This scene covers the interrogation of the major villain, Guruinath Zalyn before his superior and the acting commander of the Legion. The two PCs are Kolath, a relatively junior kandar Legion officer, and Hollis, a powerful if unstable human psychokinetic who’s been, who are major witnesses to his wrongdoings.

[GM]

The prisoner sits in a wooden chair, constrained by leather straps. There’s an ugly bruise across his face that wasn’t there when Hollis saw him last. His face is twisted to an ugly snarl. He’s accompanied by two immense Legionnaires, both human, who Kolath recognises as as two of the guards from the Legion’s military prison.

Apart from Guruinath’s chair, the chamber is empty. Everyone else will have to stand.

Lavuyl, the senior Karazthani, takes a small spherical device from his pocket, and places in the floor a few paces from Guruinath.

“Recording eye”, he says, “Everything that happens in this room will be on record. This will form part of the official investigation”.

“This is an imposition!”, says Gurinath.

“Shut up”, says Nir-Urileyr Kavarluis, “You are not to speak except to answer questions”.

“I demand independent representation!”, says Guruinath.

“This is not your trial”, says Lavuyl, “This is your interrogation. You will just make things harder for yourself if you you do not co-operate”.

[Kolath’s player]

The tall, thin Kandar legionnaire nodded as Lavuyl placed the recording device on the floor and activated it, relieved that the interrogation would be recorded.

“Requests would possibly be considered, Guruinath, but your demands no longer impress us overmuch.”

[GM]

“Don’t listen to him”, snaps Guruinath, “Can’t you see that human wizard is mind-controlling him? She’s making fools of you all. Known terrorist, she is. You know her brother is in the cells, don’t you? Accessory to murder. Don’t try to deny it woman, you know it’s true”.

[Hollis’ Player]

“Let anyone ask the questions,” Hollis said, maintaining a steely demeanor despite the spike of fear this revelation engendered. How much did he know? How much could he know?

“If you fear me so much, I will leave the room and let anyone ask the questions. Besides, if I could mind control anyone, why not just mind control you into admitting your complicity in treason?

“I suppose they could bring in someone from the Academy, who could check for my presence in their minds. Face it, Guruinath; You’re whining is so transparent. You are a traitor who’s been caught, and you are trying to blow enough smoke to conceal your treason and confuse your interrogators. You are so used to bullying everyone to get your way, you keep trying it even when the truth would clearly be best. Who’s in prison has nothing to do with your guilt or innocence.”

[Kolath’s player]

His expression did not change much, but he did wonder about the brother statement. Now was not the time to delve into that subject, however; Hollis was right.

Kolath cocked his head slightly to one side and looked at his associate and, yes, friend and he nodded before turning his attention back to Guruinath.

This is a scene where powerful NPCs are in opposition to each other, but I have to remember it’s got to be about the PCs. So I’m treating the it as a conflict between Guriunath, who’s currently down but not out, and the two PCs. The stakes are simple, it’s who’s story Kavarluis and Lavuyl, the two high-level NPCs believe.

So far, we’re just scene-setting, and I have yet to roll any dice.

I’ve finally had a few hours to spare to work on the Kalyr RPG. I’ve been working on the Gifts section of the character generation chapter, one of the sections I’ve never really been happy with.

The end result is quite crunchy - I think the gifts I’ve ended up with are reasonably balanced.  The big change is that I’ve eliminated Talents as a separate type of Gifts.  Previously talents were a crude way to trade gifts for skills, in that each one gave an extra level in four different skills.  What I’ve done now is turned most of those talents into specific gifts, and they no longer all work the same way. Some still give extra skill levels at character creation time, others give a +1 bonus in play in particular situations, or let you substitute one skill for three or four others.

I’ve cut-and-pasted the whole draft to The Fudge Forum to try and get some feedback and comments.

So, to try and get the creative juices flowing, I decided to select half-a-dozen random songs, and seek inspiration from the lyrics.  Since I haven’t ripped most of my CD collection onto my PC, I selected the songs by rolling assorted oddly-shaped dice to determine shelf, CD on shelf and track within CD.

This gave me the following six songs:

Rush - Red Lenses

Here we have a lot of imagery associated with the colour red; sunsets, blood, dancing shoes, the Soviet Union. The nearest analogue to the Soviet Union in Kalyr is probably the Konaic Empire.  They are the morally unambiguous villains of the setting.

Iommi/Hughes - Don’t You Tell Me

Am I a sacrifice?
Am I too blind to see?
I’m not a vagabond
I know what is, is meant to be
There is a better way
There comes a time I do believe
There’s a price to pay
I know where you’ve been

Don’t you tell me you don’t know

Seems to be about a betrayal, the exact nature of which isn’t specified. There’s definitely some plot potential there.

Marillion - Easter

The original song, written in 1989, is about the troubles in Northern Ireland.  Made more general, a pointless death in a long-running conflict which needs to be resolved.

Pink Floyd - Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2

OK, so I can’t really fit teachers and education very well, but ‘We don’t need no thought control’ works in a setting where telepathy and mind control are common powers.

Breathing Space - Shades of Grey

There’s no need to pretend now
We all come in different shades of grey

Moral ambiguity - the protagonists of the story arc aren’t flawless, and the bad guys aren’t necessarily irredeemably bad either. But when I’ve got Nicki Jett as a player character, the first bit of that goes without saying, really.

And finally:
Uriah Heep - Time to Live (from Salisbury)

Well I spent twenty long years
In a dirty old prison cell
I never saw the light of day
…
They say I killed a man
But I never told them why
So you can guess what I’ve been through
So for twenty long years
I’ve been thinking of that other man
What I saw him do to you

There’s definitely an NPC with a significant back-story in that song.

Let’s see what I can come up with with that lot.  To go into any more detail would be entering into spoiler territory!

We’ll start with the rather obvious H.P.Lovecraft version

One for this Saturday’s gig in Lowdham

 And finally, the obligatory gamer one:

“So, Valneth”, said Zartheyn, “It is six days since we last spoke. Please update me on the security situation”.

“The rebels attacked us again last night”, the knight replied.

“And?”, Zartheyn asked, “What damage this time?”.

“My militia gave a good account of themselves”, said Valneth.

“You have not answered my question”. Zartheyn tried to suppress his rising anger.

“They.. attacked the village at Gavius Hill”, the knight replied, “Set fire to the barns using flamelances. And some farm workers are missing. My men extinguished the fires, and saw the rebels off”.

“Flamelances again?”, said Zartheyn, “We’re not up against regular feral humans, are we? They sound like legion deserters to me. Or worse”.

Zartheyn let out an audible sigh. Valneth was his half-brother, after all, and ties of blood within the clan are supposed to run strong. He’d be in trouble with the elders if he dismissed him without good cause. But Valneth was so clearly not up to the job.

And the rebels did have to attack Gavuis Hill, of all places. It was almost as if they *knew*.

“It is probably fortunate that I have persuaded the legion to step up their border patrols”, Zartheyn continued, “I am expecting reinforcements to arrive tomorrow, and expect your full co-operation”.

“Will there be humans in the patrols they send”, asked the knight.

“They’re from Calbeyn, so that is to be expected”, Zartheyn responded, “And don’t look so disgusted. They tell me they’re sending veterans from the Zughru wars, so they’re men, kandar and human, who know how to fight. And I’m summoning their commanding officer her as soon as he arrives so that you and I can brief then on the situation. Understood? Good?”

“Yes, brother”, Valneth replied, as he turned to leave.

“Perhaps the turnips are the sinister goings on?”, asked Qeelu, the solidly-built woman who acted as his second-in command. “Perhaps those rumours really are true”.

Brogan laughed. “What? Turnips that render humans infertile?”

“Don’t dismiss it out of hand”, Qeelu responded, “We don’t really understand the magic of the Academy of Life. Our reconnaissance did pick up a lot of Academy of Life comings and goings to and from the village”

“And the barns we torched were full of turnips”, added Grodd, a small wiry man who acted as the scout for the group. “We all know how the kandar fear the rate at which we breed”.

“You’re both expecting me to believe this nonsense”, snorted Brogan, “Turnips are cover; they have something nastier in the works”.

“Which we’re not going to find out about unless we raid their research complex at Guvil Bridge, Grodd replied, “Which is too well defended, and will bring the legion down on our heads if try a fool stunt like that”.

“And I’m no fool”, Brogan stated firmly, “Guvil Bridge is off-limits; but I know enough about the Academy of Life to know their black projects are never based at their publicly known facilities. There’s something going on at or near Gavuis Hill, that needs a stop putting to. And I intend to find out what it is”.

Getting there late meant that many games in which I’d liked to have played were already filled up - I noticed Mike Cule was running Vincent Baker’s “In A Wicked Age” on the Sunday, which would have been fun. Fortunately there was a slot in Mark Baker’s marathon Unknown Armies game running from 5pm until late on Saturday, so I signed up for that.

It turned out to involve time travel; what started as a tube journey early on a Sunday morning turned out as a trudge through the Fleet sewer, in which we emerged in 1829. Out attempts to get back home lead us to various times which increasingly diverged from our own timeline; at various points we killed the vampire Jack the Ripper and encountered Princess Elizabeth as a member of the British Resistance in the abandoned tube tunnels beneath Nazi-occupied London. Eventually we managed to fix the timeline, and get back to what would have been our own time but for some very bad dice rolling; everything was as it should have been except that both our London tube train and the Virgin Pendolinos at Euston appeared to be powered by Stirling Engines.

Sunday’s game was very different - Pete Crowther’s game of Toon. Which was very, very silly indeed. I wrote up a Toon version of Bug, from the Guardians of Dimension games from Gypsycon. Other characters included a 50′ high robot and a squirrel. The plot was probably impossible to summarise, but included live-action Space Invaders, a fight in a tea-room, aeroplanes getting coated in cottage pie, the Welsh village of Llandofmyfathers, and an arch-villains base in the volcanic crater in Mt Snowdon.

Next Stabcon is from the 2nd to 4th January - see you there!

But sometimes it’s pretty clear. In this example, Hollis, a powerful psychokinetic, has been taken prisoner. This is completely unedited game transcript; Hollis’s words and actions are written by Nicki Jett, one of my best players, and the scene setting and Guruinath’s lines are mine.

Hollis aches all over; when she slowly comes round, she’s in a windowless room with featureless grey walls; if there’s a door, it must be somewhere behind her. She’s sitting in an uncomfortable wooden chair, and appears to be restrained by leather straps.

Facing her are three kandar males. Two of them look like standard-issue Karazthan security goons. The man standing between radiates an aura of being someone of importance, a handsome middle-aged kandar of aristocratic bearing, with piercing mauve eyes. The expression on his face cannot possibly be described as friendly.

“Human, you have some explaining to do”, he says, “You were captured while engaged in hostile acts against Karazthan security who were engaged in lawful activity”.

“You have now been positively identified as the human who attacked our security team on the West Side, causing serious injuries to one, and the death of a member of Guild of Victuallers”.

“Can you give an explanation of your actions. Starting with the most important question. Who are you working for?”

“Of course,” Hollis said. “I represent the Legion — actually, the Fifth Legion, and in particular Tavonoleyr Kolath Polyn d’n Miralath a’r Surene. I have been retained as an advisor on human affairs and a guide to the human quarter, and I also serve as an errand girl when needed. In that capacity, I go where he says –”

** well, not exclusively, but that is merely a semantic issue.**

“– I investigate what he wishes investigated, and I question those he suggests. However, when I am in the middle of one of these investigations, and some people *try to kill me,* like your victualler, I regretfully must defend myself.

“In the case you cited most recently, I was concerned for my employer’s safety, and I was making an effort to reduce the tension without anyone getting killed in the process. I was trying to maintain a low profile and defuse what I saw as a volatile situation.”

She glanced around the room, taking in the nature of the restraints and the positioning of the interrogators, and noting the presence or absence of edged weapons. SHe is evaluating how quickly she could get them unbuckled mentally, or slice through them if she “borrowed” a blade from one of the interrogators, and how many times she would have to bash heads together to take them all out.

The proximity and security of the exit came under consideration as well.

As Hollis’ head clears, she realises the identity of her interrogator - it’s Guruinath Zadaz, the Karazthan head of security. The man Kolath believes to be a traitor to the city.

“Ah, Kolath d’n Miralath”, he says sarcastically, “The loose canon himself. Who’s never been quite right in the head since he had a nasty blow to the head. Probably leaving him vulnerable to mind-control from a human wizard with an agenda all her own”.

“Now, tell me who you’re *really* working for. We can do this the easy way, or the hard way”.

Hollis scans the room; the two Men in Black have lightning wands at their belts, but don’t appear to have any swords or knives on their person. Hollis senses that there’s a fourth person in the room somewhere behind her that she can’t see.

“Where’s my belt pack? I have some things in there for you to see that might make things clearer.”

“Answer my questions first”, says Guruinath.

Hollis considers her options. She probably has the mental strength to break the leather straps, but will probably injure her wrists in the process. She can’t loosen the straps without being able to see how they’re attached.

Seizing the lightning wands, then aiming and firing them would require a lot of finesse, and her forte is brute force.

She scans the part of the room she can see for any suitable objects to start throwing around. The only thing she can see is what looks like a waste bin in the corner - it’s made of basket-weave stuff rather than anything solid, so probably weighs next to nothing.

One thing she does notice is that the whole room does appear to be swaying slightly. This might just be Hollis’ still being a bit groggy.

Hollis decided that the wavery effect could also mean this was not real. MAybe it was a dream, or something similar. No reason to get too goofy. She could always bash two of them together, or seize the lightning rods and use them like clubs.

“Afraid there’s nothing left to say, since I an a simple girl and doing a simple job helping the Legion. IF you try to get rough, though, I am not going to sit still for it.”

“I like a girl with spirit”, he says, getting the timing sufficiently wrong that the joke falls rather flat. “Now, you really expect me to believe that. Kolath’s a flake, and you know it. You’re using him. Now tell me who you’re really working for, and we won’t need to start using Devices”.

The room is definitely swaying. Hollis is sure it’s not just her imagination.

“Be-HAVE,” Hollis said, shaing her head and opening and closing her eyes rapidly to try and diminish the swaying effect. “I’m not working for anybody else.

“And stand still and quit swaying, would you? You’re making me nauseous. Here, let me help … ”

She reached out with her mind and seized the two on each side of Guruinath, trying to smash their heads together at the place where Guruinath’s head was located.

It would be like smacking three melons together. Hard.

Leaving her with one to deal with, if things worked out …

Hollis concentrates….

…and nothing happens. Apart from what feels like someone driving red-hot nails into her skull.

“11.4!”, says a female voice from behind her. “Unit’s only rated for 14! She’s strong”.

Guruiniath gives the owner of the voice a black look.

Hollis made the immediate segué, being analyzed, being managed, being held down by a machine with a limit.

One she bet she could blow out the top.

She concentrated, tightened up her mind, put everything she had into defeating this thing and grabbing *someone* in the vicinity, preferably Guruiniath …

Emergency, threat to her brother, threat to Kolath, death of her parents, she used them all for motivation, to kick it up to a power level she’d never achieved before.

Let’s see what their machine could handle …

I think Hollis’ player is pretty unambiguously saying “I’m spending a Fudge Point here…

It’s scenes like this that make message game RPGing so worthwhile.

For those unfamiliar with it, Amber basically posits an infinite number of universes, each one only fractionally different than the ones next to it, and the princes of Amber travel through these realities (’shadows’) by making progressive changes in their environment. This means that no place but Amber (Where you can’t do this stuff) is really unique. If you find a place you like, but accidentally blow it up or something, you just move to an otherwise identical universe where your bartender is left handed.

Now, this model works fantastically if you heartily want to buy into the idea that only Amber and its princes matter* but if you step away from that at all it gets a bit dodgy. For example, it’s hard to say any given place matters in some unique way, or to say any _person_ matters, since a replacement is just a quick shift away.

Now, my exposure to the setting is limited to reading the books, and one convention-style one-shot game several years ago which probably didn’t expose me to the game’s strengths. But I’ve always found it’s played bait-and-switch on me; it purports to be about parallel universes, but what you really get is a dynastic soap opera where all those potentially fascinating parallel universes are just insubstantial background.

“Quick,” Hollis muttered in mild disappointment. But now without the crossbow pointed at her, she could grab the whole person and slam him into the ceiling head first a few times. Which is what she was going to do if he was still visible…

He seems to instinctively understand what Hollis is trying to do; he drops the crossbow and concentrates on trying to avoid being dragged ceilingwards by hanging on to the stair rail. He’s pretty strong, and Hollis doesn’t have quite the right psychokinetic grip on him. But the wooden stair rail begins to creak and splinter.

“Get down here!” he cries, “Mad wizard!”.

“Not mad,” Hollis murmured. “Merely annoyed. I get that way when people try to kill me.” She shifted from trying to yank him skyward, to whipping him back and forth like a rag doll in the hands of an angry child. Since he’d tried to kill her, breaking a couple of wrists or his neck from the whiplash effect didn’t bother her in the slightest.

Sooner or later he would come loose — the sounds from the rail made sooner sound likely — and then he would be *hers*.

“We might think about backing out in just a moment …”

She could use the man to stop up the entryway while they escaped, but they needed to get him loose and get moving.

But he’s not hers just yet; she can feel him struggling, and he’s strong. Somehow he manages to brace himself, and avoids getting twisted around. That handrail isn’t going to last long, though.

Another man, this one small and wiry, appears at the top of the stairs. He’s got another crossbow.

“The woman!”, cries the big man, “Be quick”.

He aims the crossbow. 

With the new arrival Hollis couldn’t wait to wear out the handrail; she had to let go of his — so she could twist the new arrival so that his crossbow was pointed at her first assailant as he released.

“Gath, you can jump in here anythime …”

“Stop!”, says Gath, “I can explain

The man with the crossbow pays no attention.

“This is for Rik, bitch”, he says, as he looses the quarrel.

The big man lets out a strangled gurgle as he rolls down the stairs, to lie sprawled at the foot of the steps with a crossbow bolt sticking out of his neck.

By the time he reaches the bottom, the crossbow man has gone,

This starts out with a couple of opposed rolls between Hollis’ Superb psychokinetics and the unnamed NPC’s Good Strength.  Both rounds ended in ties; my NPC was lucky with the dice; I really hadn’t expected him to live this long.  When the new arrival turned up on the scene, his luck ran out. This was Crossbow vs. Psychokinetics, and the result was Terrible vs. Great. That’s a difference of -5.  Since I’m not using the extended combat rules fo this, that’s a near death, and because he’s an unnamed NPC and mere canon-fodder, it’s game over for the big man.

It’s a typical cellar of a tavern; full of beer barrels, some redundant furniture stacked in one corner. Hollis’ eyes are initially drawn to a bloodstain on the floor; enough blood for a nasty wound, not enough for someone to have bled to death.

A little searching reveals two items; a five-glerin coin bearing the head of Sarkan Vorsath of Karmork, and square black object resembling the communicators issued to members of the Karazthan.

“Aha,” Hollis whispered. “A clue. Two of ‘em, in fact.”

She collected the items and after a close perusal, pocketed them, then continued to search. aside for looking for clues, she was also trying to figure out the route the bad guys had employed, as opposed to the one Gath used to escape. She assumed that was they way she’d come in.

“Put you hands where I can see them” comes a male voice from somewhere behind Hollis. “And no funny business from you either, Gath”.

Hollis kept her hands wide and turned toward the voice, taking note of any useful objects in the vicinity as she did so. “No problem,” she said cheerfully.

The voice belongs to a thick-set human with arms and legs resembling tree trunks. Hollis doesn’t recognise the face, but she does notice he’s pointing a seriously large crossbow at her.

“Now, you two are going to explain to me precisely what you are doing grubbing around in this cellar. And that explanation had better be a good one”.

“Just trying to find my cousin Wozzeck,” Hiollis said cheerfully. “He’s not right in the head. Someone told us they’d seen him wandering around down here, so I persuaded this gentleman …” she turned to Gath apologetically, “I didn’t even get his name. Gath, you say? I persuaded Mister Gath to help me look.”

She gave Gath an imperceptible nod, then turned back. “Perhaps you’ve seen him. Stringy brown hair, about forty, with a scar right here … ”

… and with the faintest, harmless-looking flick of her fingertips along side her face, as if demonstrating the scar location, she *snatched* the quarrel right off the top of his crossbow.

Assuming that went as planned, she would flip the quarrel end for end and then drive it right into the big man’s eye.

This is a fight scene. Hollis has Fast-Talk at Fair, and Psychokinetics at Superb. The NPC’s relevant abilities for the encounter are Insight, Perception and Dodge, all at Fair, and Crossbow at Good. This guy is a professional, but nothing like the power level of a typical PC.

I decided to resolve this in two stages - first is Fast-Talk vs. Insight to see if Hollis managed to distract him. If Hollis wins, she can do the PK trick with the quarrel. If she loses, he attempts to shoot her (which would probably be Crossbow vs. PK to actually hit her, so he’d probably miss)

If Hollis wins the first contest, it’s then PK vs both Perception and Dodge - Perception to realise what’s going on, and Dodge to get out of the way.

Fast-Talk vs. Insight goes to Hollis, but only by a narrow margin. For the second contest, Hollis rolls -1 (Great) against the NPCs +3 (Superb) for Perception and 0 (Fair) for Dodge.

“Never heard of him”, he says. His reactions are far quicker than Hollis would have imagined; by the time the crossbow quarrel pierces where his eye would have been, his head is no longer there, leaving the quarrel embedded in the wood.

In the current playtest draft rules, there are two different ways you can combine two skills. In some circumstances you can use either skill, in which case you roll against both and take the best result. In others, you need both skills, so you roll against both skills, and take the worst roll.

I ruled Perception + Dodge as an “either” and used the better of the two rolls. Since his Superb beat Hollis’ Great, that means Hollis missed.

Now, in the context of this fight, I’m wondering if that approach really makes sense. Any opinions?