D&D is For Nerds - BONUS House Rules - Play by Post, Majesty, and Blackwatch (Ft. Josh Perault)

Episode Date: July 13, 2019

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Hey gang, no new episode of D&D is for nerds today, as we like to take a week off between seasons. So instead, here's an episode of House Rules we did when we were at D&D Live a few months back with friend of the show, Josh Peralt, from Taking Initiative. What's House Rules I hear you ask? Well, it's a monthly show Adam and Jackson do exclusively for King subscribers over at SandsPantsPlus.com. Each month they go through their personal Dungeon Master archives and share their homebrew creations and shelved game ideas. This episode they talk about Play by Post, Majesty and Blackwatch. Hello. Hello and welcome live from D&D Live 2019. It's in LA.

Is it live, Adam? It's live. It's not. It is recorded. I was about to say it's not recorded. We are House Rules episode, God, six? Possibly. Yeah, good thing we started numbering these. I'm Adam. I'm Jackson. And I'm Josh.

And today we're going to be talking about some of our homebrew systems, some homebrew things we made, yadda yadda yadda yadda. Who would like to go first? I would like to hear what you guys have done because your games have had some crazy shit all through. That is a compliment. Thank you. I'll take that. Assume that away, man. It's a compliment.

What I wanted to bring to the table today is a game system that I came up with a while ago. World of Darkness is often a system that lends itself to spooky vampire werewolf chicanery. And it's the system also that I first sort of learned on, I first started playing on.

And I wanted to, I guess I've always found it funny to get a superpower, but none of the things that protect you from that superpower. That's the classic gag. Like, oh yeah, you can manifest fire all around your body but unfortunately you're going to get severely burned. People who are like, the flash can run really fast but what happens with friction? Yeah, and I was like, what if I kind of tried to use that

world of darkness, sort of grimdark kind of element and kind of lay it onto a a superhero system so i created a system called majesty the ruined so the idea is i guess the the like law behind it is that there's this unknowable eldritch entity eons away in space and uh it's sort of tentacles or tendrils if you will are constantly just sort of flailing throughout the universe and occasionally just by sheer happenstance they'll touch somebody. They'll be touched by the Majesty, is what the

eldritch being was called. And a person who was touched by the Majesty would get what was also known as a Majesty. Unclear! As we'll discover, chatting about this particular system, there were a lot of things that were quite half-formed. Well, pretty formed, though,

is your tentacle-touching RPG. That is definitely what, yeah. I think I like the idea of this sort of invisible, impossible to kind of physically... Cthulhu, like Lovecraftian. But just swiping through your body, but it's not intending

to give you this power. It's just an unfortunate side effect. And what would happen to a player touched by the majesty is they would black out for about like 10 seconds. They would kind of get this sense of like infinite empty space and like as

though you're in pitch black, but there's this impossibly gigantic something there with you, which was the majesty. And then they wake up and they have a majesty or a superpower. But the superpowers worked in that you got it and it was all your typical powers, but then you had nothing to protect

you against it. And I had a massive list of what's the majesty and what's the downside. So for example, there was stuff like and a character Adam played is you could become any animal, like a beast boy type situation. But when that happened,

you no longer were cognizant. You were the animal. And that led to a lot of moments like... There was my favorite moment, and in our friendship group, if you will, for lack of a better term, we always described Majesty. Majesty is an unconscious donkey in an airport bathroom.

Dear Christ. Yes. All right. My character, he was a doctor or like a, it was basically a doctor house type character. Okay, yeah. And I had, like, when I found out that I had been cursed with a Majesty or the one that I'd been cursed with, I bought a ton of horse tranquilizers and whenever i felt myself beginning to change i would hit myself with the trunk and then try to

go somewhere private in one instance it was an airport bar in the midst of travel and so the way it worked when the way a majesty activated is the first role you failed after you were touched by the majesty anytime you failed that so in in world of darkness you have mental social physical and if you failed a mental role any mental role you ever failed would activate your majesty so it was the kind of thing that happened very often and then there were degrees of it everybody had i think five i forget what they were control points control points that's right five control points and the more it activated the worse it got so say you screw up like uh I don't know

say it was physical and you're trying to jump between buildings and you have I think there was like an anti-gravity one you fail the jump you hit the ground you begin just floating up in the air and obviously when your majesty ends you will fall back to the ground and incur a whole bunch of damage yeah falling damage

is the worst type of damage yeah yeah absolutely and, say that happened again within the same day, then you're going to go higher up into the sky and etc, etc, etc. Something that I really loved in the Majesty game was that he wouldn't... So it was a game where

each character was introduced in a different game. So it would be like two or three people were in the first game, then it was four in the second, then it was four in the second then it was five in the third and so on and so forth and he didn't tell anyone what was happening so to be part of the group was like all right jackson's running some game called majesty jackson and two of our mates have run it and then they come back and they're like adam oh my god majesty is insane it was one of the benefits of it but also i really think a downside because it was so exciting because to drop that on a player that just thinks they're about to

have a classic but yeah i think i had one that made your um your your arms and you could like detach your limbs but you could control them as they detached but you also took a whole bunch of aggravated damage because your limbs had fallen off. And just dropping that on a player. A blast. Just a great time. No one's ready for it. I wasn't there for that session, but I remember you telling an insane one where someone's majesty was that they were invincible, but their

body still took damage. It was a one-on-one game, which are always great. And he'd found this secret American high school in the subway, and it was this dusty, it had been from the 80s, it was part of a military experiment, whatever. And there was a guy in there that had been trapped

and just barely surviving, who also had imagined he could teleport. And he starts to tussle with this guy, he doesn't really know what's happening, and the guy just shoots him in the back of the head, and he's like, oh, am I dead? And I'm like, no. And he's like, what? And I'm like, but you can feel your brain slipping out. And he was like,

what? What? What? He had to put on a beanie to keep it in. And I don't know. It was a fun thing to drop on a player. But the downside is that once you knew it was coming, if I'm like, oh, I'm running a Majesty game, you knew something was going to come up. Yeah. And that's, I don't know, sort of a shame. I always liked after we had after everyone in the group kind of knew what majesty was

to introduce so like i ran a like a one-off game where they were all firefighters and uh they were responding they didn't know but they were responding to someone who's uh whose majesty was one called tanguska where you just. So it's a one-off majesty. That sucks. When you got touched by the majesty, it was a random D100 roll as to what you were going to get. And Tunguska was on there. I think it was number 100.

So always just a wild thing to be like, well, this game, you exploded with the force of a nuclear warhead. So it was always a possibility. It was a rare possibility. And it would definitely change whatever game you planned on running. But anyway, there were firefighters responding to a majesty. And I hadn't told them what the game was. I just told them that they were going to be firefighters.

Okay. And then partway through the game, I'm like, everything goes black. Majesty. And then we had, we'd made, a friend of ours was pretty handy in Photoshop. And had made majesty character sheets. And I took all of their character sheets and gave them majesty character sheets of their characters and I was like and this is the game now. Very exciting moment.

That character sheet, props to my friend, incredible. So it had like a stat for hope that was crossed out. It had like a whole bunch, it was like the character sheet was all warped and ruined. It was like yeah, there was all these stats on it that it was like oh yeah, if it was like any normal game where it was kind of like you were super powerful then like oh that's how it

would work well the darkness typically for all the different uh types of characters like werewolves vampires whatnot they all have a special stat like humanity or ferocity or something like that that is usually 10 points where uh where that went was the control stat for um majesty yeah but majesty is only five dots so it was 10 dots and five of them had been crossed out which i really love i am such a fan as a dm uh or a gm or a marshal or whatever you want to call it of of having my players like as underpowered and under the pump as possible. And Majesty was all about that. It was like, you begin on the off foot, at any second your hands and legs could fall off.

Or you could become an owl. But you've got to achieve this goal in the game. And I tried to do that sort of superhero teams, except instead of them being like, teams come together to fight crime, it was more like, we are all cursed by this terrible thing. We've got to stick together so we can look after each other. That was kind of like the way that it sort of worked. And look, it wasn't as thought out as maybe it could have been.

There was a lot of things with control. I needed to write down a different level for each hundred, you know what I mean? Like, it's a hundred majesties to figure out what the difference between a control three failure and a control one failure for becoming an animal I don't know I guess it's just length of time and you have

downsides as well where like to be like oh okay that was like your majesty five you've lost control completely you're a donkey for like two hours but you have other plays in the game you're like I'm sorry you're just out of the game for a bit. That was kind of a downside. And I think as well

that if you failed, you effectively had five fails. It was a bit pell-mell as well, because I remember you would spend a point of control to willingly use it, but if you failed a physical roll or whatever, and you had to force your majesty, that was

also a loss of control. So it was, yeah, a little bit confused like that. Yeah, that was a problem. And also, I think I had it that if you used up all your control, that was you done. Yeah, whatever your majesty was is a permanent thing. Hey, you're an owl forever now. So this is definitely more of like a one-shot experience,

especially on assuming players. Absolutely. Yeah, you're right. It's not the kind of thing, yeah, that's a very good good point you could never run like a multi-session campaign with with majesty no but the same character again right everyone is john kind of kind of situation yeah absolutely where it's like well that was a fun one session it was cool how we all died you could never be i mean you could try to run a consistent game but it might be difficult you know what i mean yeah but it was

yeah it was a really fun system and it was it was very fleshed out as well as opposed to a lot of the other kind of like haphazard ideas i've had for like oh this would be fun but i've it's just a concept this one at least had like some stuff going for it um and some fun little weird bits of lore and stuff like that i had the idea that when when the majesty because obviously it's it's constantly sending its tendrils through all dimensions or whatever, when it pops into our dimension, you can kind of contain it in a little box

and add a character that had like, she was working for like the secret government division or whatever that looked after the werewolves and the aliens, you know, like your classic X-Files situation. But her department was just Majesty and she just had a box with a bit of the Majesty in it. But obviously when you look at the Majesty, you don't know what you're looking at.

So she was just like, we got a box. You look in it. You don't know what you've seen. It's something big. That sounds such like an SCP. You know SCPs? I don't know. It's a website with things like that.

I think we'd written out a journal for her where it was like, her first day on the job, and they're like, this is the box. We don't know what it is. Figure it out. And then it was like, it went through to like 20 decades until she was kind of like in her 60s and there was a new person coming in and she's like, that's the box. I don't know.

Yeah, I'd love to try and retool Majesty. I think it was a fun system. But yeah, it certainly had its problems. Well, if you like some guinea pigs, there's a couple of TI people that I would love to throw your way and just be like, oh, Jack has a cool game. It's just going to be like a normal kind of game.

Don't worry about it. The perfect, the perfect, yeah. You're going to be firefighters. Yeah, it's just a game. Everyone's cops. Whatever. You're like, oh, cool. Just like a little, oh goodness holy shit i i'm

now i think one of them was like you could control the city around you oh that was but every time you did you would lose stats to the city so you would get like less intelligent but the city would become more intelligent but you could do stuff like move a brick wall with your hand or like i don't know animate a street light lose Lose some bricks, lose a Starbucks. Yeah, exactly. I'm trying to think of some of the other majesties. There was an equivalent one with animals where you could control an animal.

And then that player, it was a friend of ours, he had done it so many times over the course of his lifetime. Because getting touched by the majesty also made you... Immortal, yeah. You stopped aging, basically. Unless you explode. Yeah, you stopped aging, basically. Unless you explode. Well, yeah.

And he had done it so many times with his pet cat that he had permanently switched with the pet cat. So his character was like a comatose in a wheelchair, and he was a cat who spoke through a speak and spell. He was sort of the

Professor X of the except he was just a cat with a speak and spell. He was sort of the Professor X of the, except he was just a cat with a speak and spell. Wonderful. He had a cat keyboard that was like, I don't even know how did it work? It was like, it was a giant cat keyboard. And he'd be like, A, B, C, as the cat's like pressing the little keys. And he would give the like team missions and tell them what to do. And he was, and he played and tell them what to do. And he was great. And he played it absolutely straight.

It was incredible. He was so funny. That's a solid cat name, too. It's a great cat name. I think it's from cats. Yeah, it is. It is. Fair point.

Very quickly, it reminds me of, have you ever seen Darker Than Black? No. So it's an anime that exists. It's about 22, 23 episodes or so. And just the main premise of the show was the people who had abilities, there was a price for it. So someone, they can use their blood to

attack people and it would explode. But obviously the cost of that is you need to cut yourself to use your ability. Someone else, after they use their ability, need to break all of their fingers. Someone else needs to binge eat, but they can shoot lightning or something. That's so cool.

It's a very cool flaw-benefit kind of mechanic where you just balance it out. Some of them lucked out pretty good. The other guy laying out 100 rocks in a row in an OCD pattern after he did. It's like, hold on, guys. I need to lay down some rocks. It was a very cool show.

Probably one of my favorite animes I've seen. Yeah, it sounds great. I'm a massive fan of that. It's so good when a game does it well, where they're like... Yeah, exactly. Big benefit, but poor because... It's gonna suck. But yeah, so that was Majesty. What has anyone

else got? Josh, would you like to go next? Sure. Mine is less of a system change and more of a play style change yeah we were talking about this briefly before uh off mic but it's uh i had to run a game over text uh i say had to as in we would just work to really ridiculous crazy overnight hours yeah we all lived uh separately before we thought the idea of like hey maybe we should just zoom chat each other. That's a better idea.

But we did a group text through the GroupMe app, which was a good but awful idea. It was a homebrew campaign. It was my first time DMing. Wow. Yeah. It's like DMing on a hard mode from the get-go. Listen, I've been told I'm very book smart with no common sense. That's my mom I'm quoting.

That's just how I've lived. I just make things more complicated. And this was the way to actually get to play the game, but complicate it thoroughly. So I would just play on the Long Island Railroad the entire trip home at like 7 o'clock in the morning or whenever I used to leave work. And Drew, Bucky, and Nick from TI, before we started the podcast, that was the group. And we all played together. Nick down the hall would be blasting Lord of the Rings soundtrack to prep himself before a game.

He would just walk and pace through the hallway, getting pumped for his text-based D&D role-playing. Oh, that's so cute. It was nice. Bucky was working on dailies. Drew was working in data. And I'd be like, Bye, guys. See you on the text. Yeah. And we would run the game there.

We started in Neverwinter. And I had a campaign. We didn't go very long. And you'll see why. Yeah. Where Luskin was trying to invade Neverwinter and do some really terrible stuff. Sure. I had the five big bads be named after the different ships.

Because up in Luskin, you had people named after ships. Or your position was based on that and from a lore perspective Luskin was full of very not good people it was a very it was taken over by corruption essentially

so we had a bunch of demons attack which is very fitting for like the setting we're in now they got out of Neverwinter they They went to go to the mountain close by. I had it so that way there was fire elementals that were heating the city through special piping.

That's cool. How is it hot? Instead of reading lore, I just said fire. That makes sense. I'll pay that. This text game was frustrating because every time we would try to do a lore dump or a big part of exposition, any type of reactionary post, everyone else would hop in in the process. Yeah.

And it's not like you can see that people were typing so you would stop. Yes, you could see people were typing so you should have stopped. But no one did, of course. Because they're like, oh, I want to do this before Josh says what happens. So we would also need to wait for people to stop working to be able to respond in. So it felt very much like a play-by-post.

So it was in that style but in a system and an environment where you expect immediate results. You're not waiting for mail. It's very different. Yeah, absolutely. You're combining waiting for mail. It's very different. Yeah, absolutely. You're combining the expectation of the medium you're playing with not realistic results.

Especially with the Long Island Railroad, for where I was going, I would drop signals sometimes. So everyone else is ready to go. I'm like, hey, I gotta wait. So it lasted a couple sessions. It got us actually amped to play more in person. So if anything, it was a catalyst. That's good. Some good things

about it was we didn't need to worry about what time of day it was or if people were available or whatever. If people did want to say something, they did. That's so nice. Combat. That sounds like it would have sucked dicks. How did I not even think about combat? That's got to be a nightmare.

The first thing you said when you were talking about that, I was like, in the back of my mind, combat, combat, combat, combat. Sounds like absolute hell. Combat in person is absolute hell. Right. It just takes forever. And as I was mentioning before, they started in Everwinter with like a demon attack. So what I start this off with on hard mode for my first time DMing,

combat. And you know what? I learned. Fucking hard. That, yeah, because I see a lot of people, and it's something that we've done a little bit, like, over Facebook and stuff, doing those play-by-posts or those, and you're right, if, you know, you get

older, you drift apart, you find it harder to, like, get that Sunday session, get everybody together. But, like, I'm always amazed at how patient everyone must be. Well, I mean, I guess not. You're not filling us with confidence that this campaign went forever. It didn't, no.

We got somewhat to the first town they were going to get to because that took days. It took literal days because we did not make a lot of progress. We played maybe for an hour and a half, two hours. And in person, you can potentially get a lot of stuff done. I know it's not always the case. Not.

As I point to you, too. But in person, sometimes you have that. You can have a player be like, I just want to push things forward and be like, I do here. And you also got like, I don't know, everyone's in a physical space together. It feels like there's more of like a momentum to it. Even just the DM can be like, there's something you can do when you're physically there

where you can control the space a lot better. I mean, and you've played with Nick, Adam. You know that Nick doesn't always go with the plot right away. It's about the riffing. It's about enjoying yourselves, as you guys do very well and consistently. And that's what makes your show. You're very kind, thank you.

No problem. But yeah, I found out that a benefit would be to nix combat, and to play it more as a role-playing as the old forums used to be. You go in, just post whatever's happening in the tavern you're in, or something like that. If you have it just as an open dialogue story- element, maybe if you throw in chase sequences instead or a Power by the Apocalypse system where it's just one roll or something like that where you just kind of push.

Yeah, you're right. You kind of want it to be as simple as possible. You probably want some rolling in, but even then, you you know, you just have that, yeah, collaborative story. Sort of seems like the way to go there. But then you do miss out on some of the like, I don't know, like the D&D-ness of it a little bit, which is a shame. There was some situations like at the time I worked with Drew

before I moved on to editing, where I would be sitting next to him. Bucky would be in the hallway behind me, Nick down the hall. And I'd be sitting next to Drew in the same campaign, just texting next to him. Bucky would be in the hallway behind me and Nick down the hall. And I'd be sitting next to Drew in the same campaign, just texting everything to him. And then off comments to him. But I'm like, oh, now I need to tell everybody else

and keep on texting. It really killed momentum a lot. It was again, a very good learning experience. I learned what worked, what didn't work. I learned how to DM slightly. The first time DMing out loud was for our podcast. The Curse of Strahd is my first time DMing and with a module in an actual sane capacity. Yeah, but that must have been good.

Like, you know, there's something about like going into the, what do you say? Going to the deep end. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Beginning in the deep end. You're like, cool. I've tried it as hard as possible. Everything after this is going to be comparatively a breeze.

The only thing I have left to experience is the kiddie pool. Yeah, exactly. It was definitely a trial by fire that I was happy I tried and won't do again. Do you think it would have been over Facebook or something? I guess that just becomes a play by post, doesn't it? Yeah, it does every 24 hours of

like, hey, do you want to be an elf or a dwarf? I'll wait till tomorrow. Good point. But in that way, I've played those play-by-posts because, again, that's the expectation of the medium and what you're doing. If I post that, I'm not expecting an answer right away and now it's delayed. It's like when you text that person and you're in the middle of a conversation, you're like, hey, how are you? And then they don't respond. You're like, you just engaged. Where go like you're in the middle of a conversation like hey hey how are you and then they don't respond you're like you just engaged where'd you go

I want you back and then like two days later they're like oh sorry my bad I messed up I guess that's the sort of hole that things like Fantasy Grounds and Roll20 have been trying to fill yes I've not really used them for that but I find

I think that because I know I've used Roll used them for that, but I find, or I think that, because I know I've used Roll20 for many other things, and I find that Roll20, I'm sure, would be quite useful. Or Fantasy Grounds. Fantasy Grounds is slightly more complicated, and I am but a simple boy. And so even though I own it, I've not really masked it. Yeah, and also, and I believe you don't really have any maps or anything.

You do Theater of the Mind when you guys are in the morning. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we do the same deal. And it may be the same reason for you. I mean, it's less prep work, which is great for everybody. Although it has a different feel at the table. But from a podcast audio standpoint, referring to things in a visual medium

when the audience isn't with you is disorienting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It kind of creates that distance. We've been, see, we have done, most of ours is theater of the mind, but we have toyed around with a couple of ones where we had a physical map. It's, to be fair, I've always kept the maps, like, very simple, like a corridor and two rooms on either side for the most part. But we've been slowly working more and more on that, and I would like to try and develop that.

I mean, it's a different, it's not like a play mat, but like when we did Curse of Strahd, you know, we had the big map of Barovia in the middle. Yeah, Curse of Strahd had some rough maps to work combat around. Castle Ravenloft? Holy shit, yeah. There was only one map. Good DM solidarity.

It was just like, whoa! Yeah, it was trying to explain. Drew, for us, drew out the map pretty efficiently. The only map I had to supply was the crypt. Because trying to navigate that crypt was rough. Yep, absolutely. All the ramps up, the ramps down, fuck that shit. Yeah, so we ended up posting the map that I drew out.

Which I could have just took a picture of the map. But I drew it out and I'm like, I'm doing something. But that's ultimately what we, because we've done some ones with Jackson, Zamet and Dusha where we did the Tales from the Yawning Portal, those classic stories.

We did the Sunless Citadel, right? And basically what we just ended up being was like, hey, just download all, the maps are free to look at. Right. Get the map and you can follow along. Yeah. And that would be very helpful. I'll hopefully be like, oh, you're up to this room.

Or, hey, they're at this room. Yada, yada. Do you think with like trying to do it by text, like an app, like somebody should develop some kind of app that you can be like, you can pause everybody's replying. That would be awesome. Like from the DM side of things,

be like, pause that, type out your, whatever, your exposition or your lore and then you're like, post, and then you as the DM

can be like, reply. Open up to the players, like a lock-on-lock system for chat. That is very smart. You could like prepare posts or something like that

if you wanted to do an exposition. To be like, okay, I know what I've got. I know what I'm going to have to explain visually tomorrow. This town, this castle, whatever. Write that the night before. Save it into the app. Bup, bup, bup, bup, bup.

There you go. Play by text. Especially sharing, instead of taking the time to explain characters and all that kind of stuff from a visual perspective, just sharing the pictures of them too. Yeah, absolutely. Man, someone take my genius and... Give me some royalties. i don't need to have them i'm not making it but if you make it

give me the royalties we did uh take something from you guys yeah uh to be able to share which is uh when uh adam shares the picture with either yourself or zamit or whoever and go explain this for the audience yeah that's my favorite part. We took that as well, and we usually give it to Nick, because why wouldn't we? Because, I don't know, some of the D&D creatures are so ridiculous, you want people to know what they're looking at.

Right. Some of them look so happy. Jackson loves a koa toa. Yeah, I love the koa toa, and it's the fifth Edmondson manual. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where he's going, yeah! Oh, no, that's the 3.5 one, I think.

No, I think it's the fifth one. Do you know? Is it the 3.5 or the fifth Edmondson? He's like, yeah! I'm pretty sure it's not the fifth Edmondson. It should be. But it's just a derpy fish. Yeah.

That's it. They're so funny. And it's almost tragic because they're mind-addled by the illithics. And that's why apparently they have some cultural thing where if they see an object that looks

important, they're like, must be a god. See, to me, it looks like a very realistic Spongebob character. Yeah. There's two characters that tend to stick out to me. One is the Galabdor or Galabdor. These are just adorable little rock things. And then the Kowatoa, you're just like, why?

Why did... And someone you knew drew it and was like, look at this horrible piece of shit. We're going to put this in the book. Hey, while we're on this topic, can we talk about how red caps are just a Goosebumps monster? They are. That's just Night of the Living Gnomes.

How many D&D monsters are just Goosebumps villains? Now I'm suspicious. Sorry, please go on. No, well, that's basically it from that system. Again, good learning experience in the proper

campaign setting. It could work really well. A lot of role playing. Great combat is abysmal. But yeah, it was good to try. Lessons learned. We've been saying a bunch on this trip. Here to D&D Live

2016. Live. 2016. 2019. 2019. Sorry. 2016 live that's it 2019 sorry did someone 2016 2016 we made it we'll edit that out in post what was I gonna say

oh yeah yeah something that we've been telling ourselves a bunch during this entire trip is man thank god mistakes help you learn yeah yeah absolutely because we've made a few on this trip boy oh we are we are staying too far away from this event it is a dumb move we are dumb boys all right and um i think i think i'll uh just squeeze myself in here at the end slide on in uh so what i'm going to be talking about today is an adventure or a campaign that I like to call Blackwatch,

which is also set in the World of Darkness universe or using the World of Darkness system. And I had this idea of a paranormal investigation team, kind of almost maybe in a Hellboy-esque type of vibe. Yeah, BPID sort of thing. Yeah, something like that. A game that transcended the entire 20th century, every major event. So I was going to start it at World War I because that, at the time, was the...

I didn't even research it. I was just like, what's the first 20th century event? The Great War. That's where it all starts. So the first game was basically a character introduction. Everyone gets to pick a character. And the only stipulation I had was that you kind of had to pick an allied power. Okay.

Or be from an allied power. And Russia was included. And you had to have some sort of paranormal experience. So I had characters who were like, I was a nurse on the Eastern Front in Russia or whatever like that. And I saw a man with a wolf bite transform into a werewolf, run off. I had another character who was like, I was a priest and someone got me to perform an exorcism. And I saw an actual ghost leaving a statue sort of thing. And so they were all formed together into a new,

well, quotation marks, new. It had been reformed because during World War I there was, or before World War I, there was Black Watch, which was from the knights, the old crusading knights. Like the Knights of the Templar kind of stuff. And so they come to London

and they go into this underground facility and it's got massive oil paintings that slowly become pictographs and then photographs over time of previous groups. Nifty, I like it. Yeah, and what had happened was World War I had kind of like destroyed the current Black Watch group. And so the person in charge was like, well, we need a new group. And he just grabbed anyone at hand, which was all of the characters.

They come in and the first story is like a vampire in London. Let's say a werewolf in London. That's not what it was. But a vampire in London. And they were all going to be led by an American who I described as like beautiful, classical, gorgeous, chiseled jaw sort of man. And during the werewolf fight... God, I'm an idiot.

During the vampire fight... They're basically the same thing. They both bite shit. They're largely interchangeable. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They release literal hellfire, a fire that burns forever or whatever. And one of the flames licked that leader's face

and he became like an Iron Man or whatever, he had to have like the man in the iron mask he had to have like a mask like that for the rest of his life to contain the fire burning on his face and then, so I would have that game and then I'm like

well now we jump ahead in time to like World War 2 then maybe I was going to go through. I only got through the first couple of sessions. So I didn't plan much further than that. But I knew I wanted to cover most of the large wars during the 20th century. But I also wanted to do things like, I don't know. I wanted to try and do a game on all seven continents.

Oh, that's, yeah. I like to try and do a game on all seven continents. Oh, that's... Yeah, I like that. As a progressive thing. And I had all of these systems that I wanted to slowly progress over time. So every game, the characters would realistically age. And then eventually I'd talk to one of the players. I'd be like, your character is 75. Too old to be doing this.

Probably time to retire. And I'd have them bring in a new character, and that would be basically a loss of all of their experience. So they'd have to come in with a basic new character, and then the idea would be to cultivate that where the older players would look after the newer players. That's cool. And then it would slowly change hands and such.

So was there a specific... Were you going to do events or time? I guess is my question. So was there a specific... You're like, okay, so we do World War I and then we do five years later. We do a game here. Are we going to be like, we do World War I

and then what's the next big event? World War II, we'll do a game set around that. Well, so the first event, World War I, was going to be Europe and that was going to be London. And then World War II, the second event, was africa yeah and i had them running around in the desert looking looking for a mummy that was harassing allied troops goal a loose mummy and i had i had just like a vague idea in um for them to be doing something in v, which that game didn't end up happening because that group kind of like split up or whatever.

But I reused that game actually for something with Majesty. I ran like a short little Majesty game set in Vietnam during the Vietnam War, which was originally going to be this Blackwatch game. Okay. And I think I knew, I kind of knew the game I wanted to run in Australia would have been in the red center, in the center of Australia.

And it would have had maybe something to do with, like, I would have made up a small little mining town underground. And then I was just like a Cooper Petey kind of thing. Yeah, Cooper Petey, Uppal Amanda, one of the underground cities in Australia. And I would have looked up, I don't know, I was like, what subterranean monsters could they fight what what i like about this is an idea is that you've got a finite end yes like that's really nice you you're starting a world war one and you're like we'll hit the modern day and that'll be it like there's not much further i can go did you have an overarching story no it was just going to be little novellas basically i like that individual stories i'm very into that the characters would have obviously developed but the story would uh the story would have been like each one contained like a monster

of the week but a longer time period yeah yeah yeah i quite like as well that you would have kind of enjoyable stuff where say over the course of one game a character i don't know falls in love and you're like oh those you know then when you're like hey we're doing the next one and it's five years later you as the player can be like, what happened? Are we still together? Absolutely. What would have developed in those five years? How has my character changed?

And I had, like I said, a few ideas for how things would develop. So I had the idea would be that they would get something at each of these different events that would be, translate into new technology that they could use. So in the first one i had uh they fought a vampire that regenerated a lot and in the second game i gave them two syringes where if they injected it they would fast heal oh okay okay uh and i uh i kind of had ideas for uh like i don't know you know you always got ideas in the back of your head you're

always format formulated different things. But I wanted, like, I think at one point I was like, in World of Darkness there's a book called Advanced Armory or Armory Reloaded where they have, like, a Mjolnir cannon which shoots lightning. And I was like, that looks freaking sick. I want to give them that. A lightning cannon, but a cannon that,

because there's two variants of it in Armory Reloaded. One that you mount on a vehicle and one that's handheld. And I wanted to give them the mounted one first and then the handheld one second. That's cool, like down the track as they can... And I also had this idea for...

I wanted them to be like Monster of the Week where they learn about the monster. They learn what's a vampire, what's its strengths, what's its weaknesses. Because World of Darkness is great at that. World of Darkness is like, here are werewolves. Here's literally every single... If you want to know what hairs a werewolf would have, here's the thing for you.

So I had a... It started out as a library called Athena. Which was, in the first game, it was a, it had like a, it had a, what do you call it? The little like, you're going through a drawer. Yeah, like alphabetized. A filing cabinet. Yeah, a little filing cabinet.

Or Rolodex. Yeah, like little Rolodexes that you could go through and you could find references for books that you wanted to look through. And then slowly over the course of the game. Oh, a card catalog. Yes, thank you. A card catalog of the game... Oh, a card catalogue. Yes, thank you, a card catalogue. Libraries, people.

People at home were screaming into there. Come on. Screaming at us. And then over the course of the game, it slowly became a computer. And then it would become like an AI that they could call and be like, Athena, we've discovered this. And Athena's like searching, you know, yada, yada.

That's very, yeah. I'm a big fan of any game that progresses through time. I think that's great. I think it's wonderful when you can have characters and places and stuff like evolve naturally, not at like a snail's pace that you sometimes get with some like real-time games. I don't know. Yeah, I'm always a massive fan of that.

It's a shame it didn't work out. Yeah. Well, maybe something for a future game. Yeah. Look, who knows? Anyway,

I've been Adam. I've been Jackson. I've been Josh. Thanks so much for coming on the show, man. How can we find you? Well, you can find me over at taking initiative.

We are a D and D five podcast. You can find us at ti underscore pod or at takinginitiativepodcast.com For myself, you can find me on Twitter at a very easy to spell thing at Xyroxis the beard. That's at X-I-R-O-X-I-S the beard. And that's

where I do all that stuff. And also this has been D&D Live. Yeah, yeah. Thank you so much to D&D Live for letting us record. Live! D&D Live. Yeah, yeah. Thank you so much to D&D Live for letting us record. Live! D&D Live! 2016! 2016!

Live from the Hollywood Bowl! Hey guys, we're going to have to edit that out as well. Edit what out? The 2016 bit? Yeah, that's the correct bit. Yeah. Thanks for listening. If you want to help support this show and all the other shows we do here at SantsPantsRadio,

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