Friday, December 14, 2018

d66 Sci-Fi Horror Room Details

Because I've had DOOM, Mothership, Alien, Aliens, Teleglitch, et cetera on the mind lately, and because boring rooms are boring.

ONE

  1. Flashing emergency lights
  2. Hanging chains
  3. Open electrical ductwork
  4. Venting steam, 2 meters max visibility
  5. Storage crates littered about
  6. Private improvised work/rest area
TWO
  1. Jury-rigged lighting
  2. Large AC fans / vents
  3. Schematics and printouts strewn about
  4. Sealed capsule, 1000 kg. Contains Plastic Death Tree
  5. Pitch black
  6. Super loud
THREE
  1. Weirdly tiered (about 1 meter difference, good for cover)
  2. Metal grill over wire / steam pipes / liquid / drop
  3. Effluent access, pipes
  4. Broken mainframe materials
  5. Extra flooring / wall / ceiling covers, some glass
  6. Stacks of corpses in body bags
FOUR
  1. 2d6 barrels of unstable fuel
  2. Artificial park
  3. Foundry re-flow, open, molten metal
  4. Demon sigils carved everywhere, humming faintly
  5. Graffiti'd with rumors
  6. Emergency computer terminal 
FIVE
  1. Large industrial bags of trash everywhere
  2. Vaulted ceiling, thick columns
  3. Large acquariums
  4. Spare algae farms
  5. Crates full of flour, (one secretly contains powder-based drugs, worth 30k credits)
  6. Overgrown with lightvine, 3 meters visibility despite light as it hangs down from ceiling
SIX
  1. Filled with acrid smoke
  2. Lots of nooks and crannies, dim
  3. Bright and very spartan
  4. Shot up, ceiling panels creaking, falling
  5. Narrow, twisting like guts
  6. Loose floor panels

Monday, December 10, 2018

DOOM in an RPG

I wanted to play DOOM as an RPG. (Happy 25th anniversary, DOOM!) There are two things you need: Stay Frosty and Exemplars and Eidolons.

Stay Frosty is an RPG about playing a bunch of Doom Marines or Aliens' Space Marines running around, getting stressed, which makes you more competent until you make an unlucky save and then TENSION EXPLODES and you're murdering everything and ignoring tactics, possibly until you die. It's like if Mothership were about just playing marines and people panic by doing Billy-style last stands from Predator. Remove armor, throw away gun, attack big bad with a giant knife. The reason I don't just use it vanilla, is that the PCs are still fairly flimsy, _especially_ if you want to just run 1 PC against squads of enemies like a Doom Slayer.

To up the PC power level, I use damage, Gifts, and HP/HD from Exemplars and Eidolons.

Exemplars and Eidolons is about playing supernaturally-powerful thieves, wizards, or warriors. Your warrior can take on groups of 1 HD fools and destroy them all, punch through walls, never needs to sleep, that kind of thing. E&E evolved into Godbound, where the PCs are even more over-the-top, but E&E is perfect for what I want to play: solo Doom Slayer vs the first level of that game.

So your PC has 4 stats (Stay Frosty): Brawn, Brains, Dexterity, Willpower. Roll 3d6 and sum. You roll _equal to or over_ your stat: So Brains 9 is like '9+', and you want to roll a 9 or higher. If none of your stats are 5+, set one to 5+. Enemies try to hurt you (or terrify you) by rolling a d20 under your stat, and you subtract the difference between their level and yours from the roll.

Stay Frosty is a Black Hack hack that figured out to make everything the PCs want to do roll over. 20s are good! You use your stats to resolve attacks, unbreaking an APC's engine, wire electricity through a bulkhead, dodge falling rains of fire, that kind of thing.

Tension is as per Stay Frosty - you get tenser and better at kicking ass, until Tension Explodes and you flub your Willpower save and then you're fighting a cyberdemon with a knife. There's also critical hit and critical fail tables in there that I'll use. And enemies, mission generators, pointcrawling advice.

You can carry 21 - Brawn items.

You have 8 HP and gain 4 per level. Monsters use their HD as their HP. Armor is ablative HP that gets ruined and replaced just like in DOOM. Back-and-breast armor has 2 hp, a helmet has 1 hp. You could probably cobble together arm and leg armor and have up to 5 hp - for a 1 HD soldier that's a lot of extra survivability. Perhaps too much, we'll see when I run this more.

Damage is: weapons do 1d6 to 1d20 damage, a roll of 1 is 0 damage, 2-5 is 1 hp/HD of damage, 6-8 is 2 hp/HD, 9+ is 4 hp/HD. A combat knife does 1d6 damage, a pistol does 1d8, as does a 1-handed sword, as do some cheap assault rifles. A good rifle or two-handed weapon does 1d10 or more damage - a chainsaw might do 1d12, as might a super shotgun at optimal range. A BFG does 1d20 damage to an area of enemies but has like 1-2 shots taking up inventory slots.

So the damage is one huge thing that ups a single PC's survivability. You start with 8 hit points, you can take out 1 HD enemies with 1 hit, you can probably go toe-to-toe with a decent-sized demon/alien monster and survive.

You get 2 Effort, from Exemplars and Eidolons. You spend that to use some of your E&E Gifts.

You get some of the Warrior or Generic gifts - 3 at level 1. So you might be able to fight large groups of your-HD-or-less monsters and only get attacked once, or you can rip bulkhead doors down given a few minutes, or you can spend effort for the combat to nat 20 hit your enemy. To me this is another thing that we see the Doom Slayer do all the time.

Passages of Planet Psychon

Rescuing this from Google+:

Here's a Passage-style oraclular list but for Planet Psychon or Ultra Violet Grasslands or whatever Heavy Metal / Moebius inspired thing you want. Some are from Passage, because it has a great list of words in there.

How To Use This: Roll 3d20 and make up a scene or thing or resolve some action using the Oracular Words! That's about it. 

1. Weakness
2. Might
3. PSI
4. Magic
5. Tech
6. Ancient
7. New
8. Crimson
9. Jade
10. Fuchsia
11. Azure
12. Light
13. Shadow
14. Memory
15. Hallucination
16. Walls
17. Portal
18. Discovery
19. Loss
20. Gods

The only thing that really needs explanation is the colors.

CRIMSON: Blood, Chaos, violence, brick, sky, rivers, motion

JADE: Wealth, vegetation, jungle, food, decoration, labyrinthine, complexity

FUCHSIA: Mutation, dust storms, sky, weather, skin, pools

AZURE: Sky, wind, air, starkness, openness, expanse, stillness in motion

Gods can be AI Gods, actual Gods, agents of Gods, false gods...

Memories or Hallucinations can be dreams, dream-quests, desires.

Planet Psychon has a lot of tables for weather, what the hex you're in looks like or sounds like, colors, etc. It's great, it's really vivid. UVG has some similar things going on with its illustrations and descriptions. Google them! They're AWESOME!

Passage is also pretty great. It's here: https://www.rpgnow.com/product/250996/Passage--A-Storytelling-Exploration-Game-for-Exactly-One-Player