Meanwhile, back at Jam Pony…

I've been watching Dark Angel, a television series about Max, a genetically engineered soldier on the run in post-nuclear pulse Seattle. One of the interesting aspects of the show is that nearly every episode, there's a sub-plot involving Max's friends at Jam Pony, the bicycle courier service she works for. Sometimes, the sub-plot doesn't involve Max at all, and the sub-plot thread never crosses the main plot. But it adds a sense of reality, the feeling that there's a real world around Max and her action-hero life. When Max does interact with her friends, we see them as more than two-dimensional cut-outs who only exist to interact with Max. The supporting characters clearly have lives of their own and it makes the whole more believable.

I've been thinking about this from a gaming perspective. One of the tools often used in telling stories is the third-person point-of-view. In fact, many "how to write fiction" books recommend this PoV for beginning writers, because it makes it easier to tell the story when you aren't restricted to the PoV of just the main character. Without the third-person PoV in Dark Angel, they couldn't show all the little sub-plots that lend verisimilitude to the show. Or the villain doing his dastardly thing at the beginning so the viewer understands what's going on.

This approach is used very rarely in gaming. When most roleplaying scenarios rely on investigation or discovery as a primary driver of the plot, there's good reason not to show scenes that will give away information the PCs are trying to discover, unless you don't mind the players knowing information their characters don't. (I do. Even if the players are good at firewalling non-character information, I don't like to burden them with knowing something and not being able to have their character act on it.) But there are still other areas, like these sub-plots of minor characters, that the players don't get to see.

Theatrix is the only game I know of that addresses using a third-person PoV. It explicitly encourages cut-scenes and sub-plots involving characters that aren't the PCs. Usually, the NPCs are assigned to players for the duration of the scene so the players don't have to sit and watch the GM talk to himself for twenty minutes.

Theatrix goes as far as to promote foreshadowing with scenes involving the main plot. For instance, two players might be given characters with instructions to play out the exchange of money between an assassin and his employer, with just enough information to play the scene, but no reveal anything important. So the players will know an assassin has been hired, and that this is going to be important to the plot, but they won't know who did the hiring or who the target is.

Theatrix is based heavily on television and film, and strongly integrates the "foreshadowing through cut-scene" element. But I find there's a lot of resistance to this. The one time my group tried this, the players found it awkward… though that's expected when trying anything new. I'm wondering how much of the resistance toward the idea comes from the idea that the player is telling his character's story, and when asked to tell someone else's story, it's a deviation from what he's in the game for.

I think doing the Dark Angel style of developing minor characters might be useful. More useful than foreshadowing the main plot, because the player can actually know the character and play the role every time the minor character comes up. No information really needs to be hidden from the players. I'm not sure if it'd go over any better… it'd be a story within a story, and while it's good pacing for television, it might kill the pacing of a roleplaying game. And it could interfere with players who are trying to get into their character and don't want to be distracted by changing their frame of mind. (Funny that, for all of Theatrix' high-brow roleplaying direction, it seems to assume that players can drop in and out of various characters without any trouble.)

I'm not sure I'll do anything with this, but it seems like there might be something here that could be useful. If it could add depth to the world and give the PCs more connections to it (by involving PCs in the sub-plots), that would be a good deal. I'm just not sure if the pros outweigh the cons.

Office supply geek

Okay, I'll admit it… I'm an office supply geek. I like cool office toys, especially if they make me feel like I'll be more productive or something. (I think writing is 90% attitude, and if a new notebook and pen makes me want to write more, it's money well-spent. :)

So in light of my recent comments on how I use 3x5" index cards to organize my roleplaying information, you might be able to imagine how much I'm drooling over this…

3x5 Card Bleachers (photos) from Levenger.

Now isn't that totally cool? I can see using this instead of my GM screen. Too bad it's a Levenger product… $54 is a hefty price for an index card rack. It's hard to tell from the pictures, but it looks like it's slightly curved, and may hold the cards by flexing them slightly. If that's the case, it'd take me far more than $54 worth of time out in the woodshop to make one for myself. So maybe $54 isn't so bad. But I'm having trouble seeing me shelling out the bucks for one. Which is how every trip to the Levenger catalog has gone… lots of window shopping, but I've never bought a thing from them. Le sigh….

Levenger, the store that charges $40 for 1000 blank index cards. I can get a pack of 500 for three bucks from Amazon.com.

I got my Moleskine today

It's a pocket notepad with unlined pages. I wrote my name on the title page. Wrote some to-do stuff on a unruled 3x5" index card and stuck it in the front. Stuck a few blank cards in the pocket in the back.

Eh. It's a notepad. Very nicely made, but it's still a notepad. I'll carry it with me and see what comes of it. Already have that feeling that what I really want is the expanding pocket folder instead of an actual notepad. The covers are very rigid and it makes a good writing surface for the notecards. But I think I'm going to use the pages of the notebook to capture ideas, both for fiction and gaming. Todo lists and schedules will go on notecards.

More about index cards

I've been thinking about why I prefer index cards over my PDA for organizing my gaming notes, and there's one key piece that didn't occur to me yesterday. The "physical arrangement" aspect occurs on the card itself, as well as the card in relation to other cards.

For an NPC card, the character name goes in the upper-left corner. The upper-right corner is a very short phrase that describes the character's role in the story… a short-hand tag to jog my memory.

If the name on the left is "Buffy" the tag on the right is "vampire slayer." (These can correspond strongly to Theatrix traits, BTW.) If the name on the left is "Lord Dorregon" the tag on the right might be "evil high overlord". With minor supporting characters, the tag is usually a relationship… "Boron" may be "Dorregon's man-servant".

Under the name, on the first actual line of the card, comes the stronger secondary traits, which include abilities, race, relationships, etc… "Superb swordsman, Lord of All Jumania, father of [PC #3]". Boron's reads, "Hates Dorregon (secret), will help PC's."

In the lower-right corner, I write the "actor" that "plays" the character. This is a "visualization" technique I use to help me establish personalities and mannerisims and keep them straight. The wizard's apprentice Liru was "played by" Lennier from Babylon 5. Notice that he's not played by Bill Mumy, but by Bill Mumy playing Lennier. So when I play Liru, I try to move and talk like Lennier. Not necessarily sound like Bill Mumy, but to get the mannerisms and way of talking down. It gives me a solid, real-world reference point. Sometimes I do use an actor, when the actor is generally type-cast. "Clint Eastwood" works just fine. But "Sean Connery" doesn't… because I have to know if it's "James Bond" or "Juan Sanchez Villa-Lobos Ramirez" from Highlander that I'm working with. I might have a couple keywords here to help me remember what the character was like, or what movie I'm referencing. I'm more likely to write "Sean Connery in Highlander" than I am "Juan Sanchez Villa-Lobos Ramirez."

Important skills get listed up the lower-left side. After that, it gets more freeform. Keywords and bits of description, important equipment, etc. I do similar things with place and thing cards. Primary role in the story, keywords, etc. Sometimes there are circles and arrows… something the PDA doesn't lend itself to.

I think the place that it isn't obvious why the PDA doesn't do this well is how I actually fill out the cards. I often bounce around… I may be in the middle of writing key traits, and suddenly realize who ought to be playing the character, then get the inspiration that he should be related to the King, etc. I bounce around a lot.

The cards aren't just summaries of the larger amount of information on the computer… they're where I start when creating a character as well. A bit of a brainstorming tool, by having specific information go in specific places, I'm prompted to consider, "What is this character's intended role in the story? What are his relationships? How does he move and talk?" When I'm ready to get in-depth with detail, I'll start entering stuff in the computer.

(I don't always do this. I realized yesterday that I haven't been using cards at all for the current superhero campaign… and that the cards will be an immense help and I need to start using them again.)

Information organization tools

Recently, I discovered a strange, but understandable, phenomenon. People are going nuts about a pocket notebook! I give you, the Moleskine. A little bigger than 3x5" index card, acid-free paper, an accordion pocket in the back, a faux-leather oilskin-on-stiff cardboard cover, and an elastic band to hold it closed. All for about US$11, give or take a few pennies.

Eleven bucks for a fancy notepad! Granted, it is fancy… and it's created a crowd of fans who just can't say enough about it, like the folks at the Moleskinerie blog.

I won't go into the maker's dubious claims about the history of their product (which seems to drive a lot of its popularity). All claims of ties to famous writers and artists aside, it looks to be a nifty little notebook. I don't own one yet, but it and the Hipster PDA (a pack of 3x5" index cards in a binder clip; try Levenger.com for a fancy leather PageID=1659|Level=2-3|Pocket Briefcase that serves the exact same function for about $30 more) got me thinking about how I store and manage information, especially for my games.

I own a PDA. I mostly use it to play games. It doesn't play nice with the Outlook calendar at work, it doesn't play at all with 'remind' (a little reminder utility I wrote in Perl that runs every time I fire up my mail client). So I have calendar information here and there, and getting all that info into my Palm is too much trouble. I don't even look at my Palm because the information is never up to date, so I never bother to bring it up to date. The Palm is just too clumsy for data entry, and too slow for data retrieval of anything more trivial than a phone number.

And when it comes down to it, it's not "sexy" in the way a nice journal and ink pen are. I think that's why the Moleskine is so popular. I've bought a nice journal or two in the past, and it's nice to have something fancy dedicated to a writing project… makes it seem more important somehow. It's just a tool, but a leather-bound journal with fine paper is somehow "better" than a college composition book, even though they serve the same basic function.

Off and on for gaming notes, I've used index cards of various sizes, mostly 3x5". I really like index cards because they're physically relocatable. I'm very "spatially" oriented, and I like to spread cards out, sort them into categories, etc. I can display a lot of information, create an "information web" and physically move information around to suit my mental state far faster with index cards than I can on a computer, even using one of those "mind web" tools. Index cards work better than keeping notes on a pad of paper, because I can write about Detective Sorensen on a card and then file it in the right place, instead of the Detective's notes being kept along side a damage track for some thugs, a note about the clue I just invented, etc. I can pull out cards from various categories as they apply to a particular adventure.

The problem with index cards is that they're an analog medium in a digital world. I keep so much of my work on the computer, but I want the index cards at the game table (where I dislike the distraction of the computer). Even if my printer would gracefully handle printing inexpensive index cards, it still means formatting my information (which I write in TWiki notation, even outside the Wiki) specifically for printing. What I end up doing is writing down key bits of info on the index cards I want for the game. Then after taking notes away from the computer, I transfer the new info into the computer. It's a lot like the same problem I have with the Palm, except I can write faster, an I can access information a heck of a lot faster. PDA's have a bandwidth problem all around… can't input information very fast, can't display much information at a given time. And when I'm running a game, I want as much information in front of me as I can get.

To bring this back around to Moleskine, they come in several formats, one of which doesn't have paper at all… it's an accordion folder in the same format with six pocket dividers, just the right size to hold 3x5" index cards. I usually keep my index cards in a card box, but I've kept them bound up with rubber bands. Neither of which makes them pocket-portable. But the Moleskine is a little hard-back pocket accordion file for index cards. Sweet, I say. (Unfortunately, I realized this after I ordered a couple Moleskines to give as Christmas presents and a basic ruled one for myself. I'll have to consider getting one after I evaluate how the basic Moleskine notebook fits into my life.)

One of the things I dislike about notepads is the inability to move pages around. No such problem with index cards. And I like to use cards to pass notes during the game. I can write meta-information on them afterward and file them if I like. And out in the real world, I can selectively choose what information to carry around (as opposed to carrying a notebook with pages of stale information), I can organize cards, archive cards, give cards away, etc. I'm actually thinking that the Moleskine file pocket might be more useful to me than the original notepad version. I could carry one around with note cards to record or develop gaming ideas, calendar and todo information, etc. We'll have to see how things develop.

RPG meme bandwagon

From the journal of LJ user matt_snyder, the RPG meme bandwagon.

I figure I might as well…

RPG meme bandwagon

1. What is the first RPG you ever played?

Dungeons & Dragons, Basic Set… the one with the Erol Otus covers.

2. What RPG do you currently play most often?

Fudge, in as freeform a mode as I can. Just how freeform is variable… I'm rather experimental right now.

3. What is the best system you've played?

Played, not counting GMing? Hrm… have I actually played Fudge? Yeah, Bruce ran a game in Fudge. So I'll have to say Fudge.

4. What is the best system you've run?

Fudge again, though only because I can't quite find anything that does what I want better.

5. Would you consider yourself an: Elitist/ Min-Maxer/ Rules Lawyer?

Well, that's a biased question, now isn't it? Elitist.

6. If you could recommend a new RPG which would you recommend? Why?

Who am I recommending to, and what is meant by "new"? New to the recommendee, new on the market, new to me? (Are we sure I'm not a Rules Lawyer? No, I'm just a computer programmer, and like the computers I program, I usually want clarity.)

Insufficient data. As evidenced by recent discussion in my journal, I'm not sure I'm up to recommending Fudge. Maybe Theatrix for someone trying to break out of the mold and into that "higher" Elitist mode. Maybe I should go back to Theatrix myself. It's kind of what I'm turning Fudge into, in a way.

7. How often do you play?

About every other week nowdays, but I've had a lot of long hiatuses… school, baby, school, etc. I'd like to have the time to game weekly, but I don't know that that'll happen in the rest of my lifetime.

8. What sort of characters do you play? Leader? Follower? Comic Relief? Roll-Player/ Role-Player?

I rarely play, though I'd like to play a lot more. I'm a Role-Player, and I often try to play "supporting roles." Let someone else do the leading, I want to try to keep people talking in character, and I'll try to create a talkative character who can have some kind of conflict with other party members. (Not violent conflict… my last character was a coward, and thought entering forests full of goblins was a bad idea, no matter that "we have to go there, that's where the plot is!"

9. What is your favorite Genre for RPGs?

Hrm. I like many of them. SciFi, Fantasy, Superheroes. Love 'em all. I think that, in the end, Fantasy probably holds a special place in my heart… it's where I started gaming. I came into the whole sf/fantasy/horror genre by way of horror, reading Alfred Hitchcock collections in middle school, and then reading science fiction. But the mystery of magic trumps the cold heartlessness of science. And there's Tolkien, of course.

10. What Genres have you played in?

What haven't I played in? I've done fantasy, sf, horror, superheroes, comedy.

11. Do you prefer to play or GM? Do you do both?

I GM far, far more than I play, but I'd really like to play a lot more. I think I prefer to GM, though. Roleplaying is a creative outlet and there's a lot more room for creativity on the GM's side.

12. Do you like religion in your games?

Religion is often very important in my games, though I haven't really touched on Christianity or other modern, "real" religions. My primary fantasy world uses their beliefs in the afterlife as the primary shaper of culture. (Which, according to some anthropologists, is what drove real-world religious belief up until the 20th century.)

13. Do you have taboo subjects in your games or is everything "fair game"?

"That depends." I'm not big on sexual themes, which includes rape. While I don't game merely as escapist fantasy, there are just some things I don't want to deal with in my escapism.

14. Have you developed your own RPG before?

Well, of course. A couple of them. I never finished Impact! because I found Fudge and thought I'd found the game I was trying to write. Cinematique… well, that's an on-going thought experiment. Kind of in the same genre as Theatrix, except it's not diceless. Someday I'll put it up on the web, but it's not ready.

15. Have you ever been published in the Gaming Industry? If so…what?

Well, of course. :) I wrote "The Gramarye" in Grey Ghost Games' A Magical Medley, which is a compilation of magic systems for Fudge. The Gramarye is available online. (I'm not so happy with it now. I've had a second edition in the works for a few years, but other things keep getting in the way.)

I've got another article accepted for a Fudge supplement I'm not sure will ever see the light of day. I wrote it two or three years ago, and I'm still waiting.

And I have forever stalled the publication of GURPS Dark Places by submitting something to it. It was supposed to come out in SJ Games "Summer of Horror."

Fudge Factor probably doesn't count, but Department 13 has been pretty popular. And it's not very rules-oriented, so it can be easily adapted to any most game systems.

And I wrote the original two-die crash tables for the Car Wars Compendium rules. Charles Oines then mucked them up and published his revision without playtest review.

Freeform or not?

My wife, Karen, and I spent some time talking about our superhero game and play in general last night.

So I've lamented the difficulty of adapting Fudge to superhero play. But a lot of where that is coming from is that I started out trying to play fairly freeform, and the further I go, the deeper I find myself in creating more rules when my intent was to not do so.

Karen's mostly convinced that there's no middle ground… either we commit completely to freeform play, or we commit to a robust set of rules. Mostly because when we have some rules, using those rules always seems to lead down the path of creating more rules to fill in the "gaps." This wasn't such a problem for me with the fantasy game, but it is with superheroes.

I'm wondering if part of that is because practically all of my superhero gaming experience was with Champions… seven years of playing Champions almost every Sunday. My mind makes a lot of "automatic" connections between "superheroes" and "tactical combat system."

One of my concerns about running supers (or any genre, really) is that the players feel like they have accomplished something when they win a fight. That immediately puts me in the position of feeling like I have to be "fair." And you see where that leads… that means "impartial," which runs me into "more rules." Heh. (The "feel like they've accomplished something" is a topic for another entry.)

So Karen's challenged me to run our next session completely ruleless and diceless. And that scares me. Which leads to my own personal problem with gamemastering… I fear failure. I over-analyze minute decisions and find myself paralyzed because I can't find criteria that calls for one choice over another. And that's just in making decisions for the antagonists' actions. Throw in making decisions about who hits and who doesn't, and whether or not that wild leap from the twentieth story window onto the helicopter skid is successful… and I feel somewhat overwhelmed by having to make so many decisions and get them "right."

Part of that is wanting to keep the players happy. The dice keep an impartial layer between the GM and player… the player blames the dice for failure. Eliminate those, or interpret them in a very freeform manner, and now they can blame the GM. But that's only part of it.

I think the other big issue there is that I fear so many decisions could be key turning points without my realizing it ahead of time. That I'm going to screw up the storyline three sessions down the road by making the wrong decision today. And, ultimately, that my players are going to think poorly of me for making mistakes. I feel like I'm "performing" when I gamemaster, and I fear being laughed at or thought stupid for making "dumb" mistakes. So I treat nearly every decision as if it were a key decision, even if it's as simple as deciding whether that blow was enough to knock the villain unconscious this round or not.

This is an entirely stupid way to think, but it just comes to me naturally. :) I'm seeing it as the largest obstacle I have to overcome in becoming a good gamemaster… I have to quit worrying that my players will think I'm stupid.

So I think I'm going to bite the bullet, talk it over with my players, and take up Karen's challenge. To run completely ruleless. Maybe not diceless, because there are times that I just don't care what the outcome is. But if I use dice, they'll be used in a very freeform manner.

Boy, the

Fudge List is really hopping with a discussion about what Fudge really is and what that says about commercial viability. This has spawned a lot of little sub-threads concerning what is and isn't wrong with Fudge, etc.

For me, it brings up something that's been bugging me again. I've claimed Fudge as my "exclusive" system for the past several years… I run all my games with Fudge. Thing is, I haven't had a lot of time to actually run games in the past ten years, so my hands-on experience has been lacking. The interesting part is that every time I get a hands-on experience, Fudge somehow comes up short for me.

There's a lot of niggly little reasons, no one of which is really a big problem in itself. But despite its "toolbox" approach, there are some core bits of Fudge that are tightly locked together and it's very difficult to tweak the system because some parameters can't be changed without changing other parts of the system. And some of those tightly-locked pieces are what, to me, make Fudge what it is. If you remove or change them drastically, then it's no longer Fudge.

The adjective list

This one is very frustrating, because it's one of the things I really like about Fudge, and I consider it one of the "core" elements. Get rid of using adjectives to describe traits and you've taken a step away from being Fudge.

But the adjective list imposes severe limitations, namely that your conveniently-usable trait range is limited to a manageable number of words. Fudge defaults to seven or eight, and I'm finding that number is too small for my tastes, especially when using Fudge Dice.

The adjectives really start to get in the way when you start playing games involving non-human scale characters. The Scale system, while it looks elegant on the surface, becomes very cumbersome during play. I find superheroes much easier to manage using numbers instead of adjectives.

Fudge Dice

4dF, the standard Fudge die roll, ranges from from -4 to +4. This range is greater than the standard Terrible..Superb, which is -3 to +3. I could write all day about Fudge Dice, but I'll try to sum up the key issue:

Everyone on the Fudge List will tell you that a +1 is a large bonus in Fudge. Yet the dice are so variable that someone with a Fair skill can range anywhere from Terrible-1 to Superb+1 (or Legendary, if you optionally label +4 that way). The randomness of the dice overshadow the skill of the character in any given roll. Only across a large number of rolls does the difference in skill start to show up… but a statistically significant number of rolls is very large, and we don't obtain that number in a single game session. A character may only use his lockpicking skill three times in an adventure series, and his performance may be all over the map compared to his skill. You can't tell how competent he is at lockpicking by watching his performance in the spotlight.

But the biggest problem with Fudge dice is that they are difficult to tweak… changing the number of dice doesn't help a whole lot and introduces issues of its own. The die result maps directly to the trait range… a +1 on the dice is a +1 to the trait. This is very difficult to change, which makes the dice one of those "tightly integrated" factors that's hard to tweak to get the kind of results you want.

Degree of success

Degree of success (including relative degree) falls out of the die mechanic. There's this understanding that when you roll +2 to your Fair skill, that you get a Great result. This is what makes the wide dice range such a problem.

Relative degree feeds directly into the combat system. If you remove it, you have to rework bits of the combat system to compensate, including finding another way to randomize damage if you want it random.

Bonuses from traits

The strength bonus to damage is +1 for each level above Fair. Damage resistance is the same… except that +1 is like leather armor, and +3 is around chainmail. Having the level of the trait add directly appears elegant, but in practice it ends up being far too large.

The whole ball of wax

When you roll all these things together, you have a tightly integrated trait and resolution system that resists tweaking. And when you look around, it doesn't take long to realize that this is the core of Fudge that I'm fundamentally dissatisfied with. Years of discussing dice, the trait range, Scale and superheroes and being unable to come up with satisfactory answers should tell me something… I really don't like Fudge as much as I want to think I do.

I like Fudge well when I'm not playing it. But when I start playing, I quickly start running into things I don't like about it.

It may be salvageable, but I think it's going to require creating something that most folks on the Fudge List would consider "not Fudge." Bummer.

I'm thinking maybe I'll switch to Mutants & Masterminds for awhile to get my head out of Fudge for a bit so I can come back with a different perspective. It actually has a lot in common with Fudge, and they've thrown out a lot of the d20 bits that I dislike. It's a classless, point-build system.

Coming up with adventure ideas

The imagination is a funny thing. Or at least mine is. I've written a handful of articles on brainstorming and idea jump-starts, and yet I often find myself looking at the mostly-blank canvas of my current roleplaying campaign with no idea what to paint on it. It seems odd that it's almost easier to decide what to put on a completely blank canvas than it is to figure out how to paint a picture that incorporates what's already there.

One of my favorite idea generators is simply pulling up random words and trying to make something of them. (I've written a couple utilities that do this for me in various ways.) But it doesn't always help… either I'm not getting good words, or I'm just not in the right frame of mind for the words I'm getting. Or maybe I'm just too lazy and I don't want to take the effort to pull something useful out of them. ("counterfeit, catalyst, liquefaction, flew, civic, care, molal, mesoderm, synapse, elute"… there's something there. What do you make of it?)

So I decided to go my favorite route, which is to steal ideas from others. :) I hopped out to RPGNow.com, my favorite vendor of PDF sweetness. There are a lot of interesting plot-generating products out there, most of them for fantasy, and they vary in presentation and usefulness. But what's cool is that most of these products are very inexpensive. For just over nine bucks, I walked off (digitally… my fingers did the walking) with four different products that looked useful.

The first of these are Seeds: Supers and Seeds: Supers II by Expeditious Retreat Press. They have nineteen "Seeds" products for nearly every major genre. Each one is four to five pages (not counting the full-page OGL license), and costs only $1.35 (except Fantasy, which you can download for free). Packed into the handful of pages are about twenty-something short (a paragraph or two) adventure ideas.

These are of mixed quality and usefulness, though for less than a buck-fifty, if I get just one good adventure idea, the product was worth the cost. A very few entries don't seem worth being printed (I'm looking for something a little more novel than "the heroes are plunged into an alternate universe in which dinosaurs rule the earth AND the Nazis won WWII".), but those are the shortest entries. A few entries assume a set-up that seems unlikely (One seed requires that the heroes have a reptilian mutant friend that wants to go skiing, despite cold-blooded. More than one assumes recently retired or deceased heroes.) but overall there are some Good and maybe a couple Great ideas in each one. But I find many of these ideas difficult to incorporate into my fledgling campaign because we have little history and because many of the seeds are too specific. More on that later.

Next up is Superline Gamemaster's Series: A Fistful of Plot Devices, #1 from Ronin Arts. Unlike the "Seeds" line, these five plot ideas, while not full-blown adventures, are very fleshed out. Totalling 16 pages of useful material once the OGL and extras are removed, three or four pages are devoted to outlining the plot idea, then discussing the various aspects and how they might be implemented. The product assumes it's being used with Green Ronin's Mutants & Masterminds, but it's easily adapted to any superhero roleplaying game. This one also carried the biggest price tag… $4.25.

This is a different creature compared to the "Seeds" line. Seeds makes up for lack of detail by providing lots of ideas. More ideas means it's more likely that something will click. But with only five plot ideas presented in Handful…, you've only got five chances for something to catch hold. They're all well-written, and it's likely that you'll be able to use at least one of them at some point in a superhero campaign. But with two of the five calling for likely death of innocents before the heroes can intervene, some of them may not be appropriate for just any superheroic campaign without careful modification. And a couple of them aren't terribly inspired… evil duplicates of the heroes are on a crime spree and must be stopped, some super-science device has malfunctioned and is about to explode and kill lots of people, and ancient beast has emerged into a time in which it doesn't belong and the heroes have to stop it, for instance. But the detail that the product gives toward how to structure an adventure around these common comic-book events is Good.

Finally, the one I thought would be least-useful, another offering from Ronin Arts… Modern: Six-Pack – Government Drugs. Six pages for $1.99, describing six different potent pharmaceuticals that are kept secret from the public, plus a seventh page of D20 rules about staying awake for more than 24 hours. The product simply describes the drugs and their effects, plus a little about where they came from and who's using them. And that's it… no adventure seeds, no suggestions about what to do with them. Yet because of their "nakedness," they make no assumptions about my campaign beyond the assumption that someone would be making and using this particular drug. And I think I've found more useful (to me) plot ideas out of this product than in the other three, which contain over forty plot ideas.

And I think it hinges very much on two things: the idea assumes nothing about my campaign and it doesn't tell me the core event for the adventure. It's one thing to say, "An experimental power plant has malfunctioned and will destroy the city if the heroes don't stop it." It's another to say, "Experimental Power Plant X-11G, invented by Dr Precocious, can power half of New York City for three days on just one gallon of liquid hydrogen, highly unstable if containment feedback loop is broken."

What's interesting about the latter is that it doesn't say, "Experimental power plant runs amok, news at 11." Yet it can suggest that. Or it can suggest something else… like Dr Precocious coming to the heroes with a story of death threats and attempts to steal the technology from him. Or the almost-complete device being stolen by Megalomaniac and installed on his secret island base… to discover that the plant malfunctions and opens a portal to… what? The first plot suggestion gives a specific direction and I say, "Eh… the heroes saved the city from destruction last week, it's too soon to do that again," or something like that. But just presenting the idea of this power plant gets my brain working, and since I just did the "save the city" thing last week, my brain runs with the idea in a different direction.