Supernatural game ideas

So I decided I'm not going to make a custom system for the game, as that would take too long and could be prone to bugs.

Instead, I am going to use the system present in the Sine Nomine games like Stars Without Number, Other Dust and Spears of the Dawn. There will still be three classes, but I know the system works well so it'll rock.

I'm also changing around how the races work a bit. Instead of being a pure zombie, mummy or whatever, you are instead a human instilled with basically a monstrous bloodline. You'd be human, but you'd have the lycanthrope bloodline. In total, there are 12 bloodlines and then a 13th "humanity" bloodline. Everyone has the humanity bloodline and then a monster bloodline.

The game will then have a corruption scale. If you become more monstrous, you get cool monster powers but also get the drawbacks of being that monster. For example, the lycanthrope bloodline will start off with the weakness of being very violent, unstable and, well, horny, on a certain phase of the moon. At the second level, the lycanthrope will get large amounts of hair and will look strange, but he'll be able to speak to animals now. At the third level, the lycanthrope will be able to shift parts of his body, like turning his hands into claws, but he will become severally allergic to silver and wolf's bane.

At the fourth level of corruption, you have fully turned, and you become an NPC probably. However, if you do awesome humanistic stuff, you'll go down the path of humanity and gain some powers. But as you become more human, you lose all that cool Hammer horror powers.

I'll probably also include rules to basically "multiclass" bloodlines, for those people who want to play a vampire/werewolf or whatever.

The bloodlines so far are Lycanthrope, Vampire, Golem, Hyde, Spirit (angels, demons, etc.), Ghost, Witch, Fae, Mummy, Gill-man, Slasher (serial killer), Zombie and Humanity. I don't know if they will change, but I like the solid power balance of "classic" monsters.

Supernatural Characters

I've been wanting to run a modern horror game in the style of WoD, but I honestly think WoD has a little unwelcome bloat. There is some hope though, as many horror games get released around the fall season including the very cool Spooks!, Accursed and the updated Book of Pandaemonium.

So I thought I'd jump on the band wagon and make a little game. Rules lite, takes some cues for WoD, but works on its own. The main meta plot involves the Well of Souls, which is where all life is born from and returns to. Guarded by celestial beings, it is somehow mysteriously closed off, trapping souls both inside and out. People are panicking, the dead are rising, and supernatural creatures are running amok. Your characters are part of a Cult, a group of people looking for the "Key" to unlock the Well of Souls again.

Characters are divided into cabals, which are different depending on the status of your soul.

Ghuls have no souls, but extreme force of will, and are thus undead abominations. This cabal includes mummies, zombies and vampires, all with flavorful names.

The Circe have two souls, and are at a constant war between their two halves. This cabal includes lycanthropes, changelings and Mr. Hyde type characters

The Dias are the former protectors of the Well of Souls. This cabal includes angels, demons and lovecraftian horrors.

The Fae have souls, but they are splintered and broken. This is the widest spread cabal, and deals with all mythical creatures ranging from centaurs to goblins.

The Neph have no bodies, but can not turn to the afterlife. This cabal includes golems, ghosts and nature spirits.

Then there are humans, of course. The group is composed of people that rely on natural ability, ones that rely on technology, and one that rely on a divine host.

The classes will be Warlock, Investigator and Soldier, and I want to have some sort of skill tree for the classes.

The resolution system is 2d6 plus modifier versus a target number. Skills work in that if you have the skill, you roll 3d6 and take the two dice. There will only be three stats, and there will be three "pools": magic, sanity and health.

I'm currently working on the races, which are coming along pretty well. No estimated date, but I feel it could be done before Halloween. Hope you guys think it sounds cool!

Possibly Doing a Layout Change

I've been meaning to do this for a while, but I may actually do it soon.

Originally, Pulpwood! was supposed to be a progress blog for my Pulpwood! game (which is once again being developed). However, it has transcended past that and turned into an RPG blog that focuses mostly on my game creations or whatever.

So soon, I will probably change the site to be "Old Soul Games" or something, which is what I've been doing projects under. The content will be the same, but the name, design and layout will mostly change.

I'm off for two weeks, so I have time to do such a thing, but hopefully it'll only take me an hour or two.

So anyway, just wanted to say that!

Sixth World - A Dungeon World Hack

So I helped make a thing!

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/986437/sixth_world_revised.pdf

Sixth World is a Dungeon World hack that is used for playing in the Shadowrun universe. Primarily written by Chris Clouser, I jumped on at a later point mostly as an adviser/editor. Then I guess I gave him so much info, he decided to put me as co-author. Go figure.

Anyway, the game contains:

-Rules to play as the 5 classic metatypes, as well as suggestions on making stranger races
-10 Archetypes that allow multiclassing between them, keeping the "classless" spirit of SR. All your favorites are here, from Adept to Hacker to Rigger to Street Samurai
-Tons of equipment, spells, spirits, vehicles, cybernetics and rules on how to make and customize all of that! Yes, spell creation is in-built in the system
-A list of threats ranging from Lone Star Cops to Acid IC to Dragons
-Rules on stating out Sprawls and Wildernesses, allowing you to show how much of a threat Perils are to the city
-Quick and simple rules to facilitate narration over mechanics
-Rules for legwork that make a difference when it comes time to run.
-Rules for wireless hacking AND astral quests
-Optional rules for Blood Magic, Otakus and Gaeas

So yeah! Check it out!

Something I'd Like to See

I wish someone would make a hack of Eclipse Phase using Apocalypse/Dungeon World. I would do it, but I am working on Panopticon and Pulpwood!

Yes, you heard me right, Pulpwood. It'll be a different format, but I am sure it'll still be awesome. The big draw will be a crap-ton of setting blurbs, placed on a map of the world Indiana Jones style. It's coming along, but I'm not giving a day. It'll be done when its done

Panopticon is getting close to being some kind of playtest ready. I'm almost done with all the Upgrades, and the human classes are mostly done. Still, I have to hammer out psionics, gear and basic combat, but after that it should be easy. Combat will be pretty simple OD&D fair, adjusted mostly for the use of guns. That allows things like aim, burst fire and so on. It should be pretty ool

Preliminary Upgrades

I've been compiling ideas for that OSR cyberpunk game, tentatively entitled "Panopticon." Below is a list of
cyber/bioware, which includes modifications for the torso and the arms. I'm also having leg mods and head mods, but this is what I have so far.

Torso Upgrades

These upgrades are for systems located in your torso, or ones that run throughout your whole body.

Neoheart 
Your heart has been upgraded to increase circulation and efficency. Your Constitution score increases by 1. This Upgrade can be taken three times. Simply replacing a diseased heart only costs no power, and that type of neoheart can't malfunction. Note that Constitution modified by the neoheart does not allow for additional Upgrades.

Bone Weave
Your bones have been reinforced to be extra strong and resistant to damage. You gain an additional point of natural AC. This Upgrade can be taken twice.

Gigalungs
Your lungs have been upgraded, both in size and holding capacity. You can hold your breath for up to 20 minutes, sealing off your system from dangerous gases, water and vaccuum. Simply replacing a diseased lung costs no power, and that type of gigalung can't malfunction.

Muscle Threads
Your musculature has been fortified to make you stronger and tougher. Your Strength score increases by 1. This Upgrade can be taken three times.

Nerve Splits 
Your nerves have been branched and increased in output, allowing you to be faster and more responsive. Your Dexterity score increases by 1. This Upgrade can be taken three times.

Black Blood Cells
Your blood has been infused with black blood cells; hyper-fast nanobots that seek out and destroy pathogens hundreds of times faster than white blood cells. You become more resistant to disease, granting you a -2 bonus to saves involving avoiding them. This Upgrade can be taken twice.

Hardened Adipose
Your fat and skin tissues have been hardened, making you more resistant to damage. You gain 2 additional HP unmodified by Constitution. This Upgrade can be taken up to five times.

Magnetism
Your endocrine system has been augmented, releasing synth-pheremones in order to make you appear more attractive or influential. Your Charisma score increases by 1. This Upgrade can be taken three times.

Steel Gut
Your digestive system has been fortified with nanites and advanced bacteria. This makes you extremely resistant to poisons, both ingested and otherwise, granting you a -2 bonus to saves involving avoiding them. This Upgrade can be taken twice. Note that this upgrade also makes it quite difficult to get drunk, though now you can eat almost anything.

Cosmetic Alterations
These alterations include things such as animated tattoos, glowing eyes, elvish ears, strange colored skin or hair. These alterations do not cost any Power, but they cost credits like all Upgrades.

Arm Upgrades

These upgrades are used to replace and augment your arms and hands.

Cyberarm
This metallic arm replaces large portions, or perhaps the entire length, of a dismembered or missing arm. They range from high class and sleek to rusty and piecemeal. A cyberarm is needed to obtain the Sleeved Gun, Bicep Compartment and Inbuilt Compdeck Upgrades.

Sleeved Gun
You have a gun built within your cyberarm, which fires out of your palm and reloads through a feeder under the wrist. The gun must be small-arms and though only one weapon can be placed in an arm, it is possible to switch out guns (e.g. pistol for SMG). If you have two cyberarms, this Upgrade can be taken twice to provide a weapon for each.

Siberia Claws
You have mechanical or bony claws that extend out of the back of your knuckles. They function like a 1-handed melee weapon.

Bicep Compartment
You have a hollow storage space in your bicep that can only be unlocked by your brain. The space is large enough to hold a pistol or anything smaller. This Upgrade can be taken twice if you have two cyberarms.

Inbuilt Compdeck
Your Compdeck isn't handheld, but rather built into your forearm. This prevents your Compdeck from ever being stolen, unless someone wants to just rip your arm off (which some people do.)

Parker Tips
Your fingertips are laced with small barbs, allowing you to climb up vertical surfaces with little to no climbing gear.

Sworl Erase
Your fingertips have been scrubbed clean, leaving you lacking of fingerprints. While useful in avoiding the police, it's hard to access to anywhere without them.

Field Sensors

You have had magnets, or a biological equivalent, implanted under the skin of your palms and fingers. This allows you to feel energy fields, allowing you to discern their properties, where they are going and more.

A Basic Running System

And here is the draft system for net running! It's pretty easy since I treat running as more of a separate setting than one that requires a million rules. Still, I offer pretty easy to remember guidelines for all your running needs.

Running

When you enter the IntraNet, you are navigating the nearly infinite digital space with your mind. Your body, as well as all your gear, is sitting in situ (hopefully in a safe place). That doesn't mean you are unprotected in the IntraNet, however. Your mind is convinced it still has all its gear, but it is instead a manifestation of your mind, rather than a physical object. Still, while in IntraSpace, your brain becomes a computer for all intents and purposes. That mentally digitized gun may not be "real," but it can still lay the smack down.

Running is handled exactly like normal, real-life street missions. You have all your gear, and you look like your normal self, though you glow slightly blue and look digital. The difference is that you are no longer in the realm of the physical, but of the mental. That means when it comes down to fisticuffs, you have to flex your grey matter instead of  your muscle matter.

This translates in a few ways. First, Strength is no longer used to determine melee attack bonuses and damage. Intelligence takes up that roll. Second, your Dexterity is no longer used to determine ranged attack bonuses and AC. That is now Wisdom's job. Further, like you saw in character creation, you have two new stats while running: your FC, or Firewall Class, that acts as your AC while in digital space, and your SP, or Stress Points, that act as your HP.

IntraNet combat works exactly like regular combat as well, though instead of fighting gangers and corp security, you'll be tangling with ICEs, worms and more. These programs can take up thousands of forms, similar to your Avatars.

In this way, IntraNet running is a good way to get away from the normal cyberpunk aesthetics for the GM. Want to do a fantasy dungeon crawl? Have the runners visit a IntraSpace that emulates a medieval town, where malware in the shape of a fell drake constantly frags the inhabitants.

"Dying" in the IntraNet

While exploring the IntraNet, if your SP ever reaches 0, you will become "fragged." Fragging basically is the break-up of your digital form, causing your mind to refuse a connection with the IntraNet, thus jacking your consciousness out of the Net and shoving it back in your body. You will be unharmed, but mentally, you'll be exhausted. Fragging occurs after 1 minute of reaching 0 SP, so the runner's partners have time to revive him before he is booted out. SP heals at the same rate as HP.

However, if you reach into negative SPs, that could be a serious problem for you. When you plunge down into the negatives, your mind starts reeling and trying to destroy the "infected" parts of your brain to revive you. Your consciousness stays in the IntraSpace as your brain does its work, and you must make a Will save to stabilize, similar to stabilizing physical wounds.

If you do manage to stabilize, you are fragged instantly and tossed back into your body. People with negative SP will not only be mentally tired, but they'll often be confused, confrontational, depressed and forgetful until
their brain manages to self repair itself. SP can also be restored through visits to a psychologist, often called "brain docs". These aren't so much licensed psychoanalysists, but more programmers who jack into your access port and try to root out malicious programs. Both natural and assisted healing at negative SP works exactly like healing similar HPs.

At -10 SP, the runner is fragged instantly, shoved into his body, and either becomes irreversibly comatose or incredibly insane. That means it's time for a new character.

It is important to stress that when you are in the IntraNet, your body must be safe. While running, you can easily be killed, kidnapped or worse. Further more, if you are unexpectedly jacked out, your conciousness will be stuck in the IntraNet as your body stays as a potato. You can rejoin with your body if you can find where it was transferred to, but that in itself is a whole other adventure.

Entering, Exiting and Moving in the IntraNet

The actual process of entering the IntraNet is fairly easy; find a safe and comfy place to rest, insert the Jack Wire into your access port, and sink into the Net. Where you arrive in the IntraNet is a different story. Every IntraSpace has an IP address, similar to current computers. If you know the IP number of the IntraSpace you want to visit, you'll arrive there with little complications once you Jack in. A good deal of IP numbers are easy to find, but some, such as the IP of a megacorp's stock portfolio, will be extremely hard to locate and may require real-life hacking and infiltrating to get access to.

Most IPs won't actually drop you inside the IntraSpace, but rather right in front of it. If you want to get in,
you'll have to do it the old fashioned way.

If you don't know the IP, good luck. The IntraNet is vast, some say infinite, and finding anything is a bitch. You may find what you are looking for by wandering, as similar IP addresses are placed close together physically, but don't expect to drop into an IntraSpace city and find a gun smuggler's hideout with no effort. If you enter the IntraNet without knowing the IP, you'll drop into your personal IntraSpace, which usually takes the form of an apartment.

Entering and getting place to place in the IntraNet is fairly easy, but exiting is a different story. As stated in the previous section, getting fragged is the forceful way to leave the IntraNet. The willing way requires you to go back to the IP you entered from. Yes, this means you can't just go to the IntraSpace's core, grab the data you want, and then Jack out. You have to escape with the goods. However, once you get back to the IP, jacking out is basically instant.

The Core

All IntraSpaces have something called a core. The core represents the source code used to write the IntraSpace, as well as the hard drive which contains the more important and hidden files. It also serves as the central processing power of the IntraSpace. If you want to modify or extract from the IntraSpace, you have to access the core.

Cores are usually centrally located, and are not hard to miss. The core is often in its own heavily guarded room, and the core's room itself is high vaulted and empty. In the middle is the core itself, a floating piece of geometry that constantly shifts and fluctuates with information and code.

Actually accessing the core is difficult, as the cores are fairly powerful AIs that will try to destroy the runners. Cores can be dealt with like any enemy, but these creatures are dangerous. Not all cores are insanely powerful, though; accessing the core of a digital coffee shop will usually only take a quick battle or round of negotiating. However, destroying a megacorp or government core will be a drawn out battle that may result in some fragging.

Once the core is defeated, runners won't have long until the core's back-up systems activate. These could be alarms, self destruct systems, or even a full reboot. Runners have a limited time to access or alter the information they wish, represented by an extended Intelligence check. Weak cores can take up to 20 minutes to activate their back ups, while powerful ones only need about 1 minute. This is complicated by the fact that more powerful cores will need more successes on the extended check to get the information you want. Once the runner does get what he wants, it's time to bolt.

Hacking in the IntraNet

Hacking with your Avatar in the IntraNet is fairly difficult, if not impossible. What an Avatar does to an ExtraNet is avoid, destroy and circumnavigate malicious programs in order to get to data files. However, most items in the IntraNet ARE programs. The Avatar simply doesn't know how to infilitrate individual programs to access their source codes.

Well, that's not really true. Not all Avatars can.

Some very illegal, very powerful and very expensive Avatars exist, and they are known as Devas. Devas are extensions of Avatars, so you can have a rank 3 Deva. Devas can hack items in the IntraNet, and the hacking functions just as Avatar hacking. Some things are too powerful for even the Deva to hack, such as an IntraSpace's core. What is hackable by the Deva is up to the GM.