Mostly Not Broken: After Sundown
Posted: Sun Oct 02, 2016 3:57 am
Topic Title was formerly, "Anatomy of Failed Design: After Sundown".
You knew what this was as soon as you read the topic title, much less clicked it (I guess I lied here). In reviewing some old work that would have gone into After Sundown 2e, Frank said that he's unable to perform this particular AoFD. So, this being the den and all of us being pretentious assholes, I'll do it. It goes against the traditions of Gaming Den reviews, but I'm not really a drinking sort of guy, so I've got a pot pie and orange juice as I start this. Today's music is the Crusader Kings 2 soundtrack. Deus Vult and such. I expect that this'll be a multi-sitting sort of affair though.
AoFD: After Sundown
The year is 2011 and some crazy guy has finally posted his 200+ page tirade about horror movie monsters. This thing is brought to us by one "Frank Trollman", and I'm just going to assume that all his mobster friends refer to him as Franky T. He was half the duo that brought us the DnD Tomes series back around 2006, and he also did some paid work on Street Magic and Augmentation for SR4 around that time I guess. He did a whole Matrix thing for SR4 because he was bored or pissed or something. So, we've got a lot of examples of portions of an RPG being made at a time, but can he put a whole RPG together and keep it sane? Well, this isn't called Anatomy of Pristine Design after all. Sure, we've got some good points to look at, but the point of this thread is to tear into the cracks and flaws when they show themselves.
So the first mini-section... well normally we'd talk about the cover and inside the cover and TOC and page count and all that but this is put up as a forum thread, so we have to be a little liberal in our interpretations of things. Anyway the first mini part is like 3 paragraphs, which are two sentences, three sentences, and then four sentences long. Probably was not intentional, but fun fact. "This is an RPG, play with your friends", that sort of thing.
Then we get to a Table of Contents, which is marked Index for whatever reason. We'll go over all this as we go, but basically while the information presented is often enough to play the game, it's often presented in a haphazardly ordered way.
So we have an introduction, and we start to see that the little tagline thing is going to be a thing for the whole book. This isn't unique to Frank, it's in Shadowrun, Earthdawn, and probably other things I can't think of right now. Probably other things that once came from FASA. Sometimes the text blurbs are in quotes, like someone said a cool thing that was worth writing down, and sometimes they're not. I'm not sure how we're supposed to interpret those parts that aren't in quotes. Are they just spare thoughts from the author himself? I've never known.
So we're going to play as a universal studios monster, and all the monster movies are real at once, at least all the ones that you can semi-sanely fit into one setting at once. That's fine, if you're like 80 years old or whatever. I'd like to see more modern connections being made myself. Most people I know that aren't major film buffs haven't actually seen many movies from before 1970. Even films from before 1980 are usually unlikely. There's also a lot of stuff about keeping things to a limited number of stuff, so I guess things will work out. We also have boilerplate stuff about how a paper and pencil rpg will probably necessitate paper and pencils. And character advancement is... a deck of cards? The hell? So... then we have some stuff about the MC, which is this game's name for DM/GM/ST/Whatever. They do the NPCs and stuff. Totally normal so far, other than that cryptic deck of cards comment.
Terrible Places
So the game is set on Earth, but like Spooky Earth. Also "coterminous" worlds that aren't Earth I guess. Which really is a fancier word than I think the situation calls for when you're in the first paragraph of the first real chapter and trying to be all introductory-like. Anyway, then it's insisted that this game is a horror game, and anything you do must be horrible, and if you try to play this game in a non-horror way of any kind the men in black helicopters will break into your house at night and force you to play it the correct way.
So we get the three bullet points of how Spooky Earth is different from Earth. The police are no help at all, telecommunications are shoddy, and people don't travel much. But these are all true in real life, where's the difference!? Zing! And we have four worlds. Three of them are hell planes that have a cool name and theme, and one of them is earth, which doesn't get a cool name or a theme. Sucks to be us. They're introduced in a bulleted list and then they each get a section I'll get to in a second. First we're told that each hellscape has two levels: the Shallow and the Deep. Shallow is earthy-but-themed, and deep is 100% themed. In the shallows you can get attacked by earth stuff I guess, but you also aren't on earth exactly, but then in the depths of a hell plane you're in a totally different place without even the same stars. So, instead of the Four Worlds, this section really should have been called the Seven Worlds, because there's really seven different places you can be.
Maya
So Maya is called the dreamlands because it's literally the land of dreams and you project your mind there when you dream sometimes. It also has giant monsters and jungles and things like that, which is cool. It's unclear if the shallows are all tropical jungles, or if it's part tropical jungles and also like crazy endor forests and stuff too. The deep part is almost 100% tropical jungles, and "There are few reasons for the sane to want to go to the Deep Maya". The book literally introduces a whole spare planet to explore, and then immediately says "fuck you don't go here". What the fuck kind of setting building is that. I want hell planes with shit to do. Some group we haven't been told much about yet is building an "Arcanotower" in the Brazil-connected part of Maya (but Brazil is spelled Portuguese-style, with an 's'). I checked, this word doesn't appear a second time in the entire book. Evocative, but pretentious. "Things to do in The Dreamlands" is more like "people who will probably immediately try to murder you", without any explanation of what you'd actually want to try to do in The Dreamlands. Like farming leylines for dream tears which you can use to power dark and elder rituals or whatever. It's not that there's a lack of mechanics for that, there's not even a suggestion that you'd really want to be in this place ever.
So that's one hell plane description that's totally fucked.
Limbo
Next up after the jungle hell is the fire hell. It's got some nicely evocative writing that describes how everything here is dull, tarnished, sooty. Ash filled skies and shattered glass. "Limbo is home to what the unenlightened would call demons, ifrit, and shinma", but then he calls them Demons a few sections from now. Guess now we can say for sure that Frank is just as unenlightened as the rest of us. There's rules for getting out of Limbo that mention specific dice values, but since we don't know how to roll dice yet I don't know what that really means. "Things to do in Limbo" once again is a list of people that will try seemingly try to murder you with little provocation rather than a list of things you'd want to try and do. It says there's almost no food, and survival is a "brutal" matter we were told just above. Humans can get out easily because they lack a Potency (some sort of monster stat I assume, we'll find out later). Seemingly everyone wants to get out all the time. In fact the whole theme of this entire fire hell planet is that no one wants to be here ever. And we don't have any interesting things that we'd want to do here that would offset how shitty the place sounds.
Also, Limbo is technically only the outer edge of Hell in Christian lore, so really this plane should more properly be called Infernum if we wanted to be mythologically correct, which is also a cool name for a hellscape and all. Either way, you don't want to be here, and you don't ever want to go here, and you seemingly don't even have a reason to go here, and all the people here will brutalize you for food, or maybe use you as food even.
So there's a second hell plane with no reason to adventure there ever.
Mictlan
Normally letters don't go together like that, but this is a Nahuatl word. WP tells me that it's pronounced kinda like "mik't-lawn", with a long a sound. Mictlan is cold, and dark, and there's no wind really, and no waves in the water really, and nearly no life. It's basically like being on the moon, except that you can still breathe (but probably only kinda). Mictlan has ghosts (which are solid in mictlan, just not in the mortal world) and zombies and other "undead" sorts of things. "Things to do in The Gloom" tell us that things erected in Mictlan just sit for eternity, so you can find other people's old shitty minecraft huts I guess. Some ghosts have whole "cities" that just sit there forever once they're abandoned. Even though "never entropically decaying buildings" is about the last thing that an oppressive death zone would probably do. The bulleted list mentioned that plants only grow with blood, and that there's blood sucking insects too.
So this is our third hell plane with essentially no reason to visit here given. Everything tries to kill you and there's no prizes to be had for your strife.
Being In Between Worlds
The Mortal World doesn't get its own section, because most of the rest of the game is about it. Instead, we're straight on to inter-world movement and positioning. Did I say Seven Worlds earlier? Wow, was I wrong! Between the fact that you can be Mortal, Shallow Hell, Deep Hell, "Between" any two touching planes, and possibly in a Bleed version of being in between two places, there's like 19 different dimensional realms you can be within in this game.
Terrible People
Hey what the hell? Yeah, I guess we're suddenly talking about people while we're in the places chapter for some reason. And this isn't even in the Table of Contents. Whatever.
First we learn about Extras and Luminaries. This is actually a good concept, and you can consider using it in other games as well when you're conceptualizing a world. Basically, some people are important to the plot and they get names and interesting stuff to do, and some people aren't and they're there to take up space. Maybe they speak some, but they're really just there to take up space. What's not talked about is what the proportion of Luminary to Extra is. Extras that are monsters are Spawn, so since we have lots of non-spawn monster NPCs to talk to they're all definitionally in the Luminary group. And then some portion of NPC humans are probably luminaries. But there's really no way to tell I guess.
Now we get to talk monster types. Vampires are obvious, Animates are golems and stuff, Lycanthropes are were-things, Witches are 'human' magic users, Transhumans are 'human' science users, and Leviathan are monster-people like fish-man and mole-man. It's a totally arbitrary but totally fine list. We also have Zombies, Fey (not really very fey), Demons, Ghosts, Giant Animals, and Evil Plants as non-playable types. Which is also a fine list.
There's a an argument put in here about how you need to outline every possible antagonist type for the narrative to maintain cohesion or whatever, but it falls pretty flat with me. I've played DnD for over 15 years with hundreds of made up monsters and had plenty of narratives. Given that we supposedly have all these hell planes floating around, they might as well be filled up with mysterious whatevers.
Running The Game
Yay! We'll finally know what getting 5 dice on your test to pass through The Gauntlet means!
The dice are, unsurprisingly, basically the Shadowrun 4e rules. Except that there's no rules about glitches. You'd think that in a game intending for horror, that there'd be a rule about stuff going extra wrong unexpectedly every so often. Like, at least as an optional rule. I guess not.
And we learn about the basic stats and special stats. Strength, Agility, Intuition, Logic, Willpower, Charisma. Which is, again, basically the Shadowrun stats with Body taken out (that's all part of Strength now) and Reaction taken out (merged with Agility). We're introduced to the terms Physical Resistance Test, Mental Resistance Test, and Social Resistance test, as if they're going to be important terms later, but they're not. Social is mentioned in one power, and the other two aren't mentioned ever. We're told that humans have a stat range of 1-6, but we aren't quite told that 3 is the average, or maybe a 2 is an average, or something.
You also have Edge (which lets you resist better and gives you luck points), Power Points (which are basically mana points), and Potency (which raises your attribute caps mostly).
Edge is a cool stat, and it will come up a lot in your games. Power Points are similarly a cool thing to have and you're often sad when you run out of them. Potency is kinda... not impressive. It says that you get potency at the sorts of times "when a monster would become nearly unstoppable", but really it doesn't actually do much of anything. If you get a Potency point your attribute maximums all go up, but you have to go on even more adventures later to actually get those stat points after that. If every NPC in the game that you ever faced secretly had +2 Potency, you'd hardly notice unless they were already pushing maximum. Jumping ahead a little bit, some magic abilities have ranges and stuff based off of Potency, but since the game assumes that you'll have Potency 1 anyway, things are kinda alright ranged even with just Potency 1. The big deal power that you'd care about the most is Vigor (the bonus Strength power) which is capped in how much bonus Strength you can get by 3+Potency. Other than that, you'd almost not notice if every NPC had +2 Potency. And for a stat that's supposedly so cool that you'll kill each other Highlander style over, that's pretty weak.
Once we learn about Attributes we're suddenly on a section about Advancing Goals, followed by a section about the types of Missions you might be called upon to do. Then we finally can talk about Character Creation some. Goals and Missions is solid advice and all, but it doesn't belong here in the book. Along with the "Placing Opposition" section after Character Creation, that sort of stuff needs to be collected into an "MCing the Game" chapter or "Campaign Structure" chapter. Or at least somewhere not literally between the "these are the numbers you'll have to have" and "here's how you pick those numbers" sections.
So character generation depends on the sort of adventures you want to go on. Options include: "Origin Story", for humans that might become supernaturals or might stay X-files investigators; "In Media Res", for when you can't spell "In Medias Res" correctly; and "Power Fantasy", for when you don't want to give any more character creation rules and you just say "do what you want".
We have no guidance so far on building a party, or what sorts of roles and tasks you'll be asked to do on a regular basis, so I guess everyone is expected to do everything all the time. Perhaps things will become clear as we keep going.
You knew what this was as soon as you read the topic title, much less clicked it (I guess I lied here). In reviewing some old work that would have gone into After Sundown 2e, Frank said that he's unable to perform this particular AoFD. So, this being the den and all of us being pretentious assholes, I'll do it. It goes against the traditions of Gaming Den reviews, but I'm not really a drinking sort of guy, so I've got a pot pie and orange juice as I start this. Today's music is the Crusader Kings 2 soundtrack. Deus Vult and such. I expect that this'll be a multi-sitting sort of affair though.
AoFD: After Sundown
The year is 2011 and some crazy guy has finally posted his 200+ page tirade about horror movie monsters. This thing is brought to us by one "Frank Trollman", and I'm just going to assume that all his mobster friends refer to him as Franky T. He was half the duo that brought us the DnD Tomes series back around 2006, and he also did some paid work on Street Magic and Augmentation for SR4 around that time I guess. He did a whole Matrix thing for SR4 because he was bored or pissed or something. So, we've got a lot of examples of portions of an RPG being made at a time, but can he put a whole RPG together and keep it sane? Well, this isn't called Anatomy of Pristine Design after all. Sure, we've got some good points to look at, but the point of this thread is to tear into the cracks and flaws when they show themselves.
So the first mini-section... well normally we'd talk about the cover and inside the cover and TOC and page count and all that but this is put up as a forum thread, so we have to be a little liberal in our interpretations of things. Anyway the first mini part is like 3 paragraphs, which are two sentences, three sentences, and then four sentences long. Probably was not intentional, but fun fact. "This is an RPG, play with your friends", that sort of thing.
Then we get to a Table of Contents, which is marked Index for whatever reason. We'll go over all this as we go, but basically while the information presented is often enough to play the game, it's often presented in a haphazardly ordered way.
So we have an introduction, and we start to see that the little tagline thing is going to be a thing for the whole book. This isn't unique to Frank, it's in Shadowrun, Earthdawn, and probably other things I can't think of right now. Probably other things that once came from FASA. Sometimes the text blurbs are in quotes, like someone said a cool thing that was worth writing down, and sometimes they're not. I'm not sure how we're supposed to interpret those parts that aren't in quotes. Are they just spare thoughts from the author himself? I've never known.
So we're going to play as a universal studios monster, and all the monster movies are real at once, at least all the ones that you can semi-sanely fit into one setting at once. That's fine, if you're like 80 years old or whatever. I'd like to see more modern connections being made myself. Most people I know that aren't major film buffs haven't actually seen many movies from before 1970. Even films from before 1980 are usually unlikely. There's also a lot of stuff about keeping things to a limited number of stuff, so I guess things will work out. We also have boilerplate stuff about how a paper and pencil rpg will probably necessitate paper and pencils. And character advancement is... a deck of cards? The hell? So... then we have some stuff about the MC, which is this game's name for DM/GM/ST/Whatever. They do the NPCs and stuff. Totally normal so far, other than that cryptic deck of cards comment.
Terrible Places
So the game is set on Earth, but like Spooky Earth. Also "coterminous" worlds that aren't Earth I guess. Which really is a fancier word than I think the situation calls for when you're in the first paragraph of the first real chapter and trying to be all introductory-like. Anyway, then it's insisted that this game is a horror game, and anything you do must be horrible, and if you try to play this game in a non-horror way of any kind the men in black helicopters will break into your house at night and force you to play it the correct way.
So we get the three bullet points of how Spooky Earth is different from Earth. The police are no help at all, telecommunications are shoddy, and people don't travel much. But these are all true in real life, where's the difference!? Zing! And we have four worlds. Three of them are hell planes that have a cool name and theme, and one of them is earth, which doesn't get a cool name or a theme. Sucks to be us. They're introduced in a bulleted list and then they each get a section I'll get to in a second. First we're told that each hellscape has two levels: the Shallow and the Deep. Shallow is earthy-but-themed, and deep is 100% themed. In the shallows you can get attacked by earth stuff I guess, but you also aren't on earth exactly, but then in the depths of a hell plane you're in a totally different place without even the same stars. So, instead of the Four Worlds, this section really should have been called the Seven Worlds, because there's really seven different places you can be.
Maya
So Maya is called the dreamlands because it's literally the land of dreams and you project your mind there when you dream sometimes. It also has giant monsters and jungles and things like that, which is cool. It's unclear if the shallows are all tropical jungles, or if it's part tropical jungles and also like crazy endor forests and stuff too. The deep part is almost 100% tropical jungles, and "There are few reasons for the sane to want to go to the Deep Maya". The book literally introduces a whole spare planet to explore, and then immediately says "fuck you don't go here". What the fuck kind of setting building is that. I want hell planes with shit to do. Some group we haven't been told much about yet is building an "Arcanotower" in the Brazil-connected part of Maya (but Brazil is spelled Portuguese-style, with an 's'). I checked, this word doesn't appear a second time in the entire book. Evocative, but pretentious. "Things to do in The Dreamlands" is more like "people who will probably immediately try to murder you", without any explanation of what you'd actually want to try to do in The Dreamlands. Like farming leylines for dream tears which you can use to power dark and elder rituals or whatever. It's not that there's a lack of mechanics for that, there's not even a suggestion that you'd really want to be in this place ever.
So that's one hell plane description that's totally fucked.
Limbo
Next up after the jungle hell is the fire hell. It's got some nicely evocative writing that describes how everything here is dull, tarnished, sooty. Ash filled skies and shattered glass. "Limbo is home to what the unenlightened would call demons, ifrit, and shinma", but then he calls them Demons a few sections from now. Guess now we can say for sure that Frank is just as unenlightened as the rest of us. There's rules for getting out of Limbo that mention specific dice values, but since we don't know how to roll dice yet I don't know what that really means. "Things to do in Limbo" once again is a list of people that will try seemingly try to murder you with little provocation rather than a list of things you'd want to try and do. It says there's almost no food, and survival is a "brutal" matter we were told just above. Humans can get out easily because they lack a Potency (some sort of monster stat I assume, we'll find out later). Seemingly everyone wants to get out all the time. In fact the whole theme of this entire fire hell planet is that no one wants to be here ever. And we don't have any interesting things that we'd want to do here that would offset how shitty the place sounds.
Also, Limbo is technically only the outer edge of Hell in Christian lore, so really this plane should more properly be called Infernum if we wanted to be mythologically correct, which is also a cool name for a hellscape and all. Either way, you don't want to be here, and you don't ever want to go here, and you seemingly don't even have a reason to go here, and all the people here will brutalize you for food, or maybe use you as food even.
So there's a second hell plane with no reason to adventure there ever.
Mictlan
Normally letters don't go together like that, but this is a Nahuatl word. WP tells me that it's pronounced kinda like "mik't-lawn", with a long a sound. Mictlan is cold, and dark, and there's no wind really, and no waves in the water really, and nearly no life. It's basically like being on the moon, except that you can still breathe (but probably only kinda). Mictlan has ghosts (which are solid in mictlan, just not in the mortal world) and zombies and other "undead" sorts of things. "Things to do in The Gloom" tell us that things erected in Mictlan just sit for eternity, so you can find other people's old shitty minecraft huts I guess. Some ghosts have whole "cities" that just sit there forever once they're abandoned. Even though "never entropically decaying buildings" is about the last thing that an oppressive death zone would probably do. The bulleted list mentioned that plants only grow with blood, and that there's blood sucking insects too.
So this is our third hell plane with essentially no reason to visit here given. Everything tries to kill you and there's no prizes to be had for your strife.
Being In Between Worlds
The Mortal World doesn't get its own section, because most of the rest of the game is about it. Instead, we're straight on to inter-world movement and positioning. Did I say Seven Worlds earlier? Wow, was I wrong! Between the fact that you can be Mortal, Shallow Hell, Deep Hell, "Between" any two touching planes, and possibly in a Bleed version of being in between two places, there's like 19 different dimensional realms you can be within in this game.
Terrible People
Hey what the hell? Yeah, I guess we're suddenly talking about people while we're in the places chapter for some reason. And this isn't even in the Table of Contents. Whatever.
First we learn about Extras and Luminaries. This is actually a good concept, and you can consider using it in other games as well when you're conceptualizing a world. Basically, some people are important to the plot and they get names and interesting stuff to do, and some people aren't and they're there to take up space. Maybe they speak some, but they're really just there to take up space. What's not talked about is what the proportion of Luminary to Extra is. Extras that are monsters are Spawn, so since we have lots of non-spawn monster NPCs to talk to they're all definitionally in the Luminary group. And then some portion of NPC humans are probably luminaries. But there's really no way to tell I guess.
Now we get to talk monster types. Vampires are obvious, Animates are golems and stuff, Lycanthropes are were-things, Witches are 'human' magic users, Transhumans are 'human' science users, and Leviathan are monster-people like fish-man and mole-man. It's a totally arbitrary but totally fine list. We also have Zombies, Fey (not really very fey), Demons, Ghosts, Giant Animals, and Evil Plants as non-playable types. Which is also a fine list.
There's a an argument put in here about how you need to outline every possible antagonist type for the narrative to maintain cohesion or whatever, but it falls pretty flat with me. I've played DnD for over 15 years with hundreds of made up monsters and had plenty of narratives. Given that we supposedly have all these hell planes floating around, they might as well be filled up with mysterious whatevers.
Running The Game
Yay! We'll finally know what getting 5 dice on your test to pass through The Gauntlet means!
The dice are, unsurprisingly, basically the Shadowrun 4e rules. Except that there's no rules about glitches. You'd think that in a game intending for horror, that there'd be a rule about stuff going extra wrong unexpectedly every so often. Like, at least as an optional rule. I guess not.
And we learn about the basic stats and special stats. Strength, Agility, Intuition, Logic, Willpower, Charisma. Which is, again, basically the Shadowrun stats with Body taken out (that's all part of Strength now) and Reaction taken out (merged with Agility). We're introduced to the terms Physical Resistance Test, Mental Resistance Test, and Social Resistance test, as if they're going to be important terms later, but they're not. Social is mentioned in one power, and the other two aren't mentioned ever. We're told that humans have a stat range of 1-6, but we aren't quite told that 3 is the average, or maybe a 2 is an average, or something.
You also have Edge (which lets you resist better and gives you luck points), Power Points (which are basically mana points), and Potency (which raises your attribute caps mostly).
Edge is a cool stat, and it will come up a lot in your games. Power Points are similarly a cool thing to have and you're often sad when you run out of them. Potency is kinda... not impressive. It says that you get potency at the sorts of times "when a monster would become nearly unstoppable", but really it doesn't actually do much of anything. If you get a Potency point your attribute maximums all go up, but you have to go on even more adventures later to actually get those stat points after that. If every NPC in the game that you ever faced secretly had +2 Potency, you'd hardly notice unless they were already pushing maximum. Jumping ahead a little bit, some magic abilities have ranges and stuff based off of Potency, but since the game assumes that you'll have Potency 1 anyway, things are kinda alright ranged even with just Potency 1. The big deal power that you'd care about the most is Vigor (the bonus Strength power) which is capped in how much bonus Strength you can get by 3+Potency. Other than that, you'd almost not notice if every NPC had +2 Potency. And for a stat that's supposedly so cool that you'll kill each other Highlander style over, that's pretty weak.
Once we learn about Attributes we're suddenly on a section about Advancing Goals, followed by a section about the types of Missions you might be called upon to do. Then we finally can talk about Character Creation some. Goals and Missions is solid advice and all, but it doesn't belong here in the book. Along with the "Placing Opposition" section after Character Creation, that sort of stuff needs to be collected into an "MCing the Game" chapter or "Campaign Structure" chapter. Or at least somewhere not literally between the "these are the numbers you'll have to have" and "here's how you pick those numbers" sections.
So character generation depends on the sort of adventures you want to go on. Options include: "Origin Story", for humans that might become supernaturals or might stay X-files investigators; "In Media Res", for when you can't spell "In Medias Res" correctly; and "Power Fantasy", for when you don't want to give any more character creation rules and you just say "do what you want".
We have no guidance so far on building a party, or what sorts of roles and tasks you'll be asked to do on a regular basis, so I guess everyone is expected to do everything all the time. Perhaps things will become clear as we keep going.