Savage Worlds - Firefly using High Space

Firefly!
The 'Verse. The Alliance and Browncoats. Reavers. Badger, Prentice and Saffron. You know it and you love it. I am running a game in it. This is the report from session one.

For the Savage Worlds setting rule set, I am using the High Space character and ship rules from Storyweaver. I know, why didn't I use the new Sci-Fi companion? Because it wasn't available when I started prepping. As it is, it was only out 2 weeks (or was it 1?) before I ran my first session. I am sticking to High Space for the duration of this mini-campaign. Yes, campaign, there will be more postings about this game in the future.

Characters
From the game that I run on the Last Thursday of every month at my local game store (Guardian Games) I had a lot of requests for a space game. Since I like Firefly the best, I decided to use that. So, a call out to the group for people to dedicate themselves to a character and the game. I got a good response, I ended up with 7 players (one more than I had planned for, but NPC turns PC is pretty cool). The way it worked was: The player sent me a character concept, and I worked them out. Then I sent the character to the players and tweaked them a little from player suggestion. I made all the characters Veteran level (40 XP). Overall, most of the characters are 90-95% how I made them, very little tweaking required.

The run of the crew is this:

• Agent / Spy (Saul Bau - played by Terill)- The player wanted a Shephard Book / Simon Tam combo.. I ended up making a character that worked as a field agent for the Alliance doing low risk (re: low combat) errands. He didn't like the package contents, and is now anti-Alliance.
• Computer expert (Leng Ping - played by Michael) - For covering tracks and seeing what folks are up to.
• Mechanic (Lachlin "Lock" Elliot - played by Aaron) - Someone has to keep this thing safe and running!
• Medic (Skeeter Osceola - played by John) - Folks are apt to get hurt, someone has to fix 'em up. This character has a Native American Indian background, who speaks Cherokee, English and Chinese.
• Melee Mercenary (Elliot MacBride - played by Cameron) - For the times when ranged combat is not an option. Was a pirate with the Pilot, although this character felt better about it than the Pilot.
• Pilot (Edward 'Steady' Rocksmash - played by Chris) - Someone has to fly this thing! Hopefully, he won't have to resort to piracy again.
• Shooter Mercenary ("Bulldog" - played by James) - The subtle reminder of folks watching from afar. This character is also a bounty hunter.

No Captain! This might be interesting, no one is really in charge, or everyone is in charge. But, we do have a nice spread of skills and types. I also tied a few of the character backgrounds together.  The Bounty Hunter was the one who caught the Agent and two characters served on a Pirate ship together. They all have a common 'Browncoat' hindrance.

Plot Setup
All the characters are in a military space station as war criminals or criminals against the Alliance. Pirates, captured browncoats, spies, etc. The space station is near where the Reavers ran headlong into the Alliance fleet. I took some liberty and I changed the order of events. In my game, the Reaver recording blasted thru the 'Verse before the Reaver / Alliance clash. This allowed the characters to see the recording first, and then the space station they are on gets attacked. This forces the characters to perform a prison break. With no weapons. And with Reavers running around everywhere.

The Game
Now to the meat of the posting - the actual play. I'll try to keep this fairly succinct, but will try to get all enough of the details to fill in the gaps. In the middle of Skeeter's medical documentary show, the Reaver broadcast happens. The guards try switching channels on the common room vidscreen only to find it is on all the channels. The guards power off the vidscreen. But everyone in the room saw enough. About eight hours later (when everyone is in their bunks), there is a huge crashing sound. The station shakes and alarms start screaming. A few minutes later, the power and the lights go out. The cell doors default to an unlocked state under a power down so the characters can exit their cells to the common room. The two door system out of the cell block is still intact. Guards have flashlights and gather the prisoners into one area, watching them. Radio chatter is overheard by the prisoners as the situation deteriorates in the rest of the station. Using the guard's computer terminal, the characters start watching through the station's camera system.  They see empty military barracks, an empty ship bay (one ship remains), and a lot of fighting throughout the station.  The characters see Reavers.  A lot of Reavers, armed with hunks of metal and slaughtering anyone they come across.

After some time, the characters decide to escape the prison block.  They take guard with them who is reluctant to go. Armed with just a couple of stun batons from the cell block guards, the characters start their escape. They reach another two door system that leads from the prison section to the regular section of the station. The far door is open (looks broken) and there are two Reavers surrounded by dead Alliance guards. Then it happens, the Reavers spot the characters and rush the closed door.  They start to smash it down with pieces of metal in their hands.  The door opens and one Reaver rushes through. The Reaver hits the closest character and takes hits from the other characters.  This merely shakes the Reaver. The second Reaver also attacks, swinging wildly.  Several characters dodge past the Reavers to pick up dropped weapons off of the dead Alliance soldiers.

When the characters start grabbing up weapons, I gave them a choice of pistol or rifle, and then had them roll a die.  That roll determined the weapon card from the deck weapon cards I had (See the Weapon Cards section later in the post). Six characters manage to drop two Reavers and continue on. The corridors are noisy with the sounds of battle: gunfire, screams, and pounding. Outside of the prison area is a stairway leading both up and down with noises from both directions. Waiting to see where the Reavers may come from, the characters are rewarded with Reavers start running up and down the stairs at them.  One of the weapons the characters picked up is a massive machine gun, which helps them make their from a large number of Reavers coming down on them. As the characters move along, they run across ripped up bodies of Alliance soldiers, at which point they continue to arm themselves, including battle armor and helmets. First stop is the armory, which they find mostly empty. Next is the medical bay to pick up some patch pads, sell-able medications, and basic supplies.  One more stop at a storeroom for rations and other general supplies.  Then to the ship bay to see if they can abscond with the ship they spied earlier. They make it to the ship bay, get the ship ready for flight, and take off.  The ship bay doors are opened and they fly out into the middle of a big space battle.  That's where we ended for the night.

Unknown Ship
There is a ship that they can escape on, but it has a serious lack of markings on it. The players receive a blank ship sheet, and will have to figure out the details of the ship as they use it.  I thought that this would add some intrigue to the travel time in deep space. Plus, it will give the players time to learn some setting details and rules.

Paper minis

Weapon Cards
I bought a deck of Savage Worlds SciFi weapons cards from a company called Dramascape. They primarily make maps, but these cards were interesting to me.  I got them from RPGNow.com (http://www.rpgnow.com/product/116672/Savage-Worlds-SciFi-Weapons-Cards) and used the print-on-demand option.

Paper minis and a weapon card.

Toy spaceships I got off Amazon for this game (well, mostly for the sessions coming up):
Toys 1 | Toys 2 (I used these for bennies!) | Toys 3

Savage Worlds - Agents of Oblivion - Bullet Extraction

One of my favorite settings in Savage Worlds is Agents of Oblivion, by Reality Blurs.

Not only have I run several games in this setting, but one specific adventure I have run probably 6 times. When I first got Agents of Oblivion (AoO), I managed to get an adventure called "Bullet Extraction" from the mostly-famous Ed Wetterman. This was the first AoO adventure that I ran, and I still have it in a manilla folder as one of my ready-to-run games that I have been amassing. It took a little editing as it was written for the beta set of the AoO rules, but after that was done, I was ready to roll.

Characters
Agents are all members of an organization called Oblivion, hence the name of the setting.
All of the characters have code names, which are all colors.
Agent White: Cell leader
Agent Black: Combat mage and arcane expert
Agent Pink: Close range assault expert
Agent Green: Computer expert
Agent Brown: Infiltration expert
Agent Orange: Information expert

Plot Setup
The mission is a snatch and grab. The target is a briefcase, contents unknown. The location is a bullet train in Japan during a daily run. The organization they are going up against is The Hand of Rasputin and the opposition agents are one known senior agent and an unknown accomplice.

Running the Game
As I mentioned previously, I've run this game a half a dozen times and I am amazed how different the game goes each time.  The neat thing about this game is the timer.  The agents have 30 minutes of time on the train until the mission officially starts.  At that point, the agents have 5 minutes to get the briefcase and get to the top of the train where a helicopter will extract them.  The 5 minute time period is where the timer comes in; each minute of agent time is represented by 15 minutes of real world time and is accounted for with the timer.  This adds an element of urgency to the game session, which I think is fantastic.  The target is in a First Class train car, alone.  The Hand of Rasputin managed to book the entire car for their agent.

The progress of the game is essentially the agents getting through security (a fairly minimal task), scoping out the agent and the little girl with her, boarding the train, and using the 30 minutes to prep for the 5 minute mission.  During this time, the hacker is usually very busy while the rest of the team is planning and doing recon.

The details of the actual mission varies from group to group, but the agents will make their way to the First Class train car and assault the agent and little girl.  At this point, I don't really want to reveal any spoilers, so we'll leave you on the precipice of the mission and call it a day.

RaspberryPi

Backstory

Around Christmas 2012, I decided I wanted to have a media server.  I was looking at the Mac Mini and was pretty serious about it, but I didn't really want to spend $800-ish for this, and then a big HD in addition.  I looked at mini-computers running Windows and Linux and my buddy Tim asks "Have you looked at the RaspberryPi?".

No.  No, I hadn't.  I started researching and in about 72 hours made an order..  Sure, it's only $35, but with SD cards, power supply, case, wireless keyboard and mouse, wiFi adapter (which I am not using..) I was still under $100 for the thing.  Add another $100 for a 3TB external USB 3.0 drive, and I got something worth playing with.

First and foremost, I wanted a media server and I really like XBMC.  I know there are a lot of PLEX users out there, but PLEX on Unix doesn't play files, it just serves them to other PLEX clients. I find XBMC to be better for my purposes. Next, I researched a few of the RaspberryPi Linux distributions for XBMC, and settled on RaspBMC.  I settled on it before I actually had my Pi. The Pi took a little over a month for me to get the damn thing!  The order was in back-order hell.

Initial setup

I finally got the thing in the mail, and I had already decided that I was going to set it up temporarily in my office and then move it to its designated spot - next to the main TV in our media room.  The initial setup was fine, although I did re-image the SD card twice just messing around with it.  Next, I plugged in the already formatted drive (EXT4) and the Pi recognized it, and I had a working media server.  I copied a few movie files over and played them.  Everything was ducky, so I moved it to its home.

Power

From what I have read 90% of problems with the Pi are a result of a poor power supply.  I was victim of this as well.  For the longest time, my TV was getting some wavy lines on its input, and it carried over to other inputs on the TV - it wasn't too bad, but it was noticeable and definitely undesirable.  I tried 3 power supplies over about 6 months and finally settled on the solution I have now. Here's a rundown of what I experienced:

• First power supply was the one I bought from the store I got the Pi from.  This gave me wavy lines on the TV (I am using the RCA video, not the HDMI right now). Other than that, everything worked well.
• Second supply I tried got rid of the wavy lines on the TV, but the external hard drive mounting kept dropping.  I really don't understand this one too well, the external drive is powered from its own power supply, but when I switched back to the original power supply, the HD mounting issues went away.
• I found an interesting wall outlet item - it plugs into an existing outlet and the bottom outlet is 2 USB charging ports.  I got a nice thick USB cable (with lights!) and all my power issues went away.  The only issue with this solution is I lost a power outlet on the wall and the USB cord is kind of short, so the Pi had to move down a shelf.  It's a simple solution, I just plugged it into an existing outlet.  I could buy an outlet and pull the other one, but for now, this works and it was an easy test.

Software

Over the past few months I've been messing with the little box and have found it to be pretty damn neat.  It's not a powerhouse, but here's what I am doing with it.

XBMC - obviously.  this is why I got it.  It doesn't play as many formats as the Mac or Windows - and I even bought the additional MPEG-2 and other license (for $2 each).  I tried using software as a remote control from my phone and tablet, but it got into some repeat loops.  I usually just use the wireless keyboard and mouse I got for it.  The interface is a little slow to refresh, but once you're watching something it runs fine.  As I said above, I am using the Raspbmc distribution.

SSH - For remote access to the Pi.  Since I still don't have an HD TV in that room, using the command line directly from the Pi is not very good.

FTP - I use this mostly as a file manager - FileZilla is a great interface and I can rename, move and generally muck about with files with ease.

Torrent - I am using Transmission as a headless server.  I can manage torrents via a web page interface from any computer on my network.  This works out pretty slick!

iPerf - For some network issues I was having, this was a great tool to install and use for me.

Wrap-up

I have found that I like having a Unix box always running on my network.  I've been playing with it and re-learning the Unix command line; although, I am still not an expert, I know enough to be really dangerous. This has led me to use my Mac OS X terminal for unix commands, too.  I have a lot more fun on a command line now.

There you go, that's my geeky project that has been around for a little over a year now.

Savage Worlds - Dracula

This month's game landed squarely on Halloween and I opted to run a game instead of finding something else to do.  It was also our first time at Guardian Games.  They are in a new location and I love the new store, so I had to try gaming there.  I got a big, private room to play in, but their hours are shorter than our other venue, so some time management came into effect.

My friend and co-GM Brian (AKA HawaiianBrian on various Savage Worlds forums) wrote up an adventure based on the classic story of Dracula. The PCs were Jonathan Harker, Mina Harker (Jonathan Harker's wife), Abraham van Helsing, Dr. Jack Seward, Sir Arthur Holmwood, and Quincey Morris.

If you are familiar with the classic story, the game starts before Mina is enthralled by Dracula, but the second act is during the time when she is starting to be influenced by the vampire.

Throughout the adventure, there are journal entries that are used to set up the next scene.  I thought this was a great way to introduce the next scene - some of which are weeks apart.  I took it a step further and had the player read the journal entries for their character. The players enjoyed that, too.

Before I detail out the game, I will highlight the best part of the night: right before the scene where the characters approach Lucy's tomb, there was quite a in-character discussion (yes, role playing!) about whether or not there are such things as vampires and about Dracula, his three brides and, potentially, Lucy.  This may have cut into our time, but I would not have had it any other way; the players enjoyed the in-character debate.

Act I
The first act is after the death of the group's friend, Lucy.  Van Helsing is trying to prove to the rest of the group of the existence of vampires, and most of the group is skeptical.  The plan is to go into the crypt at night and if her body is in the coffin, then Van Helsing will have to find another way to prove his claims.  If, however, the body is not there, that is some proof to his story.  As it turns out, the group shows up in the daytime and obviously the body is there.  They wait around until dark, and the body rises out of its grave.  A battle ensues with the characters fighting a vampire and the vampire attempting to get away.

The casket is open; Lucy walks!

The burst template shows the influence of a cross being used against the vampire.

The party all gangs up on Lucy to pin her to the ground and ultimately stake her.

Act II
This act is primarily a search and destroy mission.  Dracula has brought large crates of dirt from Transylvania and the characters decide to consecrate the earth so that Dracula does not have a refuge in England.  They find all but one box.  Due to time, I had to really speed this act up, but the flavor was still there.


Act III
The last act is to follow Dracula to his castle in Transylvania and, hopefully, destroy the creature.  There are several scenes in here that include a chase scene (wolves chasing the carriage) and some gypsy protectors who attempt to prevent the heroes from gaining entrance to the castle.  Once they are in the castle, the characters search for the Nosferatu, and encountering either his three brides, or himself.  Hopefully not all at the same time.  As it turns out, the party managed to get into the castle during the day, surprising the three wives, but their screams and deaths alert Dracula.  The final battle was fairly fast as Savage Worlds exploding damage dice sometimes shortcuts drama to an exciting quick end.

Final showdown in the brides' chamber with Dracula

Thanks for reading and watch for another posting chronicling my games.

Savage Worlds: High Space

Late posting.. I ran the game on September 26th, and it has taken me this long to post.  Sorry.

This game is in the setting of High Space, by Storyweaver Games.  I ran the "Blind Threat" scenario that can likely be free if you work it right. (Look at the site.) I paid the $3 and ran a enjoyable game for everyone.

The Setting
The PDF purchase from RPGNow.com is $15 and the Core Rules is quite the set.  You get the Character Analects, the Fleet Manual and The Lantern.

Character Analects is the setting book we all expect for a Savage Worlds setting with Races, Edges, Hindrances, Skills, and unique setting qualities.

Some unique things about this setting are Culture, Career, Equilibrium, and Gear purchasing.

First, Culture.  Items like Aristocrat, Militant, Beyonder and more.  These give your character a background of how he grew up in the universe; they also give you some skills.  I hadn't mentioned it yet, but in character creation you only get 13 skill points, where typically 15 are used, and Culture gives you the missing skill points.

Careers are current or very recent job paths the character has had. This gives you access to benefits that are usually equipment beyond a Novice's grasp.

Gear purchasing is done based by rank, not credits or money.  Acquisition rank is used for getting and keeping equipment.  If characters are found with equipment beyond their rank, they have a hard time keeping it.

Equilibrium is a new attribute that is specific to life in space: cryo travel, space maneuvering, bionic implants, and encountering alien species.  It seems to be a lot like Sanity in a horror game, because you roll checks whenever you encounter something to keep from flipping out.  Unlike a Sanity check, Equilibrium doesn't reduce, it is only effective for the current scene.

Fleet Manual
This is the ship building manual to make ships.  They are built like typical Savage Worlds characters: the ships have Manuever, Computing, FTL (Faster Than Light), Displacement, and Quality.  There are also derived stats of Pace and Toughness.  Ships can have hindrances and edges, too.  Building out a ship was really fun.  There is a lot to play with.

There is an option to play a ship as a character which I tried setting up.  I built an AI which was the ship's computer.  I am not sure if I did it correctly...  No one played that character anyway, so we didn't get to play test it.

The Lantern
The Universe.  This guide describes races, planets, corporations, organizations, and political entities.  This is your sandbox.  And a plot point campaign outline.  All the plot points are sold separately, it seems, something I just figured out.  The Lantern also has a plot hook generator and a lot of tools to create your own adventures in High Space.

The Game
First off, characters were chosen.  I built a typical crew of a space ship and used some alien races and even androids.  I also built an AI character to be the ship. One good thing about Storyweaver, they built Hero Lab files, and since I am a heavy user of Hero Lab, this was very welcome.  Turns out there needs to be some fixing of the files, but I got the unofficial updates from my buddy who works at Lone Wolf for the Savage Worlds piece.  I was then able to make characters for the game.

The adventure was planned to split the party: they go off into space to make a deal and when the deal is done, the crew left behind on the planet have a short window of time to get the goods the deal was made for.  Both of the deals used an extended diplomatic mechanic using the dramatic tasks method.  Alternately, the adventure wrote in some pre-negotiation bits that impact the rolls for the dramatic task.

After each of these, there was an incident to introduce some combat, including ship battles.  The players opted out of the ship battle in an interesting way.  They had done such a good job negotiating that they managed an extra bit.  They used this bit to pay off the 'Pirate' in space to avoid combat.  The incident on planet side wasn't so friendly; they were attacked outright.  The party defended themselves quite adequately. With a big ass gun.

The next scene was implementing the plan, to put a security scrambler on a network of a corporate plant.  The scrambler replicates a signal and destroys the communication network of the corporation.  With the job finished, the party launches to space for their getaway.  One of the corporate ships is nearby and intercepts the ship.  The battle is engaged.  After a few rounds, the players manage to destroy the other ship and make good on their escape.

Overall Impression
I like the rules, with the exception of Equilibrium.  I might house rule it out as I don't think it really adds much.  Cyberware, AIs and aliens are well done, although I haven't really dove in as deep as I could.  I love the ship building and the rules for the ships; I think that was really well done.  The Sandbox setting is very detailed and should be very useful.  I don't like that each plot point is a new PDF to buy, and they aren't all available yet.  Hopefully when they are all done, you can get them bundled.