Caerwent Closes

A couple of weeks ago, I concluded my most recent RPG campaign, Caerwent Ascending. Of course, Caerwent Ascending was a sequal campaign to my group's previous campaign, Caerwent Down.

So, closing this campaign marks the end of about two years of adventure.

Caerwent Down

The origional campaign was played in the Numenera setting using the Cypher System basic rules and character types. It followed a group of adventurers searching for a legendary flying city that had fallen from the skies. 

Caerwent, the origional flying city, was inspired largely by Aurthian legends, and the group got to encounter the aged versions of several figures from these stories as they sought out the fallen city.

In the end, they found the city and rose it back, becoming the new leaders of this soaring city-state.

Caerwent Ascending

The more recent campaign utilized the Discovery & Destiny (Numenera 2) types and picked up a year after the previous campaign ended. The players took on the role of new leaders of caerwent (after the heroes from the past campaign had vanished) trying to make their city whole and leave an impact on the world.

They faced off against numerous threats, and learned a great deal about powerful datagods in the Ninth World that had created Caerwent and that would use the Iron Wind for their own ends.

In the end, they convinced the pawn of these datagods to join with them as they were joined by positive datagods in battle against the masters of the Iron Wind. The end of the day found them victorious.

Reflections-These were good campaigns

I enjoyed these campaigns a lot. It might not seem like it, with some of the things I'm going to follow this statement with, but I did. I want to highlight that right now. I am very happy to have gotten to run them, and I see them both as successes. It's just...harder for me to reflect on things that went well. I can't think of much to say about things that did go well, because they just...are... I think it's human not to be able to see the good as easily. I know I experienced the good, but it's harder to put my finger on it.

My Vision-Build a Better Ninth World

When I first started planning Caerwent, it was going to be one campaign. I wanted to have the players raise up the city and then become its champions, touring the world with the city in tow and making the Ninth World a better place. 

Then Monte Cook games announced Numenera 2, with a focus on building up cities and making the Ninth World better, and this seemed to be exactly exactly in line with my plan for the Caerwent game. But it wouldn't be out in time for when I wanted to start the game. So, I decided to split it into two games instead.

The first campaign, Caerwent Down, was fairly straightforward and went, more or less, according to plan. (I feel like I didn't think so at the time, but I cannot put my finger on what seemed out of place. Possibly just wanting to get to actually building up the Ninth World.)

I had...very high aspirations for Caerwent Ascending. I wanted to really get into the city rules. I wanted to really get into the crafting stuff. I wanted to really focus on Caerwent's connection to other cities and places in the Ninth World and for the players to work on building up these places. I had a plan that involved giving the players city-based issues in between sessions and having them vote on how they wanted to resolve them. Most of this didn't really end up happening.

Unmet Expectations

Notably, I don't really blame my players for things not going according to plan. The stuff that I thought was important and wanted to focus on? The city and crafting stuff and having players make decisions about how to rule the city? It all felt to me like stuff that was more technical than roleplay, and therefore stuff that I wanted to resolve outside of session. This really meant that even if that stuff was done, it wouldn't have been the focus of gameplay anyway, so I had set myself up for failure to begin with. 

But then, I found that players didn't really want to engage with these things outside of session. They didn't want to read long walls of text giving their advisors opinions on matters and then vote on them. They didn't want to spend time outside of session working on long technical crafting things. I don't blame them. 

So, most of these things, that had been my driving push to begin with sort of fell by the wayside. It also meant that we really didn't get to experience the full benefits of running Numenera 2 and might have been better off with the origional types/rules.

I'm not saying Numenera 2 doesn't work or that it wouldn't be fantastic for this sort of thing. It just wasn't as compatiable with the combination of how I was trying to run things and how my players were trying to play things. I probably could have taken time in session to work out the city-focused things, but for whatever reason I didn't want to and I ended up dropping these issues instead.

NPC Players

One thing that I did that I enjoyed a lot was that I ran NPC players. I may write a longer post about this in the future, but the basic idea is that I had people who weren't at the table that made characters/groups that were active in the world. Every couple weeks, I'd message the NPC Players about what was happening in the world as it affected their character/group, and we'd discuss what they wanted to do moving forward.

I think this made the world seem more real/dynamic for the players, and it allowed them to experience things that worked on other lines of thinking than the common patterns that I use.

One of the NPCs played a datagod who had an automaton infiltrate Caerwent under the guise of being one of its advisors. Another controlled the Jagged Dream, an organization trying to spark war in the Ninth World. Another played Caerwent's military advisor. Another played a replicating automaton, infecting any tech it found and turning it into instances of itself. Another played a mad noble whose wife had been transformed by the Iron Wind and who was set upon the path to revenge against the soaring city.

Overall

As I said earlier, I really enjoyed these campaigns, and that's the note I want to end on. I loved the characters that my players (both at the table and beyond) came up with, and I had a lot of fun interacting with them. The players explored a lot of interesting places across the Ninth World, and met a lot of interesting people. They overcame great villians and they did help cities and nations of the Ninth World. I had a lot of fun running these games, and I'm really looking forward to what we have to play next.

But that's a post for another day.

If you play RPGs, what are some campaigns that you look back on (either playing or running)? What do you remember fondly about them? Are there expectations you had that weren't quite met?

Descent into Laughter

I have very clear goals for what I need to focus on completing this month...

So, of course, I've gotten distracted by a smaller more personal project.

I recently tried to run a Numenera game for new players, mostly unfamiliar with tabletop RPGs or the setting of the Ninth World. I was using one of the adventures from Weird Discoveries. These adventures are designed to be run with little to no prep and sort of be the sort of thing one could recommend in the place of a board game. My experience running some of these with my regular players is that they have taken roughly 1.5-2 hours. We spent 3+ hours playing and didn't finish the adventure.

Which is fine. And I think that the players mostly had a good time, which is good. That's the objective.

But I was a bit surprised by how...slowly things seemed to go. Which isn't my normal experience with Numenera/Cypher System. Especially since I had chosen something I thought would be fast/exciting for my new players. I don't think either my players or I did anything wrong, and, as I said, it wasn't a bad experience. It just wasn't the experience I'd expected to have.

I spent a lot of time questioning if there was something that I could have run which would have been more in line with my objectives.

My objective was this: to find something that could introduce new players to roleplaying games with a simple system and fast-paced/exciting adventure.

Thus began my Descent.

Place Clever Title Here

Hi.


A lot has happened since last time we talked.


I can remember telling you that I wasn't dead, nor was I dying, and now I've vanished for like two months. It's not very honest of me. Hopefully I'll do better, but I'm not sure what I can promise. It's often hard for me to know what to give.

The Toybox Closes

Last night, the Toybox closed for good. The campaign ended. The Toybox crew had found a portal to the realm from which Vinka had been assembling her universe-altering efforts. They were accompanied by knights riding Xi-Drakes, Aeon Priests, WRENCHes, and reality-bending flying entities from another planet.


As they traveled Vinka's realm, each ally was necessary against a particular challenge. The Xi-Drakes took on some flying monsters that acted in Vinka's defense. The Aeon Priests battled members of the Convergence and kept their esoteries from taking effect. The WRENCHes worked on a mechanical machine that was producing numerous automaton warriors. The aviators used their powers to hold back the Iron Wind itself.

Projects Update

Here's a general update on what I'm working on and what stage it's at presently.

Author

Heroism and Other Lies

I honestly expected Episode 101 to be out by now. However, my editor has been held up due to unforeseen circumstances. I am hoping to have the edits before the end of the month, and then with my edits in hand it shouldn't be long before I can release the final product.

I have Episodes 2-4 written. Two will be sent to editing soon, but I'm still going to work to make some more revisions on 3 and 4 before sending them.

I have begun working on Episode 5.

Short Stories

I am working on two different short stories. The first is for an anthology that is being published in honor of Carrie Fisher. The proceeds of the sales will go to a charity supporting those with bipolar disorder.

Game Master

Toybox

By far my biggest creative focus right now is gearing up for my upcoming Toybox campaign. This campaign utilizes a tabletop game system of my own design and takes place in a setting heavily inspired by/based on Monte Cook Games' Numenera. While the setting is not directly the same as the Ninth World, it does have many of the same creatures and essential elements of it.

I'm hoping to post session summaries up here in story-form as the campaign progresses, but we'll see how that goes.

The first Toybox session will be January 26th-a little more than a week away-and I'm very much looking forward to it.

Looking Glass Moon

My surreal sci-fi setting for Cypher System isn't getting much attention at the moment. I've dropped the ball on this while focusing on other projects. I'm considering dropping this project altogether. However, if I do continue with it, I will probably roll out the setting incrementally, with various smaller books focusing on specific elements or parts of the setting rather than all at once in a huge volume. This way people can pick and choose the parts of Looking Glass Moon that they want to use, while choosing to overlook the rest.

Islands of Peril

I have recently been thinking about the Instant Adventures provided in Monte Cook Games' Weird Discoveries (Numenera) and Strange Revelations (The Strange), and I have to say that I like the format.

My first instinct was that the format of having the ability to pick up and play a session of Numenera (or really any RPG that I enjoy) without any prep seemed like an awesome idea with a lot of potential. Looking at some of the adventures, they seemed to flow nicely and have a format that played in with Node-based design, which I've mentioned in the past as something that makes interesting game sessions.

My second thought, after running one or two of these, was that these adventures are very short in comparison to what I normally think of when I think of running an RPG adventure. Not to mention that the ones I ran seemed pretty "easy" too.

This was disappointing to me, until I really thought about it. The intro to the adventures is pretty clear. They aren't trying to take the place of full RPG adventures. They're trying to fit, instead, into the slot that might be held by board games. To a degree, they're designed to be quicker and simpler. They're designed with the idea that the players may not be familiar with the system in mind.

This intrigued me as a way of introducing people who aren't familiar with tabletop RPGs to the hobby, which is something I think these sorts of adventures would do very well.

In my thinking about these sorts of adventures, I began to consider making one myself (and what that adventure might look like). One turned into more than one, and thus Islands of Peril was born.

Another thing that interested me was that the adventures in Weird Discoveries mention links to other adventures in the book, in a way that one story can lead to others. In this way, if you're playing with the same (or an overlapping) group of players, they can experience some interesting connections between their adventures. The problem that I had with it is that these adventures assume that the PCs never advance. They never gain new abilities (which sort of makes sense for the pick-up-and-play nature of the game.) In fact, in general it seems to me that there are very few cypher system adventures geared towards characters beyond Tier 1.

It is my hope to unveil 8 adventures in the Islands of Peril series which can be played stand-alone or as a linked campaign which takes the characters from Tier 1 all the way to Tier 6.

I have the skeleton of the first adventure completed, and look forward to working on the next seven.

Consumables

I acknowledge that I'm about three posts behind. Unfortunately, real life has caught up with me over the last week or so, and my creative pursuits have had to take a backseat.

That said, I've been thinking about and looking through Numenera stuff in preparation for the Toybox Campaign, which has got me thinking about cyphers, which has got me thinking about consumable items in general.

If you're not familiar with the cypher system, it utilizes items called cyphers. These are single use "magic" (or whatever the appropriate setting flavor is) items with a wide range of effects from adding to a user's stats for a time to making a user able to phase through walls to being used as a weapon that does damage to an enemy to leveling a city. Basically anything you can think of. Being called the Cypher System, it's obvious that they're supposed to be an important part of play. The rulebook talks about how they're supposed to be used pretty freely and how the players are supposed to find new cyphers pretty often.

Of course, in my play, most of my players have not tended to use cyphers freely. They treat them the same way they treat all other consumables: always saving them because there might be a "better" use for them later. When players then find a new cache of new cyphers, they trade out for the best of the lot while staying below their cypher limit. It ends up not replenishing so much as just changing out certain cyphers, and the players have lost the opportunity to use whatever number of cyphers they trade out then.

And this doesn't just apply to cyphers or to the cypher system. Players are hesitant to use potions that boost their stats or abilities or magical arrows or any other consumable in any system I give them out in.

To be fair, I'm the same way. I don't like using one-use items, because then I won't be able to use them if I need/want them later. Which ends up with them not getting used at all, which is wasteful.

So, I don't know how to encourage both myself and my players to utilize one-use items with a greater frequency.

One thought that occurs to me, but that wouldn't necessarily be appropriate all the time, would be to have a time limit.

Last night, my wife and I were watching the second Narnia movie, Prince Caspian, and there is a scene where Lucy is looking at the healing salve that she'd had in the last movie. Hundreds of years have passed in Narnia while Lucy was spending a year in the real world, so that salve is at best hundreds of years old. I was thinking about medicines that we have, and I was realizing "There's no way that's still good. It has to be way past it's expiration date." My wife, wisely, made some comment about magic and asked me how old I thought most of the potions I find in ancient dungeons in RPGs are. It raised a good question.

Using a time limit, the item will expire after X days or hours or whatever relevant period in the game world, and after that it's gone. This would inspire players to find a use for the item before the time period is up, knowing that they won't get to otherwise.

Of course, it might also add a level of stress to something that is supposed to be a benefit to the game and to their characters.

Thinking About Character Sheets

In preparation for this weekend's session, the Web of Wavemeet, as well as my future Toybox campaign, both utilizing the system of my own design, I've been thinking about character sheets.

My system uses four primary Factors to determine character ability: Body, Mind, Voice, and Essence. When I was building my pregens, it was easiest for me to lay things out in a quad-type layout, with each factor getting it's own section, under which I list the resources, skills, abilities, attacks, and armor associated with each.

I've been debating if this is a reasonable way of actually laying out a character sheet, or if it would be better to have a section that gives the core factor values with their resources and maybe armor separate from a section for abilities separate from a section for skills and so on. I think this second is probably be better way of doing things, which is unfortunate just because it means reformatting everything I've done.

My next concern is, perhaps, less significant, but not insignificant altogether. How to layout the sheet. Do I want to have a portrait oriented page, or landscape?

When I first started getting into Numenera, I thought that the character sheets looked really cool. They had this cool tri-fold structure where they folded up like pamphlets, which seemed new and nifty to me. They also had a lot of really cool decorative drawings across them, which was pretty neat too.

However, when I started designing characters and trying to put the information on them, I found that these sheets weren't the most efficient. I was frustrated with not being able to really list out my abilities, or even my equipment very well. I felt like there was a lot of wasted space. To begin with, there were entire sections, mostly those on the front, that I either wasn't using at all or was using very little. But, on top of that, all the nifty drawings and artwork, while looking cool, was taking up space that could otherwise have been used for actual information.

Because of the lack of space, if I was using the Numenera character sheets, I would have to have another page on which I printed the full text of my abilities, which, in my mind, sort of defeated the point in having them written on a character sheet.

Recently, Monte Cook Games has come out with a character portfolio that you can download and print which addresses this, mostly by adding a lot more pages in which you can put additional information. I'm fine with that.

But that didn't exist at the time, so I made a bunch of my own character sheets. Since a majority of my experience before Cypher System had been 3.5/Pathfinder, I laid out my custom sheets more or less exactly like the ones for those games, and this worked for me. Eventually, I made sheets trying to imitate the trifold layout of the Numenera sheets, but making a better use of the space. This worked out pretty well too.

But now I'm just trying to decide what to do with my own.

What do you think? Are there character sheets that you've particularly liked or not liked? What do you like or not like when it comes to character sheets?

Publication Day: Wonder Vault Heist

I have released my second Cypher System adventure, The Wonder Vault Heist.


If you've read my posts on heist adventures, this was the adventure I was designing that got me thinking about them.

This is a heist adventure designed for a science fantasy setting, but which could easily be converted to other settings/systems.

The heist revolves around a mechanical/mystical vault, left by the ancients, which can bend space and time, and the sinister group that controls it. As the players get closer to the wonder vault itself, they learn more about their enigmatic employer, and about the events of the past which tore a rip in space and time where the vault now stands.

http://www.rpgnow.com/product/197242/The-Wonder-Vault-Heist

If you haven't checked out my posts on running heist adventures and are interested in making/running your own, see the posts below:


Heist Adventures 1: 5 Challenges


Heist Adventures 2: Tips and Advice


Heist Adventures 3: Heist Campaigns

Heist Adventures 2: Tips and Advice

Planning a heist adventure for an RPG can be difficult. I discussed the difficulties of this in my last post: Heist Adventures 1: 5 Challenges

In planning my upcoming adventure, the Wonder Vault Heist, I had to think through some of these issues. I'll share some of my thoughts with you on how to overcome them.

As you recall from the Challenges post (or, as I'll tell you now if you haven't read it), a majority of the challenges to planning a heist adventure have to do with how to present the planning of the heist to the players. Much of the advice below will have to do with those challenges. Some of these ideas can be used together, some are best used separately.

1. NPC Mastermind

One way to bypass the opportunity for PCs (Player Characters) to have bad plans, and possibly even the information gathering phase, is to have an NPC present by the plan and the information to the PCs.

This strategy cuts out a lot of the advance legwork for the PCs, which many players find tiresome anyway, and allows them to get right to the heist, which is what a lot of the PCs want to do.

The only issue with this strategy comes if the PCs question why the NPC Mastermind isn't involved in actually carrying out the heist. If the NPC does accompany the PCs, he/she should only have a minor role in the heist. Remember, the PCs should be the protagonists of the story, and the spotlight and action should revolve around them.

2. Pre-planned Plan

Rather than having an NPC plan the heist, it can be assumed that the player characters planned the heist, but that the adventure is starting after that point.  As GM, you should either provide handouts to the players detailing the plan, or review the plan in advance of getting into the adventure.

As a whole, this strategy provides many of the same advantages of the NPC Mastermind. It cuts down on the roleplaying opportunities of having a scene where the mastermind lays out the plan, but it does get to the action much faster. It's all a matter of what your group enjoys the most.

If you are reviewing the plan, you can do it in stages, as the PCs progress through the heist itself. This way there is not just an infodump all at once, and it also creates the feel of other heist movies and tv shows where scenes of the plan discussion are cut and intermingled over scenes of the characters actually carrying out the plan.

In The Wonder Vault Heist, I use an NPC mastermind, but I still have a method of intermingling the planning scenes with the heist scenes to effectively create this feel. I don't want to give too much away about how this works in that adventure, for fear of spoiling the fun for potential players in the future. I will say that while it works well in fantasy settings, it would not work as well in a non-magical setting.

3. "Yes, but..."

If you do let the players plan the plan, or even if you don't and they are just adapting to circumstances as they arise, they are going to have the most fun if their ideas work. Players can (and usually will) come up with things that you, as the GM, have never thought of. As a GM, notably, you might have plans that oppose these ideas, but if you can be flexible and think on your feet fast enough to allow for the player plan to work or at least be enacted, they will have a blast, even if something else goes wrong right afterward.

And it probably will, and should. Especially if they have already been told about some security measure that their plan neglects. In letting the player's idea/plan bypass one area of security, another might be triggered. Whatever the complication, it should be something that doesn't cause the whole heist to fail, and still allows the PCs to keep moving forward. This allows the PCs to succeed where they want to, and feel that victory, but it also immediately ramps up tensions and it establishes consequences for neglecting information that has been given.

4. Things go Sideways

There are often two types of heist-type scenarios in shows and movies: The first are the ones where the main characters pull off the heist perfectly and according to plan, where any perceived failure is revealed to actually have been a part of the plan itself the whole time. The second are the ones where things go wrong for the characters and they are forced to adapt and come up with a new plan in order to pull it off.

Do you know how to know which is going to happen? As a general rule, the more the show/movie shows you of the planning in advance, the more likely it is that something is going to go wrong. This is because there's no tension, and therefore interest from the audience, if they know exactly what is going to happen. When the audience is given the plan and it works, it's boring. When the audience is given the plan and can see things go wrong, it becomes exciting to see how the characters will get out. When the audience doesn't know the plan, everything that happens is a clever surprise.

Likewise, for players in an RPG, if they have a detailed plan, follow it, and it works, then in the end the adventure tends to be a bit flat. Especially if the plan was handed to them in advance and not even their own idea.

So, keep things interesting. Have complications arrive. Maybe the guards changed their shifts. Maybe some other team of thieves is trying to steal the same thing. Maybe someone at the heist location recognizes one of the characters from some shared past. Maybe a person of importance is visiting the location. Any number of things can happen, but have one or more unexpected complication that the PCs have to figure out in the moment on their own.

But, don't forget to follow the next bit of advance. It is in the moment, but it should still be something that the PCs can (and probably will) overcome, not something likely to ruin the whole heist, even if they think for a moment that it might.

5. Keep it Simple

This is true of complications, as well as the known complications for the heist itself. Especially if the players are the ones planning the heist.  Make there be straightforward paths and easy solutions to the problems at hand. Chances are, the players will come up with a complex plan anyway. Just putting in people and security measures, and saying they're advance, the players will think that they are dealing with something complex.

Make it simple so that the players can solve it. Give them a genuinely complex heist to handle, especially if they don't have a lot of experience with heist adventures, they'll never manage. It is something they can be worked up to, but in truth, let them solve a simple heist with easily solved hurdles, and they'll think they are criminal masterminds.

6. Think of it as a Normal Dungeon

There are rooms, there are NPCs, there are traps. It's not actually that much different from how dungeons would normally be laid out. The biggest things are that the PCs probably won't be killing everyone, and that they'll be trying to be sneaky. Having traps and alarms in more abundance than normal is probably a good idea. Still, it can be laid out as a normal dungeon and you shouldn't over complicate things for yourself at the GM in thinking about it otherwise.

Hopefully these pieces of advice are helpful.

If you missed the first post of this series, check it out here: Heist Adventures 1: 5 Challenges


For the next post in this series, check out: Heist Adventures 3: 3 Heist Campaigns



To see a heist adventure that I've made, be sure to check out The Wonder Vault Heist when it comes out next month.

In my next post I'll be talking about campaigns structured around heist type adventures, so be sure to come back and check it out.

In the meantime, what other advice or challenges do you perceive for heist adventures?

Heist Adventures 1: 5 Challenges

A couple days ago I finished the draft of The Wonder Vault Heist, my upcoming Cypher System adventure.  I'm pretty proud of it, and am very excited to playtest it. In the meantime, I'm working on formatting it and working out the kinks (as well as finishing editing on the first episode of Heroism and Other Lies, getting cover work done, and planning for my next novel).


In planning a Heist adventure, I was thinking of some of the great fiction I've encountered before that either includes or focuses on heists: Leverage, Alias, Burn Notice the Ocean's movies...


In addition to this, I recently had a conversation with a friend who was trying to plan a Burn Notice one shot for Hero System, and we talked about some of the challenges associated with running that sort of adventure.


The biggest challenges all have to do with planning.

In heist movies, there are usually cool scenes where the characters discuss the information they've gathered and use it to make a plan for how the heist will go about. In order to hold audience attention, these scenes may be interspersed with the heist itself so that the events are seen and experienced by the audience as they are discussed. Oftentimes, the thing that makes heist fiction so appealing is the cleverness of the main characters and their plans. For translation to RPGs, there are several hurdles to this.


1. Gathering Intel

A lot of times, heist fiction doesn't really get into how the characters find out about their potential target. There's a research phase before the planning phase that often happens off screen, or is handwaved with hacker-magic. This generates information about people who connect to the target as well as about the target's security systems and the like.


When I ran the Firefly RPG, I had put a lot of thought into how players might look for information and so I created people and places where the PCs could go to try to get information. The PCs didn't really seek these contacts out on their own unless I made the path very obvious, in which case they didn't feel particularly rewarded for finding the information. More likely, they tried to rush in and take things blind, which was sometimes frustrating for everyone.


2. Character Knowledge

In a lot of heist fiction, different characters are experts in different things. In Leverage there are the clearly defined roles of Hacker, Hitter, Grifter, Thief, and Mastermind. Each of the characters has extra knowledge about things based on their specialties (and their backstories). For example, if they are dealing with mercenaries or military units, the hitter usually has some extra knowledge about how those types of people operate and what their procedures are.


Unless a character has a really long and detailed backstory and/or the adventure is designed around this, the player likely doesn't have the specific character knowledge. To a degree, this is what Knowledge skills are for, but in some cases characters may not think to make these rolls.


3. Planning the Plan

Characters in works of fiction have the best Hollywood minds writing for them, and doing so without the same time restraints the characters have. A portion of the plan that a character might think of in a second may have taken the writer hours, days, or even weeks to think of.


In real life, planning is difficult. Ideas and dialogue don't flow freely, and people don't all contribute in a sensible fashion. Many players tend to get frustrated in long planning discussions, debating between hypotheticals. Oftentimes, these plans will fail to address certain elements of a heist, and/or focus on entirely the wrong details.


Most likely, your characters are not criminal masterminds. This will make it hard for them to think in the way that criminal masterminds think.


4. Boredom

In addition to the frustration of debating hypotheticals, many players like getting right into the action of things. They see forming or debating plans as separate from the "fun" part of actually pulling off the heist.  I've had numerous times where a player, getting bored of the discussion, just says "Okay, my character goes and does X" even though X is impulsive, impractical, and often directly opposed to the interests of the character. The player just wants the story to move forward, and doesn't see a planning discussion as doing that.


5. Bad Ideas

As I said already, it is unlikely that your players are criminal masterminds. You may think that the path to success is obvious, but players are unpredictable things. Inevitably, they will come up with plans that are far more complex or convoluted than necessary. They will come up with ideas that are unreasonable and illogical. They will fail to account for particular security measures or obstacles, even if you tell them about the obstacles, give them a note with them written in all caps, and circle them in bright red.


This can make things go wrong, and not just in the "oh, the plan went sideways, what will we do now?" interesting drama wrong. It can make things go "oh, there is no sensible way the PCs get out of this without being dead or captured" wrong.


So, what do we do?

Don't fear! I have several suggestions for how to overcome these challenges and more, and I'll post about these in my next blog post.

See the post here: http://goalworlds.blogspot.com/2016/10/heist-adventures-2-tips-and-advice.html


For information on running a campaign centered on heists, see this post: 3 Heist Campaigns




In the meantime, what other obstacles do you think there are to planning a heist mission? Do you have any thoughts on how these can be overcome?

Publication Day: Machine God's Temple

In yesterday's post I'd mentioned that I was hoping to get out The Machine God's Temple very soon?


Very soon is today.

http://www.rpgnow.com/product/193385/The-Machine-Gods-Temple

This is an adventure designed for the Cypher System (originally based on an adventure I ran in Numenera) where player characters explore an ancient temple for a powerful Machine God. The temple is filled with tech that was never designed to exist this long, but which is far more advanced than that which the current world is familiar with. There are automatons, a maze of teleporters, travel across the world and back in an instant, and more complications from the unfathomable and malfunctioning technology. Even if the players can get through this, they still have to parlay with the Machine God itself and hope that it will provide them the help they sought here.


This adventure is 25 pages and includes 5 pregenerated characters.

The Beginning of the Worlds

I've been meaning to start up this blog for some time now, but have been having trouble with beginnings.  So, I apologize if this seems a bit unfocused. Let's begin.

I am Douglas Miller.  I'm an independent writer of novels and game master of tabletop roleplaying games. I've been writing as far back as I can remember, and have years worth of work that I'm building upon.  I've been game mastering a shorter amount of time, but I've played and run roleplaying games in many different systems and for many different lengths of time, from one shots to short campaigns to longer wider-spanning ones.

It's my hope to use this blog to talk about my projects, but to also share my musings, advice, and thoughts on varying writing, roleplaying, gamemastering, and storytelling topics.

On the writer side of things, my main focus at present is Heroism and Other Lies, a series of short novels that I've been working on. I'll be posting more about this to come, but the basic concept is a superhero/comic book style story set in a cyberpunk type setting, exploring the good and bad of future technology.  I have the first two books of this series in draft form, going through varying levels of editing, and a third mostly written.  If I can make final decisions on cover work, I hope to have the first two books out before the end of the year. Fingers crossed.

I've got another novel idea that I'm working on developing, but I don't want to say too much about it just yet. I'm hoping to get a good chunk of that written during November, so I will probably talk more about that then.

On the GM/roleplaying game side, I've got a bit more going on.  Much of it is Cypher System based, but some of it isn't.

Using the Cypher Creator System, I'm working on putting together two adventures for publication. The first one is called The Machine God's Temple and is based on the first Numenera one shot that I developed and ran...probably almost three years ago.  I'm mostly done writing it all out and re-skinning it for Cypher System rather than for Numenera specifically, so I'm hoping to put that out really soon.  The next is called The Wonder Vault Heist and, as the name implies, is based on a heist, also in a science-fantasy setting.  It's largely in the idea-phase right now, but I'm hoping to put that out in the November/December time frame.  In addition to those two adventures, I've got an idea for a surreal sci-fi setting for the Cypher System inspired by (but not based on) Monte Cook Games' new game, Invisible Sun. I haven't decided if I'm going to follow up on the setting idea or not yet. I'd like to, but I'm not sure I'll have time with my other creative pursuits.

I've also been working on developing my own system, which I hope to publish in the future. I've got the basic framework down, but will need to develop a lot more in the way of abilities, creatures, setting, etc, not to mention playtesting to iron out the kinks. It's my intention to start a campaign with my system in the next few months, set in Ninth World (the setting of Numenera). This way I can test the mechanics while still working on the side on the more setting specific details that I'd need for publication.

In the meantime, while all that develops, are there any writing or roleplaying game topics that you'd be interested in me sharing my thoughts on?