[Play-Thru] Claustrophobia

In 2009, I owned a lot of board games - mostly because I was working at a game store, and I have "ooh, shiny" syndrome. (I've since paired my collection down to about 1/3 it's former glory.) One of the games I picked up at the time was Asmodee's Claustrophobia, a two-player dungeon crawl, based in Hell Dorado, the setting of a minis game. A little over two years later, I finally got to play it.

One player controls the Redeemer (essentially a Paladin or Cleric) and his condemned warriors, a group of thugs and and murderers with nothing to live for but their redemption. The other player controls the demon and his troglodytes. It amounts to 17 beautifully pre-painted plastic minis. One may think this is a limited selection in the grand scheme of things, but read on.

The board is modular, a series of square tiles, which get turned over as you explore the catacombs. Many of the boards have special rules, including movement-affecting terrain and game events, such as card drawing or treasure collecting. The tiles are sturdy, the art gorgeous, and the random aspect of the catacombs really increases the re-playability of the game, while adding to the immersion of "where the hell am I" for the Redeemer player.

Speaking of re-playability, there is quite a bit in Claustrophobia to keep you playing. The Redeemer can start the game with a number of different spells and abilities. While the game is scenario-based - there are several in the book and more at the designer's website - the random abilities and the random board seem to provide plenty of fresh play. The condemned are outfitted with different weapons and abilities as well.

While the demon figure doesn't change (duh!), the demon the figure represents does. Basically you have a card that explains the stats and abilities of the demon you're using. There's some nice variance here; I can't wait to try more out.

I mentioned I have "ooh, shiny" syndrome, but if you know me, you know I wasn't necessarily referring to the beauty of the components. The big draw for me was actually the mechanics.

Each good guy character has an interesting take on a character sheet. The character card is dropped into a raised plastic tray, similar to those found in my favorite racing game, Formula D. You use pegs to show damage on these, and there's a spot for a six-sided die. The die you put in that spot determines your stats for the round.

At the beginning of the turn, the Redeemer player rolls a number d6s equal to the number of active characters in play. The dice are then assigned to the character cards, and the numbers correspond to a line of stats. The Redeemer's abilities also tend to correspond to a die number, so you only get them when the right die is used on his card. I mentioned peg holes for damage. These also correspond to lines of stats. If a line is marked by a peg, you can't use that line any longer. If you're forced to put a die in a card that matches a canceled line, that character is out for the round, for the most part.

On the demon side, as I mentioned before, the demon's stats and abilities are determined by which demon you're playing. The troglodytes have their own board. Here dice are rolled to give the troglodytes modified stats or to give the demon player access to more monsters or special events that generally make things hard on the good guys.

Both sides get to make fun - and tough - choices. It makes for an enjoyable tactical experience, as you react to your opponent and deal with the "hand you're dealt" throughout the game.

The rules recommend you begin with a scenario where the Redeemer and his condemned are trying to escape the catacombs, and the demons are pretty much trying to eat the good guys. My friend Robert and I went with this scenario. I played evil (indeed!), and Robert played the Redeemer and his condemned.

At the start of the scenario, it seemed like the good guys were going to run away with it. A d10 was used to show how close the Redeemer was getting to the exit, and it was ticking up fast! Evil eventually got some control and stomped the good guys. Our first play went pretty fast, considering we had the book in hand. I absolutely believe the 45-minute play time on the box.

Combat in the game is simple. Roll a number of d6s equal to the attacker's Combat stat. Each die that beats the defender's Defense causes a wound. Simple and efficient.

Claustrophobia is aptly named. The Redeemer starts out confident; then the game starts to really close in on him. This was exacerbated by the fact that I had two rules wrong, both of which favored my side (not deliberate, I swear!). While we initially thought the game was too skewed toward the bad guys, it turns out it's much more balanced when you play the game correctly!

It's a good sign when the loser of the game wants to play again, and once we determined my rules flub, Robert was ready to play again.

My one complaint about Claustrophobia is the dice. The d6s are OK, but the d10 is very obviously cheap. At the very least, I will be replacing the d10. I may replace the 6s if I can match the size right.

Overall I recommend checking out Claustrophobia. It's a great two-player game - one of my new favorites (despite it being on my shelf two years).

[Read-Thru] The Flux

Are you one of those GMs who get Shiny New Game Syndrome? Does it cause you to constantly switch games on your usually-reeling players? Have your players held an intervention to make you commit to running the same game for more than, say, 90 days?

If you answered "yes" to any of the above questions (I may have), then John Wick's The Flux might be just the ticket for you and your group!

The Flux is one of the many little games to be found in John Wick's Big Book of Little Games. The PDF was provided to me, gratis, by the fine folks at DriveThruRPG.

You might be playing The Flux in your current game, and you don't even know it - yet. Because The Flux happens to your character, to your group's whole party, and usually when they least expect it.

Imagine playing a sorceress in a Pathfinder game, and she's in the midst of a climactic battle. Suddenly, your GM describes a humming in your character's ears. She can't place where it comes from - it's everywhere and nowhere. Then there's a flash and BAM! She's no longer a sorceress in Golarion, but a mad scientist in Hollow Earth Expedition. Later in the Hollow Earth, she has been captured by Nazis and left without any gadgets. As the player you try to help the mad scientist recall a memory - a skill or ability - from a previous world or existence, and suddenly she makes a gesture, speaks an incantation, and throws a fireball at her captors, clearing a path for escape!

In The Flux, you can totally do that. Seriously.

So if you're running a game, say RunePunk for Savage Worlds - you love it; you really do - and you discover you can finally read Earthdawn Third Edition on your iPad (totally not your fault!), there's an easy way to transition, using The Flux and making it easy on your players:

• Grab your players' RunePunk characters
• Make new Earthdawn characters for them, based generally on their RunePunk characters
• One session, in a tense moment, have The Flux kick in
• You're now running Earthdawn

Your players don't have to make new characters or come up with new personalities - you're remaking their characters in a different world. Your players don't have to know about the new world right away - your players' characters are supposed to be hazy on the new setting.

There's no need to remember the rules from the old game. To access their previous characters' abilities, the players keep their characters in a stack - newest on top, oldest on the bottom. They roll some d6s - the difficulty based on how old the previous character is - and if they succeed, they automatically succeed with the best possible outcome: Fireball? Max damage. Shooting? The target is dead, if that was the goal.

On the surface it may seem broken. You may think players will abuse the abilities. But there is a price. The world knows someone is breaking the rules, and it fights back. Every time you use an ability from a previous character, there's a chance for Whiplash, where your character may get really hurt - or worse.

The Flux is very cool. I will be trying it at some point. And to my players: trust me, there were no spoilers in this post...

Freedom From JPEG2000 Tyranny On iPad

If you’re an iPad user and a roleplayer who likes PDFs, one term has likely been the bane of your existence: JPEG2000 compression. As awesome as the iPad is for viewing PDFs, especially with GoodReader, any PDFs using JPEG2000 compression are at least buggy and sometimes unreadable.

There have always been tricks to make them work, but some PDFs are unfixable. Worse, due to many publishers locking their PDFs, there’s nothing you can do but appeal to the publisher for a fix. The problem is you have to spend your hard-earned money or do some research to even find out if a PDF will work on your iPad.


Publisher’s have gotten better about testing their PDFs before release, but for many publishers, there is a lack of skill and/or resources (and sometimes desire, sadly) to do such a thing.  And since my iPad has become my primary reading device, I have taken to just not using those books I can’t read on my iPad. I tend to read on my breaks, and lugging around a 300-page hardcover tome just isn’t convenient. This was an especially tough decision for me recently, when I had to veto my beloved Earthdawn (3rd Ed.) as a candidate for game night, since those books are epically unreadable in GoodReader, despite my efforts.


Then the other morning I had guests, one of which had a new Kindle Fire. I’ve been thinking about the Fire for my wife since she wants a tablet. I’d tried it in the store and liked it. But one thing I’ve considered is making sure there was a PDF reader that will utilize the built-in bookmarks like those added in Acrobat. Sadly many PDF readers (including Adobe’s on Android) don’t.

A quick search led us to ezPDF Reader. For $2.99 it seemed to have what Android users needed. My buddy went ahead and downloaded it. Success! So if my wife gets a Fire, or any other Android tablet, she’ll be good to go.


It’s a great app, and I liked the interface so much I wanted to see what it looked like on iPad. A quick trip to the App Store, and I was dumbstruck. It lists as a feature that it can read JPEG2000 compression! I downloaded it immediately.


It turns out it works as advertised. I can now read my beloved Earthdawn on the iPad. Pages turn a little slow when the app is set so it can read JPEG2000 (GoodReader just builds on features native to iOS - which is why its fast and JPEG2000 doesn’t work on it),  but it’s absolutely beautifully displayed.

The interface seems clunky, but it might just be that it’s different, since I’m so used to GoodReader. I haven’t even made the time to check out all the features, so I won’t call it a GoodReader “killer” just yet (though it will read those bookmarks). But at $2.99, it’s well worth the price of admission even if I only ever use it to read those pesky JPEG2000-plagued PDFs.

The Family Game

Recently, we've started a family roleplaying game on Sunday afternoons.


I am GMing the game, and the players are my wife (Veronica), my brother (Cliff), my brother-in-law (Scott), and my daughter (CaLeigh), who's nearly eight. While my wife and I have quite a bit of experience, everyone else at the table has little to no experience with pen and paper RPGs.


To keep it simple and free-flowing, I've decided to run ICONS. Veronica put aside her prejudice against random character creation, and we went all in with it. To say the least, character creation was quite a bit of fun. Despite the ability to throw together a character in minutes, we decided to do it as a group; and I walked them through each step. We ended up with:

• Lady Flux (CaLeigh): A shape changer who can grow and shrink, usually into animals - think Beast Boy.
• Knight Shade (Cliff): A crime fighter with elemental power over darkness.
• Force (Scott): A mutant with the power of telekinesis.
• SwitchBack (Veronica): An ex-cat burglar with a transmutation gun.

After a quick discussion, Cliff and Veronica decided Knight Shade convinced SwitchBack to become a hero (in Knight Shade #42!), so there was at least one connection in the group. We decided the team would get together after a chance meeting, so we're running the first adventure, Sins of the Past by Theron Bretz, before doing Team Creation.


I did make one small mechanical change to the rules. Veronica is not a fan of the d6-d6 dice mechanic, and I thought the ladder concept, in general, might cause some confusion with CaLeigh. So I'm just having everyone roll up and add, and on the back end, I'm simply adding 7 to the difficulty. Shedding the plus/minus concept doesn't change any probabilities, and it seemed to make the game run just a bit faster. It may not be technically faster, but I for one have been rolling 2d6 for a very long time (going back to Monopoly when I was younger than CaLeigh). It just feels really natural.


We started late for our first play session, and Cliff and Scott had plans after our scheduled stop time; so we only got through the first two chapters of the story. There were still some highlights. Lady Flux turned into a huge ape and belly-flopped an armored bad gal. SwitchBack used her transmutaion gun to turn the same bad gal's armor to pudding (it'll turn back in 10 pages). Knight Shade overconfidently raised a wall of darkness, only to have it shut down by a villain with probability control. Force used his telekinesis to throw a metal desk through the darkness, only to find the armored villain holding it when Knight Shade's wall came down.


Fun was had by all.

[Read-Thru] Agents of Oblivion

Recently my friend, Sean Preston of Reality Blurs, sent me an early copy of Agents of Oblivion (AoO), an upcoming Horror/Espionage setting for Savage Worlds. The copy was sent simply for my amusement, but I offered to provide my thoughts on this Savage setting for this site, and he agreed.

The copy I received is text only, but it is the final text (barring any last-minute proof-reading) of the game, laid out and waiting for art.

Forgive the length of this post, but I’ve seriously waited several years for this setting…

The Read-Thru:

Savage Worlds veterans should be careful to read this section, as there are a couple tweaks, to include the bonus for being human, starting and available Skills, Hindrances, and Defining Interests. Speaking of Defining Interests, this is one of my favorite features common in Savage settings from Reality Blurs—essentially you choose a set of hobbies and other interests not necessarily covered by Skills, and these get you bonuses to your Common Knowledge rolls. This is a great way to help flesh out your character.

Another thing AoO provides is archetypes, nearly ready for play. Essentially the Attributes, and Skills are filled in, and you need only choose your Edges, Hindrances, and Defining Interests (though the latter can be chosen in play). These archetypes are a nice compromise between designing a character and having a pre-gen—your work is nearly done, but the archetypes are customizable so you can still feel like the character is yours.

There are a few additional skills—not the typical Knowledge (Whatever), but real new skills. I’m not a huge fan of the new Skills. All these skills could be covered by existing skills, and while they make things a little better defined, I’m personally a “fewer is better” thinker. On the bright side, Agents get four free Skills at d4, so this should make up for the extra Skills you have to choose from.

There are several new Edges and one new Hindrance. My favorite addition here is Power Mods. These edges modify existing powers in a way you might expect to do in a supers setting. For example, there’s one called Selective, which allows you to choose who is hit with an area effect power. Very cool! In addition there are Technological Edges, which deal directly with cybernetic implants.

In the Setting Rules section there are rules for Extended Trait Checks (or ETCs), as originally found in Reality Blurs’ Iron Dynasty: Way of the Ronin. These cover a similar roll to the new Dramatic Tasks rules found in the new Savage Worlds Deluxe Edition (SWD). I’m glad these are here, though. They’re well written and more detailed, which allows for greater flexibility. I can see using both ETCs and Dramatic Tasks in the same campaign, depending on the situation. Also, it may be awhile before many players convert to SWD, and I think this type of rule is essential to the genre.

AoO provides some great guidance on different ways to use skills for certain situations you don’t want to roleplay out, such as manhunts and hacking. There’s some good stuff here. I think other licensees—and for that matter, designers of all systems—should take note of this. This type of guidance can be invaluable to a gaming group.

Now for my favorite rules bit of AoO—Using Powers. Reality Blurs has devised another way to go Power Point-less in Savage Worlds. I am aware of three other ways it’s done, including Savage Worlds of Solomon Kane, Hellfrost, and the new SWD. This version is my personal favorite. Basically you just ignore Power Points, and power maintenance begins immediately. Blast and bolt were re-written and broken down into separate powers to take care of the stickiness these rules would cause with those Powers as written. While I don’t have a problem with Power Points, some Savages do, so this is a Good Thing.

Special Ops teams are typically provided their gear, and AoO has a great day to simulate this. Agents are given Resource Points to spend on mission loadouts—package deals for equipment. Players take a few moments to make their gear picks, and off they go. There are also rules for that equipment an Agent may need when already in the field. This seems to work very well and can actually be used right alongside the standard money system if your campaign concentrates at all on your Agents’ real lives.

You can also use your Resource Points to purchase Perks—special benefits you may need for a mission, like calling in an air strike or arranging an escape from a bad situation—and Spytech & Special Training (which I would hope I don’t need to describe). These are a nice idea and necessary to the genre for sure. Well handled.

The final section of the players’ portion of AoO is a lexicon of terms used in this setting and the special ops genre in general. I find this sort of thing very useful for immersion, and it’s great for newbies not already familiar with the lingo.

The Eyes Only!—or GM section—of AoO is chock full of great setting info and GM tools. As is pretty common in Savage Settings, it comprises much more of the book than the player section.

The Hidden Histories section gives you the setting history and info you need on Oblivion and its evil counterpart, Pandora. I love that Reality Blurs went with the G.I. Joe/Cobra format for their bad guy. It’s nice to have someone for the players to be paranoid about and blame for everything—makes a GM’s job easier!

The campaign section gives a lot of great advice on the genre and provides some clear direction for the GM. In addition it provides guidance on tweaking the setting elements, including, aliens, conspiracies, magic, horror, and tech. It really allows you to run anything from the default Mission: Impossible meets X-Files, all the way to G.I. Joe versus Cobra—no kidding!

The campaign advice section rounds out with campaign archetypes, which are generally frameworks for your campaign’s direction. This section covers a huge swath of campaign types—really anything I could think of while reading the book.

The next section, Agency World View, gives you an idea of what’s going on around the world, and it’s designed to work alongside the campaign archetypes. There are a ton of story seeds to be found in these pages. You could seriously run several campaigns out of this book with very little prep!

Speaking of little prep, AoO includes the now-obligatory adventure generator found in so many Savage settings. The Mission Generator, as it’s called, is much more detailed than the typical adventure generator, though. It’s chock full of great options for when you have one hour till the game session starts and you seem to have failed to prep (that may happen to me sometimes).

In addition to the Mission Generator, there’s a Creature Generator, for those times when your mission consists of “just what the hell is this thing killing people?!” I love this tool and could spend days just making creatures.

This is where we get into the “But wait, there’s more!” section of the book.

As if there wasn’t enough campaign goodness in this book, AoO includes sample story arcs, one for each of the Campaign Archetypes from earlier in the book. These are basically outlines for Plot Point Campaigns. Combine these story arcs with generated missions, creature hunts, and stories of your own devising, and voila! The story arcs are reminiscent of what Ken Hite called Savage Skeletons in The Day After Ragnarok, but they’re more detailed, including stats for each story arc’s major players later in the book.

The final section details some useful NPCs and organizations, including those from the aforementioned sample story arcs. The NPCs cover nearly any other character you may need for a game, certainly any character with little tweaking.

The Conclusion:

Agents of Oblivion may be Reality Blurs’ best effort to date. With enough information to support seven complete and varied campaigns packed into the book, the full edition of AoO can’t make it into my hot, rather large hands fast enough.  Awesome setting aside, this may have been called the Horror/Espionage Companion, were it a Pinnacle product.

If you enjoy horror, espionage, modern action/adventure, or any other modern gaming, this book is a “can’t miss” for you. Don’t bother with the book if you are not into any of those things or detest fun in general.

[Read-Thru] Masks: 1,000 Memorable NPCs for Any Roleplaying Game

Awhile back, I posted my thoughts about Eureka, a system-neutral, plot-assistance book for Game Masters by the fine folks at Gnome Stew. I was pretty excited about the book, as it was the most useful book of its type I'd come across in 25 years of GMing. UPDATE: I still use it. I used it a couple weeks ago. No one's changed my opinion of its status as the best RPG plot book ever.

The same group is back with a system-neutral NPC book, and, given my adoration for Eureka, I couldn't resist digging in. I should disclose, unlike with Eureka, I received a PDF of the new book, Masks: 1,000 Memorable NPCs for Any Roleplaying Game, free of charge, for review purposes. Further, while my opinion has been solicited, it has in no way been guided.

Masks starts out on familiar ground. Like Eureka there's an explanation of why the book exists and how to use it. The why is obvious, I hope--make it easier for a GM to provide awesome NPCs to her players. The how is much more detailed.

The NPC's are broken down (nearly) equally into three broad genres: fantasy, sci-fi, and modern. They are further organized into enemies, allies, and neutrals. Each character takes up a quarter page. The design goal was to provide enough information without being too much, so the entries were kept to a tight word count budget. This goal was definitely met.

Each numbered, character entry is written sparsely, but manages to provide everything you need to know about the character in question, including everything but stats.  The NPCs include an entry number, a name, a quote, and a two-word description, containing an adjective and a noun (the first entry is a "Possessed Cleric"). These are followed by tips on appearance, roleplaying, personality, and background. Like Eureka, each Masks entry includes traits, by which NPCs can be searched in the book.

The most important thing about the NPCs in the book is they're very well written. I haven't read all 1,000, but I can tell you I've read a lot of them. From the very start, the NPCs are interesting and thoughtfully designed, especially compared to what most GMs get when they truly have to make up an NPC on the fly. I found myself wanting to know more about these people--always a good sign.

One final thing about the uniformity of the NPC entries: the authors suggest the template they've created for these characters will help you write your own characters. I tend to agree. And I look forward to using the template myself.

The authors believe you can use these NPCs on-the-fly or with some planning, and I tend to agree. You can just grab a name; or the two-word descriptor and the traits maybe. You can read them all the way through if you have time. There is a simple list of names that starts at the beginning of the first NPC page and ends on the last. I'm terrible at taking notes during play, so I plan on grabbing a couple key words and jotting down the entry number so I can return later to flesh out my find.

On the advice front, there is a section on how to modify the NPCs to fit any roleplaying game, by giving a twist here or a quarter-turn there. For instance, all the NPCs are humans, as this is the easiest twist of all, since any race a game designer can create will have intrinsic human qualities. Simply focus in on those to find your race. A gruff carpenter? Dwarf. A beautiful sorceress? Elf. There are definitely more than 1,000 NPCs in this book when you consider these simple changes you can make.

The other advice in the Masks is a collection of excellent points on playing NPCs, from the GM's standpoint. This advice has been delivered elsewhere by many people, but I've never seen it all together in one convenient place in a book designed for roleplaying. Players should take note of this section, as it serves as a great set of tips for PCs as well.

Like Eureka, Masks is a super reference. There are indexes in the book to help you find characters by trait, by name, by author, and by group (think Tavern Staff or Bandit Gang), so as a GM, you have lots of ways to find what you're looking for. The pdf is superbly bookmarked. My only gripe is I believe the entry numbers should have been used in the bookmarks with the character names (yes, all 1,000 characters are bookmarked), as one more awesome way to reference this book.

I plan to have Masks close to me for every game I run, and if you're a GM, you should too.

ICONS Revisited

Awhile back, I put ICONS back on the shelf. Having run it twice, I wanted to love it, but I couldn't bring myself to. There were a couple reasons, but the principle one was in play. I couldn't get past the Invulnerability power.

Basically a character with Invulnerability can never be physically harmed by a character with Strength two or more points below that Invulnerability. From a genre standpoint, it makes total sense--Batman can smack the heck out of Superman for days and it wouldn't do anything but annoy Superman. But from a game standpoint, it felt wrong. In my experience there should always be a way to hurt the bad guy.

A couple of weeks ago, I had a conversation with Chuck Rice, who writes a lot of support material for ICONS. I decided to bring up this flaw to maybe get some house rules from a subject matter expert. It didn't go the way I'd planned. Chuck made some pretty good arguments for why this was OK. So I resolved myself to run the game one more time, looking at it from his standpoint--it is a genre convention; it forces the players to thing outside the box; this is a Good Thing.

This week my Friday group was down a player, and since we're just starting a campaign, I didn't want to go on without him. I took the opportunity to run Steve Kenson's excellent adventure, The Skeletron Key, using the official freebie characters given out to promote the release of ICONS. Justin played the Hangman, Ed played the Mighty Saguaro (brilliantly, I might add), Veronica played Miss Tikal (that name still cracks me up a year later), and our guest player, Matt, played All-Star.

I warned the players in advance about the inability to damage some things--they wouldn't necessarily be able to smash their way to victory. I told them to think outside the box when this issue came up. The group really thought on their feet. They used Stunts and Retcons to defeat the physically tough opponents. All-Star was equipped to hurt anything in the story, but that didn't stop the other players from doing their part. 

I was impressed. Not only did the players get around my perceived flaw in the game, they had a blast doing it. And it felt more like reading a comic or watching a cartoon. The result is ICONS does a great job of providing an authentic-feeling, super-powered experience.

Another thing I learned about the game is I'll be running it exclusively from my iPad. As a physical book it's beautiful, but I have some organization issues with it. There is no index and the table of contents is anemic. The powers section is not organized in a way that lends itself to quick reference. Powers are broken down alphabetically by type, rather than just alphabetically. Further, there's no alphabetical page number reference to make things easier to find, and the table of contents doesn't tell you what page the sections for power type start. It makes for a very frustrating experience when you're new to the game and need information now. On the iPad, I just bookmarked this stuff, and I can now reference the book very quickly.

Overall, ICONS is a great game, and as long as you warn the players of the genre conventions and keep your copy on a laptop or iPad, you should enjoy it too.