Fantasy Heartbreaker, by Russell Bailey

I’ve talked about the excellent ways in which 3:16 makes me uncomfortable. I thought I’d tackle those feelings from another angle. I started jotting down a few notes… and then, an hour or so later, I had a total conversion on my hands.

Trigger Warning: This post discusses suicide.

The Bugs

A Science Fiction Roleplaying Game based upon 3:16

No one’s ever seen it, but they’ve called it a lot of names. The Grave World. The Corpse Star. The Eye of the Damned. You begin to see a pattern.

When humanity stretched forth into the cosmos, we found dozens of worlds that could be adapted to our ways of life — and more that we could adapt our ways of life to. Spaceflight was exciting and profitable.

Spaceflight was also deadly. The engineers called them cold equations. Mathematical rules which modelled the boundaries of what a human being could survive. The rules that tell you when you run out of fuel, when you’re freezing to death, even when you’ve lost your mind.

Ships were lost frequently, especially in those early centuries. Millions died. Stuck in flatspace, sometimes, or losing rations to a cargo breach. Long, slow forms of death, affecting hundreds or thousands of people at once. And therein, the coldest equation of all.

In space, humans are close to twenty percent more prone to suicide.

The equations became well-known, but the variables were debated. Isolation in metal cocoons? Neurological consequences of stasis-sleep? The subtly unique radiation patterns of Earth’s sun, or the composition of its soil?

No one knew. No one knows. But tens of thousands of humans have died by their own hands or knives or tampered EVA suits.

Settlers joked about it. “In space,” they said, “no one can hear your cry for help.”

They were wrong. Something did hear those cries for help. Those last, desperate moments. Hard to say what it was, exactly, but it gathered all of those lost human souls and it gave them new flesh. New consciousness. New life.

They accreted, merged, became the Corpse Star. And then, as humanity does, they sent out settlers. Unhuman beings linked by a single, overriding drive. The missing variable in the cold equation. Hatred for Home.

They are the Bugs. You are one of them.

What’s a Bug?

Physically speaking, a Bug is what happens when you try to house a human soul without any human flesh to work from. You end up with a simple mockery of a human shape, made out of cartilage, chitin, and things most people wouldn’t even call living.

The name Bug comes from two places: the scourgemind, and the tendency of Bugs to have extra body parts that some thoroughly alien molecular engineering system thought would be a good idea at the time. The longer a Bug evolves without integrating something else’s genetic material, the stranger its appearance becomes, as its nanoscopic, mad engineering microbes try to patch flaws in the design.

Bugs are capable of self-grafting organic material, from genetic fragments to body parts and brains. Human adaptability merged with alien biology.

What do Bugs do?

Bugs conquer and destroy human ships and settlements. On occasion, they absorb them, usually as fodder for the scourgemind. Everyone whose heard of the Bugs know that they don’t want to encounter them. Some people fear them so much that they commit suicide. And if you don’t want to be a Bug, that’s the worst thing you can do.

Stage one is infiltration. Bugs can’t communicate well enough to properly lie or deceive, but that’s not for a lack of cunning. Bugs hide in cargo shipments, ride meteorites through atmospheres, lurk in the cyclopean grave-cities of lost alien civilizations.

Stage two is infrastructure. The Bugs create the scourgemind, the neurosphere that plans, schemes, and nourishes the invasion forces with hatred. The scourgemind is generally a single Bug, immensely overgrown and supplemented with as much human neural tissue as can be salvaged. Some are massive, deadly hulks, others near-helpless brains in pools of mutated cerebral fluid.

Stage three is invasion. The Bugs cut off supply lines destroy power, open habitation zones to hostile environments. And then, only then, do they begin to stalk the survivors.

Adaptations

 

How do I create my Bug?

Sound: Each Bug has a sound, which is effectively the name by which it is referred to in play. This might be the sound your Bug makes moving, engaging in short range communication, or killing.

Role: Bugs lack the strict, evolved hierarchy of insects, but specialization remains a priority.

Abilities: A Bug has two Abilities: Fighting Ability and Non-Fighting Ability. Assign these as per 3:16.

How do Bugs develop?

Bugs develop into progressively more monstrous forms. A Bug changes and mutates until it makes one wrong mutation…and gets killed. Probably by a desperate human civilian who’s just figured out how to flip off the safety on a slug rifle.

Bugs advance in level just like troopers, and can improve their mutations or manifest new ones. See Forms and Mutations later in this article.

How do Bugs fight?

Just like troopers in 3:16.

Can Bugs use Armor or Combat Drugs?

Armor’s still armor — Bugs are naturally tough. Combat drugs are replaced by sudden surges of Hatred.

Who fights back?

Whoever survives the initial assault. Soldiers, mothers, miners, children. Collectively, they have Survivor Ability, which replaces Alien Ability, and can use Threat Tokens. Humans have a Survivor Advantage, which replaces the Special Advantage aliens have in 3:16.

How do Bugs use Strengths and Weaknesses?

All Bugs can hear the voice of the Corpse Star. That’s where the name comes from, actually — whatever the Corpse Star actually is, it generates radio output a lot like a conventional pulsar. Radio Bugs across the universe can hear. Unlike the scourgeminds, the Corpse Star doesn’t transmit plans. It transmits memories, emotions, lifetimes worth of human mental residue. Where individual Bugs pervert human adaptability, the Corpse Star perverts human memory.

A Bug having a Flashback remembers some little incident from some little human life… almost certainly one that ended badly. If that memory gives the Bug Strength, then the Bug shows some remarkably deadly human trait, like courage, guile, independent decision-making. If the memory belies a Weakness, the Bug is temporarily overcome by a positive human trait, one that prevents the creature from continuing in the slaughter.

All Bugs share their first Strength (Hatred for Home) and their last Weakness (Mercy).

Forms

When your Bug develops into a new form, take a new mutation. Bugs below Pastor can keep no more than two mutations. Pastors and more advanced Forms can keep three mutations.

Spawn

A primitive, newly reborn Bug, usually an advance scout. Like other humans, Bugs have an instinct to protect their young. A panicking Spawn can Force Weakness.

Mutations:
- Hand to Hand
- Acid Breath (Grenades)

Hellspawn

A fully grown Bug, more dangerous and independent.

Mutations:
- Bio-rocket (E-Cannon)

Mutor

A Bug beginning to mutate in earnest. Lesser Bugs instinctively follow mutors, simply because the mutor demonstrates more determination and creativity.

Precisely because of this, a Mutor can persuade an entire group of Bugs to run away when the battle turns against them. (Use the E-Vac rules.)

Mutations:
- Lethal Precision (Sidearm)

Initiate

Most Bug infestations never reach the stage of manifesting Deacons or other advanced Forms. Once Bugs stop killing, evolution stops.

The Initiate begins to understand the dogma of the Corpse Star, the abstract concepts of hating humanity and the world that birthed it. As such, the Initiate is able to call upon its brother Bugs and lead them into war.

The Initiate can summon a swarm of brother Bugs. (Use the Orbital Bombardment rules.)

Mutations:
- Greatclaw (PowerClaw)

Deacon

A Deacon can not only call a swarm, but can control one.

Deacons can compromise human vehicles by fusing them with Bug biomatter (APC). Deacons can call entire swarms of Bugs to berserker suicide attacks (TPK Bomb).

Mutations:
- Scorpion’s Tail (PowerBlade)

Pastor

The Pastor leads specialized swarms carrying out attacks too sophisticated for the average Bug. When Bugs display shocking strategic ability, it’s usually the influence of a Pastor.

A Pastor can organize swarms to create a nest as a base for further assaults (Drop Ship).

Mutations:
- Survivor (Kinetic Field Armor Transmitter)
- Voice of Hate (Flame-Gun)

Bishop/Scourgemind

The Bug which commands the invasion of a ship or planet. Typically, there’s only one per infestation. Multiple scourgeminds tend to either merge or destroy each other.

When a scourgemind Sacrifices its swarms of Bugs in the name of hatred (Paradise Bomb), it ascends to Bishop.

Human Survivor Advantages

Ambush

Armour

Hit and Fade (End Encounter)

Martyr (Enrage)

Combat Drugs (Boost Ability)

Suicide Bomb (Exploding Bodies)

Retreat (Flee)

Advanced Armory (Ignore Armor)

Defending the Weak (Ignore Wounds)

Savior Virus (Impair)

Plea for Salvation (Induce Weakness)

Pincer Attack (Isolate)

Heavy Weapons (Lasting Wounds)

Jet Packs (Leaping)

Vehicle Support (Rapid Movement)

Jam Corpse Star Transmissions (Reduce Visibility)

Reinforcements (Regeneration)

Neural Chaff (Stop Technology)

Special Ops Team (Suicide)

Relentless Advance (Swarm)

Two questions always get asked about 3:16: “how do I convert it to fantasy,” and “where are the psychics?” As a followup to my 3:16 campaign retrospective, I answer the latter question.

Ever wonder why the strategy boys name planets after artists? Goya, Degas, all that? Started in SIGINT. In the first Terran campaign, the 1:1 was deployed to planet E-348.3. Three days after the drop, the comm officers were calling it Planet Munch. Because all they heard on the radio were screams.

The 1:1 was the vanguard of the Expeditionary Forces, the First Earth Battalion. They sallied forth into the universe, confident they’d be home in a few years, having made the cosmos safe for Terracracy. They were the most highly trained and expensively equipped troops ever deployed by a human military. They were the poster boys for Terra’s invincible armada. And they were not ready.

The 1:1 lost their hypercarrier, the Omnicariximus, while entering orbit. A thousand survivors in overcrowded drop pods made it to the surface, where they were mercilessly destroyed by an entirely different civilization from the one they had been sent to engage. They fought desperately on the surface for more than a year before extraction.

There are as many accounts of what happened next as there were survivors. Which is to say, about a hundred. What is known: all of the veterans came back scarred, and a few came back changed. They felt anger, fear, hatred… and when they felt those things, people died. Sometime tens. Sometimes hundreds.

The 1:1 were neurologically cleansed, and reassigned as raw Troopers under new identities. Their operational specialty is listed as “psychological warfare.” The Admiralty is hoping that they can serve out their lives quietly. Failing that, it would like to know what makes the 1:1 tick. And how to make them go off.

The fate of the 1:1 was not reported publicly to the Expeditionary Force, or on Terra.

Their pictures are still on the posters.

System

A player may choose to play a psychic at character creation.

Catharsis

A psychic’s greatest weapon is Catharsis, a replacement use for Strengths. The difference is that the psychic character is actually having a flashback right there on the battlefield… and it’s generally not a happy one. The raw trauma of his past is simply capable of blowing entire armies to pieces.

Rather than the standard Strength effects, Catharsis acts much like a Paradise Bomb. Every PC in the encounter takes a kill, including the psychic. Armor cannot negate this damage.

For each PC that takes a kill, remove one threat token. Each PC rolls d100 kills — while the psychic inflicts many of those kills, the brass don’t want the 3:16 at large to know about the deployment of psychic Troopers, and redistribute kill credits accordingly. Needless to say, this creates some tension, especially among squads who have to wander the battlefields putting the final bullets into helpless, mindless enemies.

Peace Pills

Psychics must take regular doses of memory blocking drugs, and each is given an emergency supply before the drop. While a single pill simply prevents a Trooper from annihilating his camp site during a bad dream, the whole lot can be taken at once to create a brief and all-pervading sense of clarity and calm. The Trooper forgets everything but the task at hand, allowing a single NFA check per mission to be re-rolled.

Because of their volatile nature, psychics are issued sugar water in place of combat drugs.

“Run and hide, because the monsters are coming — the human race.”

– Russell T. Davies, Doctor Who

I don’t remember why, exactly, I ordered 3:16 Carnage Amongst the Stars. I may have read and liked the original, free version. I may have wanted to look at a “post-AGON” game design.

What I do recall is that I loved everything about it.

The game was honest and unapologetic about the “kill-happy machismo” of the power-armored-soldiers genre, as well as the frankly upsetting implications of playing death squads in the grim, dark future. Attack rolls didn’t deal abstract “damage,” they resulted in concrete kills. And the Flashback system seemed guaranteed to deliver the kinds of broken protagonists I so much enjoy.

Problem was, I couldn’t run it. The setting conceit I appreciated so much for its honesty, that the players were tasked with killing every living thing in the universe, was something I just couldn’t handle. I couldn’t play the NPCs who gave the orders to exterminate planets.

Either fortunately or disturbingly, though, I’m more than able to play a character who follows those orders.¹ So one of my coworkers took up GMing, and I took on the role of Trooper Shiv, who would turn out to be almost as much a victim of the Terran military as the people he killed.

Our squad’s first deployment was to a planet crawling with acid spitting bugs. You know the type.  Hard to sympathize with. In the first few minutes of scouting, the PCs were ambushed and Trooper Shiv took a face full of acid. Checking off wound boxes on my character sheet, I saw that he was “crippled.” I decided that meant that he was now blind. By the end of the mission, he also had the last surviving brain-bug riding around in his head.

3:16 is a lot of things. One of them is a PvP game. Players end up competing for kills and promotions. Within one mission (which took four or five lunch hours), the most craven character had become an officer. Within two missions, it became obvious that if the Lieutenant’s right-hand man didn’t get him killed, the Lieutenant was going to get the squad killed.

The Lieutenant liked to put Shiv on point.

The campaign went on a good long while, for a lunchtime game — most of a year. Here’s what I learned.

The tactics/management game is tiny and brilliant. Like most combat systems, it probably couldn’t save an otherwise dull campaign, but it’s fun and you can actually play it over lunch.

Flashbacks are fun, especially since you unlock more of them as you advance. Your characters become progressively more capable of destruction while, in parallel, becoming more developed people. For my group, this was both unpleasant and hilarious. Early on, it was my favorite feature of the game.

Flashbacks are also frustrating. Using a Flashback requires you to invent both an anecdote and a character trait… and that character trait needs to be sufficient to either pull you out of danger or end a full-scale battle. I ended up abusing the system a bit, and having most of Shiv’s Flashbacks be “deleted scenes” from previous missions.

The GM has to play things fairly straight. A few Futurama-esque gizmos are alright, but the more humor becomes built into the setting, the less morbid and funny the troopers’ lives become.

Ultimately, 3:16 requires you to both find something kind of amusing about shooting everything that lives, but also be queasy with the idea that this is a good thing. It’s a game about doing the awful things that 40k assumes as a matter of course, and doing them as a job.

The moral lesson is obvious… unnecessary, even. But it’s a good one to work through once in a while. I work in video games, where success is measured in imaginary murders. Once in a while, it’s good to play a game that’s not asking me to be entirely okay with that.

In the year since our campaign wound up, I’ve often found myself thinking about 3:16. Should we play again? Should I be running this time? Having played the game more or less as written, I’m now a lot more comfortable making changes to the setting. Giving Earth a sympathetic reason to go to war, for instance, or putting troopers into literal hell in the fashion of the Doom series. But I don’t think I’ll ever be able to gloss over or forget what it was like playing not just the monsters, but the bad guys.

Carnage Amongst the Stars still carries some of the unease that I feel every time I see an FPS that involves mowing down the Other.

I’m glad that it does.

So, my housemate, Orrin, played through the demo of Rich Dansky‘s Tom Clancy‘s Splinter Cell: Conviction. For the moment, her observations hold more water than mine, but just watching her, I could see the writing on the wall. For her, it was all stuff like “INFILTRATE THE MANSION,” but for me, it was “POST MORE ON ENVIRONMENTAL NARRATIVE.”

Because this is something that’s worth talking about. You’ve got all this crap that’s going on inside the head of the character, and all this crap going on inside the UI (or on the character sheet) of the player. Generally, though, the environment doesn’t reflect any of this. If you’re lucky, you get some post-processing shaders to put everything in stoner blur (or the GM narration equivalent) when you’re dazed.

If you’re really lucky, you get one of those entire maps where you’re crazy, like in BioShock 2 or Velvet Assassin.¹

Heads, HUDs, and types of action

Video games have been trying to push character and game state information into the 3d environment for a while. Dead Space and Ghostbusters both replace classic interface elements with animations on your character.[3. Arguably, World of Warcraft does this with its various floating punctuation marks. I think that's an in-between case, myself. I'd love to see an MMO push character-mind stuff into the environment, though.] The reduced screen clutter is supposed to immerse you more in our friend the environment.

Does it? I think it worked a little in Dead Space, but thought it was almost irrelevant in Ghostbusters. Seeing the character state on the character looked great, but it didn’t make me feel like there was any kind of focus on him or his world. It wasn’t his story, it belonged to the actual Ghostbusters, and that was okay. The game also did a good job of conjuring the environments from the first film, but didn’t share that film’s gift for evoking 1980s New York.²

And the environment in Dead Space was an impressively rendered rehash of other games, kinda like every half-decent remake of Aliens. Focusing on it more didn’t really do anything for me.

Splinter Cell, though, is taking one of my own personal demons (quest text) and marrying it to one of my personal fascinations (the dungeon, or, if you must, the level). Your environment doesn’t just tell you what you have to do… the tooltips for climbing and sneaking and peaking and all are projected into the environment, too.

In other words, the game takes a somewhat new approach to two things:

• Required action (Infiltrate the Mansion)
• Potential action (Jump on this crate)

You find yourself looking into the environment for your goals and opportunities. Will Hindmarch says:

Conviction is all about putting you into the head of Sam Fisher, more so than his body. The game projects his thoughts onto the walls and surfaces of the game world, turning literal space into a figurative, psychological terrain at the same time.

That’s particularly interesting to me, because I think that the dungeon (electronic or imagined) is a landscape of psychological terrain.

The Dungeon as Psychological Projection

Sometimes, that terrain is the designer’s headspace.³

Sometimes, it’s the hero’s. If you look at Quarmall, ⁴ or the Scarlet Citadel,⁵ you see environments that reveal the essential qualities of the characters therein.

The Scarlet Citadel reveals almost only what Conan brings in: old grudges, bold action, murderous ferocity, and a canny mind ready to exploit any weakness. And, yes, he fights a giant snake. Says it all, really.

Quarmall is more your “ecosystem” dungeon, with its giant slaves bred to pump the ventillation system, its halves controlled by warring princes, and ruling over all, its withered wizard-king. Here the Gray Mouser encounters charlatan wizards, and Fafhrd muscle-brained fools — both things they’ve been accused of being themselves.

Each also finds opportunities to showcase his most conspicuous qualities. The Mouser abducts a girl and attempts a spell, Fafhrd finds his romantic inclinations overwhelming his better judgment.⁶ And, of course, traversing the dungeons levels leads the two to reunite and perpetrate one of their own greatest scams.

So, if the dungeon is, in part, a projection of the hero who enters it⁷, is that something to consciously model in roleplaying games? It’s not hard to envision a mechanism for doing so, something like 3:16‘s flashbacks, only projecting into the environment, rather than exclusively the hero’s own past.

If I’m a little suspicious of the idea in a roleplaying game, I’m even more suspicious when it comes to MMOs. Do designers even have the right to tell a player what’s going on in their character’s heads? I’ve been told that an exclamation point is already a bridge too far. Should the character even be acknowledged as someone psychologically separate from the player, or is that just a legacy inherited from other sorts of games?

And if we’re facing the death of the character⁸, then is it acceptable to make psychological assumptions at all?

______

I think I’ve mentioned before that I consider the original The Legend of Zelda an almost perfect example of a game design. The game flows beautifully, challenges the player, and provides lots of rewards for exploration.

It’s also one of the finest dungeon crawlers of all time, despite a surprisingly small number of clones to its name.¹ Despite clearly adapting the wilderness/underworld model of tabletop roleplaying, Zelda doesn’t adapt the experience/level model.

The original Dungeons & Dragons leveling scheme has four elements:

1. Increased hit points.
2. More spells/skills.
3. Magic items.
4. Money.

In D&D, these are presumed to be gained by trekking across a dangerous wilderness and completing more and more challenging dungeon levels. Just so in Zelda.

Zelda takes the brilliant step of combining the effects of leveling with the completion of dungeons. In the middle of each dungeon, you gain a magic item which is (usually) key to your progress. At the end of each dungeon, you’re rewarded with additional “heart containers,” or hit points.²

But what about wandering the wilderness to gain a few levels and gain an edge on the monsters? Zelda‘s got you covered there, too. Additional heart containers can be found in out of the way places on the overworld map. And some magic treasures (like the equivalents of +1 swords) can be obtained only by exploring the wilderness.

I admire the elegance: one reward halfway through each dungeon that you can put into play immediately, with an increase in power provided at the end of the level. Plenty of cherries for players intent on scouring the map. There’s both an economy and completeness of design that only a few games have, even those from the early eras of video gaming.

I’ve often thought of incorporating a variation of Zelda‘s leveling scheme into one of my games. Much as 3:16 requires a successful mission to advance, I’ve considered making a full exploration of a dungeon the key to leveling in one of my own fantasy heartbreakers. Here’s an excerpt from something I’ve been playing with:

An experience box may be checked by:

• Rolling the same number on every die on a core roll.
• Finding a cache of treasure unguarded by monsters. (Doesn’t count if you killed them.)
• Killing a monster.

An experience line is a special accomplishment, such as:

• Defeating a special monster.
• Completing a small dungeon.
• Completing a level of a large dungeon.
• Performing a deed of legend.
• Being recognized by a non-player character authority figure in some significant fashion, such as knighthood.

Thoughts?

____

In the world of men, there are few things duller than waiting for a maintenance dude. Waiting for the end is probably one of them. Right now, I’m doing the former and thinking a bit about the latter.

At White Wolf/CCP, we have an informal tradition I call the six shooter. You’ve played one shots, right? This is like that, only spread out over a couple of weeks. We play on our lunch hour, and we get to experiment with different rules and styles. It’s a tradition that’s produced mafia sagas,* Catch 40k, and the epic Pugmeier campaign setting.

The most recent was Eddy’s Mutant Future game. Mutant Future is essentially a Labyrinth Lord homage to Gamma World. It plays up the strange, impossible aspects of post-apocalyptic gaming, rather than Fallout‘s satire or the well-intentioned seriousness of the White Wolf Gamma World.

This was also the first old school experiment I’ve been in that wasn’t firmly rooted in the Dungeons & Dragons subgenre. Eddy built a little section of the irradiated futurescape for us, but he also pushed the game’s random elements hard. I enjoyed this, but I think it grew to annoy him as a GM.

Characters were close to pure random… we got to allocate our ability scores, but I chose to just take them in order. I ended up as a two-headed robot named “Bjorn XL,” with Exceptional Sense (Fashion). My companions were an octopus man, a deaf mutant with a mule sidekick, and Doc Savage.**

In practice, we were subdivided into Team Smart and Team Dumb. Justin’s mutant and Bjorn were both completely clueless with technology, while Doc and the octopus were practically made of knowledge.

Our adventure took us across shanty towns, irradiated suburbs, and a drive-in that had become home to Mants.***

So, what did I learn:

• Maintaining a GM’s sense of a living world can be as important as maintaining it for the players. Sandbox campaigns are in vogue right now, but I think Eddy felt the encounter table turned it into more of a beach, with the occasional wave washing in and leaving unpredictable flotsam in the game.
• The turn order of classic D&D produces the occasional stumble with people who don’t use it often, but it’s a lot of fun.
• Hirelings. Man, these guys are like the cornerstone of high-fatality old school gaming.
• I don’t like playing characters with highly specific special abilities that I only get to use occasionally. I want to participate frequently, even if my character ends up failing.
• Narrating failures: still the best part of having a PC.
• Just listen to the damn octopus.

Randomness really was the key factor here. I generally find random characters liberating, because I don’t have to come up with a killer concept before I know how the game feels. In the friction between mechanical choices and the world I’m exploring, I find my character.

On the other hand, having random, highly specific traits can be a little frustrating. I couldn’t find a single good moment to bring up Bjorn’s second head, something I would have loved to make a signature of the character.

Eddy made the choice to go balls-out on random elements, and I think he found that broke his rhythm as a GM. That’s something I’m keeping in mind as I design the game for the company retreat.

I find I need to build a certain amount of momentum going into a game, at which point the crazy ideas just start pouring out of my head. Random elements are good to help build that momentum, and also for having crazy rebounds build up.

I recognize now, though, that if the world doesn’t stay coherent in my mind, I’m likely to get frustrated and lose momentum.

Does that happen to you folks? Do you find that there are certain places in your game rhythm where chance is more valuable than others?

____

* Note to my roommate: it was multi-generational, so it really was a saga.

** When given the opportunity, I will always play a thief or a robot. Similarly, John Chambers will always play Doc Savage.

*** Exactly what they sound like. If you ever run into them, you should know that they do have a Mant-queen.