. Dr. Silverback is an obvious choice and Signal Ghost provides a good inside Viper agent who would be able to find common cause with the heroes at the height of the plague.

So what about all those PD's and ED's and Combat Skill levels and ???d6 damage dice used to resolve action in Hero Game System?

Just jettison them all.

Your Unbelievably Simple Role Playing System mechanics doesn't need them. Our character with the power of time travel was taken as an Action specialism. The +2 given his action rolls will suffice for his bonuses to attack and dodge. The time traveling agent would logically have some advanced armor characteristics to cushion physical and energy attacks. Any disadvantages and power limitations which would come into play will rely on the shared story created by the PC's and GM. Viper agents have blasters. Good, better avoid getting shot because blasters leave big holes in soft human flesh. If you chose to play a "Brick" type superhero with incredible physical toughness then those same blasters won't hurt so much.

My initial character choices are what I would consider enhanced normals. While some abilities are enhanced in extremely powerful ways (traveling through time in a controlled manner), they still can be harmed by normal physical means. If your genre book is a good one you can pluck all the mood and meta-genre information you need for creative guidelines for your campaign and the characters your players chose to play. Relying on my Champions genre sourcebook from my dusty shelves I find the Drama Campaign has many useful bits I would mention with my players while crafting the PC's back story's. The implications of time paradoxes, and the distortions possible with existing relations, the judgement of the Time Corps, etc...


Good character concept generated with the input of the GM and the other players at the beginning of play will allow you to use USR to game any genre effectively. For superhero role playing I just need to wring out all the essential elements of my existing sourcebooks and leave the number crunching aside.

As I mentioned earlier, I would read the Fiasco rulebook for inspiration on how to distill story lines down to their essential elements regardless of system. It will go a long way in maximizing your role playing pleasure with USRPS and other game mechanics which trend towards lite.

Tuesday, October 30

USRPS Mash Up cont.

I am using Scott Malthouse's Unbelievably Simple Role Playing System to create PC's for superhero role playing, and now wish to begin creation of the second player character, a Time "Agent" who now is stuck in the campaign's time period.

Her equipment has been damaged by unanticipated temporal interference and has effectively cut her off from returning to her space/time origin. This interference is manifest in some action by the first PC and his use of untried time traveling abilities.

A trouble shooter of cosmic conflict, our time agent has access to advanced equipment and training. Until now. Being stranded in the past she has lost the ability to replace damaged or lost equipment. A highly skilled human, she may have a list of "specialisms" as such;

Detective Work +2, Wit
Ranged Weapons +2, Action
Combat Driver +2, Action

I could have chosen to give her some electrical or technical specialism as fitting to a future tech setting, but then why go through the trouble of wrecking her transport equipment?

The importance of a "hooky" character role to play for the PC is important with the USRPS. The lack of a lengthy rule set (the core is a mere seven pages of text) will require increased table talk for all involved. Players as well as GM's.

If someone wants to play the stranded time agent, the background story should give enough information of their nature to help players chose a character they would enjoy playing in the campaign setting. If players wish to create their own PC, the pre generated characters provide good examples of great archetypes to play.

Her specialisms make her a clear action oriented  superhero. With the powerful tools available from the unimaginable future she can more than take care of herself. I break her attributes down this way;

d8 Action
d10 Wit
d6 Ego
Rolled 9 for Hits

That's it for the bones of the character. The rest is to be fleshed out in descriptive terms with the GM. Good character concept questions worth discussing would be what type of equipment does she find herself with, why was she being sent back in time for to begin with, what was the nature the temporal disturbance and its relationship to our first character?

None of these character concept questions need a lot of detail. I like to look to Fiasco from Bully Pulpit Games and the game's set up rules for guidance. Their thoughts on how a good background story for a player character is done is essential reading for a game like USRPS.

Gone are the piles of stats, attributes, powers, endurance points, stun points, speed points... a Champions character creation process could take two hours, or more!

Next we will take a look at these two quick superheroes and how they interact with the Champions Universe and plot an adventure with some of Champions own sourcebooks.

Sunday, October 28

A USRPS/Champions Superhero Mash Up



USR by Scott Malthouse looks to have drawn sizable buzz in the geek community and I threw the system at my Champions adventure books to see what became of the mash up.

The superhero genre was one I first embraced with gusto after the D&D glowing fan boy attraction began to dim under the games disappointing role play mechanics. 

I was choosing between Villains &Vigilantes from Fantasy Games Unlimited and Champions from Hero Games. I ordered a back issue of some gaming magazine which gave a review of the different systems. It could have been in Dragon Magazine, I don’t know. 

While I was attracted to the wide open system of character generation, Champions turned out to be a cruel joke in state of the art game design. Math and dice heavy, the game rules were another product which helped hide the potential inherent in role playing games behind a voluminous rule set. It was another case of players not being placed front and center of the story. At least for me. Maybe others had better success with complicated rules when they were thirteen, but for me dense rules hindered more than helped. Not that I would have been aware of this back then. Besides, Champions was the only thing on the shelf at Toy City in Fort Eddy Plaza when I managed to gather enough bread for purchase. 

So maybe “Unbelievably Simple Role-Playing” would be the trick to tame the hundreds of dollars of Hero products which once dotted my dusty bookshelves. I am down to a few items left so I pulled out the campaign sourcebook “Millennium City” and the adventure sourcebook “Sharper Than A Serpent’s Tooth”.

 With only seven pages of text USR puts all the creative elements in the players and GM’s hands.

Your starting character is created with three attributes and three “specialisms”.

Assigning your attributes is simple. 

Really think about your specialisms though. Besides adding a +2 for your attribute skill rolls, which is how you resolve everything, it is the three defining elements of your character. 

The premise of the system is these three freely chosen game elements, these specialisms, give you all you need to flesh out your characters strengths, powers, and abilities. Let us see how such premise holds up against a wild card character as a player character superhero. 

The two initial characters I came up with are;

a gifted scientist from Millennium City who has discovered the ability to time travel, and

a time travel agent from the far off future.  

A superhero is nothing if not the story behind his origin. Spiderman was created through the bite of a radioactive spider, Batman from the terror of violence, and Superman by the color of Earth’s sun. Our intrepid scientist has created a machine which he believes will allow movement back and forth through time. On his first experiment he succeeds, but with some ramifications. He is not sure where he has been and he is not sure what happened to him on the trip. All he is sure of is the journey has fried his experimental equipment and by the mere thought of a past event he finds himself at that place in time. Travel back to his last recalled present moment is possible as well, but conceiving himself in any future which has not occurred yet does not result in a time “jump”.

I wrap this unique ability around the specialism “Enhanced Movement, Time Travel +2 Action”. In the spirit of an Unbelievable Simple Role-Playing I am capturing the entirety of this character’s time travel superhero ability in this one specialism. The fact that it gives a +2 to his Action attribute roll will aid in many tasks including combat.

The next specialism is easy to conceive, “Theoretical Physics +2 Wit” is a nice tag for a comprehensive knowledge of the latest scientific thought.

A third specialism is causing me some consternation, but I finally settle on “Persuasion +2 Ego” to simulate the characters ability to convince others of the soundness of his science, to secure research grants to fund his experiments, and his expertise in navigating the competitive world of scientific research found at most prestigious schools of learning.

So the three attributes are simply selected per the rules and now I have three abilities (a power and two skills), this character has started to take shape. All that is now required, and insisted on by the rules set, is a background story.

While I let this new superhero's back story percolate I'll move on to the "Time Agent" character concept...

OpenQuest Character Creation; Searching Sailor

My OpenQuest Fantasy Adventure #2 is a dark fantasy setting. Unlike Adventure #1 which has all the trappings of "classical" fantasy, #2 requires the players to create human characters in a world where life is cheap and integrity is a liability. Much in the spirit of the great gaming blog Tales of the Grotesque and the Dungeonesque or the horrible fantasy books The Game of Thrones, everyone is out for themselves.

I find these type of settings where the world is a swirl of grey instead of black and white suite good character development. In fact, rely on it. Since everyone is a turd what sort of polish can you bring?

OpenQuest is great for allowing a player to create a character quickly with much depth of character.

I also am not above providing pre-generated characters for a new group to chose from. Since I am still attempting to accomplish the blog's main goal of regularly playing role playing games with other people in the wilderness, immediate gaming with minimal prep is essential.

I also aim to give the players opportunities to organically foster group relations with "believable" hooks, themes, and plots. A well appointed list of character backgrounds with just enough detail to make the character interesting to play, fight and die can only help deliver a dynamic player group from the outset! This means you will want to offer your players many different character choices. Pick a system which allows you to generate characters quickly!

Starting the campaign in a city offers legitimate reasons for characters of diverse races and backgrounds to be found together, and with intriguing character descriptions it makes it even easier to start table dialogue.

One such character I can offer as an example is The Searching Sailor. Here are the background notes which were the springboard for quantifying the character's abilities;

Washed up on the shores as a child, superstitious peasants took you in as a gift from the sea gods. Much to their disappointment you only found happiness on the tips of the waves and the edge of the wind. Soon you left your poor village behind without a second glance and became a daring sailor on the open sea. Your quest to find your true origins has led to family secrets steeped in darkness. Do you pursue these tantalizing clues further? Or do leave them, like the miserable village of your childhood, in the misty fog of past days?

Any player with salt will have no trouble fashioning your traditional sailor skill set; navigation, swimming, cutlass and some other skills of personal preference will get the usual character creation work completed. Where OpenQuest aids in satisfying depth of character, your character concept, is the addition of the Battle Magic school of magic required to complete the character creation process.

My thoughts on Magic in OpenQuest for Non Magic Users comes into play here. For this sailor character I create an Enchanted Item and devise an Elemental Talent to spend the required magic points on.

I call the enchanted item the Brace of Burk, a leather embossed wrist guard. It can predict approaching storms two days out and detect land up to twenty miles away. Yes, I know the OpenQuest does not include these specific effects in any of the listed spells, but if you get anything from the OpenQuest it should be you can make it up. So, predicting weather and detecting land seem to be mundane powers in which Battle Magic would seem to thrive.

The elemental talent is restricted to the realm of Battle Magic if nothing else but to avoid taking on another school of magic such as Divine Magic or Sorcery. The character's latent elemental talent was first awakened when the brace was first donned as a piece of armor. So far it has given the Searching Sailor the ability to communicate with Air Elementals.