My God, It's Full of Hair: One Night With Vast & Starlit

Please excuse the title of this post. You see, a couple of weeks back I played Vast & Starlit at Open RPG Night and V&S features a very interesting alien creation mechanic. It works (roughly) like this:

• Every player names an animal they are familiar with.
• Each player, in turn, picks one of the animals and singles out a defining feature. Another player then chooses to either exaggerate or invert that feature.
• This is repeated until each animal has been picked over.
• The results are combined into some kind of bizarre creature.

As you can imagine, when it came time to invent an alien we made good use of the above. If I recall correctly we combined moray eels, squid and sheep. The result was an impossibly hirsute creature that used its hair as tentacles to traverse an alien forest. We called them 'Wigs' and they were a peaceful, nomadic people until we landed on their planet and ate them.

I seem to have gotten ahead of myself, just what is Vast & Starlit? V&S is a nanogame from  Epidiah Ravachol and it has a very interesting price tag: $1 and a drawing. The game is tiny, fitting on a single piece of card about twice the size of a business card. It packs a surprisingly large punch for its small size. Within minutes we had created our merry band of escaped convicts and were soaring through space on The Warden's Wife.

I can't really say too much about the game's mechanics. It's only about 400 words long and anything particularly descriptive here might just as well be a scanned copy of the game. What I can tell you is that it is very much on the story game end of the spectrum. It has no fixed GM and players take turns establishing scenes and determining outcomes. There is no dice rolling, bidding, point economy or other gaming structures to get in the way. Players simply take turns setting up pieces, guided by V&S' rules, and role play things out. The result s a fun and quick game that occasionally left me wishing for Fate's cruel hand to throw me a curve ball.

The lack of a random element really is this game's greatest weakness. Vast & Starlit does a great job of giving the players a lot of elements to jam off of, but a problem arises when it is time to end a conflict scene. One of the players chooses whether something is dangerous, difficult or both and then events proceed based on specific requirements for those three scenarios. The trouble with this is that as a player involved in the game I felt bad about being cruel to the other player characters. I didn't want to kill or maim them and there seemed to be a similar reluctance coming from the other players at the table. Without that die roll to take the blame, even if the odds would have been terrible, conflict didn't have sharp enough teeth. This would have been less of an issue had a I been playing with my regular group, rather than the ragtag band of RPG enthusiasts that showed up for Open RPG Night, as I would have known where my fellow player's limits were.

Vast & Starlit is fun and it is tiny. It isn't a game that I see myself coming back to very often, but I don't think it needs to be. It will sit on my gaming shelf and wait for its time to shine. I'm filing this one away in the "use in case of absent player(s)" box. I say it's worth getting your hands on, if only as an excuse to draw some terrible pictures and snail mail them away.

Categories: Open RPG Night, Review, Science Fiction, Vast and Starlit

Lasers & Feelings & Game Night

Last week my Open RPG Night played Lasers & Feelings (PDF Warning), the latest single page RPG from John Harper/One Seven Design. It's a swashbuckling, Star-Trek-esque game inspired by a song by The Doubleclicks. As is usual for one of Harper's games, it is an RPG boiled down to only the most necessary elements.

I became aware of the game the day before and I knew that it would be perfect for our open nights. I wasn't expecting to play the game so soon after learning about it, but when several of the players called for a space opera game I knew what had to happen.

The game really is very simple. You make a character by combining two archetypes described as Style and Job and then you choose a number between 2 and 5. How high or low that number is determines whether you are better at Lasers or Feelings and all tests are handled by trying to roll above or below the number. Direct hits allow players to ask questions about the world and get true answers. There are a few other wrinkles, but I'll let you read about those yourself rather that type up the whole game here.

Space Pirates - Build - Ancient Space Ruin - Destroy a Solar System

One thing that I always love to see included in micro games like this is a quick and dirty way for a GM to generate an adventure. L&F has that in spades and in just a few rolls I had generated the scenario bolded above. What does it mean? For the most part that is left up to you, but it's amazing how just a few words can provide enough to jumpstart a few hours of role playing.

Our night of gaming went like this:

• Character creation and rules explanation - 5 minutes
• Character introductions - 10-20 minutes
• First act: in which the crew discovers the space pirates - 30 minutes
• Second act: in which the crew infiltrates the space pirates - 40 minutes
• Third act - in which the crew sabotages and escapes the space pirates - 40 minutes
• Epilogue - in which a planet is accidentally imploded - 10 minutes
• Chatting about the game - 30 minutes

All said, a pretty good time.

Oh, what's that? You want to know how a planet was accidentally imploded?

Since you asked...

The space pirates were trying to restore a piece of ancient, yet advanced, technology on a forgotten desert planet. This piece of technology was capable of collapsing entire solar systems and when the heroic crew learned what its purpose was they tried to shut it down. Unfortunately nearly all of them, save a single psychotic doctor, had specialized in Feelings. They were incapable of saving the day by turning off the machine or subtly sabotaging it. No, instead they drove a vehicle into its power core. They escaped the planet just in time to avoid being destroyed with it. Why did it implode? I don't know. The workings of super-advanced ancient technology is beyond me.

A basic character sheet

While L&F is as simple an RPG as you are going to find, I am always looking for ways to speed things along on our open RPG nights. Prior to game night I invested a little time in laying out a basic character sheet for the players. I'd have also liked to do one for the spaceship, but in the end I didn't have enough time to do so. If I whip out L&F again I may do a ship sheet to add to the package.

click image for download and second page

Categories: Free RPG, John Harper, Lasers and Feelings, Open RPG Night, Science Fiction, session report

No good deed goes unpunished.

I recently mentioned how I had started an Open RPG Night in my city and that each week a random assortment of gamers assemble to play an arbitrarily chosen game. Last week that game was Dungeon World and this week a group of (mostly) different people chose to play Apocalypse World.

This time around I wasn't in the GM's seat and I got to flex my player muscles for the first time in, oh, about six months. And boy did I ever flex those muscles. In less than ten minutes I had put together a chopper named Domino, a man that was best described as a greasy, overweight "leatherdaddy". What can I say? There's just something about Apocalypse World that makes me want to play a sadistic gang leader.

While I was busy bringing Domino to life, the GM had whipped up a zombie apocalypse scenario and the other two players had finished making their Battlebabe (Jayed) and Brainer (Sin). The other two players didn't have a clue how nasty a character Domino would turn out to be. For that matter, neither did I.

Domino and Jayed got off to a bad start before the game even began, with Jayed ending up with some Hx (history) with Domino that had placed them at odds in the past. Domino has a good memory and like any gang leader, he holds grudges. Jayed, on the other hand, was a wasteland hero. You know, the kind of guy that helps people out and has the everyone's best interests in mind. The kind of guy whose naivety gets someone killed. Sin, well what can you say about a Brainer? Domino and Jayed knew nothing about him and he knew everything about us.

Things started rolling with Jayed returning to town after having found a farm, a farm riddled with undead. Where there is a farm there is a food and Sunset Mall, our little community, was desperately in need of food. So where does Jayed turn to get the firepower he needs to clear out those zombies? None other than yours truly, violent gang leader and all around bastard. Domino bargained hard, but Jayed was eventually able to convince him to lend his muscle to cleaning out the farm for a sizable portion of the food. Domino fully intended to keep the farm for himself once he and his gang had occupied it, but Jayed didn't need to know that.

Come the next day things got bloody. Domino had a hard time convincing his gang to travel to the farm and leave their motorcycles behind while they moved through rough terrain. He had to crack a few heads and even kill one rebellious upstart before the gang started moving. From there it went smoothly until the gang got to the farm and Jayed decided he knew better than Domino and started issuing orders to the gang. Domino told him to piss off and Jayed ran off to help Sin.

Sin's story was happening alongside everything else. He was nearly always there, hidden and watching and someone had hired him to dive into a specific zombie's brain to find out the location of their child. That zombie was on the farm and when Jayed found him he was grappling with that zombie and about to go down. Ever the hero, Jayed jumped into save his life. Unfortunately there were too many zombies for the two of them to fight and Jayed had to call for backup. Domino heard the call, walked in, blew the zombies apart with his shotgun and walked away to continue overseeing the destruction.

Once the zombies had been cleared out the gang grabbed what food they could and wanted to head back to Sunset Mall. The farm was away from any roads and the gang wanted no part in actually controlling the farm so Domino was willing to let the farm go. Jayed challenged his leadership a few more times, demanding that they leave guards and build defenses. Neither was done and instead Domino started plotting on what to do with Jayed, who had challenged his authority one too many times.

That night Domino visited Sin and convinced him to use his Brainer powers to walk Jayed right into a trap. Sin agreed, perhaps too eagerly, and a deal was struck. The following morning Jayed was captured and beaten within an inch of his life. He put up a good fight, but on one man is no match for fifteen no matter how tough he is. The game ended with Domino dumping Jayed on the outskirts of Sunset Mall and telling him never to return.

Observations

• I was worried that playing an aggressive character like Domino could ruin the night; however, the group I played with made it work and there were no hurt feelings. I think it helped that I didn't push the inter-character conflict until the end of the session so that it didn't distract from the other events.
• Apocalypse World was a hit with the two players that had never tried anything beyond D&D. This doesn't surprise me, but it is always nice to see players open up to something unfamiliar.
• Everyone wanted to play AW again and with the same characters. Jayed's player wanted an opportunity to get  his revenge, so I think we will run AW again in the near future with myself as GM and Domino as an NPC villain.

Categories: Apocalypse World, Open RPG Night, session report