New Eikones For Weird Adventures!

We're talking about Eikones - just over Bob's shoulder to the left

This post has a small spoiler for the first season finale of HBO's True Detective.

Trey Causey's Weird Adventures RPG setting features several different religious traditions in a D&Dified version of pulp NYC. There's the Old Time Religion (evangelical monotheism), the Oecumenical Heirarchate (Catholic/Orthodox monotheism), Native and Black diasporic religions, and numerous petty gods and spirits. And then there are the Eikones.

Pronounced "icons" (yes, just like 13th Age, although Weird Adventures came first), the Eikones are spiritual personifications of various aspects of human experience. A few of the big ones include:

• Management - representing, government, bureaucracy, law and order
• Phile - the spirit of solidarity, popular in the unions
• Doll - beauty, seductiveness, sexual power (regardless of the faithful's gender)
• Maker - technology, industry, science

Well, in the "The Anagrammatist", the Weird Adventures tale I ran at Con of the North (chronicled here, and here, and here), two new Eikones were introduced: one by the players, and one by me. 

In this post, I'll share both of them and provide some contexts in Fate for how they can be used.

A person devoted to an Eikone (i.e., one who believes in that Eikone; follows it or seeks to emulate it; and takes it as an Aspect/Extra) can invoke the Eikone for help by spending a Fate Point. Similarly, an enemy can offer a Fate Point to compel a person who follows an Eikone . In that situation, the Eikone will exert a negative influence or inflict stress on the target. 

Here are the two Eikones:

The Hand

The player who ran Dr. Haint, stage magician and occult illusionist, created the Eikone of The Hand: a personification of both the luck of the draw, and of the relationships among the cards that create an advantageous opportunity.

The Hand can be invoked by a follower to Create an Advantage when gambling, or to uncover relationships between seemly unrelated things in scene that could be turned to one's advantage; another can compel a follower of The Hand and force them to reveal a secret advantage they've been hiding.

TRAUMA

The Eikone known as Trauma (and sometimes as TRAUMA) is the secret force behind the figure of Nicolai Limrovic - the villain known as The Anagrammatist. This Eikone is very recent; it was instantiated by the encirclement, betrayal, and destruction of the country of Carcossa during the Great War, and of the Carcossan people's subsequent expulsion from their once-bucolic homeland and their new status as exiles who are strangers in a strange land. The Carcossans suffered the ultimate indignity: their homeland no longer appears on any map.

As with the TV series True Detective, the question is not whether there is something supernatural about Carcossa. The question is what is its meaning in the story? What does it stand for?

In "The Anagrammatist", lost Carcossa was a real place, surrounded and destroyed by contending belligerent powers. Thanks to Limrovic's Recapitulations, his people's Trauma is now universalized; personal pain has become hypostatized into an Eikone that stands for loss, death, separation, and fear. A Trauma which breeds a compulsion to reproduce, reenact, recapitulate, and amplify that original pain again and again.

The Eikone of Trauma can be invoked by a follower for use in a mental Attack. The follower either projects their own traumatic emotions and experiences onto a new victim, or forces someone to relive a traumatic experience of their own - their worst experience; a follower of Trauma can be compelled by reminding them of their traumatic experience in some way. Oftentimes such a compel will trigger a trigger catatonia, a dissociative state, or flight in its target.

Weird Adventures: The Anagrammatist, Part Three

Bragaglia's "Thais" (1917)

"An act of faith in the futility of all things." This is the third and final installment of our Con of the North convention report on "The Anagrammatist", a Weird Adventures tale using Fate Freeport Companion. I shared details about how I converted the setting to Fate, as well as my character designs here, and shared the opening details of the scenario here.

At the end of Part Two of our report, the PCs had made a grisly discovery: a movie theater in Little Carcossa, the Old King Cinema, had a full house of strange corpses. A finger poke proved the corpses to be waxy, fluid-filled sacs surrounded by a thin membrane of skin. The corpses were dressed like other immigrant residents in the neighborhood of Little Carcossa.

A strange, silent film was playing.

Doctor Haint went upstairs to the projection booth, only to be surprised from behind by a frightful, yellow masked figure, who whispered "May I have a word with you?" before disappearing into thin air.

Meanwhile on the main floor of the Old King Cinema, other members of the party were jolted into alertness when the house air conditioning turned on... and began pumping out a strange smelling gas. The players surmised that the gas might just have something to do with the strange corpses - perhaps it was an amorphing solution in gas form? Had the entire theater been converted into an execution chamber? Was the intent to harvest the soul-fuel necessary necessary to summon miniature sun in the Taxman's apartment building (as described in Part Two)?

Everyone hightailed it out of the theater, and the PCs began their research in earnest.

Millionaire socialite Vernon Astra started making inquiries in the art world. Were there any Carcossan silent films? Yes. Just one, an Expressionist film called Let Me Spell the Death of You. The film had a poor reputation: it only garnered one published review in The City's papers, and a brief one at that:

"Let Me Spell the Death of You" is an act of faith in the futility of all things. Expressionism at its worst. Subtitles in Carcossan. No translation. Thankfully.

Something bad had happened to the critic shortly after the review was published. Crossing the street, the reviewer had been hit by a fruit truck and and dragged for five city blocks. Poor fellow: it was a closed casket affair.

The PCs dug even deeper and discovered a few more things:

• Only one actor was listed in the credits - one Nicolai Limrovic - who played the wicked, "Masque of the Red Death"-like masked Carcossan King in the film.
• After the film's release, Limrovic, apparently now an emigre living in The City, had a second career staging grisly "spontaneous living theater performances" which he termed "Demonstrations" or "Recapitulations." 
• Twisted language and wordplay played a central role in these demonstrations.
• Limrovic's final performance took place on a subway train and involved the deaths of everyone on the train. 
• The City's Exterminators were charged with capturing Limrovic; he was reportedly executed by being rendered in the chemical vats of The Gasworks neighborhood. 

The PCs concluded that somehow Limrovic had come back. They set a clever trap for him. Vernon Astra had discovered that a print of Let Me Spell the Death of You was locked away in the secure vaults of the Museum of Dangerous Art. He made a sufficiently large contribution (i.e., bribe) to the Museum to be put on its board of directors, and be given the film on more or less permanent loan.

Of course, the PCs next step was to view the film. It became clear upon viewing that the film recapitulated the destruction of Carcossa by the contending belligerent powers of the Great War. With each scene in the five-act film, the PCs had to made WIS rolls (i.e., Sanity Rolls); a few of the players suffered Consequences as Mental Stress accrued. By the end of the film, our heroes were shaken, and convinced that there was something profoundly wrong with this sinister work of art!

The PCs arranged for a public screening of the film. Vernon Astra insisted upon it as a way to draw out Limrovic, and simultaneously thin the herd of arrivistes, poseurs, and social climbers cluttering up The City's social scene. Astra found a good screening location: a posh bar called The Caviar.

The players preparations for the screening were outstanding. Preparations took the form of Create Advantage rolls. Doctor Haint used his special deck of cards to create a magical intrusion detector so that our heroes would have early warning of Limrovic's arrival on the scene.  Simultaneously, Alex Gold, the Bronze Titan of Science used his ample weird science skills to jury rig a "magical lightning rod" or ground for the entire space. Pull the guillotine switch, and the theater would become a huge magical sink.

Camilla, the China Doll Martial Artist, decided to dress in traditional frilly Carcossan girls' garb, and to position herself prominently in the screening room. Creepy, creepy.

Their plans worked well. Once the film had progressed to the scenes of the great powers' invasion and the carnage they wrought in Carcossa, the atmosphere began to change. Audience members began vicariously experiencing - recapitulating - the fear and trauma of Carcossa's utter destruction. A few of the audience fled the theater in sheer terror. Many began to scream.

The stage was set, and The Anagrammatist stepped through the movie screen, just as a giant airship loomed front and center in the film.

Doctor Haint's cards gave off their alarm; Alex Gold pulled the guillotine switch, the magical damper began its work (as it turned out, this hampered Doctor Haint more than The Anagrammatist), and the real fight commenced.

The foundations of the theater shook; the ceiling cracked and dust rained down. The Anagrammatist was able to cast one anagram spell: The Caviar --> Vicar Hate.

In spite of the distraction, carnage, and chaos caused by the machine gun toting cleric Vicar Hate, the terror created by the film, and presence of the The Anagrammatist himself, the PCs prevailed in the fight.

They made the very wise recommendation that The City lock-up The Anagrammatist in a nameless box - something that The Anagrammatist couldn't spell into something else and escape.

***

Tomorrow we'll be back with two new Eikones for Weird Adventures - powerful spirits that personify certain concepts - that emerged from our story.

Source: The Horrors of Malformed Men

Weird Adventures: The Anagrammatist, Part Two

It's not often that people leave Carcossa with a smile on their face, like the gent pictured above. Bob played the millionaire socialite Vernon Astra in "The Anagrammatist", my Con of the North adventure using Trey Causey's Weird Adventures setting. Think "D&Dified version of pulp era NYC" and you have the basic idea of what the setting's like. The basic scenario set-up and character designs are described in Part One of my convention report, here; I used the character generation and magic rules from the Fate Freeport Companion to build out the adventure.

The game started with a summons. Each PCs was on-call to the City as a special problem solver, on the City's Master Contract. Each had been assigned a "token" of some kind, so that The City could contact them in times of need. Vernon Astra's token was a special limousine - with full bar - that the City used to summon him for special assignments. Each of the PCs was brought to a special room in the legendary Fate Exchange in the downtown Financial District. There, the City Manager informed them that "the machines in the basement" had an assignment for them: the PCs were to go to a certain nearby apartment address, belonging to a Taxman who had not reported for work, and investigate.

The PCs soon arrived at the Taxman's brownstone in nearby Pentacle Park. City Hall, and the Municipal Department of Taxation and Finance, were also located in the same neighborhood; this guy clearly lived pretty close to where he worked. The apartment building was radiating a great deal of heat. The PCs feared that a fire was imminent, so they broke into the building, and rushed to the apartment whose address they had been given. The PCs broke the apartment door down, and upon entering the Taxman's apartment, found a miniature sun floating in the middle of the living room.

There were small fires everywhere. A lot of paper was burning: tax ledgers. This Taxman apparently liked to bring his work home. No sign of the Taxman, though, just that sun floating in the middle of the room.

Tax Man --> Max Tan.

An anagram. (It's OK to groan.) The place reeked of magic, and of time running out. A couple of our heroes raced to help other tenants evacuate the building. A short time later, that sun went nova, and the apartment burst into flames.

Paper flew everywhere. It blasted out of the apartment's windows, into the streets, and into the sky surrounding the apartment building. Curiously enough, most of the paperwork that blasted out of the apartment building appeared to be records from tax ledgers. Much of the paper gusted out and up.

Doctor Haint used a spell similar to Eye of the Nexus to follow the resulting magical flaming paper trail. Alex Gold, the Bronze Titan of Science, improvised an aircraft from his roadster and took to the air with Doctor Haint, following the trail. The lines of magical force landed on numerous rooftops in the adjacent immigrant neighborhood of Little Carcossa, where they began to kindle, like small fires in the trenches of the Great War.

The epicenter of the paper meteor storm was a long-abandoned neighborhood theater, the Old King Cinema. Doctor Haint picked the lock (stage magicians are good at this sort of thing), and the PCs entered a theater, all of whose seats were taken-up by waxy corpses. The corpses were fresh - kind of. The PCs poked one, its skin broke, and fluid seeped out everywhere.

A strange silent movie played. The subtitles were in an odd blocky foreign script. The early scenes were of bucolic festivals and scenes of life in a small country that is no more - a country erased from the map. Soon that country was surrounded, swallowed-up, obliterated by armies and weapons of the Great War. Amorphing shells and acid fogs rained down from airships up above. Villages and towns were pounded by artillery using thaumaturgical munitions.

All of the horrors of war. No way out. And a King who sealed himself with all his military officers, and the nobility, within the walls of his castle. Once the drawbridge was drawn and the gates had been barred, the King enjoyed himself by turning the guests on one another in a series of ruinous homicidal social games and contests. Meanwhile, the King's subjects outside the castle's walls were utterly destroyed.

Old Carcossa. We're never far from there in The City.

More to come, in Part Three!

Weird Adventures: The Anagrammatist, Part One - The Setup

Our next Con of the North game was a four hour session of Trey Causey's wonderful Weird Adventures game setting. Fans of Spirit of the Century and Strange Tales of the Century should really get to know Trey's setting. You'll find a lot of synergies there! Plus a model for a modern urban Undercity/Underworld. Do yourself a favor and check it out!

The City of Weird Adventures is a D&D-ified pulp analogue of New York City. You have neighborhoods whose names have what Wittgenstein called a "family resemblance" to Manhattan neighborhoods, and a lot of historical references to the old Gotham.

Weird Adventures also has a TON of occult and supernatural Easter Eggs built into it.  You can build a scenario or even a campaign with almost any page in his book, a big chunk of which reads like a traveler's guide book to The City. We took that one step further for this game: we generated about eight characters in advance for people to play. Each one was the result of a random roll to assign the character a neighborhood in The City, and each character consequently had a Neighborhood Aspect.

I used Fate Freeport Companion as the engine for the scenario for three reasons:

• Characters are built using D&D's six attributes as their Skills, instead of FAE's more abstract and admittedly flexible Approaches. Since The City is a D&D-ified pulp setting, it made sense to me to play-on gamers' 40 years of experience and intuition about the meaning of Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma. It helps ground who their characters are, and how they can interact with the world. The D&D-based Skills have a weight and meaning far beyond the 3D6 bell curve.  
• Fate Freeport has both Physical and Mental Stress Tracks, and Sanity rules, all of which were pertinent to the kind of story I wanted to tell.
• The Companion has rules for discrete D&D-style spells, which I really like. Anybody who has visited FATE SF over the last couple of months has probably seen the Galactic Grimoire, our growing SFnal spell corpus, which is based on the spell creation model used in Fate Freeport. 

Here's a sample character from the pregens. The character is a Taxman, one of the city's tax collection specialists.

Name: Lucre

Neighborhood: Welleran Heights (i.e., Washington Heights*) is your home. You used to be a Taxman. Now you work at the Union Nuismatic Society in that neighborhood.

ASPECTS:

• High Concept: A retired Taxman who still loves money
• Problem: You need to gamble
• Neighborhood Aspect: Sticky-Fingered Collections Curator, Union Nuismatic Society 
• Aspect: Friends (and Enemies) in the Financial District
• Aspect: Invested heavily in the Fate Exchange**

SKILLS: Str +1, Dex 0, Con +1, Int +3, Wis +2, Cha +2

STUNTS:

• Wooden Nickel - You kept your Taxman's Wooden Nickel which Detects Lies. Roll your Wisdom +2 vs. Target's Charisma to Detect a Lie.
• Wooden Quarter - You kept your Taxman's Wooden Quarter which quivers in the presence of gold or valuable gems and jewelry. 
• Forensic Reading Glasses - Roll Wisdom +2 when wearing your Forensic Reading Glasses to create an advantage by uncovering a carefully concealed clue.

STRESS: 

• Physical: 3 boxes
• Mental: 3 boxes

REFRESH: 3

Special: You may invoke the Eikone of Management. The Eikones are supernatural personifications of the way the universe works. Most represent aspects of human life and culture.

*Washington Heights was the first place I ever visited or stayed in New York City, back in the early 80s. I remember the small museum district that Trey is alluding to here.

**The Fate Exchange is like the Stock Exchange (which also exists in The City). The Fate Exhange is all about the incremental manipulation of  future possibilities.

***

The characters that the players chose to run were:

• Vernon Asta, a wealthy socialite of Empire Park East, who of course has a permanent residence in the Borgove-Astra  Hotel 
• Alex Gold, the Bronze Titan of Science, who has his own laboratory apartments on a few floors of the Imperial Building in the Circus District
• Doctor Haint, a Black American stage magician with real powers of illusion, who lives in Solace (The City's equivalent of Harlem)
• The Gasworks Monster, a living coal-fired chemical accident, whose skin is forever smoldering; he lives in The Gasworks, a stinking industrial area on the Middle East Side, along the Wyrd River
• Camilla, a diminutive China Doll Martial Artist from fey Aldwood (i.e., sinister Inwood aka Spuyten Duyvil), a part of the city where a Broad Boulevard musical adaptation of F. Marsh Loam's "The Magical Monarch of Mu" came to life (and lives on). We might add that the player who ran Camilla did a super creepy, creepy job roleplaying the character! Seriously!

Each of the players was on The City's Master Contract (something which I added to the setting, based on my real world experience with county government). They are specialists whose skills go well beyond the limited powers and portfolios of The City's Taxmen, and of the Municipal Department of Animal and Pest Control, better known as the Exterminators (the monster hunters on The City's payroll).  People on the Master Contract are paid well, and have relative indemnity if they create collateral damage - as long as they pursue The City's interests.

Each person on the Master Contract has a token: a specific way that The City summons them when it needs them. For Vernon Astra, it is a limousine service that appears at the Borogove-Astra Hotel. The stage magician, Doctor Haint, knows he is being called when all of his the cards suddenly come up Jokers. For Alex Gold, the Bronze Titan of Science, it's simple: he gets a transmission on one of the special frequencies on his wrist radio.

So much for the set-up! Next time we'll talk about the scenario itself!

Ringworld Reloaded Tonight

During the day on Sunday we are doing our prep for tonight's Ringworld Reloaded game at Con of the North. The game runs from 6-10 PM, so we will be prepping this morning and afternoon, and driving over to the con around 5 PM. For prep, I am focusing on reading the old Chaosium Ringworld RPG first; it's an elegant package.

If I have time this afternoon, I'll dig a little deeper into Sarah Newton's Fate Core masterpiece, the new edition of Mindjammer. I plan to have people build their characters using the Aspects and Skills framework from Mindjammer.

On Friday and Saturday, I ran 12 hours of roleplaying programming at the con. Players seemed to have fun in all the games, and we had a particularly good experience last night with my first run in the world of Trey Causey's Weird Adventures pulp adventures setting, using Fate Freeport Companion mechanics. More on all the events during the week.

Tonight's game is going to be an "on-the-fly" experience. I had to compress a lot of prep work for my five events at the con due to life, so my games have been a mix of high-level prep and on-the-fly GMing.

I told a friend a couple days ago about the creeping desperation I was feeling about how little prep time I had left, and he had some great advice: "Con-prep is one of those things that we all over-stress. Just relax and have stuff on-hand to facilitate improvisation."  In other words, don't just stage the scene for the players, stage it for yourself as GM!  Have things available you can draw upon!

I have found the Deck of Fate to be one of those great tools to facilitate on-the-fly GMing, and RPG Inspiration Cards are another great resource with aspect-like signifiers, weather conditions, directions, and terrain.

We have a cool little SF movie prop lined-up for tonight as well. 

The "Where You From?" Aspect And Weird Adventures

"Where you from?" People get asked that all the time in The City. After all, it's the Biggest City In the World, and At the Center of Everything.  Where else would you rather be, than in The City That Never Sleeps?

There are 5 Baronies and 42 neigborhoods in The City. Many Weird Adventures players will want their characters to be from the Ur-Manhattan of Empire Island itself (and who can blame them?). But some may want to be from one of the other Baronies, or even a place beyond the Baronies. Some players will want to leave it up to chance, so here's how to do that!

First, roll 4DF and consult the corresponding result below:

• -4: The Dustlands ("The Dust Bowl" states)
• -3: Freedonia ("Texas" and the Southwest)
• -2: The Steel League ("IL, OH, PN") or The Combine ("MN, WI")
• -1: Ealderde ("Europe"), or outside The Union
•  0: The Five Baronies
• +1: New Ludd ("New England")
• +2: The South
• +3: The West (the Mountain States)
• +4: Hesperia ("California")

If you roll the Five Baronies, pick one, or roll a d10, and consult the corresponding result below:

• 1-3: Empire Island ("Manhattan")
• 4-5: Rookend (Motherless "Brooklyn")
• 6-7: Marqessa ("Queens") 
• 8-9: Shanks ("Bronx")
• 10: Lichmond (New Jersey, at least that's what I think - could be wrong)*

Tomorrow we'll break down mechanics for generating your "Where You From?" neighborhood aspect if you live on Empire Island itself.

But for now, let's make a roll on the table and see what happens: We rolled 4DF on the first table, and got a -3. That means we're from Fredonia. So for our "Where You From?" aspect for this character, I am thinking they're not a lawman, but perhaps a roughneck oil rig worker who had a run-in with the Rangers and had to go North. For our "Where You From?" aspect, we could go with: A Roughneck Gone North.  Could be fun. I can see someone like this getting a job in the construction trades, or as a longshoreman, or maybe even with the mob. 

*Because no one wants to be from there. Or admit they were.

Weird Adventures: The Board Room

We're getting ready to run Trey Causey's Weird Adventures setting using Fate at Con of the North in a couple of weeks. Today's post is about getting into the mood of the City. 

Places of light, places of shadow: it's in a dozen of the City's well-appointed board rooms that decisions are made affecting millions. The Bottom Line is attended to here, affecting hiring and firing at hundreds of firms, the trimming or expansion of industries, decisions to deepen or pull investments in Fate Exchange, allocations for charities to pacify and in some cases improve the conditions of the working masses of the Baronies, and much, much more.

Entire branches of wizardry are dedicated to influencing, amplifying, or mitigating what happens in these well-guarded rooms. Special care is taken with how board rooms are arranged, equipped, and decorated. Firms select only the most propitious table woods to fashion their board room's Great Table. At least one Captain of Industry in the City meets with his board of directors around a table fashioned from snapwood prised from Yggdrasil itself in far away Ealderde. It's said he paid a dear price for that table.

All of the major firms also keep defensive practitioners on retainer to ensure their board rooms are well-warded. The sanctum sanctorum of a magical corporate security specialist is never more than a room or two away from the board room. Its occupant will always be monitoring the board room and its immediate surrounds when an important meeting is underway. Such specialists often keep their own, esoteric ciphered Minutes of board meetings.

Such Books of Minutes fetch high prices for those who are able to filch them. These ledger books record much, much more than what people are saying. They often reveal the subtle influences on board members, the occulted Conflicts of Interest that each brings to the table.

Deck of Fridays 7: A Solid Blow

Welcome back to DECK OF FRIDAYS, our weekly feature here at FATE SF. We make a draw from the Deck of Fate, RPG Inspiration Cards, or another Aspect-generative randomizer. Then we do something interesting with it, using the Aspect as inspiration for a campaign or scenario seed, a situation, scene, location, NPC, thingie, etc.

This week's draw from the Deck of Fate is a card with the Aspect: A Solid Blow. 

We're using it today to create a location for +trey causey's Weird Adventures RPG, a pulp setting based in The City, a more fantastic D&Dified version of our beloved Gotha-, er, I mean New York City. I'll be running a Weird Adventures FAE game at Con of the North in February 2014. This location may just feature in the game...

The Monster Hall of Maxwell Geat

Every neighborhood in The City has its boxing halls. Some are private gentlemen's clubs with fine booze, betting, and cigars. Others are street corner neighborhood establishments with a Turkish bath next door. Still others are run by settlement houses as places to keep kids off the street and out of trouble. Of course, most of these joints still attract trouble. Lots of it: gangsters, nosy cops, gangs, and much worse.

But not all halls are created equal. Some are larger than life, special. There's the Starvation Army Boxing Hall where it's Salvation Street Soldiers get their training. There's Mama Mawl's Boxing Club, the only place in The City where girls and women are trained to box and face off in the ring against each other - a favorite destination for bohemians and aesthetes. 

And then there's Monster Hall. Its proprietor, Maxwell "Monster" Geat is a huge meat-slab of a man of Northern Ealderish stock - although he's rumored to have some Hillbilly Giant blood running in his veins... or something worse. He opened the Club several years after he returned home to The City from the Great War. 

How a giant like him could have survived in the trenches is anyone's guess. Geat is so that tall he should have presented a target that would be impossible to miss. But survive he did, and after a few years making a name (and a bundle) for himself fighting in the ring, he opened his own boxing club in the tough Hardluck neighborhood, just a few blocks from City Police Headquarters, at the junction of Hardluck, Yiantown, and Dead End. 

The club draws all types: off-duty (and sometimes on-duty) cops from Headquarters, people with Hell Syndicate connections, people in the trades, kids from the local gangs - and even upscale types from the Fate Exchange. Even with such an ecumenical crowd, there is a noticeable stir in the place when members of the Municipal Department of Animal and Pest Control (the so-called "Exterminators", the only City employees who dare enter The City's endless warren of sewers and tunnels) show up for a fight.  But show up the do, often parking their trucks in the alley behind Monster Hall.

There are a few rumors in circulation about Monster Hall:

• The fights are unpredictable here. Scrawny teenagers have won fights against burly, veteran boxers. This attracts gamblers - especially the sort who enjoy placing very risky bets.

• If he thinks you have moxie, Maxwell Geat may offer to train you in a special boxing technique: The Solid Blow. It's something he learned in the trenches. The Solid Blow doesn't knock people out. It breaks bones, and makes opponents bleed... inside.  

• If you have enough money, you may be able to buy your way into special fights in the basement. The Exterminators often show up just for these. 

• Maxwell Geat has a special water cooler in his locked back office. No one who has taken a drink there before a fight has ever lost that fight in the main ring.

• He also has a habit. Geat injects himself with a potent alchemical substance called The Cane. It causes bruising, but it also makes the user feel invulnerable. A lot of the fighters in his stable - Geat's so-called Monsters - have started to dabble with it from time to time. Look for the skinny ones with the scabby arms. 

• After every big fight, a kid leaves Monster Hall with a bundle. He gets a police escort up to Mama Mawl's Boxing Club, where the package gets delivered.

Monster Hall Aspects

• High Concept: A boxing club that's a bookie's nightmare
• Trouble: Cops and Hell Syndicate come together here
• Fights above, fights below
• A water cooler with a secret
• Home of "The Solid Blow"

The Fate Of The Nodens: A Weird Adventures Campaign Seed

The H.M.S. Nodens

"'What rough beast slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?' - or in this case towards The City to be moored? Early risers in the Castle Park and the Financial District greeted the dawn with an uncanny surprise: the appearance of the Royal Empire's long lost dreadnought, the H.M.S. Nodens, sitting a bit to the south of The City's great harbor.

"Once again, dear readers, The City Confidential has the scoop. 

"One of the greatest mysteries of the Great War was the fate of the H.M.S. Nodens. The Neptune-class Royal Dreadnought set sail to confront the Hun and engaged the foe in the battle of Judderland. 

"Serious naval buffs will recall that the Hun's barbaric Kriegsmarine used horrific munitions in the battle: acid fog shells, amorphing artillery, and thaumaturgical explosives pitted and twisted flesh, and warped metal, while setting the seas aboil. 

"After the battle rumors circled for months in both the Admiralty and the Kriegsmarine that the furious battle had awakened hungry dreamers from the depths. Many of the sailors and officers who survived Judderland reported that a host of abominations swirled between the vessels, skimming the slick of blood, chum, and oil at the surface, and sending probing eyes and tentacles into portholes and onto decks seeking charred and twisted flesh.

"The Nodens bore the brunt of the Hun's attack. The vessel was last seen blanketed by a nimbus of noisome yellow billowing clouds. The Hunnish papers crowed that the Kriegsmarine's unnatural hail of fire had rechristened the ship the "Noxins". When the cloud lifted, there was no sign of the Nodens.

"But now it has appeared in view of The City harbor, under tow from two stalwart tugs. Observers saw no signs of life on the vessel, but in a press conference today by Mr. Carl and Mr. Fredrick Staberinde, Rookend's ever-youthful, fraternal industrialist powerhouse duo, the plan was revealed.

"'Staberinde Industries found the Nodens and has claimed it in concordance with deep sea salvage law' Mr. Carl Staberinde declared. 'We have purchased a few blocks of Castle Park, which we will soon dub Battery Park' Mr. Fredrick Staberinde continued. 

"'Once the vessel has been thoroughly searched, repaired and restored to pristine condition' Mr. Carl Staberinde declared,'Battery Park will become the Nodens' new home. By day, it will be a living museum to the memory of the Great War. By night,its searchlights and batteries will maintain a constant vigil protecting the city from incursions by sea devils and newts' completed brother Fredrick.

"The City Confidential has learned that Staberinde Industries will be hiring a number of specialists - naval veterans, steel workers, plumbers, scientists, nurses and medics to complete the restoration and readying of the vessel for it's new home in Battery Park."
-The City Confidential Daily, Today's Front Page Story

This is of course a campaign seed for Trey Causey's Weird Adventures pulp RPG setting. The PCs would be specialists investigating what happened to the Nodens, and helping ready the dreadnought for its future role as museum cum fortification protecting The City's southern tip.  The idea came to me after reading Iain M. Banks' Use of Weapons, but Dungeon of Signs' HMS Apollyon campaign structure was an inspiration as well.

Weird Adventures Accelerated

Cover art by Doug Stambaugh

As I mentioned over at The Everwayan a few weeks ago, I am planning to run +trey causey's brilliant Weird Adventures setting at Con of the North 2014! The book is 90% setting and built out with old school D&D in mind, but should port over brilliantly to FATE Accelerated Edition (FAE). Weird Adventures offers a pulp RPG setting with a D&Dified flavor.

The default setting is a place called The City, which is very much like New York. With an Underworld (and we're not just talking about the Hell Syndicate here), monsters, and sorcerers. If you thought "a 1920s version of Urban Arcana" you'd have the form, but not the substance. The substance is a setting that could have been written by fantasy and horror luminaries like China Mieville, Jeff Vandermeer, Fritz Leiber, and Cornell Woolrich.

So it's very cool.

We're going there in February.

Initially, I was planning to run a story called "The Cult of the Barren Madonna", as Our Lady of the Grave is one of the ways that the Virgin is venerated in this world. Then last weekend I learned about George Sylvester Viereck, and his connections with Aleister Crowley (I had no idea he ever lived in NYC!), and Crowley's apparent lover and Horst Wessel biographer Hanns Heinz Ewers - can't make stuff like this up!

Then a little more thinking, entirely new story ideas, a new title, a different blurb:

"The Anagrammatist, A Weird Adventures Story!"

Event Description: The mean streets of The City just got a lot meaner. Not only do you have to deal with the horrors dwelling under The City, Devils in the Financial district, and the Unspeakables of Little Carcossa, but The Anagrammatist is back, twisting people, places, and things into monsters. Stop him before he kills The City itself in this pulp-flavored supernatural thriller. 

The Bootleggers' Bible

The Nash Quad, the first all-wheel drive vehicle

This past weekend was JonCon '13 in the Twin Cities. I ran a FATE Accelerated Edition version of Kerberos Club there (more on that later this week), and I was also fortunate enough to play in +B Cook's FATE Core prohibition-era game inspired by the CrimeWorld supplement for FATE Core.

Bob's game, "The Bootleggers' Bible", has a terrific write-up over at Rachel Kronick's Blade & Crown Blog. Check it out!

The Bootleggers' Bible was a really great scenario - one which I found it particularly enjoyable because I am a big fan of Boardwalk Empire. It is nice seeing how versatile FATE Core is. This one felt very focused, immersive, and real-world to me, like the best of the Jazz Age Call of Cthulhu scenarios.

Hopefully these kind of examples put to rest the idea that all FATE Core games have to be gonzo genre mashups. That's of course fun, but it is not required for fun with FATE Core.

That being said, the ease with which the game handled the Jazz Age suggests that FATE Core would also work very well for more occult/supernaturally inspired settings with a bit of the pulp gonzo, like +trey causey's fine Weird Adventures setting which is also featured on his blog, From the Sorcerer's Skull. Yeah, I admit I'm itching to try that out.