FtA: Once More, With Feeling

It's been awhile, eh?

It's been a busy time for me of late.  My wife and I are in the process of moving.  Well, we're in the process of finding a place to move to, to be exact.  Still in the same general area, but a bit more equidistant in regards to our jobs.  So, as you can imagine, I'm poking around empty houses in much of my spare time.

As if that weren't enough, I took a Statistics class this semester, and it has reminded me over and over again for the last few months how much I hate.  HATE.  Math.  I also took a Sociology class, but that's pretty easy - it's such a subjective course with such inexact parameters that it pretty much boils down to, "If it sounds good, it gets an A"

But yes - Statistics.  The bane of my existence, currently, has not only sucked up all of my free time, but much of my creative spirit.  Fortunately, my online gaming group is kind and patient and keeps inviting me, reminding me that soon, SOON Statistics will be over and I can think about fun things again.

My face to face gaming group dissolved as well, so no gaming for James these days.  I've been popping in on g+ when I have time, but the idea of blogging just has held no appeal to me.

Instead, I've been snatching up old pulps from my Half Price Books.  I breezed through Jack Vance's Demon Princes series in about a week, devoured the first few Earthsea books the next, then switched over to Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover series.  I got to The Bloody Sun, and had to take a break, so right now I'm reading Doc Savage and the Thousand Headed Man and good god, this book has some truly appalling descriptions of foreigners that would make Lovecraft shake his head in amazement.

So why now?

Well, as you can see, I've changed the header of the blog.  It's a brand new day, with a brand new header, designed by an artist that I hold in high esteem.  The header sits at the top of the completed cover for From the Ashes.  I'm going to withhold the name of the artist and the completed image for right now, as I still have a bit to do, but I'm at the point now where I can actually see the completion of this project, and start to work on ancillary stuff, like artwork.  It's kind of unreal.

Sooo, if you're an artist, or you know someone who is an artist, and you can palm off a fair forgery of some Post Apocalyptic Art, get in touch with me via my g+ account, which is linked to the right.  Be reasonable with your rates - I splurged on the cover, and this is a labor of love, funded by me.  I'm not Kickstarting anything, just getting it done by my lonesome, then putting it out there.  I expect to sell about two copies.

Anyhow, my Statistics Hell doesn't end until the beginning of next month, so hopefully shortly thereafter I'll have more to talk about, and can even get back into the blogging rhythm.

Apocalyptic Music - Aphrodite's Child - 666

If you didn't know, before Vangelis was VANGELIS, he was a part of a Greek band called Aphrodite's Child, which put out a double album called 666, which is a musical interpretation of the Book of Revelations.  As you can imagine, it's got some serious apocalyptic imagery. 

Enigma actually sampled quite a bit of the album for their seminal work, MCMXC a.D., and listening to 666 for the first time, having been quite a fan of Enigma was very revealing.  I knew that they sampled heavily (oh, those halcyon days) from many different sources, but it's always fun to hear something you know in a different way.

The famous heavy breathing from Enigma's Principles of Lust, for instance, is a sample from "∞", a five minute song supposedly cut down from 39 minutes, recorded in a single take, where Greek actress Irene Papas chants, "I was, I am, I am to come" over and over, in increasingly hysterical tones. 

Anyway, it's some pretty heavy progressive rock, with seriously apocalyptic overtones.  So enjoy!

My Love Letter to White Wolf

I still remember exactly how I was introduced to White Wolf.  I was in high school, and my gaming group was sitting around the table when I was handed a dog-eared copy of the first edition of Werewolf: The Apocalypse.  It was already looking a bit beaten up, with the claw marks in the cover starting to tear, and the edges of the book starting to curl, like an old textbook.  I flipped through it idly, and asked, "So we're like, hippies?"  and my friend snatched it back, flipped through the pages until he came to a two page splash of two werewolves eviscerating each other, superimposed over text describing combat.  "Fuck that, we're PISSED OFF hippies," he replied.

You have to understand, prior to that, my group had only played AD&D 2nd Edition.  There was very little subtlety to our adventures - 14th level was our 1st level, we all started off with 2 magical items, and we rolled in a flying ship, battling tarrasques and nests of elder red dragons, and our final bosses were gods as often as not.  Our missions were all combat based, with a few traps and mostly given to us by mysterious hooded strangers in bars.  You know - we were that type of group.

Werewolf was something else entirely.

There was nothing heroic about it - the world had gone to shit and it was your own fault.  You fought, knowing that by fighting you were surrendering your own humanity in what would likely end up being a pointless battle - the enemy had already won by the time your troops ever hit the field.  The End Times Were Here, Baby, and you were damned if you did, damned if you didn't.

And yet, you fought - but did you fight because it was the right thing to do, because you didn't know what else to do, or because it was all you knew how to do?  So many questions, so much ambiguity, so completely unlike any of the games we'd been playing up until that point.

And the world - it combined the best aspects of comic books, sequential novels and role playing games - it was a fully realized world (or at least it seemed to be in those heady days), that still left enough unspoken that there was room to breathe.  My only other experience with world building on this level was the Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance, but both of which had been paved over by the stories of others that it didn't feel as though there was any room for my characters - why were they hiring us when Elminster was right around the corner?  The World of Darkness, though, had nooks and crannies, darkened corners and shadowy alleyways with room enough for everyone.

At first, we played it true to what we knew - half the party were Ahroun Get of Fenris basic fighter types.  But as we went along, we started playing around with it - someone put their primary stats into Social, and decided his character owned a bar, and didn't appreciate it when the Gets went full Crinos during happy hour.  Another created a Scottish Fianna Bagpiper, and soon we had a wacky bunch of misfits, none of which were worth a shit in battle, and our GM had to start thinking of... y'know.... OTHER stuff for us to do besides kill formori.

I picked up Mage: The Ascension not long after, and then things got really crazy.  Playing characters who could literally do anything, we got into all kinds of mischief, constrained only by the limits of our imagination.  I picked up Wraith and Changeling, and while we were intrigued by the ideas presented, neither seemed to mesh with our style of play.  Strangely, although we had a copy of Vampire, without articulating it exactly, we could sense that the game was a bit too "scene" for us, and while one of our group talked about playing Wednesday Addams as a Tremere, we never found a good way to integrate her into what had become a MageWolf game.

These were the last games that my original gaming group ever played.  We went our separate ways, and while we got together briefly for a few months six or seven years ago, we never did recapture the same cohesiveness that we had in those halcyon days.

So I wasn't playing any longer, and while I picked up some of the novels here and there, I found them fairly bland, and not representative of the feel that I had gotten from reading the game books.  I drifted - I wasn't gaming, and had mostly forgotten about the World of Darkness.  Then in 1999, White Wolf released the first Vampire Clan Novel, Toreador.  I picked it up on a whim, and was sucked right back in.  It took them 262 pages to completely and utterly knock over the apple cart, totally disrupting the status quo of the World of Darkness, and I couldn't get enough.  To make matters worse, they started integrating their game books into the novels, with the two working in concert - the novels gave personal accounts of the events that took place, while the game books told you what actually happened, as opposed to what was experienced.  This had it's good points and bad (I understand why they didn't spell out the Technocracy dropping a "spirit nuke" on the warring antediluvians in India, but without it, most of the Ravnos novel made absolutely no sense), and in general while it made for excellent marketing, it made it a pain in the ass to keep up with the narrative.

But keep up with it I did, and followed along through the Dark Ages novels, then the Werewolf Tribe books, the Mage novels with the destruction of Doissetep, you name it, I was there.  To this day, I speak fluent Classic World of Darkness, as it's apparently known now.  Gangrel Antitribu, Gnosis, Deathmarks, the Autumn People, the Earthbound, I absorbed it all.

And then, it all went away.

They wrapped up the cWoD, wholesale.  The novels were fairly good, the closeout gamebooks offered some interesting ideas, even if they were frustratingly vague.  As was their wont, each novel was a personal tale, with little of the big picture that I craved, and while they provided the gamebooks as usual, this time they just gave suggestions on how each GM could end things, should they so choose.  Frustrating, but honestly, it was about as good of a sendoff as the line was going to get.

I remember standing in my FLGS, holding the New World of Darkness book in my hand, and thinking, "Do I really want to get back on this train?"  I had ridden the beast from it's inception to its apocalypse, what more did it have to offer me?  I put the book down, and haven't looked back since.

For ages, my bookshelves had groaned under the weight of the WoD books, but as more RPG books came in, they began to fight for space, and gradually the World of Darkness was edged off of my shelves, and into storage, until there was nothing left.  I still had the trade paperback versions of the clan novels on my shelves, but for the first time in ages, I had no White Wolf game books on my shelf.  It was around that time that I was swept up in the Old School Rennaisance, so I didn't miss it much.

Then last week, I was at my local Half Price Books browsing the clearance shelves, and lo and behold, there were two copies of the Second Edition of Werewolf.  You know, the one with the Tony DiTerlizzi comic book at the beginning of the book?  The spines were a bit loose, but they were otherwise in pristine condition.  Nonetheless, HPB had marked them at $5 each.  Impulsively, I grabbed them, not knowing what I would do with them, but just feeling as though they deserved better than the $5 bin at HPB.  They sat in my truck that day while I worked, but it was as though they had opened a floodgate, and I started thinking about the great times I'd had playing it, how much I loved the world, the charactes.

That night was my Traveller game, and I gave the books to the group, and basically browbeat them into agreeing to giving it a shot.  It's going to be a challenge - they're the type that see a wall, lower their heads and charge.

I'm not sure if it's going to work.  I'm prepared for it to fail utterly.  But I'm playing old World of Darkness again, and I can't wait to see what happens!

The Uncanny Chasm

Oh Father Ted, you never let me down.

I'd imagine that many, if not most, of the readers of this blog have heard of the Uncanny Valley, but in case some have not, it refers to the fact that the closer you get to building a robot that simulates humanity, the more "wrong" the robot appears, until it finally hits that point of seamless integration between expectation and reality.

What does this have to do with RPGs?  Well, a game that takes place entirely in the imagination has similar issues.  There is the chasm between the mind of the creator and the mind of the user, and there is the chasm between the mind of the GM and the mind of the PC.  In either instance, the Uncanny Chasm represents the gap between how it is "meant to be" and how it is "perceived to be".

Now, "meant to be" is a loaded phrase.  Some will take issue with it, I'm sure, but at the end of the day, if something is created, that thing has a form.  In order for you to actualize something, you have to conceptualize it, and in order to conceptualize it you have to visualize it.  Basically, the game can inhabit some sort of quantum superposition where it has no direction, purpose or meaning if you like, but as soon as it's actualized, it collapses into a thing, and that thing has form, shape and function.

"Perceived to be" is much easier to to take in - it's the house rules, it's the home-brews, it's the on-the-fly judgement calls that make your game different from any other game out there, regardless of the rules you're using.

So how do you cross that chasm?  How do you get others to play the game that is in your head?

Some will say, "Why would you want to?", and for them, I have no answer.  To me, creation is an act of sharing, and if I'm going to actualize something, I see it as my duty to make sure that my vision is as clear as possible.  So I don't create with these people in mind, and rarely spare them a thought - they will do what they will with what I create, or ignore it completely, as is their right.  My goal is not to create some sort of totalitarian creative space where those who do not use what I have created exactly as I intend are herded into reeducation camps, but rather make sure that those who are looking for something full and alive are able to grok it with as little head scratching as possible.  Basically, if you like what I'm selling, let me make sure you see it as clearly and fully as possible.

So, with that caveat out of the way, the short answer to my question, "How do you get others to play the game that is in your head?" is, "You can't".

No, seriously, you can't.

It is impossible to drag something down from the ether, define it completely, package it and hand it off to someone else without losing something along the way.  Films probably come the closest, but even so, two people can watch the same movie, see the same pictures and hear the same words, and yet come away from the movie with different experiences and understandings.  It only gets harder as you get deeper into the meatspace - two people can read the same book, and imagine the characters as completely different from how the author imagined, or even described, them.  Once you get to roleplaying games, all bets are off.

So it's a matter of expectations - you certainly can't hope that someone is going to play your game exactly as you imagine it, and the world in the GM's mind translating well to the minds of the players is as likely as not.

And yet... and yet... it does happen.  Rarely intentionally, but a thousands monkeys with a thousand typewriters and all that.

How?

I don't think there is a simple answer here, only things that contribute in varying degrees to the ability of a project to bridge the chasm.

Some fall into the trap of thinking that it's the rules.  They're partially right, but not in the way they think.  I'll come back to that.

Art is an easier one to point to.  It allows the reader to peek into the mind of the Creator.  Problem is, unless the Creator is also the Artist, you've actually added another Chasm to be leapt.  Art only gives the feel of a setting, though, not the setting itself.  It can tell you what certain inhabitants and circumstances look like in the world, but it is by no means comprehensive, and it is almost impossible to communicate the "meaning" of a game via the art?  Vibrant colors and strong, clean lines may indicate high fantasy, while drab coloring and heavy shadows may evoke noirish sensibilities, but there are other uses for each, as well - Superheroes use the former, while the latter could also be indicative of horror.  So while not perfect, art does provide a viable, if a bit crumbly, bridge across the chasm.

Another way to go about it is with color.  You know, the little bits of flavor text scattered through the book? They drop you into random parts of the world in question, giving you insight into the Creator's vision, without  the investment of a novel.  If you scatter them widely enough, your reader goes away with a good sense of things.

Then there's background.  This one is tricky.  Done well, it makes you ask questions, and draws you into the world.  World of Darkness is a good example of this.  While the conceptual element of their games are simple (Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, etc), it is legerdemain.  Each game is its own rabbit hole, drawing you further and further from what you think you know about them.  Done poorly, and you end up with an RPG that shall remain nameless.  I grabbed the pdf off of DriveThruRPG, based on an intriguing blurb.  Opened it up, and first had to scroll through a 48 page short story, followed by a 14 page history of this nightmare future, taken decade by decade from the present day all the way to the year 3,450 or whatever.  All just to tell me that it is an Aliens-inspired Lovecraftian Survival Horror game.  It took me all of about 2 pages to twig that, before my eyes rolled back in my skull and the tablet dropped from my hands.

Finally, we get to rules.  I saved this for last, because it is such a fiercely contested topic, one which has given rise to two camps, which do battle regularly with the ferocity of a thousand tigers.  Those camps are, of course, Team SYSTEM MATTERS and Team THE PLAY'S THE THING.  I think that both are essentially correct, depending on how you approach gaming in general.  If you want, you can take any rule set and use it to play any type of roleplaying game you can imagine.  You can play a George Bernard Shaw-esque social comedy using basic Dungeons and Dragons.  You can take the rule set for Classic World of Darkness and use it to play survival horror in space.  You can bend, twist and house rule any system to make it do what you want, if you only want it enough.

Now, with that being said, there are some systems which make it easier for you to do this, and require less acrobatics on your part in order to make it work.  For instance, while your characters may want to play an RPG version of The Importance of Being Earnest, you can either have them roleplay it out, in which case they have to possess the voice and vocabulary necessary to make it feel like an Oscar Wilde game, or make a lot of Charisma checks.  But what if there was a system that was designed specifically to mimic social interaction of that nature?  It allows those who enjoy that sort of thing to play along, without actually having to do it themselves.

While you may love OD&D, how many contortions must you perform to get it to work in a modern day setting?  Clips of ammunition, the relative speed of a car vs. a horse, computers, etc.  Can you do it?  Sure, absolutely.  You can figure out how to use those rules to make all of those things work.  Or, you can use a system that is designed with specifically that in mind, and have it all there, no houseruling required.

So my point regarding rules would be, I think, that SYSTEM CAN HELP YOUR PLAYERS DO THEIR THING.  There is no roleplaying game out there that can only be played by one system.  You can always take your own approach and adapt some other system to do it.  You can dig a ditch with a shovel, or you can dig it with your hands.  Either one will get you what you want, but one is going to make it easier to get it done.    In keeping with the theme of this post, you can build a bridge over the Chasm, or you can tie a rope.

Now that we're past that hurdle, it's worth it to mention that some systems make it easier to leap the chasm.  Some systems operate in such broad strokes that the worlds described are instantly recognizable to almost anyone who plays them.  I believe Dungeons and Dragons' initial success was due in no small part to the fact that the setting was generic enough that you didn't need too much background to be able to play.  You say "Fantasy", and just about everybody thinks, "Dwarves, Elves, Magic, Dragons."  There's no need to cross that chasm, because you're already on the same side.  Pull out BECMI and start talking about the trenches of Verdun, and the Chasm widens between you and your players.

I don't really have any grand idea to wrap this all up with, there is no "solution" to the problem.  There's a problem, and different things you can do to address it, but you'll never do away with it completely.  As a GM, you will always care more about your world than your players will.  As a designer, you will always care more about your world than GMs will.  It's the way of the world - the Uncanny Chasm is littered with the scattered remains of tons of great ideas.  While your ideas are more likely than not to end up there, there are things you can do to make it (slightly) less likely.

Session Report: DCC Interlude

This picture will make sense, promise.

I have been neglecting my blog of late, mostly because I have been on a creative streak, and haven't needed to write about creating, as I've actually been doing it!  Imagine that!

I did, however, want to immortalize the events of my the most recent DCC RPG game that I run.  Ark, from Rather Gamey, participates in it, and did a fantastic writeup of the last session, which can be read here.   This past Saturday, one of the players was unable to make it, and while we toyed with the idea of a one-shot of some other system, we agreed that we were all in the mood for DCC, and having some time between when the last session had left off and the group was meant to stop the ship from departing (did you click that link?), we decided to run an interlude session, where the one character was off doing whatever it was that they were doing, and the rest of the group had an adventure without him.

It's important to note that the group is supposed to keep a low profile, so they decided that they should find a way to get from the district in which they were residing to the Docks, where the ship would be.  They discovered that although the house was on stilts, these were hollow stone stilts, and they also served as privy-tubes.  Lowering a rope, they began their Trek Through the Poo.

The halfling quickly determined that there were drawbacks to being a halfling, when he realized that there was 2.5 feet of waste in the sewers, and he was only 3'2.  So it was slow going as he walked sideways along the curve of the sewers.  They stumbled upon a group of Kobolds in Brown Capes, which are indicative, in the city in which they are residing, of the Servitor Class.  Yes, these Kobolds worked for the City's Sewage Department.  These kobolds also all sounded like Big Boss, the head of C.R.O.O.K.S, the organization of evil in the breakout hit cartoon C.O.P.S., from around 1988.  What's that?  You've never heard of it?  Allow me to enlighten you.  Some might say that Big Boss actually sounds like Edward G. Robinson, but I digress.

The Kobolds had inadvertently caused a cave in, and then lost several of their fellows when they were sent in to tunnel through the mess.  They were trying to figure out who to blame when the party came along, offering them an easy out.  The party crawled into the passage to find that another tunnel had been created adjacent to the one they were digging, and it appeared the kobolds had headed down that tunnel.  Heading down that tunnel, they were attacked by a creature made of bone, with a vole of some sort at the center of its mass, pierced by numerous bones of various animals.  They fought it off, but all but one zero level party member fell into a small pit.  While the group was attempting to climb out, something grabbed the zero level character, and dragged him off without a sound.  They continued on, those with infravision detecting heat, even though none felt it.  Eventually, they came to a room with a pit in the middle.  Red light spilled forth from the pit, along with several large tentacles, that seemed to be responsible for all the new tunnels.  Two of the kobolds were huddling in a corner, along with Paul the Zero Level Guy, and another two kobolds had been jammed into the bone creature things.  The party attacked, and, by the skin of their teeth, managed to defeat the bone creatures, and drive the tentacle monster back into the depths.  The kobolds were grateful for the assistance, and provided the PCs with a trinket that would lead them through the city's byzantine maze of sewers to the docks, going forward.

All was well, except for poor Kaye.  Kaye is the party Cleric, and was called upon frequently to heal his fellows.  As is apt to happen in DCC, Kaye failed several checks, and had invoked some disfavor.  One result was that he had to go on a quest to heal the crippled.  Problem is, in this city, the crippled get tossed over the wall (you did click that link above, right?).  The party decided that the best place to find cripples in a city that doesn't like cripples would probably be at the docks, where perhaps they could find some cripples that had not yet been tossed.

Lucky for them, or by the grace of Kaye's god, there happened to be a plague ship that had just tried to dock.  It had been tied off, then pushed back, while the dock master tried to figure out what to do with it.  The party decided to take care of it.  Of course, Ark's characters are not nice people (you know that because you clicked the link, right?), so they decided to remain above decks in burkas adorned with red crosses (keeps the plague out, donchaknow), arranging a triage area, while Kaye and the Halfling descended into the ship.  From there, it was pretty much a zombie movie, except the zombies flesh was tumorous.  Lots of empty rooms with signs of violence, an ominous barred door with blood smeared all around it, that sort of thing.  It turned out that a successful lay on hands from Kaye's cleric reversed the effects of the disease, but there were so many of them, Kaye's disfavor quickly increased even more.  I believe that, by the time the ship had been cleared, he had gained a new quest to heal the crippled, was required to convert someone by sundown, was deafened for two weeks, had to meditate for several hours, you get the point.

What can I say, the life of a DCC Cleric, is not an easy one.  And to think, Ark is going out of his way looking for a patron.  Oh the fun that we shall have!

FtA: Character Creation (Revised)

This is the beta character generation system for From the Ashes.  It currently only applies to Baseline Humans. Rules for Mutations will follow, as will rules for Mutated Animals, but this is the template on which the other processes will be built.  I ran my wife and I through this process last night, and while we didn't select mutations or equipment, it seemed to go pretty well, and move fairly quickly.  I'm planning on running my home group through the process this weekend, hopefully, and we'll see what happens when professional gamers get their hands on it, in particular, our resident min/maxer Kaye (to give you an idea of his skill, he managed to min/max TRAVELER last weekend).  While I'm not naive enough to believe that this is perfect (I have a feeling Kay will show me exactly how to break it), I think it's a fair beginning - it seems a good mixture of random and custom generation - while you may know what type of character you want to play, if the dice don't roll right, that character just isn't in your future.  One thing that did come up last night was the realization that, while I don't want to have a definite, limiting list of Skills, I probably do need to create example Skills for each Stat - my wife asked me what an Acuity-based skill would be, and I came up blank.  Anyhow, feedback is always welcome!
Stats: There are 9 Stats for each character, divided up into three Stat Blocks.  The three Stat Blocks are: Meat, Mind and Heart.
 

• The Meat Stats are representative of your physical capabilities: Strength, Constitution and Dexterity. Strength is a measure of your muscle, Constitution indicates your general health and physical well being, and Dexterity is indicative of your flexibility, agility, hand-eye coordination, etc.
• The Mind Stats are reflective of your mental capacity: Knowledge, Observation and Acuity.  Knowledge reflects your "book smarts" - it is representative of all the facts that you have learned.  Observation is a measure of your awareness of your surroundings, and Acuity reflects your ability to think on your feet.
• Finally, your Heart Stats show how socially adept you are (or aren't).  Geniality, Persuade and Intimidate are your Heart Stats.  Geniality is basically your all purpose First Impression roll, based on a composite of how you carry yourself, your "neutral" expression, etc.  It's how people react to you when you're not trying to make them react to you in a certain way.  Intimidation is your ability to force someone to do what you want, and Persuade is your ability to convince someone to do what you want.  

Step 1: Discover your Baseline.  For each of your Stat Blocks, roll 1d10.  On a roll of 1-3, you have a Sub Par Baseline in that Stat Block.  On a 4-8, you have an Average  Baseline, and on a 9 or 10, you have an Exceptional Baseline.

• Sub Par - Roll 1d10 to determine each score
• Average - All three Stat Scores are 11.
• Exceptional - Roll 1d4+11 to determine each score.

These represent your natural abilities, as determined by genetics.

Step 2: Determine your Concentration and Dilutias.  This represents the direction you have taken in development throughout your life thus far.  If you have had a Meat Concentration, you have focused on honing your physical aptitudes, while if you've had a Heart Dilutia, you have neglected your social skills.

Choose one Stat Block to be your Concentration, and add distribute an additional five points among the Stats.  The other two Stat Blocks are your Dilutia - subtract three points from the Stats within both.

Alternatively, you can choose to be Well Rounded, in which case all of your Stats remain unchanged.  

Step 3: Choose Skills.  There is no list of Skills.  The Player can choose to have had their character develop any Skill they can think of, provided it is consistent with the environment in which they have been raised.  Each Skill, however, must be tied to a particular Stat.  As far as the actual nature of the Skills are concerned, however, anything goes -  from Seduction (Persuade) to Underwater Basket Weaving (Acutiy) can be selected, provided the Player and the GM agree.  

Each Skill has a Ranking of between 1 and 5 Notches, with one Notch indicative of a basic understanding, and 5 Notches reflecting a complete Mastery of the Skill.

Each character is given Skill Points initially, with which to buy Notches.  

• Someone who is Well Rounded receives 15 Skill Points to buy Notches for each of their Stat Blocks.
• Someone with Concentration and Dilutia will receive 25 Skill Points to buy Notches for the Concentrated Stat Block, and 10 Skill Points for each of their Dilutia Stat Blocks
• The more Notches the Player wants in a Skill, the more Skill Points it costs.
• 1 Notch = 1 Skill Point
• 2 Notches = 3 Skill Points
• 3 Notches = 5 Skill Points
• 4 Notches = 7 Skill Points
• 5 Notches = 10 Skill Points
• For every Skill that has 5 Notches, the Stat associated with that Skill should be increased by 1
• Remember that Weapon Training is a Skill.  Any sort of Ranged Weapon training should be tied to the Dexterity Stat, but Melee Weapon training can be tied to either Strength or Dexterity, depending on the manner in which the Character is trained to use it.  

Gamma World... Is Here! Brazilian Treehopper Edition

What the hell is this thing?

This can't be real, I think, I mean, it's a drawing, so surely someone made this up, right?

Well here are photos!  Not saying that they couldn't be 'shopped, but it provides a little certainty anyways. The best part about these things/  Scientists have no idea what those balls are, or what they're for.

Read about them here and here.  It's also worth going to the Italian Wikipedia page, as for some reason, they have different pictures associated with them.  

And you know what, if they don't exist - they should....


IN GAMMA WORLD.