I am still prepping my Brutal Magic Desert Campaign, which is basically prep-finished at this point, sans actually, ya know, running the game. I took May off because I was pretty busy with travel nearly every weekend but the game was mentally cooking that whole time. I am not super happy with my encounter tables but that’s something that needs to be tested in play before I toss it out. Otherwise, I will end up redoing every little bit of this campaign and never get around to playing it.

But I digress: talking about the BMDC is not why I am here, for I have been thinking about ideas for other campaigns in other systems. Is that a form of procrastination? Yes. Will I let it stop me? Never.

Sometimes it is more fun to think about a campaign than it is to do the nitty gritty of prepping it, and sometimes probably more fun to think about the campaign than actually play it. Maybe some of these ideas would totally suck – but they sure do sound cool, at least to me.

Extraction Shooters Are Really Just West Marches For FPS Games

I said what I said.

If you’re lost, an extraction shooter (or looter shooter, as they are sometimes called) refers to a subgenre of FPS video games where generally, you get dropped into a map to scavenge loot, PVP, fight NPC bosses, and ultimately survive long enough to leave the map with your ill-gotten gains before a long-ish match timer runs out. Usually, if you die your body – with all the gear you brought into the map + all your loot – can be looted by other players while you get ejected from the session back to your hub/main lobby/whatever.

With me so far? Great. If not, boo hoo I tried. Google it. If I am speaking in too vague of generalities, it’s because there’s a handful of these games with variations of the base formula but it nearly always boils down to:

1. Get in
2. Get loot
3. Get out
4. ???
5. Profit

What does that sound like? A West Marches game? Wow reader, you’re so right! I was thinking the same thing.

A friend of mine sent me a youtube video of some normie explaining to brainrotted 5E stans what a West Marches campaign is and how it works. Being based and OSR pilled I of course already knew what it was, but the point of my friend sending it to me was it came up on his feed and he was like, “wow this sounds like it would work for our group, you should put your own spin on this and run it.” So now I feel obligated to do just that, but it also got the gears turning, and this friend of mine is a big extraction shooter fan and I guess I had a Jimmy Neutron brain blast connecting the dots.

I’ve played several of these extraction shooters, to wit:

Escape From Tarkov – the OG extraction shooter, set in modern day not-Russia featuring gritty, relatively realistic combat and autistic levels of detail in gun customization. It’s a shitty game made by shitty people but nobody has dethroned the king. Janky, frustrating, and addicting in equal measure.

Hunt: Showdown – Supernatural bounty hunting in zombie-filled Bayou circa 1895. More arcade-y combat, focused more on finding the location of big monster bosses and extracting with their bounty tokens than scavenging loot. Think Jonah Hex meets Resident Evil. I love the vibes, love the “cowboy guns” which I grew up shooting irl, and love the tighter focus.

Marauders – Dieselpunk space pirates duking it out in flying submarines on the way to loot space stations. Far less popular after the initial launch, but has a cool vibe and bonus points for having space ships (and several very obscure 20th century weapons).

The Cycle: Frontier – Generic scifi. Not very interesting visually, writing was cringe, and the gunplay didn’t feel good so my friends and I didn’t stick with this one very long. Included here for completeness’ sake.

I Bet You Thought This Was About RPGs Not My Half-Assed Review Of Video Games

And you’d be right. So to get back on track, let’s see how we could turn one of these extraction shooters into a West Marches RPG – or at the very least, what mechanics we steal from these games.

I have actually done some work at some point of actually adapting EFT and am cannibalizing some of that for this writeup. Hopefully what is below makes some sort of sense. It’s an adaptation of elements of the video game to tabletop/p&p mechanics in a way that clicks, I think, and could be used in a general sense.

So how would we expect the EFT mechanics adapted RPG to look?

• Goal is to venture out from home base to scavenge goods to survive in wreck of a city
• Stars Without Number/Traveller/Cyperpunk 2020 as mechanical base
• Household goods as treasure, with inventory slot management being important
• Google Earth maps of whatever city you’re setting your game in as dungeon/encounter maps
• PC “reputation” scores for NPCs/factions affecting how they treat you/services offered
• A stash/hideout that is upgradable by using specific scavenged goods to unlock services/bonuses
• Survival mechanics (food/water, encumbrance, fatigue)
• Pointcrawl of different districts/specific buildings in the city of varying risk/reward
• Different loot pools for different places (nails & tools at hardware store point, food at market, etc)

What about Hunt: Showdown?

• Goal is to fight your way through several points of interest to hunt for undead bosses & collect bounties
• Boot Hill as mechanical base
• Fairly-weak “mob” enemies with specific debilitating abilities (slow, poison, blind, choke, etc)
• Bosses with specific attacks/resistances/strategies to beat them; take back proof of bounty
• Pointcrawl web of small dungeons, containing either a boss or a clue to which dungeon they’re in
• Level up gives perk points used to either heal lost max health or buy perks
• Max level lets you retire PC for meta currency (lame, instead unlocks classes/bonuses for new PC?)

And now doing Marauders…

• Goal is to dogfight your crew’s pirate ship to raid & loot mining/military/civvie space stations
• Stars Without Number/Traveller as mechanical base
• Lots of spaceship combat in vicinity of PoIs
• 1-man escape/boarding pods, used for ship boarding & looting wrecks/disabled ships/PoIs
• Space stations, derelict ships, asteroid colonies as dungeons & are PoIs on pointcrawl
• Loot is building materials, food/med supplies, intel/war plans, bullion, weapons & ammo, parts
• Faction standing for trading/donating to war effort/doing missions

So There We Have It, I Guess

How workable do these seem? Are there mechanics or elements that would adapt well to other West Marches campaigns? Did this even make sense?

Brutal Magic Desert Campaign: Currency

 

The OSR grindset is all about “disregard danger, acquire currency” and that is certainly gonna be true for my game. But what do you do when your Bronze Age-Mesoamerican-Dying Earth desert crawl is deeply metal-poor, and all metal items are incredibly ancient and inherently magical?

 

You reject the Gold/Silver/Copper economy and substitute your own. Obviously, I am ripping off Dark Sun pretty heavy – so how did it work there?

 

In Athas (Dark Sun world) metal coins exist but are much more valuable. For the record, I’m talking about the currency system from the OSE Dark Sun adaptation by Lixu. There, the standard coin value is expanded with the inclusion of bronze and ceramic pieces, along with ceramic “bits” worth 1/10 a ceramic piece. So the conversion is as follows:

1 Gold Piece = 10 Silver Pieces = 20 Bronze Pieces = 100 Ceramic Pieces = 1,000 Bits

PCs start at 3^rd level with 3d6 x 20 CP and the XP system is CP = XP, rather than gold.

 

I could (and probably will, at least initially) just copy this wholesale but my setting is even more metal poor than Athas. I would like barter to be a bigger deal, coins to be rare, and different cultures to have very different currencies worth very different amounts.

 

Here’s what I am currently considering:

• The city-dwelling humans of the starting river valley use ceramic coins of the standard denominations as an easing-in point for the players

• The dwarves who live in cliff dwellings and mesa top pueblos use turquoise beads and shards of obsidian as money, but in different denominations than the standard 100/10/1

• Elves, as desert nomads (totally just Fremen), have an economic system centered on water and animal husbandry – thinking of a “water-ring” being worth a person’s daily water ration

• Halflings I envision as small family bands of hunter-gatherers who solely use barter

 

The idea is that money should be a cultural signifier that tells the players something about the world they’re playing in, rather than just a numerical indicator of purchasing power on their character sheet. Is it more unwieldly to use and track different currencies? Yes. Is it more interesting than just ___ GP in my pocket? Yes. Is that worth the trade? Time will tell.

Brutal Magic Desert Campaign -- The Setup

Hu Nhu

I’ve been mulling over what kind of campaign I want to run, what I want in it, and what system I’m going to use to make it happen. Many things to consider, many choices to make, and yet…

 

In the immortal words of Bill O’Reilly (may he rot): Fuck it, we do it live.

 

Murderhobo, B/X-style, GP = XP, hex crawl is the M O V E.

 

I really took to heart a comment from Arnold K of Goblin Punch on my last post:

 

“Another question for yourself: what's the minimum amount of rules you need to have prepped for session one? Because you can always add more rules as the need arises to flesh out the rest of the system, but session 1 can be pretty small.

 

I'm a fan of smallest-viable-system for session 1. Let's you focus on the important stuff.”

 

I got a lot of great comments on the OSR discord, too, about systems and Dark Sun adaptations and the long and short of it is this: I’m gonna run OSE.

 

Why?

 

I told my friends we were going to play old school-style D&D and I want to stay true to that. I have a bunch of B/X compatible materials and OSE seems to me to be the least conversion-heavy. It’s rules-light and easy enough for noobs to understand. I like the idea of the simplicity of the OG classes, and I think I’ll steal the (Chris Kutalik’s of Hill Cantons fame) idea of the players “unlocking” more classes through play.

 

So to circle back to what Arnold K was saying – what do I need for session 1? A non-exhaustive list:

• Rules – check. I have the free OSE Basic rules, which is enough as-is, but I think I may just link the players to the OSE SRD and use that. Or maybe both.

• Starting Dungeon – check. Prison of the Hated Pretender, Tomb of the Serpent King, and Dyson’s Delve are all on the menu. Which one the PCs go for is up to them.

• Starting Area – check. I stumbled upon the Welsh Piper hex crawl generation method (though I used Noisms from Monsters & Manuals simplification) generated an area, hated it, and decided instead to just do a rough hexmap of the Tucson area. I followed the procedures for generating sites, though.

• Starting Hooks – WIP. I like the Elder Scrolls trope of the player starting as a prisoner, and the Dark Sun intro adventure can be mined for ideas. I’m thinking the PCs start as slaves being transported in a caravan that comes under attack and the rest is up to them.

• Player Gazeteer – WIP. Not strictly necessary, I suppose, but nice to have to introduce the players to both the bespoke setting and the house rules I plan on using.

• House Rules – check, sorta? Right out of the gate I want to steal the OSE Dark Sun weapon materials/breakage, currency, and survival mechanics.

 

What else am I missing?

What I Want In A Game Pt. 1: BRUTAL MAGIC DESERT CAMPAIGN

When I was in undergrad I read some bullshit article in WSJ or BI or FT or some other Wall Street circlejerk publication about how to pick a job that was right for you. They interviewed some president or C-Suite guy about how he came to pick the job he had (lol, I know). The advice? List what you want in a job, or features or aspects you liked in jobs past, and find a position that checks as many of those boxes.

 

Shit advice if you’re a teenager who has only ever worked in fast food, but the idea (and the utter hubris the article represented) stuck with me. I have been thinking about spinning up a new campaign and have a couple setting ideas. By applying the shit WSJ job search advice to RPGs, I hope to come to a decision point on what I want this new campaign to be.

 

I wrote a little in the previous post about how I haven’t run a traditional D&D game before and am sorta looking to do that now. Let’s see if by the end of this process, it will be a setting in which to run an already-written ruleset or a setting + rules hack. Historically everything I’ve done has been the latter. Can I exercise some restraint this time around? Time will tell, but without further ado:

On Writing

I need to be a better, faster, writer.

 

It is important for my job and in some sense, important for my mental health. I am a serial procrastinator and the inability to just sit down and get shit done bothers me to the point of very deep self-doubt. Golden boy’s in bad shape, and all that.

 

The other reason I would like to be a better, faster, writer is for RPGs.

 

Being a GM can be a lot of writing, or at least it is for me. Why? It isn’t prep, really, because I’m a seat of the pants prepper. I like the improv aspect of being a GM and lean into that pretty heavily because I feel like it’s a GM strength of mine. Probably because writing prep isn’t. But when it comes to settings and putting together hacks of systems, I start to procrastinate, get frustrated with myself, and the doom spiral begins. I have a bunch of mostly-written systems and hacks sitting in a folder which for the most part were never played.

 Logging back into Blogger to post this forced me to confront my list of posts for this blog. I started this blog in Spring of 2022, wrote a little bit, then went dark. I started up again in Spring of 2023 because I was starting my Star Wars D6 campaign which lasted through the end of summer, roughly. It is now Spring of 2024. It is weird to see a pattern of my writing -- what is it about this time of year that gets me thinking about RPGs and inspires me to start writing? Why have I consistently stopped around the same time? 

It's time to fix that!

 

The way I will do that is to just force myself to write more. Pure and simple, this is a skill that must be built by repetition. It’s funny that in grade school, you write often; in college, you often write more (or at least I did, as a journalism major); and in law school, you basically stop writing altogether. I had few essays to write and they were few and far between. As an attorney now, I am forced to write more but am out of practice. Time to get back into it.

I have been playing in a very excellent campaign run by the inestimable @RetiredAdventurer and feel inspired to myself take up the mantle of GM once more. Dune (and the slow march of the seasons towards the hellscape of Arizona summer) makes me want to run something like Dark Sun. On the other hand, Planescape a la Homeward Bounders calls my name.

 

An astute reader would see that 2E rears its ugly head. I have never played 2E, and the other night came to a realization: I have never actually run D&D. I have never actually run a traditional high-fantasy game. Playing Baldur’s Gate 3 sorta makes me want to, and I think I have a couple buddies who are interested.

 

Decisions, decisions.

The Big Rules Update

 Not much to see here -- I have updated my Lightspeed D6 rules to now allow for modifications of weapons and starships with specific components, rather than flat bonuses. I made a few tweaks here and there too (I mean, how can you not?) but the main thing was making upgrades to weapons and ships crunchier.

As I told one of my players, I have essentially Tark-ified the weapons of Lightspeed D6 -- though my bigger influence for this new subsystem is the venerable Knights of the Old Republic II - The Sith Lords computer RPG. The starship components & system are a meld of Stars Without Number (I literally cannot stop adapting this game, it is so good) and an old MMORPG that is so near and dear to my heart, Star Wars Galaxies.

Have I lost you?

Escape From Tarkov is a PVP-heavy extract looter-shooter (wow, so many meaningless genre buzzwords) with a shitty interface, shittier netcode, and an absurd focus on gun customization. It was, and still is, very popular with my circle of friends. I hate it. But parts of it are great, and I will steal liberally from those parts -- such as gun customization.

Knights of the Old Republic is, of course, a Star Wars computer RPG series with two entries (we don't talk about the craptastic MMO) set 4,000 years or so before Episode I that was based off the d20 system of yore. It was a formative experience for the VPofTucson and both games are in my top 5 favorite games of all time. Naturally, it is bellwether of my view of RPGs in general and Star Wars RPGs in particular.

Star Wars Galaxies is worth a drunk or high rant or three. It was a beautifully flawed game that I sunk an inordinate amount of time into at the game's twilight. There really ought to be novels written about such a feeling -- joining as a noob an MMO that has been operating for years, filled with the abandoned detritus of max-level players who have long ago quit playing, but their desolate ghost towns still dot the map and the remaining holdouts squabble over an increasingly-worthless market share in the galactic bazaar. 

Once more, an enormous influence on me to this day and the standard by which I compare all other MMOs. None measure up whether due to: nostalgia, married-adult-employed free time constraints, or lack of chutzpah in design. 

I   D I G R E S S.

My new Lightspeed D6 rules (version 0.06) are available HERE. You will also find of course the character sheet template, and a folder containing all of the older versions of the game. I do this not because I want to be roasted for my (many) game design sins, but so that people can see the evolution of the game as I continue to tweak it. 

There are other games that I have been influenced by that do not maintain a version repository (cough cough Hyperspace D6) and I think that's fuckin cringe. If you're going to make dramatic changes to the game, at least keep the older versions publicly available -- it's a damn good thing I kept the older versions of the game that I downloaded and damn good luck they have survived a couple different hard drives.

Once more, I   D I G R E S S.

Let me know what you think about the new version and its changes to how character-scale injuries, vehicle combat, and weapon/ship upgrade components work (or don't work). Or don't, I guess. It does kind of feel like I post into a void but this is cathartic in its own way, rabid comment fanbase or not.

Lightspeed D6

Here it is, in all its glory: my hack of WEG Star Wars D6. Or to be more precise, my Frankenstein game mashed together from parts of Star Wars D6 Essentials, Hyperspace D6, the OG WEG editions, Stars Without Number, and the Cepheus Engine.

You can find a PDF of the most recent version HERE along with a template character sheet for Google Sheets/Excel and the “Planets of Kord Pria Sector,” a gazetteer of planets in which my home game is set. Go wild.


I probably should’ve released this a while ago but just didn’t bother to. My home game is in the midst of an unplanned hiatus and so the time I’d spend prepping is instead spent writing this blog post.


Turns out scheduling around adult lives for half a dozen people is a real nightmare. AKA, a tale as old as time.


A big contributor (and rather unlikely one at that) for why we are stuck where we are in the game is what the table has taken to calling “Jake’s Sidequest.” One of the PCs, J4-K3 (an astromech gunslinger droid), has a very well-written backstory which so very helpfully has given me plenty of plot hooks to work with. As unlikely as that normally would be, even more unlikely is the interest everyone else has expressed in chasing down his very backstory-specific leads.


This has become something of a double-edged sword: I have a lot of organic engagement for a mini plot in what is nominally a sandbox game, at the expense of playing far less frequently. You see, J4-K3/Jake’s player has a pretty turbulent work schedule and has been unable to play in the last few weeks. The rest of the players want to play the game, but they want to continue “Jake’s sidequest” and they don’t want to do it without him.


That isn’t his fault — it’s mine.


Because of my players’ enthusiasm with “Jake’s sidequest” I have prepped the next step and hadn’t prepped much else. Each time we have sat down to play (usually missing 1-3 people, thanks to differing schedules) I have been ready to run the next leg of the side quest and not really much else. We did one “side mission” instead of the regularly scheduled programming, but the players’ intent was to come back next time and continue the sidequest. Although I pride myself on being a good improv GM, I can’t improv my way out of group disappointment at not “advancing the plot.”


This was a ostensibly a weekly game in a Star Wars sandbox, and we had clearly moved away from both of those things. I still like the idea of sessions based around stuff people came up with in their character backstory, but that shouldn’t be the focus. I need to be flexible both in scheduling and running the game, and so I must adapt and overcome. Cheesy as that sounds.


Which means rejecting plot lines and returning to west marches. Not that this was ever really set up as a west marches game, but it’s clear to me now that’s the only way it will survive.


What does that mean for the game? Rather than trying to rope as many folks as possible into one night a week, I’m going to run sessions on Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings, the two days & times we’ve identified as working best with people’s schedules in general. Whoever makes it, makes it — and if we have at least three players, we have a session.


Hopefully, this leads to 1. Actually playing the fucking game; and 2. Moving towards a more episodic kind of structure. Less Andor, more Mandalorian.