Character Sheets

 I used to make a lot of characters. I mean, a lot.

As I've said, I started in the Marvel Super Heroes RPG and I had a book called The Ultimate Powers Book, and it had (as did the core books), a random character generator in it. With that and some dice, you could generate a sometimes absolutely random nutzo character for the game.

So I did that. A lot.

I don't know if others had this, but I had a binder just full of characters that I made. Most of them, 99% probably, were characters that I'd never play or use in a game anywhere, but I just loved to make these characters.

I had character sheets for years - and this was back when photocopying was I want to say about $0.05 per page in black-and-white. Color stuff was unheard of until the late 1990's when color printing became cheaper and more economical.

So I wanted to generate a character tonight ...

Physical Form: Normal Human

Origin of Power: Energy Exposure

Fighting Typical

Agility Typical

Strength Typical

Endurance Feeble

Reason Good

Intuition Good

Psyche Poor

Health 20

Karma 19

Popularity Typical

Resources Feeble

Weakness Energy Allergy, leads to Incapacitation, Limited Duration After Contact

Powers 2/4: Energy Emission - Good Fire Generation from mouth and nose; Physical Enhancement - Poor Hyper Speed (Moves 3x faster than a normal person)

... and I'll stop there. As you can see, you get some absolutely random things from this, from severely underpowered to ridiculously overpowered, which led to making multiple characters in order to get something super cool amongst the chaff of the rest.

This tradition continued on to Champions and eventually into Silver Age Sentinels. I even continued to do this with other systems, not just superhero games - I did it for Werewolf: The Apocalypse, Paranoia, Feng Shui, and so many others. I even made characters for Robotech in the Palladium system, a system I abhor.

But, hey, that was Robotech.

I've been consumed lately with reading a new game - Prowlers & Paragons from Evil Beagle Games. It's a system that I'm really digging - handfuls of D6 dice and just enough structure to make it not a chaotic mess that is the Fate system (to me, anyway).

That's where I've been lately.

Oh, and I was vying for a promotion at work, but, alas, was not selected. It's okay, though, I still have a job I'm loving, and other opportunities will come along.

Thanks for being patient with me. Now I dive back into an Excel spreadsheet for building characters in Prowlers & Paragons: Ultimate Edition ...

Superpowered Notes

 I was going through my computer and discovered that I had the wherewithal to save those notes I wrote about earlier in regards to my superhero universe, Superpowered.

Here are a few pages:

That's what I started vomiting out on that night almost two decades ago.

Anyway, thought that was cool.

All This and some Kung Fu Part One

In the 1980's, the United States no doubt created the "Action Movie" genre with the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and others. The movies that came out of this era are classics - Commando, RoboCop, The Running Man, Lethal Weapon, Beverly Hills Cop are all examples of absolutely great action movies of this era. These action movies had superheroes as the main characters - guys who oozed testosterone and machismo from every pore.

These movies were great, but on the other side of the world, the last British colony (I really don't know if that's true), Hong Kong, was creating mind-blowing, groundbreaking action movies the likes of which you can thank for the advent of movies like The Matrix, John Wick, The Transporter, and more. The movies coming out of Hong Kong from 1985-1996 changed how action movies were made worldwide. Period.

Without movies like A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, Police Story, and Once Upon a Time in China, we would not have the spectacular action revolution that started in the 2000's here in the United States that changed the way action movies were made. It's thanks to people like Jackie Chan, John Woo, Chow Yun-Fat, and Jet Li that we see great things now like the MCU.

I remember first watching The Killer on VHS. We rented it from Hastings in Lawrence, and the cover was two guys holding guns in each other's faces. The tagline on the movie said: "One Vicious Hitman. One Fierce Cop. Ten Thousand Bullets." The movie was poorly dubbed in English but it was absolutely amazing. Back in the early 1990's I had never seen things like "The Killer" before. It was eye-opening.

The story was good (cliche, but good) and the execution was flawless. Slow-motion, squibs exploding, doves flying around, it was a concentrated, awesome, ballistic ballet. It led me to track down other movies, including Hard-Boiled, Wheels on Meals, and Fist of Legend. I ate this stuff up, going as far back as the 1970's "Chop-Sockies" to see things like Drunken Master and Snake in the Eagle's Shadow. When I went on a trip to New York, I dragged my brother and sister to a sketchy video store in a not-so-nice part of Manhattan to get obscure, hard-to-find Hong Kong Action movies that I could take home and devour.

I rented everything I could, driving from Lawrence to Kansas City to rent videos at Video Library or the Fine Arts Theater. I even went to an Asian Cult Film Festival where I saw five amazing movies on the big screen, including Goyokin and Kiru from Japan, and Once Upon a Time in China in America from Hong Kong.

These influence bled into the RPG market as well, with two releases that I recall vividly: Hong Kong Action Theatre! and Feng Shui: The Shadowfist Roleplaying Game.

Note: This picture is not blurry or out of focus. The company chose a low-res image for their cover and blew it up in all its pixelated glory when they published the game.

Hong Kong Action Theatre! (HKAT!) was put out by Epitaph Studios in Lawrence, KS, and had secured the rights from Golden Harvest to use still images from all sorts of Hong Kong action movies. It was ... let's just say the writer of the book's ego took center stage over any actual substance within the pages of the book. The game was eventually bought by Guardians of Order who retooled it for a second edition, but for me, the next game was the one that sealed the deal.

Magic: The Gathering hit game stores in the early 1990's and created a whole new kind of game - something that revolutionized tabletop gaming and changed the way the business worked for all time. Magic was everywhere when it came out, and exploded in popularity - the collectible card game was born. With the birth of the genre, an influx of collectible card games (CCGs) flooded into the gaming market over the next several years. It was ridiculous how many CCGs there were.

Companies bought up licenses left and right and tried their damnedest to become the next Magic; The Gathering. You had Towers in Time, Vampire Jihad (became Vampire: The Eternal Struggle), Rage, Babylon 5, Dune, Deadlands, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Animayhem, and even a Bible CCG. One of the games that came out was Shadowfist, a time-hopping, urban fantasy game inspired by none-other than Hong Kong action movies.

Feng Shui was the RPG that was based in the same universe. The CCG came out first, but as I understand it, the RPG was created first, then they quickly made a CCG to cash in on the CCG craze, then released the RPG right after that. A company called Daedalus put both the card game and RPG out.

Now, one thing that made this game stand out was that the core rulebook was printed in full-color and just looked so cool. The physics on the cover made no sense, but when you opened that book you were treated to a fun setting of guns, fists, and magic the likes of which no one had ever seen before.

Feng Shui revolves around several factions fighting through time over the control of important sites of power called Feng Shui sites. You can attune to them and gain power, fortune, and extort some control over reality if you get enough of them under your hat. If you attuned to enough of them, a Critical Shift would occur that could change the future based on what time period you were in.

By traveling through the Netherworld, the space out of time, you could travel to one of the four junctures in the game: 69 AD ancient China, 1850 China, contemporary (assumed to perpetually be 1996) Hong Kong, or 2056 dystopian-supernatural-cyber future. When you created a character, you started off by picking an archetype from action movies, like Maverick Cop, Supernatural Creature, Martial Artist, Old Master, Abomination, or many others. You then built the character according to a few variations set out for you, and picked some "Schticks" that your character was good at.

These Schticks were things like "Both Guns Blazing" where you could potentially be better at running around firing two guns at once with better accuracy and damage than if you fired one gun. You could pick Fu Powers that gave you magnificent martial arts abilities like leaping 30 feet horizontally or running up sheer surfaces. You could get sorcerous powers like flight or the ability to blast a cloud of radioactive chopsticks at your enemies. It was insane.

And to this day remains one of the few games I can think of that is absolutely as much fun to run as it is to play.

The game has a kind of freedom that fully admits that the player characters are better than anyone else, and will win the fight ultimately. The game was about looking cool while doing things, and it leaned into that hard. It introduced mechanics for Named and Unnamed Characters.

Unnamed characters were there solely as scenery and to make Named characters look good. Sure, they occasionally got in a lucky shot, but for the most part, heroes could wade through an army of Unnamed mooks and hardly break a sweat. But when one of those motorcycle-riding, uzi-carrying duded flipped off his helmet and did something cool, you knew that was a Named character who was somehow important to the plot and posed a genuine threat.

I loved how the damage system worked in the game - you could take up to 20 wound points without a problem, then start suffering impairment, and then eventually making death checks. The thing is, once the combat was over and the scene changed, the appearance of the damage remained and your wound points went back to zero. This was to account for things like John McLane in Die Hard looking like absolute death-warmed-over by the end of the movie, but he hops into the back of a limo with his wife and rides off into the sunrise.

Next time, I'll get more into Feng Shui and the things I pulled off with it, and how it influenced me as a gamer from then on.

All Good Things

 I finished a book for the first time in four-and-a-half years last night.

Not counting books I read my kids out loud, this was the first book I read cover-to-cover just for myself. I'm pretty happy about that.

With all these books coming in that I've had in some way, shape, or form before, I chose to read a new book - The Ultimate RPG Gameplay Guide by James D'amato.

Obviously, I'm into games, and, obviously, I'm into running games. Recently, I've felt that I've been lacking in the GM department - not from a lack of material or enthusiasm, but more of a lacking in confidence.

I've been running games for three decades now, and my gamemastering technique has evolved plenty in that time. There are things I do well, and things I don't do well. For example, I've never considered myself good at running NPCs or uncomfortable situations with player characters. It's not what I'm interested in when I'm running a game. I can tie together a story from other loose threads, so, in recent years, I often end up running pre-made adventures and tying them together in a kind of loose narrative.

I'd take something pre-packaged and modify it to suit my needs. It's worked well for me in the past, but I've found that as years have gone on, I've been using it as a kind of crutch. I don't think there's anything wrong with it, but a kind of doubt managed to seep into my brain that maybe I wasn't that good a GM and that I was just fooling everyone.

That's a common train of thought to those who deal with things like depression and anxiety, like many of us do. In an effort to try and do better, I got this book and have now read it.

While not everything in the book is for me, there are some things in there that most certainly made me think and make me willing to try different things.

There are really two schools of thought when it comes to running games. You can either be prepared, or you can wing-it. I've done it both ways to mixed results, and the times that I've ben "on" as a GM, I think it's genuinely been a fun experience for all of us involved. None of us can be perfect 100% of the time, however, and I know I've run some dismal games in the past, and will most certainly run more in the future.

I get hung up on whether or not the games I run are interesting to my players. It's a kind of paranoia that I've dealt with both personally and professionally - especially in a workplace. Some time will go by and I'll get paranoid about my performance, much like I get paranoid about my performance as a GM. I begin to doubt myself and doubt whether or not the players really care about the game, about the story, about getting together to roll dice. I then kind of spiral down a rabbit-hole where I wallow in self-doubt and I can't really hear the words of my friends who keep telling me they're having a good time. They say those words and I just think they're trying to be nice - trying not to hurt my feelings.

Something happened at my job earlier this year. I got promoted to a supervisor. For the first time in 20 years I am in charge of others in a non-volunteer environment where I'm getting paid to manage people who aren't my friends. The first time this happened, things didn't turn out too well - it was one of those, "I was supervisor in name only" and other employees didn't take me seriously.

I guess I didn't know how much that impacted me until now, 20 years later, when I'm now in a leadership role at a job I enjoy. It was a surreal transition for me. I knew I wanted the job, and I knew my bosses were confident in my abilities. I knew because they told me so, but the same thing happened when it came to my gamemastering - I thought they were just humoring me, just being nice.

Then I realized something. These people aren't my friends - not to say they don't like me, or I don't like them, not at all. What I mean, is that my bosses aren't invested in me like people who've known me for 20-plus years. They wouldn't put me in a leadership position and ask my opinion on things if they didn't actually value me in some way.

So I thought about this and had to jump a hurdle being in a management position - I had to be confident in my decisions because I knew others were confident in me. I can't have room for self-doubt that is paralyzing to the point where I can't make a choice, can't second-guess myself, or avoid conflict altogether. I need to be at least as confident in myself as these other people are confident in me.

I have found myself often telling my wife in years past that I wished she saw me with my eyes instead of hers. She's dealt with self-doubt and hardships all her life, and it's taken her ten years to finally feel at ease with me and not think I'm going to up and abandon her one day. I realize that I need to practice what I preach. My wife is incredibly supportive of me, and often tries to boost my self-esteem with words of encouragement. Hell, my family has been doing this my entire life, and my oppressive self-doubt often mutes these words of support and I slump into a funk of depression and denial.

So part of this endeavor - this writing and reading that I'm doing - is to be confident in my choices and my creativity, to once again flex those muscles where I try to be what others say I am.

This may be coming off as a big ego trip, but it's really not. I recognize my shortcomings, especially as a GM. I want to work on those to make them better, or at least not as handicapping. I'm going to read and write and try things to make me happy, and something that makes me happy is running games for my friends. I want to tell a story that is entertaining and maybe a little compelling, and some of what I got from reading this book may be a method I can at the very least try to use to make things different.

I don't want to say, "Make things better," because that's not really what I'm going for. I don't want to invalidate my friends' feedback in any way - in fact I want to embrace it and as it turns out, I may need my players' help to make some of these things happen. Reading this book has given me a few ideas as to what I want to try moving forward.

I'm excited and I hope my players are still invested in telling this story.

I've mentioned how much I'm into movies, and westerns are no exception. There are some damn good westerns out there, but it's not a genre I was deeply into as a kid. I wasn't really interested in John Wayne movies growing up, and I wasn't quite old enough for the Sergio Leone Spaghetti Westerns. It was a genre that kind of passed me by.

Not to say I didn't enjoy a good western now and then, but the first one that stands out to me is Tombstone, starring Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer. I remember seeing it at the Varsity Theater in Lawrence, Kansas before it closed up and became a clothing store.

I was 13 when it came out, and it was 1993, a great year for blockbuster movies. Tombstone looked cool and it was the first western I remember that looked cool.  Now, I remember the Young Guns movies, but I don't think I watched those until after I saw Tombstone, though they did come before in 1988 and 1990, respectively.

Tombstone is still one of the best, most re-watchable movies out there. I have memories of watching this movie multiple days in a row with my roommate, just because we were in a Tombstone mood, and it sounded like a good thing to watch at the time.

Gaming-wise, I didn't stray into westerns too much. In video games, there was Outlaws, by LucasArts, but it didn't come out until 1997.

No, the thing that got me to track down and watch westerns was Deadlands, a setting by Shane Hensley and the fine folks at Pinnacle Entertainment first published in 1996..

I think my brother first showed the game to me, and the Brom cover was so enthralling - an undead gunslinger standing in the desert wind, two six-shooters in his hands and a glint in his undead eyes. It was mesmerizing.

It was also the first time I was introduced to alternate history settings.

In Deadlands, at least originally, history was much as it was until a bad guy named Raven, for reasons I won't get much into here, went and stirred up something called the "Reckoning" on none other than July 3, 1863 during the final day of the battle of Gettysburg. Things were much as history remembers ... except that some of those dead soldiers got back up and started fighting all over again, and that made things a bit ... different.

Deadlands was a game that advertised itself as a, "Spaghetti Western ... with Meat!" Believe it or not, that made me go out and seek these "Spaghetti Westerns" and I discovered A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and High Plains Drifter - no not, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly as you might guess - all three movies starring Clint Eastwood.

They were amazing movies, with High Plains Drifter being the most atmospheric and "supernatural" as a western could get.

Now, I didn't get down to running Deadlands for a couple of years after it came out, but it really struck a chord with me, and I tried running a campaign with friends in what I want to say was 1998, my senior-year of high school. It may have been a few years after that, but I think I'm getting two different campaigns mixed together. It went okay, but there were issues here and there.

I was going through some stuff back then that didn't make it conducive to running a nuanced game like Deadlands. So the game went on the back-burner and I picked it back up a few years later and started a campaign out with my friends at the time. I did something I truly am proud of - I started all the characters off on a train with no memory of who they were.

The train went to a place called Abaddon, which was essentially purgatory, sort of. The game then went on for several years, taking a break in the middle, and revolved around a mystery heist of cursed Mayan gold and the lord of the Mayan underworld.

It was epic and one of my favorite campaigns ever.

I'm running Deadlands now, and have been for four years. It's a slow-going game and we use it to get together with friends and spend some (hopefully) fun times together.

Deadlands just released its latest edition, and it's available now. I highly recommend you pick it up.

If westerns aren't your thing, they made settings for Deadlands in different time periods to appeal to different genres - Deadlands Noir takes the setting to 1920's New Orleans, Hell on Earth takes the setting to the near post-apocalyptic future where the bad guys won, and there's Lost Colony, which takes it into the space opera genre a little bit.  They've announced a Deadlands Dark Ages, set to take place in ... well, the Dark Ages, and that'll be the first pre-Reckoning Deadlands game that they come out with.

I'm on board for it all, partner!

What's New is New Again

I've been watching my bookshelf fill back up the last few weeks, and it makes me smile. I'm in one of those phases, I suppose, where I'm happy to see old friends again - whether friends in the flesh or friends on the shelf, it doesn't matter.

Not everything I'm doing right now is revisiting older books and games, I'm also getting some new things to help me sort of shake myself out of any kind of rut I might be in as a gamemaster.

I've been reading The Ultimate RPG Gameplay Guide by James D'Amato. I'm not one to read blogs much (I know, don't say it), and this book is an edited collection of his blog from what I understand. It is giving me some perspective on running games that I'm appreciating. Also, it's a book and I'm reading it, so that's good, too.

I'm also slowly building up my collection of Mutant Chronicles game books.

I posted a little about the Mutant Chronicles before, specifically about the Apostle of Insanity trilogy of novels from the 1990's. Sadly, those were the only books to come out in the Mutant Chronicles universe proper.

Anyone who looks at the Mutant Chronicles will immediately think (especially if they look at it in its 1990's iteration) it's a Warhammer 40k knock-off. I disagree. While it does appear to be similar, I find the history of it compelling and fascinating to delve into.

It's billed as a "Diesel-punk" game. It's a universe set in the far future where advanced technology is untrustworthy (because of, well, it can be possessed by dark entities from another dimension, and anyone who works in technical support knows, this is terrifyingly close to the truth), so humanity has to rely on older tech to keep things going in the solar system at large. Earth was abandoned centuries ago because of pollution, war, climate change, etc. when the MegaCorporations were being jackasses and decided to destroy the planet (more or less).

One of the things that always makes me smile about it is one of the MegaCorporations is called Imperial, and it's the remnant of the United Kingdom given corporate form. Also, they're pretty much to blame for everything going to the dogs. If I remember right, and I might be getting things mixed up, here, in the setting, humanity discovers these weird ruins on Pluto and Imperial hops on a ship, goes out there, and starts touching stuff. This wakes up the Dark Symmetry and technology pretty much goes nuts. Later on, when they discover a tenth planet the call Nero, Imperial goes and once again pokes something with a stick when they shouldn't, and causes a bunch of bad stuff to happen.

Mutant Chronicles isn't a setting that anyone who knows me would think I'd be into. I'm generally not into bleak and hopeless genres like post-apocalypse or true-to-form Call of Cthulhu. I like there to be some kind of light at the end of the tunnel that isn't a train bearing down on you. Mutant Chronicles is bleak, but it's bleak in a Blade-Runner sort of bleak.

Basically, take Blade-Runner, add zombies, religious zealots who can cast magic, and add in a little Event Horizon "hey-what's-that-I-poke-it-with-a-stick" human stupidity and ignorance, and mix in large shoulder-pads, ridiculous firepower, and bad-ass Doomtroopers along the lines of the Colonial Marines in Aliens, and you have the Mutant Chronicles. 

It's a universe of grimy, future-noir that just clicked with me back in the day, and it's stuck with me.

Ironically, I've never run the game. I have played in it ... once at Gen Con in 2018. It took me over 25 years to go from reading the trilogy of novels to rolling dice in the game proper. I had a great time, too, and would love to re-visit the setting once again. It's one of those universes and games that I've always wanted to play in.

To that end, being the completist that I am, I've been trading in a bunch of stuff to Noble Knight and building up my collection of the third edition of Mutant Chronicles, put out by one of my favorite companies, Modiphius.

When it's all been said and done and I receive my box from Noble Knight, I'll have all but two of the Mutant Chronicles books - The Mishima Source Book and the Dark Legion Campaign Guide. I think that's pretty cool.

Then begins the arduous task of reading this stuff. That will take a bit.

Incidentally, there was a Mutant Chronicles movie made in the late 2000's that was not great. It's not a good representation of what Mutant Chronicles is. The movie had a ridiculous cast including Thomas Jane, John Malkovich, Ron Perlman, Sean Pertwee, and a bunch of others you'd recognize, but lacked a real budget that could do the Mutant Chronicles universe justice. I give it credit for trying.

I'm going to get some more reading in before bed, and I'll be back tomorrow.