Roleplaying Games | Warhammer
Hobby Blog #8: We Wrote A TTRPG
and I kit-bashed some Sisters of Battle and Genestealers
My friend and I designed a roleplaying game
My friend Tyler and I designed our own TTRPG. It is something we both wanted to do and we finally got of our lazy arses and did it.
We started with an idea Tyler came up with: playing as were-creatures in a big, old fantasy city where being were was illegal. The players would have to try and go about their day without being overrun by their inner bloodlust.
We are both big fans of single-page RPGs like Lasers & Feelings or the many games by Grant Howitt. Honey Heist is, to this day, one of the most fun nights of roleplaying I have ever had.
We decided that the premise of the game was one that lent itself to a one (three) page game: chaotic, ridiculous and with a high body count. We wanted to make something with a pace so frantic that could only be sustained for a single session of play.
We had a setting but we needed something for our were-creatures to be doing. They needed have a task to give structure to the game, direction to the GM, and opportunities for the weres to accumulate stress. I suggested they should deliver pianos to a sequence of highly strung customers. My thinking went that pianos are heavy, awkward and expensive. Moving them would be plenty stressful.
Tyler suggested that just doing pianos limited the game, so we had our weres running an odd-jobbing company doing all sorts of tasks for various annoying customers. The idea being that the task and the customers would build up stress in our were creatures and eventually one of them would flip out, murder/smash the situation and the other weres in the party would have to try and stop the situation from escalating into a full-blown rampage. We called our game No Weres.
We wanted to take as much pressure off the GM as possible. Prepping games is hard work and we wanted it to be possible to open the game and generate the customers and the tasks as the game is running. GMing in test plays, I found it exciting to not know exactly what my players would face as they traveled to the next job. It threw up some surprising situations that forced me to improvise in fun ways.
Tyler and I have different background in games. Though we have played lots of systems, he is grounded in DnD while my background is more in D100 systems like Call of Cthulhu and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. We eventually decided to use a modified version of the Resistance system by Grant Howitt and Christopher Taylor.
I recently wrote a piece for the next edition of the very excellent Wyrd Science Magazine about the Rowan, Rook & Decard team, and I got a chance to speak to Howitt and Taylor about their system. One of the things that Taylor said that stuck with me is that one of the most important parts of his game design method is to think about where the points of tension are and simulate them with the dice. Moreover, it is important to think about what it feels like to roll that dice. For our game, the moment of tension was when the character is about to turn into a were-creature.
Rowan, Rook & Decard’s games use the Resistance system, where characters build up stress. Then, if the GM rolls under that stress, narrative consequences occur. If you take stress falling off a bridge, you might break your leg. We felt that this system worked well for No Weres as there is a moment of great tension when the GM rolls the stress dice to see if the players suffer consequences for their failure. The Resistance system has a bunch of possible consequences for their games, with fully worked-out mechanics. We only had one consequence, ‘you turn into a were creature.’
We didn’t use everything that makes up the Resistance system. We ditched the skill and domain system, favouring a much more simple + and - modifiers to the dice rolls. We did it just to keep the volume of material down and not have to explain an additional mechanic to players not familiar with the Resistance system.
We came up with some basic skills. I’m a big believer in having your core skills being quite simple. Some variant on strength, dexterity, toughness, intelligence and charisma (perhaps will if you need a magic stat). With those, you can broadly simulate a wide range of different people. It’s not broken. It doesn’t need fixing.
We also wanted to create some variation between the weres. We had come up with a bunch of animals that we thought would be fun/ funny rampaging round the city, but we needed to differentiate between them. We did that through a talent list. We felt that there was no need to give mechanics to all the talents and decided leave it up to the players and the GMs to decide what they did. That gave us more time to think of puns and movie-references. It was probably the most fun part of the process.
Once we had written all of that up and added in a few more little mechanics to balance everything, we had a game. It was an extremely rewarding process, especially during playtesting when we found that the systems we’d put so much time into actually worked. Nothing was falling off the rails and people were having fun with a thing we made. I’ve written a lot of fiction and non-fiction over the years and feedback is rare. You publish and it disappears off into the void. But watching people interact with something we built was extremely rewarding.
The final step was getting some art. We paid a mate to do a couple of sketches for us. I think he did a great job and he’s available for commission here!
The game is available for free in a couple of places: but ko-fi is as good a place as any to get it.
Most of writing is a very solo affair. Gaving a collaborator to bounce ideas off and push me in directions I wasn’t expecting was a real treat.
Miniatures
I’ve been doing a bit of Warhammer over the last few months.
The Sisters of Battle
I love engines! One of the main reasons to play Adepta Sororitas is that they get all the best dark stuff. Nothing is more 40K than the Penitent Engine. I got the STLs for these folks from Heresy Lab. Normally I am very happy with their files, but there was something wrong with these. The file size was so large, just having them on my hard drive crashed my laptop. After talking with the people at Heresy Lab, who must have more heavy-duty computers than me, I was able to get them over to my printers. The files were an unnecessary pain, but I am happy with the results.
The models are just slightly smaller than the GW Penitent Engine, but not so much that I feel it is a problem. I converted one of them using parts from the Unmade kit and the Arco-flagellants kit, to give it a Penitent Sufferer. I kept the other as designed. I like to think the guy has been in there so long, he is little more than a constantly suffering brain and a few bits of rotting bone.
40K!
I also did some Cherubim. They are somehow even more monstrous than the Penitent Engines.
Chaos
A few months ago, I promised myself that I wouldn’t start a new army. However, a local hobbyist was selling off his collection of Chaos stuff cheap and … there looks like there will be a new Codex soon and maybe even a World Eaters book… so I’m starting a new army.
Like with the Chaos Lord I did a few months ago, I wanted them to be scary. A Chaos Marine should be god damn terrifying. I didn’t like the idea of having bright red armour as World Eaters are usually painted. So, I went for metallic stained with red oil paint. I feel it gives them a dirty, nasty look. The only bright spots are the flashes of blood effects on their blades.
Gene Stealers
Not a whole lot going on here. I used some of the extra weapons left over from the Corpse Grinder kit. They are a little bulkier than some of the other members, but that is OK. It makes sense that the cult would entrust their heavy mining gear to their biggest boys.
The Sanctus is a really simple swap. I stole the Scout Marine sniper rifle from a friend and the body is from the Delaque Nacht-Ghul kit. It is not the most inspired of kit-bashes so I gave him a sign to lurk behind as a bit more visual interest.
The Primus is again a bash from the Delaque Nacht-Ghul, Psy-Gheist and Piscean Spektor kits. I just gave him a third arm. I’m quite happy with this one. The claw and the sword nicely represent the load-out for a Primus.
All this modeling is helping me figure out my cult’s lore. A lot of my command units are from Delaque models. The Delaque already possibly have Zenos influence in their background. It doesn’t seem that impossible that they could be corrupted. I’ve also got in my mind that there might be a power behind the cult manipulating the Delaque as they manipulate the rest of the hive.
Speaking of shady powers, who are these guardsmen? Why do they show up in support of the cult? Who is really pulling the strings behind this cult?
