An Update Not about the Rifts Character Builder. Mostly.
Hello!
Most of my posts lately have been about the Rifts Character Builder. There has been some progress (more on that in a bit), but I wanted to talk about other RPG/PB-related topics going on in my life.
If you go to the Downloads & Resources link on my site, you’ll see numerous downloads and resources! I wanted to provide a quick update on some of these items.
I’ve been working on two new modules: “The Vampires” (Rifts) and “The Haunted House” (Beyond the Supernatural).
The Vampires
“The Vampires” is a fun one-shot. A village on the Arizona/Mexico line has been taken over by a group of secondary vampires. These vampires are using local residents as cattle to feed themselves and their master, a Master Vampire. A group of adventurers has been slowly rescuing residents of the town, and a larger assault is imminent.
It sounds like a typical “Adventurers vs. Vampires, rescue the people” adventure. There’s just one twist: the players play as the vampires, and the adventurers are the NPCs!
I’ve run this adventure twice and there were a lot of laughs at the table, as well as some surprises. So I’ve decided to make this adventure into a module. However, like with my other modules on here, running a one-shot and writing a one-shot for others to run are two very different things. The players have so much fun as vampires, using their mind slaves and coming up with creative ways to stop the adventurers. This means running a game that is largely improvisation. This is a common aspect of GMing, but it makes it hard to create a structure that can be put to paper. Yet I am working hard on it!
I kicked around writing the module such that the GM could also run the game where the players were the adventurers. I think that would be a cool feature of the module, but that would be a lot more work. We’ll see…
The module will come with pre-generated vampires for the players as well as VTT tokens (courtesy of Mad Man Mike Leonard) for use on Roll20 or wherever if played online. It also includes a fully fleshed-out town, complete with descriptive locations, defined local residents, plot hooks, and a map. The town of Hommlet (from D&D) was my inspiration when building out this town.
Keep an eye out here and check it out once it’s posted! I hope to have it posted by year’s end.
The Haunted House
Another module I’m working on is called “The Haunted House,” which is a one-shot for Beyond the Supernatural. I was inspired by a Call of Cthulhu module titled “Viral” and decided to use that inspiration to write this adventure.
The premise: the players are celebrity YouTubers. An up-and-coming paranormal agency known as ZPI wants to earn 1,000,000+ subscribers on its YouTube channel. One more viral video should do it! If ZPI meets its goal, it could be a contender for a network deal! They also have the goal of raising a certain amount of money from donations to a charity. This paranormal agency has performed many ghost hunts, most of which result in mundane explanations, though embellished for entertainment purposes.
Somewhere in rural New England is Craven Mansion, a large Victorian-era estate believed to be haunted. ZPI is ready to explore this haunted mansion and boost its reputation. To further increase potential subscribers, ZPI has recruited celebrity YouTubers (the players) to join the exploration of the mansion.
Expecting a “routine” ghost hunt, the players quickly learn that this mansion is, in fact, truly haunted! They must contend with the spirits and supernatural beings living in the house while simultaneously live-streaming and increasing their subscriber count and donations.
Each YouTuber has some specialty or gimmick. Some are true psychics but have to hide their abilities—until their lives and souls are threatened in Craven Mansion!
I love the premise of this adventure: players/YouTubers live-streaming the exploration of a haunted house. The challenge, however, is running it. This is something I’ve struggled with. For starters, I need to manage a live stream of comments from ‘subscribers’ and viewers and give the players the opportunity to respond or act accordingly. There may be comments such as, “Here’s a $5 donation: go check out what’s in that closet!” I also need to track how many subscribers and donations the team earns throughout the night.
There really are no mechanics for tracking this sort of thing. I kicked around recommending a “co-GM” to manage the live stream and real-time interaction with the players, but that’s hard to coordinate. I also thought about writing an app that will generate a live stream that players can access from their mobile devices (in real life), but that becomes a pain in the butt, not to mention it depends on the table having access to decent wifi (which some convention halls do not.)
I’m supposed to play-test this in mid-September, so I still have a lot of work to do and not much time. If you have any suggestions or feedback, let me know!
Rifts Character Builder Update
I’ve spent the past two months of my life working on Bionics. I was so happy when I got cybernetics working, then was horrified when I realized the bionics works differently from normal cybernetics. *face palm* This is what I get for never having played a bionic character.
Okay, fine, I’ll do bionics. If the O.C.C. is a cyborg, it will override the Cybernetics page and bring you to the Bionics builder page. This took a lot of work to get right, and there are still some bugs to be worked out, but it works – if you’re a Full Conversion cyborg. If you’re a Partial Conversion cyborg, then I hate you and your character. The problem with Partial Conversion cyborgs is that you may have one bionic limb, and the other limb is biological. That makes it difficult to display the correct physical attributes on the sheet. Also, the stat range for bionic limbs varies between Full Conversion and Partial Conversion cyborgs.
One question I struggled with – and which I have yet to receive a straight answer – is how to handle bionic limbs that have different physical stats. Let’s suppose you’re a Full Conversion cyborg. Your left bionic arm has a P.S. of 20 and a P.P. of 16. Your right bionic arm has a P.S. of 18 and a P.P. of 19. Sounds simple enough, except how does that translate to combat bonuses? Which P.S. and P.P. do use to calculate combat bonuses. I got various opinions and decided on this: since the character would likely favor their stronger arm, combat bonuses use the bonuses of the higher P.S.. Same goes for P.P..
Spd is handled differently, though. If you have two bionic legs of different Spds, your Spd is the lower of the two numbers. You can’t run faster than your slowest leg.
The next trick is to make the Full Conversion and Partial Conversion cyborgs more ‘modular.’ Not all cyborg O.C.C.s are the same. For example, the Headhunter Techno-Warrior has different stats and options available to it than another Partial Conversion O.C.C.s. I had to keep that in mind when designing this part of the app. If another cyborg O.C.C. comes along, I don’t want to rewrite the whole section to accommodate that one O.C.C.. Instead, I pass a configuration file providing the parameters for the specific Cyborg. For example, the max P.S. of a limb, the number of features available for a bionic component, the bionic armor types available, etc. can vary from one Partial/Full Conversion cyborg to another. I had to factor that in when building this.
GenCon 2024 starts tomorrow. I really wish I could have been there this year. Right now, I should be in my hotel room reviewing my event notes, getting some dinner in Indy, and reconnecting with some of my Indianapolis friends. Oh well. I’m planning to go next year, though!
This post has been long enough. If you made it this far, thank you for reading!