The Core Worlds

I’m going to have a go at writing a campaign manager for Mongoose Publishing’s Babylon 5 war game – A Call To Arms. I spent some time this evening going over the rules with Jim and working out what data needed storing. This entity relationship diagram is the result.

Complicated system, isn’t it?

In previous years, Mongoose Publishing has held their open days at their offices, but this time they moved out to a sports centre on the edge Swindon Old Town.

This made it easier to get to and eliminated the usual fight for parking with Saturday morning shoppers, but an echoy room doesn’t lend itself very well to demos of RPGs (which involve lots of talking).

With the extra space, Mongoose was able to open up to some third party vendors who dangled some very tempting goodies in front of me. I was tempted to pick up some scenery models, but forced myself to resist the urge until after I’ve finished moving home.

Unfortunately, the event seemed smaller (in terms of attendance) than previous years. I’m not sure if this was to do with the room simply being bigger, or if people pulled out after Claudia Christian gave her apologies and spent the time filming episodes of Nip/Tuck.

There might not have been all that many people there, but there was plenty to see. Mongoose unveiled their shiny new license – Traveller. It is a game I’ve heard a great deal of praise for, but never actually got around to playing.

The new Conan book is out (running to something in the order of 460 pages) and using art appropriate to the tradition (kids, don’t show this one to your mothers, at least not without slicing out the outside margin on every left hand page).

A Call To Arms second edition is out, and looks nice. I didn’t get much time to look at it in the end, but it sounds like fighters have been made rather less useless.

There were also plenty of demo games going on. Since I’d arrived, looked up, and found Sam and Louise parked next to me, we ended up in a trio for most of the day, and we’d barely made it trough the door before being roped into a game of Paranoia by Ian.

A lowly team of troubleshooters we were not! No, we were destined for greater things and our BLUE clearance officers were responsible for the smooth running of an entire sector. We were, of course, suitable grateful to Friend Computer for the honour (“Oh ****!”).

If you don’t know Paranoia then “responsible for the smooth running” is code for “responsible for everything that goes wrong”.

Still, we managed to come out of it in one piece, even if we did have a reactor explode, a High Programmer drugged into insensibility, and unleashed a batch of scrubbots on our neighbours with orders to leak oil in treasonous patterns all over the neighbouring sector, and steal more oil when they ran out. Their poor little bot brains couldn’t cope and they went insane (and not in a good way, at least not if you’re anywhere near them).

Umm, obviously FEMB sector was being run by traitors and we only planted the evidence to expedite due process. Honest.

Kudos to Gareth Hanrahan for running a highly entertaining game.

Old Bear was running Kerakhistan Race of Death, a car racing game with machine guns based on the Battlefield Evolution rules. It was good fun, although I think the victory conditions need tweaking (people who have scored points in previous rounds are better off trying to end the race rather then score more points), but it was good fun overall.

Unfortunately, the race followed by lunch made it too late for us to join in any of the afternoon games, but it gave us a chance to look at all the goodies. Sam and Louise had a game of ACTA and I wandered around and did some catching up with people I haven’t had much contact with since moving away from Swindon.

Overall, it was a good day out.

Kill it, you have to kill it Commander. Put it back in the ship, shoot it into space, fire it into the sun, but you have to kill it – quickly!

OK, so Delenn takes a shoot first policy, but she was in the vicinity when they tried to take her mentor. Other Minbari might not be quite so intense on the subject, so this isn’t a major problem.

I just got back from the alien sector, it’s kinda strange. The place is practically deserted, its as if they’re hiding. The place is shut down tighter than a drum. I’ll link in later.

Interesting, we’ve got nearly a dozen ships asked to leave the station immediately. Some of them weren’t due to leave for weeks, the one thing they have in common is that they’re all aliens.

So, Soul Hunters arrive and most of the non-human population starts to flee or hide. That is just a little bit disruptive! Now, would you let them into your campaign?

When I joined my new gaming group, I knew they had a policy of cycling through campaigns and GMs on a regular basis, and I’d started to think about running a game. Then someone asked me about it, and the snowball started to roll its way down the side of the mountain. I found myself getting increasingly excited at the prospect of running a game of B5, and started rewatching the series and working out plots that could tie into the main storyline.

So, a week and a half later, I’m confident enough in it that I’m happy to reveal my campaign proposal.

It was the dawn of the third age of mankind, approaching the tenth anniversary of the Battle of the Line and the end of the Earth-Minbari war. December 2257: Babylon 5 has recently opened its doors as a diplomatic station, and is a centre for trade for humans and aliens located in neutral territory.

The EarthForce explorer vessel Lancelot is en route to Babylon 5 to resupply and perform some crew transfers before starting a mission of exploration on the galactic rim. Captain Horatio Grisham commands; he has a reputation for being something of a maverick. Rumours are circulating that he’s been assigned this mission to lower his profile.

Among the personnel due to board at Babylon 5 are members of a survey team that includes both military personnel and civilians (who either have specialised skills thought to be useful on the mission, or special knowledge about the region where the ship is heading).

The central characters of Babylon 5 were equipped with greatly differing agendas, lots of secrets, and fought amongst each other to a great degree. Running this type of game would make it hard to keep everyone involved, and I don’t think I’m up to it at present.

Player characters will all be members of the aforementioned survey team. This gives everyone reason to work together and provides scope for civilian and alien characters despite being based on an EarthForce vessel, but doesn’t prevent them from pursuing their own agendas (rather like Crusade).

That said, having Narn or Centari in the group would complicate things, due to the enmity between those species. Having such characters would complicate a number of plots I have in mind and likely force the group in a certain direction once galactic politics reach boiling point. Should the group include representatives from both, and then party in fighting could reach extreme levels. I’m not going to rule them out entirely, but if people would like to play a non-human then I’m going to look more favourably on Minbari and League characters (since they tend not to have entire species out for their blood for extended periods of time)!

I am planning on starting with beginning level characters, so the Lancelot comes complete with an NPC captain, but he might not be around forever. Then there is the other advantage of the survey team, which is that that it lets me nudge the PCs off in a shuttle and remove the spectre of someone standing over them. Grisham is a representation of the EarthForce command structure, not an NPC who will micromanage the players.

I have made a resolution not to let the canon railroad the plot. JMS’ masterpiece will be vulnerable to player machinations, and certain plotlines I have in mind will see player involvement in events that could dramatically alter the course of the Shadow War. This has the advantage that I can let players dabble with key events without having to stop them breaking the plot, but means that the TV show could become increasingly less reliable as a guide to what is happening as time goes on.

Still, the club to which I belong runs games in six week blocks, so I get regular injections of breathing room in which to work out what is going to happen to the universe next. Given that in an Exalted campaign, the players have managed to systematically destroy massive chunks of the defences around Creation – by accident – this is probably a very good thing!

It looks like I might be GMing again. It has been a while, and most of my attempts have been very short campaigns, but this is going to be something longer term.

The gaming group that I joined when I recently moved to London has a policy of swapping campaign (and GMs) every six weeks, the choice of game being determined by a vote on those proposed by people willing to run them. I think this is an excellent idea:

• It allows players to avoid getting bored of one campaign through simply playing it for two long
• It prevents GM burnout
• It gives GMs time to plan while someone else runs a different game

Still, as in any group, there are far more people who want to play then want to GM; which is fair enough, GMing is hard work and requires a lot more commitment then the few hours a week that a player has to invest.

Unsurprisingly, someone popped the question – did I want to propose a game? Well, I have to confess that I do.

I’ve got a couple of games I’d like to run. The first is Spirit of the Century, a Pulp game based around the FUDGE rules. This would be something along the lines of some of my favourite (if cheesy in most cases) movies:

• The Shadow
• The Phantom
• The Rocketeer
• Indiana Jones (Trilogy)
• Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

There are just two problems with me running that.

1. I haven’t a clue how I’d manage to come up with six weeks worth of plot
2. I’d much rather play SotC then run it (I wonder if I can persuade someone else at the club to run a game?)

Which brings me to the other game – Babylon 5.

I’ve been a fan of B5 for a very long time. A decade or so ago, my father had a job which meant he was working in Germany, so I was living there. The day we moved back to the UK we were staying in a little B&B near Reading, and I turned on the TV to find a season one episode of Babylon 5 on – and I loved it.

Years later, and little has changed on that front (other then it going from something I loved and looked forward to each week to something I know very well indeed).

I’ve run Babylon 5 games in the past, and they’ve been amongst my most successful attempts at GMing, so I’m going to dig it out again and run some more.

This time I’m going to take a slightly different approach on the setting I put things in, but I’ll post in more detail about my plans for the campaign later.

In the meantime I’m busy rewatching season one (I’ve discovered that my phone is pretty good for watching TV on), reading timelines, working out plot, planning a trip back to Swindon to collect some books, and working out which extra books I need to get my hands on, as Mongoose have had a busy release schedule which I’ve been lax on keeping up with of late.