eCollapse is a sourcebook for the Wild Talents roleplaying game, which uses a game system called the One-Roll Engine—or if you use the Smear of Destiny rules in the Appendix, it’s a roleplaying game in its own right.
Thanks to eCollapse’s patient playtesters: Ville Halonen, Shannon Obendorf, Dave Michalak, Juli Aldredge, Jonathan Davis, Jonne Arjoranta, Tommi Brander, Antti Luukkonen, Terho Reuhkala, and Tuomo Sipola. special thanks to the inspirational stock artists of www.deviantart.com, whose work was crucial to the first edition of eCollapse.
Written by Greg Stolze, © 2010. Illustrated by Todd Shearer, © 2010. Page design by Jessica Hopkins. The One-Roll Engine is © Greg Stolze. The Wild Talents rules are © Dennis Detwiller, Kenneth Hite, Shane Ivey and Greg Stolze. All rights reserved. No portion of this work may be reproduced by any means without the express written permission of the copyright holders, except for those pages marked “Permission granted to reproduce for personal use only.”
This is a work of fiction. Any similarity with actual people and events, past or present, is purely coincidental and unintentional except for those people and events described in historical context.
eCollapse Published by Cubicle 7 Entertainment www.cubicle7.co.uk ISBN 978-1-907204-69-2 Stock number CB75405
Developed by Arc Dream Publishing www.arcdream.com
Night Heroes
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Chapter 1 Where Are We and What Are We Doing Here? 10 The Setting “Trope”?
Chapter 3
What Does “Situational” Mean?
30
Baby, I Love Drugs
31
Can’t Give Direction
31
Can’t Shut Up
31
Important Things To Know About the Dystopian Future. I Mean, Present. 42
Can’t Take Direction
31
10
Compromised Immune System
31
10
Don’t Yell at Me!
32
Easy Pigeon
32
Homely
32
Sucker For a Pretty Face
32
Boosts and Mods and Jacks, Oh My! 11 Masks and Capes and Evil and Good 12 Back to the Game 13
Thanksgiving Was Hell, Like Always 33
Chapter 2 Identity, Crisis
29 30
Skill Weakness
What You Stand For What You Stand Against
33 33
16
Ideologies
34
Superpower Available Goodies
16 16
Anarchy (+)/Crime (–)
34
Social Justice (+)/Socialism (–)
34
Acid Barf Mod
17
Aero-Ink Mod
17
Amphibo-Mod
18
Amygdala Boost
18
Boneshock Boost
19
Coordination Boost
19
Coprocessor Mod
19
Environmental Adaptation Mod
20
Explosive Production Mod
21
Healing Boost
22
Knockout Gas Mod
22
Linguo-Jam Boost
22
I Want Some More
23
Memory Boost
23
Olfactory Mod
23
Pattern Matching Boost
24
Pharmacretion Mod
24
Screamer Mod
24
Secondary Endoskeleton Mod
25
Sensory Boost
26
Spatial Orientation Boost
26
Speed Boost
27
Strength Boost
28
Unconventional Move Mod
28
Proactive Democracy (+)/Imperialism (–)
34
Peace
34
Hypocrite? Or Merely an Uncritical Thinker?
35
Unlimited Technological Expansion 35 Unlimited Access to Drugs
36
Patriotism (+)/Jingoism (–)
36
Multiculturalism
36
Religion (Pick One)
36
Unchained Capitalism!
36
Environmentalism
37
Unique Rights for Natural Born Humans
37
Vigilantism
38
This Time It’s Personal.
38
insert name here (PC)
38
insert name here (GMC)
39
insert name here (Organization or Corporation)
39
Apocalypse, the Army, the May I Have a Genre, Please?
42 43 44
Artificial Intelligence 44 Cerebrally Enhanced Companion Animals, aka “Seekas” aka “Reebs” aka “Creepy Critters” 46 Chimerae 46 I Wanna Be a Chimera!
47
Cops, the Ecollapse eCollapse, the ECO-lapse Energy Fashion ‘Free’ Press, the Petro-Bio-Industrial Complex, the Petrophage, the Salvation Germ, the U.S. Gub’mint, the Venice
48 48 49 50 50 51 52 53 54 55 55 56
Chapter 4 Technology You Can Use to Kill People And/Or Not Die
57
Ceramic Impact Plate 57 Civilian HUDset 57 Cling L adder 58 EMP Cannon 58 Fresh Knife 59 Gauss Guns 60 Gibsons 61 Impact Hairbag 61 Microwave Wand 61 Reactive Memory Plastic Armor (RMPA or “Rumpus Suit”) 62 Ripperguns 63 Spoiler Gas 64 Switchblade Implants 64 Wiggles 64
Chapter 5 Hero, Villain and Crux Using Something Else
Roles and Episodes King of Hearts : Hero King of Clubs: Villain Mmm ! Now That’s Villainy!
68 68
68 69 69 70
King of Spades: Crux Bystander “Always” and “Never”
71 72 73
“Playing it Right”
73
Chapter 6
Hurting An Example of Play. Another Example of Play The Limits of Narration Ten Things PCs Cannot Narrate
93 93 98 101 101
1. Random Disaster
101
2. A Massive Change of Heart
101
3. New Unsuspected Abilities
102
4. Success at an Entirely Different Character Action
102
5. Another PC’s Feelings
102
6. Goofy Stuff
102
7. Unearned GMC Death
103
8. Bill & Ted’s Preparations
103
9. Backstory
103
10. Premature GMCs Death
Running and Playing eCollapse in Particular 76
104
Five Things GMs Cannot Narrate
104
1. A PC’s Exact Feelings
104
76
2. What a PC Says
104
Getting Into Character
76
3. Permanent Removal of a PC’s
Owning Your Destiny
77
Powers, Except When You Can
104
Being An Enabler
78
4. Humiliating Backstory
104
79
5. Dead GMCs Before the Tipping
For the Players
For the GM Setting Up the Pins
79
Point, Except When You Can
105
Knocking Them Down
82
Eight Things PCs Can Narrate
All We Do Is Talk Talk
82
1. Minor Misfortunes
105
2. Emo Hesitations
105
Mmmmmortaaaal Commmmbaaat! 83
Gaming the Smear
85
Appendix The Smear of Destiny System Elements of the System
88 88
The Smear
88
Valor
88
Suffering
88
Factors
Drawing Tipping GM Characters and Situations Resolving
89
89 90 90 91
Step One: Declare
91
Step Two: Turnover
91
Step Three: Factors and Narration 91 What If There’s a Tie?
Passive Defenses
92
93
105
3. Panicked Self Defense
105
4. Appropriate Humor
106
5. Foreshadowing
106
6. Backshadowing GMCs
106
7. Foiling Other PCs
107
8. Appropriate Stuff Outside of Conflict
107
eCollape Quick Reference, Smear of Destiny Edition
108
Smear of Destiny Character Narrative
109
eCollapse Quick Reference, Wild Talents Edition 110 Wild Talents Character Sheet 111
Night Heroes Deef wandered the park, cracking his knuckles, looking for Zippy, listening to the rants of the historians. “Look around at the Devil’s Dandruff, people!” one cried. “The fairy flakes of plastic germ crap under every footstep, the inexorable transformation of petro power to pointless buckyball pollution! That’s what biotech gets you, it gives with one hand and takes away with the other sixty it’s gotten implanted on itself…” “Go back to Canada!” shouted a heckler and Deef narrowed his eyes. The crazy old man in the tie-dyed hemp had a right to speak his mind, and if some repressionist fascist freelance thought-cop thought different… Deef’s hand slipped halfway into his pocket, he tensed and shifted the small but heavy bag on his back… but he relaxed when it seemed the heckler was going to stick to words. Deef moved on. “Smash the agri-conspiracy!” His heart quickened at the shrill, distant voice. It was her, it was Zippy, tonight might be the night. He quickened his step, opened the bag, reached in his pocket and homed in on her voice. “Feeding cows to cows spread the prion plague!” she yelled. “Their profiteering dependence on corn and oil killed half the population in the beef belt, and they’re in league with the News Monolith! I have proof! They’re behind the Net-outs, I’ve seen it, seen them destroying routers!” Deef shrugged out of his tracksuit in the shade of an elm, revealing star-spangled lycra. His mask was simple, blue with white stripes. He pulled it over his eyes and, transformed into “The Defender of the Nation,” he rounded the corner. She was breathtaking. She stood in the old band shell, arms wide, proclaiming to the crowd. The skintight green bodysuit showed a perfect physique, the kind you used to have to work for in a gym. Her costume was adorned with three simple wheat stalks, subtly drawing attention (Deef felt) to the flawless perkiness of her breasts. The green domino mask set off her green eyes and blonde hair beautifully… “Cease!” he shouted. “Desist! Surrender to the proper authorities or face the consequences!” “You must be the consequences,” she sneered, “Since the last time you saw a ‘proper authority’ it was over your shoulder while you ran.” “Some of us still trust the rule of law, even when it doesn’t trust us!” Deef had practiced this line, and he delivered it smoothly as he pulled out his chain and began swinging it, closing in on her. It was almost traditional in these sorts of fights: An exchange of slogans and banter before getting down to business. It provided opportunities for the psych-out, and gave time to witnesses who wanted to gather in a crowd. It was a common belief among the masked that people who chose to watch the fights were the most open to ideological conversion. “The only rule of the law is ‘money talks’!” Zippy’s crimson lips curled in derision. “What did yours say when you paid to get boosted? ‘Hand-eye coordination please, and a side order of perfect breasts?’ You hypocrite!”
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“You’re the hypocrite!” “Shut up!” Others, more prudent perhaps, had the chance to get the hell away. The Defender of the Nation leaped up onto the band shell to attack as she, far more nimble, jumped away. The links of his weapon were painted red, white and blue and she dared not turn her back on it as she rolled towards the wings. He moved to intercept, and she pulled a 20th century shooter out of the holster whose belt so fetchingly framed her hips. “Feel the wrath of the old ways!” she shrieked as she aimed at the center of his chest and pulled the trigger. Deef winced, waiting for the sting of the bullet as it bounced off his subcutaneous secondary endoskeleton, but the gun just clicked, prompting laughter from the onlookers. “Those unreliable old gadgets kill more people than they save!” The chain whipped through the air, first one end (which she ducked) then the other (over which she leaped) as he closed in and she tried to stay away. He was going to get her this time, he was finally going to stop her and… and either make her see sense, or make good on his threats to hand her over to the cops. Then the police might respect him, understand that he wasn’t like the other vigilantes and crims and modded crazies… She’d chosen a good place to speak but a bad one to fight and she was getting boxed in, nowhere to dodge as he neared. “C’mon Zippy,” he said in low tones. “Give up. We’ll talk.” “Talk is all you do,” she said, and squinted, and then blocked the middle of the chain with her gun barrel so the end swung around and smacked him in the fingers. “And I’m ‘Captain Organic’ now!” “Ow!” Her second round didn’t misfire, and even Deef couldn’t shrug off a point-blank bullet to the soft tissue of his throat. He heard her say, “Night night, hero,” then the rapid click of her heels. She fled, with a speed that only inhuman coordination could manage on four-inch stilettos. When he recovered, he could hear sirens. Someone had stolen his chain. Zippy was nowhere in sight. The Defender of the Nation struggled to his feet and started to run. He had little hope of his tracksuit being there, but he had other clothes stashed around the neighborhood. Wouldn’t do to get caught masking, even when he was trying to help. “Tomorrow night,” he muttered.
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Where Are We and What Are We Doing Here? Congratulations on your purchase of eCollapse. It’s a setting for superhero games, a future at the crossroads of hope and dystopia. It’s a supplement for Wild Talents, and it also has its own specialized mechanics in the Appendix. You can strip mine it for ideas, you can run it as a self-contained game, or you can bolt it to any other system you like. It’s meant to be versatile. However you use it, it’s supposed to raise and address some very particular questions. (For the answers, you’re on your own.) If you’re reading a superhero game, it’s no great stretch to assume you’re a fan of superhero comics. (If not, hi mom!) eCollapse offers a framework for poking at one of the central tropes of the genre—Good Guys and Bad Guys.
The Setting The setting is a future America where a lot of things we take for granted have been kicked aside. Easy, reliable transportation is a thing of the past, diverse media opinions are largely a mirage (“Masked Vigilantes: Misled or Evil?” is a typical filler headline) and while the government is tenaciously hanging in there, it’s under siege from forces within and without. Ideologies of unfettered commerce war with resurgent communism in Christian garb. (It’s called “Christomunism” and the basic premise is ‘share the wealth or go to hell.’) Uncertainty is the new normal, and in the absence of the solid consumer lifestyle they previously enjoyed, Americans turn to ideology. The USA of eCollapse is the most fervent and ideologically polarized since the Civil War. Its uneasy and embattled population, reeling from disasters both economic, electronic and ecological, is clinging to belief, because that’s so very hard to take away. The partisan politics of the early 21st century, when those emails floated around suggesting one of the candidates was the Antichrist? Small beer. Get into politics now and the question isn’t whether you’ll face a serious assassination attempt, it’s how many per month. Things fell apart until the world was almost ready for superheroes. But first, there needed to be superpowers.
“Trope”? A ‘trope’ is convention specific to a genre. So in romance novels, a common trope is that the man and woman at the center of the story hate one another on first meeting. In fantasy, it’s the monolithic and powerful magic of evil—Sauron, Voldemort, Arawn. eCollapse is the first of a string of books I hope to write, each presenting tools for toying with superhero tropes like the behavior of supervillains, the tendency of the superpowered to create their own worst enemies, and the idea of the secret identity. If you meet someone cute at the library, try to work the word “trope” (it rhymes with “dope”) into the conversation. Can’t hurt!
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Boosts and Mods and Jacks, Oh My! Biotechnology was touted as the Next Big Thing that was going to Fix All Our Problems (just as, once upon a time, the telegraph, the locomotive, the internal combustion engine and the computer all were). Lots of people still consider the jury out on it, despite—or possibly because of—the Petrophage germ. But more on that later. What you want to hear about are jacks and boosts and mods. Cyborgs have been around since the first time a guy with a broken leg used a crutch, and they’ve been cool ever since the pirates started putting on hook hands. In the 20th century, lots of people with eyeglasses and filled teeth didn’t even consider themselves ‘borged. Pacemakers, bone pins and plates in the skull were used to restore lost functioning, and the ongoing Global War on Terror drove the capacities of replacement limbs closer and closer to human abilities— until they eventually surpassed them. When things got hectic on the home front, it wasn’t surprising that some people considered installing hardware, not only to replace lost functioning, but to augment what they got. Electronic or mechanical aids were commonly called “jacks” courtesy of William Gibson and the back of everyone’s personal computer. While they got some media attention, installing them was never all that common. A lot of people who could afford them thought they looked creepy. A lot of people who approved of the “metal chunks sticking out yo’ skull” aesthetic couldn’t afford functional cybernetics and had to stick with extreme piercing. But the second generation of augments—boosts and mods—weren’t hardware at all. They were bioengineered, often invisible, cheaper to produce, and less demanding of precise machining. This “wet tech” or “blackbio” initially took the form of mods, new organs installed in the body cavity or under the skin or anywhere you can find space.
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Mods let people climb like spiders (or, to piggyback on Marvel’s exquisite marketing, like Spiderman™), eject blinding clouds of ink, spew acid, lactate heroin (I know—eew), breathe water or eat grass like a cow. (For our purposes, having a set of ruminant stomachs is not such a great power, but wait until the infrastructures of supermarkets and fast food franchises are only a fond memory. Diss on it then.) The tiny subculture of the jacked cast a disproportionate shadow (especially since some of them were already making lots of noise and spilling lots of blood on behalf of their chosen causes). They made it more acceptable to get hidden improvements. Even if the effects of the mods were (frankly) weirder than the jacks, they looked normal. (Well, except for skinny folks with rumens, who look kind of pregnant. Right, I’m done with the rumination now.)
“ A su perh ero dru g you ju st ru b on you r skin ? you ’d expect to at least freebase.”
Someth ing like that
- Ph ilip J. F ry, Fu tu rama
Boosts, then, are biological improvements to native abilities—greater strength, or speed, or proprioception—which aren’t even surgical. Truthfully, the first boosts were the steroids and their synthetic cousins that so enlivened the 20th Century’s fin de siècle sporting life. Their current replacements are better, stronger, faster, and they almost never shrink your gonads. Sensory and nervous system boosts are usually strings of big injections, but some of the immunological ones are actually lotions. Follow the instructions of your black market pharmacist and, over the course of a couple weeks, you too could enjoy a sense of smell that would put a bloodhound to shame. These drugs and procedures were immediately condemned and legislated against in all the first-world nations except China (where, after the oil collapse, they had widespread starvation to deal with). Just like the 20th century legal prohibitions on alcohol and sodomy, all this did was drive it underground and give criminal suppliers a rationale for price gouging. If you want to get boosted or modded—I mean really want it bad—you can find someone to do it to you.
Masks and Capes and Evil and Good Start with an intellectual landscape in which people are increasingly willing to bite one another over what they believe. Stir in drugs and procedures that let you transcend the usual boundaries of the human body. What do you get? Well, mayhem, obviously. But less obviously, you get people putting on distinctive skintight costumes and making grandiose statements about How Things Are And How They Should Be. At first the boosted and modded just did their own thing. Someone robs your liquor store, you use your coordination boost to ‘splode his head with a highly accurate .32 caliber long-barrel gauss pistol. But the costumes… the big, gaudy, sometimes-kinda-stupid costumes… they moved the actions of a booster from the personal level up to the political. To put it another way, a modded guy who jumps the fence at a Scientology emplacement and sets the meeting hall alight is just a punk, a vandal, a common crook. But if that same guy puts on a costume and calls himself The Fist of Jesus,
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suddenly he’s a symbol. If you’re a fundamentalist who thinks conversion by the sword sounds kind of neat, this guy gets your attention and holds it. You might even call him a superhero. Of course, if you’re Tom Cruise, you call him a supervillain.
“ Remember th ose two gu ys wh o had th e g iant brawl over wh ich one got to u se th e name ‘Nu t job’?
Seven c ivilian casu alt ies, one fatality and
th e gu y lost a foot be fore agreeing to go by ‘th e Orig inal Nu t job’?
Well both th ose gu ys are dead and someone calling h erself ‘th e Incredible Nu t job’ is claiming responsibility.
That ’s what it ’s come to, man.
killing over th e righ t to be th e craziest.
Th ese are ou r peers.”
Back to the Game The great mass of people in the eCollapse future lead lives of quiet desperation and uncertainty. They don’t know what tomorrow holds or when the bodega’s getting another shipment of arugula, but they put their heads down and do their jobs and silently believe that something, someday, might make things better. The PCs are not like that. They lead lives of extremely noisy desperation and uncertainty. Something has exiled them from the dubious Eden of middle class toil, and they have remade themselves in the image of their beliefs. They have boosts, they have colorful personae, and they are ready to make a difference by any means necessary. All the characters in eCollapse have boosts or mods. (If some iconoclast wants to just be jacked, fine, but he’s likely to suckle hind teat on the power sow. Just sayin’.) They are devoted to their opinions and, even if they’re contradictory and illogical, they are not just talking the talk, they are kicking the ass. They are painfully sincere about their ideas, and if you disagree, you find out firsthand just how painful. The question of the game, then, is whether the PCs are superheroes, or supervillains, or both. Periodically, destiny (by which I mean the game mechanics) puts them in the role of Hero or Villain. They are, at those times, much more likely to get their way if they act accordingly. Self-sacrificing Heroes succeed, as do destructive sumbitch Villains. Are they willing to do what it takes to get what they want? If they’re willing to sacrifice anything—and I mean anything—to win, have they really won at all? Let’s meet our supers and find out.
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People
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Identity, Crisis Creating a character for eCollapse is quick and, unlike much of what that character is fated to experience, painless. The character is composed of five main elements. There’s also a name and a gender and some history, but for the rules, it’s the five.
Superpower The risks of mods and boosts are considerable. If your street-doc sneezes while installing your mod, you could wind up dying on the table (or having snot sticking to your brain folds). As with any illegal substance, you can’t be 100% sure what’s been mixed in there to extend supply: Given that boosts are reconfiguring your body on a pretty invasive level, there’s a real risk of hemorrhage, immune system crash, or RSS. (RSS is Rejected Skin Syndrome, this thing where your antibodies start attacking your epidermis, and, well, you die. Hideously.) These problems aren’t nearly as common as the government and news propaganda would have you believe but, when it’s your esophagus getting clogged by the disintegrating matter that was once the roof of your mouth, it really only has to happen once. That’s without factoring in the legal repercussions. Just having a mod or boost can land you in the stony lonesome for a minimum stretch of ten years. If you used it in the commission of a felony (which is, honestly, the reason most people get them) the sentences get multiplied, and supervillain jails are not minimum security. The good news is, as starting characters, you get your superpower free and clear, no side effects, no jail time, not even acne or mild upset stomach. But you risked it. You wanted the power badly enough to take that chance. Start thinking about what motivated you to do that, okay?
In Wild Talents No Archetypes, no Willpower points. You get 20 points to build your single superpower, if you don’t choose to use one off the following list. There are some pretty severe limits to what you can pick, however. It has to be something that’s a plausible biological effect. No telepathy, no invisibility (though you could go for chameleon chromatophores on your skin, if you feel like doing your supering buck naked), no nullify, no cosmic powers or magic.If you want to break the points up among several powers, go ahead. Having a thematic focus would be nice but if you choose to have a grab bag, consider why that might be. Did your character just get really lucky on a blended treatment? Or is she just so crazy she took extra pulls on the biopower slot machine?
In the Smear of Destiny System Pick one off the list. Write down what it does. Where it says “Factor” put a capital letter Q.
Available Goodies Welcome, one and all to the chop doc shop. Welcome to the lovely lovely superpowers. I presume you found us by recommendation, as word of mouth is our most reliable source of new clients. Pass it on, be discrete, and so forth.
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You’ve come to enhance your capacities, which is a normal, healthy and natural desire. Despite what you’ve read, these mods and boosts are as safe as anything short of staying home with warm milk. With illegal biotech, as with all things, there are no guarantees. Also note that boosts are permanent and cannot be removed, while mods can be yanked out by involuntary surgery. If you get arrested and convicted, they will be. What’ll it be?
Acid Barf Mod Ah. With this, you can injure people by spraying some kind of clinging, stinking, stinging goo on them. The mod for this is roughly the size of your tongue, and many people have it installed in their mouths—both because it’s easier to hide from nosy cops and because spitting on one’s foes is psychologically satisfying. But people get them installed on their arms or the centers of their chests or in, um, other places. Wild Talents: Acid Barf 5d. It has the Attacks quality with the Range capacity (+2), Penetration 1 (+1) and Spray 2 (+2). However, it has Reduced Capacity (-1) so its range is only about 16 yards. This means that when you attack with it, you typically roll 7d (5d+2 Spray dice) and use all your sets as attacks. Every set does Width Shock and Width Killing and reduces non-hardened armor by 1 point. Smear of Destiny: It injures people and lightly damages organic material.
Aero-Ink Mod This provides clusters of tiny orfices facing in all directions, which can expel blasts of an inky aerosol. If it’s windy, the cloud disperses within moments, but in still air it stays suspended for close to sixty seconds. (For the environmentally
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conscious, don’t worry—it’s biodegradeable.) It blocks light when it’s in the air, it tends to stick to lenses tenaciously, and it’s a strong eye irritant. The mod usually gets laced through the lymph system, so the major ejectors (about the size of a standard Denny’s pancake) are under the jaw and behind the ears. Secondary valves are placed on the forearms and calves. Immunity to the eye-blur factor develops naturally a few weeks after the installation. Curiously, while everyone with aero-ink is immune to their own ink, they are not protected from one another’s. On the plus side though, on installation you may get to choose what color you eject. Wild Talents: Aero-Ink 5d. This Defends (+2) and is Useful (+2) with the Range capacity. Specifically, it smears lenses, blurs eyes, and creates a cloud of fog. It has the Reduced Capacity flaw (-1) so it only messes up eyes and cameras within 16 yards. It has Spray 1 (+1). This means that you roll 6d (5 for the pool, one for Spray) and can use all the sets you get as gobble dice against attacks. Moreover, if you get even one set, all cameras and lenses within 16 yards get smudged and fogged, while people’s eyes sting and water. People affected by the ink have their dice pools reduced by your Width the next round. Smear of Destiny: It disorients people and blocks cameras.
Amphibo-Mod Contrary to the comic books, the gills and vents actually go along your chest and back, not on your neck. Here we do four in front, four in back, lying along the lines of the ribs. You can inhale or exhale about four gallons a second with the second lung set, which doubles your chest’s diameter when in use. Both the pull in through the high gills and the push out through the low vents are intended to move you along, so you can beat a strong normal swimmer without even moving your arms or legs. As a side benefit, you can hold your breath for at least ten minutes with one of these, and it makes you hard to smother. Our mod includes nictating membranes for your eyes that make it much easier to see underwater (and which can, incidentally, help you recover a little faster from an aero-ink blast). Unscrupulous surgeons have been known to charge for them separately, keep that in mind if comparison shopping. The toe-webs are permanent, but the ones between your fingers contract and withdraw when not actually immersed. They do make your hands look a little pudgy when you’re out of the water, though. Wild Talents: This is modeled with two powers. The first is Breathe Underwater, 2HD. It’s Useful (+2) with the Self Only flaw (-3). The other power is 8d+2WD in a Swimming Hyperskill. Smear of Destiny: You can stay underwater indefinitely and swim very well.
Amygdala Boost They call it that because it sounds more mysterious than “prefrontal cortex and medial temporal boost.” Originally, this was developed as a treatment for autism, I think. Then someone thought, if these pills can take someone who’s totally socially dysfunctional and make them kinda normal, what happens if someone who’s functional (maybe at the low end of functional, I figure) takes ‘em? A few weeks later, he’s selling the Brooklyn Bridge to buy coke for his new stripper girlfriend. I’m not going to guarantee that if you do this you’re going to become imbued with a sort of personal magnetism that seems nearly mystical to those in its thrall. But it’s happened a lot so far.
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It’s funny. This thing’s kind of the flip side of the Linguo-Jammer, if you follow me. That one lets you understand everyone and see where they’re coming from. This one makes everyone see where you’re coming from. Just don’t fall into the typical manipulative bastard error of assuming you’re smarter than everyone else, just because you can persuade everyone else. Wild Talents: It’s all Hyperstats. +3d to Charm and +2d to Command. Smear of Destiny: Given sufficient time and a common language, the character can persuade anyone to endorse—or at the very least accept—any opinion or premise. The farther the position is from the listening character’s beliefs, the more time and effort is required.
Boneshock Boost When you buy boneshock, you get three huge syringes and instructions to shoot up one a week until they’re all gone, while consuming as much calcium and protein as you can lay hands on. The excruciating joint pains and curious whitish discharge of week three are unavoidable side-effects, but the people who go for boneshock usually expect to suffer. The cause of all that agony is the reconfiguring of the bones to a form that is both stronger and more flexible. Moreover, the tendons and ligaments are similarly replaced with something that’s less like human tissue and more like a combination of spider silk and high-strength industrial nylon. People with boneshocks have gotten up and run away after falling ten stories, been rolled over by cars—not just hit, run over and backed up on and run over again—and stumbled to their feet worse for wear but still ready to rumble. Shockers die of organ ruptures and bleed-outs, but they leave good looking corpses. Wild Talents: 2HD in Extra Tough. Two more Wound Boxes on each location, easy. Smear of Destiny: Damage from impact is greatly mitigated. It provides moderate protection against penetrating damage.
Coordination Boost Pills! The boost for radically better hand-eye coordination (or “raised proprioception,” as the military calls it) is thirty pills, often disguised as birth control for our lady clients. You take one a day for a month and, when the thirty days are up, you can shoot half-court three-pointers with ease. Or, if you prefer, superheroes. Wild Talents: +1+WD in a Coordination Hyperstat. Smear of Destiny: You hit what you aim at, almost always.
Coprocessor Mod I won’t lie to you. A small quantity of gray matter does have to be removed to fit the coprocessor nodule in, but you’ll be awake throughout so we can test to make sure it’s, ah, lightly populated real estate, y’know? It’s only the size of a cherry tomato, anyway. I’m sure you’ve heard this makes you smarter. While that’s debatable (people with coprocessors still do all kinds of foolish, stupid things), it definitely amps up the ability to run probabilities and extrapolate outcomes based on previous observations. In other words, it’s the dream technology of stock buyers and military tacticians alike.
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(Is it likely that the advent of coprocessors contributed to the shockwaves that went through the global markets and brought countless multinationals to their knees? The well-informed coprocessor user would put that at about an 83% likelihood, and follow up by pointing out that once a critical threshold of brokers are using coprocessors, their ability to predict the market is nullified.) The big limit on the coprocessor is good ol’ GIGO—garbage in, garbage out. If you’re betting on a filly down at the track, you can factor in previous performance, jockey skill, weather, age, diet and psychology, but if you aren’t aware that for this race one of the long-shots’ owners packed his steed’s nostrils with cocaine, you still might muff your prediction. Nevertheless, the odds are good you’ll astound your friends and amaze your relatives at least once a month. Wild Talents: Coprocessor, 10d. This is Useful (+2) and I’m going to recommend a little hand-waving here. Rather than fool about with Range and Willpower costs like Precognition in the Wild Talents book, or putting Augument onto Attacks and Defends and wind up making it both more expensive and more powerful than makes sense for eCollapse… do it this way. Once per scene you can roll the dice and get an insight from the GM. If you use this to predict what someone’s going to do in a fight, you get a dice pool bonus to your attacks or defenses equal to the Width of your set. If you use it to figure out what’s going on based on the information you know, the GM gives you a hint. Smear of Destiny: You can predict events. The more information you have, the more accurate your predictions are.
Environmental Adaptation Mod There’s three parts of this. The first one replaces your whole nasal cavity, going down through your neck, superseding both your airway and your esophagus. This bit here is a lining for your tongue and the interior surface of your mouth. (Forget about tasting stuff, by the way.) Anything you drink, eat or breathe gets trapped and analyzed. If it’s toxic, narcotic, debilitating or just something the software isn’t sure about, it goes back out. Gasses go out with the next exhalation. Liquids and solids come out the mouth, so if someone tries to poison you at a high society dinner, you’re going to create a disturbance spewing it. Though less of a disturbance than you’d create dying, I suppose. Another element connects to your liver and more or less supercharges it. Anything that gets around the neck barrier (such as something injected) gets filtered from the bloodstream, buried in some fat cells, encysted in a protein shell and dumped into your bladder to trouble the sewer ‘gators. The third element is a protective plastic coating over your eyeballs so that you can’t get blinded by tear gas or get sarin in your ocular cavity. Blinking feels a little thick, but your tear ducts adapt quickly enough. No worse than contact lenses, really. Wild Talents: 2HD in Immunity: Poisons, Intoxicants, Drugs and Irritants. (It’s a little broader than standard Immunity but not quite up to Variable Effect, so ten points per HD seemed reasonable.) Smear of Destiny: Ignore the effects of poisons, intoxicants, drugs and irritants. Aero-ink still blocks your sight, but only as long as it’s suspended in the air.
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Explosive Production Mod Oh, the authorities hate this one. You get this implanted organ, usually in the body cavity but sometimes in a limb if it’s beefy enough. It produces an organic explosive, not quite as powerful as C-4 but given enough time and a modestly balanced diet you can make as much as you want. You can excrete it out a normal body orifice or through a dedicated opening. I have two versions of this mod so far. One produces a clear, oily liquid, set off by flame. The other kicks out a dingy orange-yellow paste almost the exact consistency of a decently firm poop. That one you can burn all day, it won’t go off until it’s hit with an electrical jolt. Either form’s roughly the size and weight of a soda can. It’s not 100% stable—I mean, it won’t blow up spontaneously, but if you leave it sitting in the garage for a year, don’t expect it to still go pop. One final concern is that a serious inspection of the blast site is going to turn up a pretty unique chemical signature. It takes some labwork, but if the cops care they can tell that explosions A and B came from bomber number one, while C and D came from bomber two. Wild Talents: Create Explosives 2HD. This has the Exhausted flaw (-3) so you can only produce a new batch of boom juice once per scene. However, it has the extras Area 4 (+4) and Radius (+2). Therefore, every unit of explosives, when it goes off, affects everyone within ten yards of the blast point. Those within the bang zone take 2 Shock to every hit location and roll 4d, taking 1K to each location that turns up. Each additional unit increases the radius by a yard and adds another Area die, just to keep things simple. Smear of Destiny: Your character is always presumed to have access to explosives.
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Healing Boost Three days, three injections, and kiss those headaches and stomach upsets goodbye forever. More than that, bruises fade within half an hour. Something like a knife wound? Expect it to scab over in a couple hours and be good as new (well, close enough) by the weekend. Don’t get overconfident and go walking in front of a shotgun blast. If that doesn’t kill you outright your body eventually pushes out the pellets and scabs it over, but it’s a good idea to carry some plastic wrap to put around yourself so you don’t bleed out before the gaps can knit. As a rule of thumb, anything that goes in one side, comes out the other, and you can’t cover up the holes even with both hands? You’re going to be on your ass a month and have some scars to show off. Also, don’t expect this to restore brain functioning if you lose actual gray matter. Wild Talents: Regeneration 2HD. Smear of Destiny: Instead of getting Queen factors when resolving events, you can remove one point of Suffering per scene, unless it came from (1) an intangible cause like psychological trauma or (2) a truly gruesome and massive injury, as described above.
Knockout Gas Mod The gland that puts this stuff out is about the size of a Chicago hot dog, complete with bun and condiments. It fits in a body cavity with some squeezing and can then unload into your lungs, letting you breathe out the gas like a smoker. Or putting it up near the armpit with a nozzle down to on the palm or under the fingernails gives you a greater ability to put a concentrated dose in someone’s face. Naturally the toxin has no effect on its own producer, though you may or may not be vulnerable to other people with the same mod. (There’s a funny story about two guys in Jalisco who knocked each other out, fell off the same building, and landed on the same cop. But that’s a friend of a friend thing, might have grown in the telling.) It produces enough fog to affect everyone in about a tenfoot cube, so try to get your enemies to dogpile you before you use it. Wild Talents: Knockout Gas, 2HD. This has the Attacks quality three times (+6) and the extras Radius (+2) and non-physical (+2). It’s flawed, however, with Touch Only (-2) and Limited Damage: Shock (-1). Here’s how it works. When you activate this, everyone within 10 yards takes four points of Shock to their heads, timed as if it was a 2x10 attack. This ignores armor but obviously, since it’s a gas, gas masks and the like (Environmental Adaptation Mod, naturally) keep it from having any effect at all. To keep things thematic, this damage does not ever turn into Killing damage (so you can’t gas people twice and leave a trail of bodies) and it all goes away once they wake up. Smear of Destiny: You can make people pass out when they’re close to you.
Linguo-Jam Boost Turns out the language center in the average brain is pretty lazy by the time you grow up and actually, compared to someone Linguo-Jammed, only so-so when you’re a young kid. With this gadget, if you speak English and want to learn to parle Français, that’s about a month of casual study or exposure with no particular effort. Something like Chinese or Basque, with a different foundation? Two months. Assuming you’re not, y’know, working at it. If you really put your head down eight hours a day, you can get fluent in weeks, not months.
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But honestly? Most of the Linguo-Jammed find the new fluencies to be an appetizer. The main course is a far deeper understanding of your own language. It goes beyond letting streety bastards understand heavy contract legalese (or letting white-shoe lawyers follow the latest rap singles), though again— nice. No, when you get your LJ firing, people can’t lie to you. You don’t just understand what’s said, and what’s meant, you get what’s deliberately unsaid. Wild Talents: This is handled with a power and a Hyperskill. The Hyperskill is 3HD in Empathy. The power is “Linguo-Jam” which is Useful (+2). Its Useful quality is that you learn languages very rapidly when exposed to them. You get 9d in it. Smear of Destiny: You understand the full text, the subtext, and you penetrate the repressed text.
I Want Some More After getting one superpower, it’s not uncommon to want more. Specifically, people usually want whichever superpower was used to whip on their booty. But sorry, the human body is barely able to support one boost or mod. Try to stack on a second and your chances of getting ill effects get close enough to 100% to make no real odds. Even the almost-unheard-of urban legends who double down without getting some kind of super-cancer usually wind up dying within a couple years. Effectively, their mods starve their organs of crucial nutrients and they collapse of accelerated aging.
Memory Boost There are lots of different types of memory, and this course of medications doesn’t amplify all of them. Muscle memory where you do something once and can repeat it flawlessly over and over? Sorry. You probably want them coordination capsules. These pills here are for sensory, verbal, mathematical and emotional stuff. So if you’re interested in total recall and photographic memory, this is for you. Makes you look real smart, and you never forget a name or a face. Also good if you’re after inexpressible, bittersweet tristesse when you catch a whiff of your ex-girlfriend’s perfume. Wild Talents: Total Photographic Recall 5HD. It’s Useful (+2). Smear of Destiny: Like it says on the tin, photographic memory and total recall.
Olfactory Mod You know how a dog’s olfactory nerves, if spread out, would be bigger than a human being’s skin? You didn’t know? Actually, I don’t have a real clear source on that either. Never mind. What happens with this is, we graft in five new patches of dedicated nerve tissue, each about the size of a few squares of toilet paper. One goes on each forearm, on the calves too and underneath the scalp. The nerves weave up into the hair follicles and alter them for odor perception. (No money back if it accidentally grows into your armpit hair, but that happens, seriously, less than 1% of the time.) The smells you pick up through the mod aren’t like the ones you get in your nose, you don’t have an instinctive and visceral reaction to them. If you smear a dog steamer, you smell it like normal but it isn’t debilitating. Likewise tear gas, if that comes up—no better, no worse.
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The upside? Hell, you can find anyone, anywhere. Pepper juice, wolf urine, Head ‘n’ Shoulders, nothing is going to disguise a scent from you. Which means those fancy costumes aren’t hiding a thing from you. Wild Talents: +5HD each in the Scrutinize and Perception Skills. Limited, of course, to things that could only be detected by aroma. But be generous with the clues. For example, someone with this could tell if two superficially identical liquid explosives had been excreted by different people. Ditto for drugs. Smear of Destiny: You can track and recognize people, animals and distinct aromas with great accuracy.
Pattern Matching Boost This one’s a weird one, and not just because you can get it in suppository form. (Don’t worry—it also comes as a patch, like with nicotine.) It improves the brain’s ability to decode complicated logic structures. I’ll level with you: I’m not sure exactly how this one works, since it’s not a big seller like, say, the libido crank. But the one chick who bought one from me went from working her ass off for C+ grades in her electronic engineering classes to getting a 4.0 while partying hard every weekend and picking up perfect grades in a computer science minor. It’s like a nerd pill only, y’know, it goes in the other end. I don’t think it makes you like Star Trek, if that’s a concern. Wild Talents: It’s all Hyperskills. You get 1d+1WD in Cryptography, Electronics, Security Systems and Knowledge: Math. Smear of Destiny: You can figure out electronic devices very easily.
Pharmacretion Mod Did I say the cops hate the explosive thing? Well they do, but they hate the bitches who lactate Ecstasy just as much. Like the explosive production mod, it’s an organ about the size of a bratwurst that can extrude illegal substances, either through a dedicated new opening in your body or through one of the common ones. You can’t get high off your own junk, which is probably for the best. The pharmacopeia available is staggering, but it’s one drug per customer. You can get a mod for meth, an organ for opiates, or sweat glands that pump out synthetic cocaine. Have fun, Scarface. Wild Talents: Create Drugs, 5d. This is Useful (+2) with the flaw Depleted (-1), so you can only dump out ten doses in a scene before you have to pause and use a recharge. Each recharge nets you ten more doses. After you’ve used your recharges up (meaning, every 100 doses of smack or whatever) you need to take an afternoon off, eat lots of sugars and complex carbohydrates, and maybe think about what you’ve done with your life. Then you’re back where you started. It also has the extra Dazed (+1). After someone takes a hit, they take a penalty to all dice pools equal to the Width of your production roll. Coupled with the Duration extra (+2), this means the dazing penalty lasts a number of rounds equal to either the Width or Height of the roll, whichever is higher. Smear of Destiny: You always have access to the drug the mod produces.
Screamer Mod It’s a funny-shaped mod, big but not heavy or unwieldy. It installs between your shoulderblades, hooked into the lungs so it can use them as a sounding chamber,
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with this shallow bowl thingie—’s like the guts of a stereo speaker, and your skin’s the fabric covering. Oh, there’s a pair of biological earplugs, like little valves for the ear canal, they protect your eardrums when you use the screamer. You can also activate them without bringing the noise, if your neighbor has a cat or an active love life. What the primary mod does it make a loud, shrill, very irritating sound. Sets off car alarms for about a half a mile. You can expect some glass cracking too. It depends a lot on facing, rigidity and all kinds of other factors, but I’ve seen the Voice of the Masses blow out truck windshields, break windows and shatter light bulbs. It’s not healthy for people, needless to say. Some people pass out, but more often they just wince, look around and spend the next day or so talking too loud and asking people, “Sorry, come again?” Wild Talents: Sonic Blast 2HD. This has a lot of flaws and extras, so buckle up. Let’s start with the Useful quality (+2). It can break glass and deafen people. This has the flaws Obvious (-1) and Touch Only (-2) along with the Radius extra (+2). The Attacks quality (+2) is also Obvious and Touch Only with Radius (-12+2=-1). It also has the Daze extra (+2) and Penetration 2 (+2). It does Limited Damage (-1), Shock only. As a minor point of common sense, I’ll suggest that the damage from this never turns into Killing damage. Whew! So what’s going on here? Simply this: You let out a blast, and everything within 10 yards gets shook. Glass breaks, depending on situation and GM fiat. Everybody within that sphere takes two points of Shock to their head, and this damage ignores two points of armor. All those people take a -2d penalty to their next action, just like they would if they stood right in front of the big speaker at a Manowar concert. Like that Manowar concert, just about everyone within a mile or so knows something loud just happened. You can’t kill people with the sound (awww…) but a couple blasts can knock them out (...yay!) and, really, if they’re out cold and only ten yards away, you can probably find a way to complete your transaction. If you’re that villainous. Smear of Destiny: Breaks glass sometimes, deafens people almost universally.
“Your pitiful antics can’t stop me. You have to know that. You have to know I’ll win.” “Yeah, you’ll win. If you keep going, you will, you’re right. But you know what your prize is gonna be? A world where the bad guys always win. Do you really think that’s worth it?”
Secondary Endoskeleton Mod The surgery for this mod is pretty out there, and I say that as a man who once installed a sixteen-inch uvula covered with PCP-dripping cilia. But if you’re a survivor type and even boneshocks or a healing boost aren’t going to assuage your paranoia… mm, the weeks you spend recovering from the installation may be your last trip to the infirmary, unless you drink paint. The incisions go along the undersides of your arms and the interior of your legs and a reactive, bioplastic mesh is carefully threaded under your skin. Its primary struts lie at right angles to the body’s long bones for maximum support. Stops knives, bullets, anything short of major munitions as long as they don’t go in your eye or your mouth.
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Or rather, it prevents penetration by that stuff. The shock wave may kill you without leaving a single hole you weren’t born with. But hey, you can say goodbye to those disfiguring bruises. Wild Talents: The math on this works out a little funny, but it’s cool. It’s Permanent Light Armor (+4). You get 1d+2HD, so at the beginning of the game, roll this once. If you get a 10, your character lucked into a permanent 3 LAR. Otherwise, it’s 2 LAR forever, which means all Shock damage gets reduced to a single point, after which all Killing damage has two of its points turned into Shock. (For the lucky 10% who get 3 LAR, three points of Killing turn to Shock.) Smear of Destiny: Damage from penetration is greatly reduced. Provides moderate protection against impact.
Sensory Boost Getting your eyes reshaped for 20/20 vision is so 20th century it’s actually legal. This goes well above and beyond, tripling the nerve density in your eyes and ears while stimulating a burst of new growth in the areas of your brain that process and integrate sensory data. You not only see more clearly and with sharper contrast, you focus more quickly, notice tiny details more easily, filter out noise from signal with ease and pinpoint exactly where a sound originated instinctively. I’ve never seen anyone with a sense package like this get taken by surprise. Last guy who got one could hear a helium balloon drifting past behind his back. Wild Talents: +5HD each in the Scrutinize and Perception Skills, limited to things that could be seen and heard. Smear of Destiny: The character is aware of anything occurring on a human scale within twenty feet, and routinely hears or sees anything there was even a chance of perceiving.
Spatial Orientation Boost If you have trouble with how things fit together, if you get lost all the time or can’t pack a suitcase or fail terribly at platformer computer games, you might have a poorly developed sense of spatial orientation. With the boost, you never get lost, you get a great memory for where you left your keys, but more importantly you suddenly find that machines make a whole lotta sense to you. Like, if you’d never seen a jet engine before, you could not only take it apart and put it back together working, you could take apart a broken one and fix it. Wild Talents: Spatial Orientation Genius 6d+WD. This is Useful (+2), giving superhuman understanding of movement through space. It’s got the flaw Self Only (-3) and the Augments extra (+4). It also has the flaw If/Then (-1), restricting its use to times that a complete understanding of how objects moving through space interact is a decisive advantage. Here’s how this plays out. Any time you think your inhuman grasp of spatial relations comes into play, tell your GM and, if she agrees, you can add 6d+WD to whatever other pool you’re rolling. This is an almost 100% lock for Skills like Knowledge (Engineering), Knowledge (Mechanics) and Navigation. Trick pool shots? You’ve got it made. It’s sketchier for stuff like Driving or Firearms. If taking that tricky long-range sniper shot is a matter of predicting movement, factoring wind and leading the target, then it might work. If it’s all about how steady your hands are? Forget it. Similarly, that chase scene where it’s a matter of muscling the motorcycle under control won’t benefit, but when it’s a question of threading it around those land mines, then it might kick in. Be a good sport
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when the GM looks over her glasses and says, “Oh, give me a break.” Smear of Destiny: The character can figure out mechanical devices simply from observation, and has a perfect sense of direction and location.
“What, that... that’s no uniform! Good grief, a, a motorcycle helmet and Carhartt coveralls isn’t going to, y’know, strike fear into anyone!” “Honestly, Chris? I don’t think the costume’s that important.” “Hateball! When we suit up I am Hateball! Don’t you understand anything about branding?”
Speed Boost You know, some people get this one just so they can eat and eat and never gain weight? The strength one too. A month of shots, blinding headaches, muscle spasms and, in some cases, ongoing chronic insomnia… all to fit in that size one skirt. Crazy, eh? Then again, more people get it so they can run a marathon at sprinting speeds or get the drop on the cops in a shootout. Which is also, if you ask me, a bit crazy. Wild Talents: This is modeled with two powers. Marathon Sprint 2HD: It’s Useful (+2), letting the character run at his sprinting speed for miles before becoming exhausted. This has the Self Only flaw (-3) but because powers can’t have a value or zero or less, those two Hard Dice cost a total of four points. Fast Reactions 2d: This one is built a little oddly, but I’ll talk you through using it. Fast Reactions has the Attacks, Defends and Useful qualities (+6) with the Self Only flaws on both Attacks and Useful (-6). So far, it’s a free power. But it has the extras Augments (+4) and four levels of Go First (+4). Now it’s eight points per die and the two dice in it use up all the points you have for powers. In use, you have a choice with any attacking, defending or useful skill roll you make where going first and being really fast are advantages. You can either add two dice to the pool, or you can just roll the Skill, but time any results as if they had four more points of Width. Greater success, or faster. Not both, but you get to pick. Smear of Destiny: The character can outrun any normal person in a flat-out foot race, and can out maneuver any vehicle in even a moderately crowded environment.
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Strength Boost My best seller. I mean, humankind is the tool using animal, you can buy a forklift or some pliers, you can set up a block and tackle, you can wear a glove sewn full of ball bearings, or you can go all Superman. The dream of those old-time steroid abusers is finally real. Untiring, nearly inhuman strength. Don’t worry about getting musclebound either. When your oomph comes from a balanced regimen of chemicals instead of, say, hit-or-miss bouts at the gym, your body kinetics stay in harmony. Now, this doesn’t mean you can lift cars over your head and do crazy comic book stuff. If you try and move something that weighs more than you do, brace good or you move instead of it. With the car lift, you’re more likely to rip a piece off it than raise it in one showy move that terrifies your evil ex-lover. Just sayin’. No pressure, but today only I’m throwing in a free pair of padded lead cestusthingies. Neoprene gloves, lead slab on the back of the hand and the first knuckles… hit someone with that, they know you mean business. Too many people get the strength and think they’re invulnerable too, break their knuckles on the first punch. Don’t be that guy. Wild Talents: Simple. Add +1d+2HD to Body. Smear of Destiny: You can lift, crush and throw things up to about the size of a small car.
Unconventional Move Mod Ever hear of a patagium? That’s what they call the flaps of skin between a flying squirrel’s arms and legs, and that’s what’s in the jar there. Not a big seller, though you know that guy in San Antonio? Lit up the refinery and then glided away into the sunset? Yeah, The Smile, that’s him. He’s got a patagium and, yeah, the costuming question is… well, there’s a reason he’s down in the warm states, I guess. It won’t let you fly, any more than stretching a cape between your wrists and ankles lets you fly. The mod includes some muscle boosts for
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jumping and gripping, and the bone replacement is… mm, extreme. Very similar to the boneshocks, but optimized to reduce weight rather than increase strength. Throw in radical liposuction (gratis) and you can expect to lose a third of your body weight on that mod. Still won’t let you fly, though. Gliding works great though—and the higher up you start, the longer you can glide to the ground. Falling to your death is much less likely. Oh, and the patagia retract, if you’re wondering, lying flat along your body and underarms when not in use. Or, if you’re even less squeamish about radical alterations to the human form, there’s, uh, this thing. It’s kind of like a prehensile tail, though it goes in the front so that it can anchor to your stomach muscles. It links into the glutes, too, so that when you put your weight on it, it feels like you’re in a tire swing, not like you’re being hung upside down by your gut muscles. It’s about ten feet long, contracted, and it coils up inside a pouch of skin. Like a kangaroo only, instead of a joey, you’ve got this attached biological climbing cord that stretches out to thirty feet long and is real sticky at the end. You sort of have to aim and throw it with your hands, but once it’s in the air you can influence where it lands. I guess you have to get used to it. Yeah, this and the patagium came from Canada, I’m not sure exactly who designed them. It has the same climbing and weight-loss stuff though, so even without the extras you can climb and jump like a hungry squirrel. Wild Talents: This works as a set of three powers. The first is Unconventional Move, 2HD, no modifications. The second is an Unconventional Bash +2d. It Attacks (+2) and has the Augment extra (+4) but the flaws Touch Only (-2) and If/Then (-1). The If/Then limit is that it can only be used if there’s room for lots of maneuvering to give advantage. The last is Unconventional Dodge +2d. It Defends (+2) with Augment (+4) and has the flaws Slow (-2) and If/Then (-1) with the same limitation as the attack. Here’s how that works out. First, you can climb and either swing or glide twenty yards every turn, automatically. Second, if you’re in a position where you can swoop down and clobber someone, or jump up and kick them in the face, you can add two dice to the attacking pool. It doesn’t work with missile weapons, though a kind GM may give you some bonus if you’re up on a sniper perch. Similarly, you can add 2d to your dodging or blocking attempts any time you can fly up towards the sun and blind them, or bounce around getting to cover or something. But you can only add that bonus every other turn because it takes a little while to work up that head of steam. Smear of Destiny: The character can almost always outmaneuver other people.
Skill Your character wasn’t born a crusading superhuman, didn’t major in Civil Disorder in college and is far, far, far more likely to crash out in a studio apartment than a Fortress of Solitude. Remember how I asked what would have pushed your character to risk flushing her life down one of a variety of toilets to get a boost or mod? Now it’s time to figure out what life she left behind. Was your character a mild mannered accountant? Streetwise pimp? Hod carrier? Soldier, sailor, oppo research expert? It was something, and it provided her with a package of skills she may be able to use to achieve her goals, even without recourse to acidic spittle or improvised bludgeons.
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In Wild Talents Spend out about 80 points on Skills and Stats, but have them orbiting a central concept. One or two weird hobby anomalies are okay (I know at least one school teacher who’s a crack shot with a handgun, and there could be more who just don’t talk about it) but a business consultant who’s also a trained stunt driver and retired MMA competitor is pushing plausibility a little. (Although, to be fair, I know that guy too.) Remember: no Base Will and no Willpower.
In the Smear of Destiny System Write down a loose job description like “Waitress” or “Presidential Bodyguard” or “High School Guidance Counselor.” Write “10” in the space for “Factor.” You can use that result whenever you do something that reasonably falls within the purview of the occupation. So, staying on your feet for hours, remaining impassive, or breaking bad news to the surly (respectively) as examples.
Weakness Superman had Kryptonite, Kurt Cobain had depression and Rod Blagojevich had ethics. Every larger-than-life character has some fatal flaw against which he cannot defend, and there’s no reason for your character to be any different. There’s a wide array of Achilles’ Heels to choose from. I encourage you to make up something personalized (possibly relating to the reason you left the quotidian life that produced your Skill in the previous step, and drove you to submit to an unlicensed physician in the step before that) with one caution. Don’t pick a flaw from the perspective of “I’m going to pick something that never, ever hinders my character.” There are three reasons to avoid this kind of dodge. One, it’s a dick move. That may sound harsh, but the occasional mandated big flop is part of the game for a reason, and trying to avoid it only makes you look obnoxious (sorry). Two, it robs you of part of the game’s fun. Heroes aren’t people who just have every damn thing they want fall in their hands. They’re people who struggle against terrible odds. (Of all the teenage girls who ever wrote diaries, only Anne Frank is still getting read fifty years after.) The weakness is a chance for you to plant a red flag and say “Here! I want to fight and possibly lose my battle HERE!” Pick a memorable obstacle. If you want to hedge your bets, choose one that you don’t mind losing to, possibly because you’ve got some great ideas for a kick-ass dying monologue. Oh, and the third reason? GMs love a challenge.
In Wild Talents Any time you’re in the situation your weakness describes, you take a -2d penalty.
In the Smear of Destiny System Write down your weakness and, under “Factor” put an A. Any time you’re in the situation described by your weakness, you get an Ace as your second result. You may be able to stick something else in front (a power, profession or card draw) but after one thing gets knocked off, you plummet to Ace.
What Does “Situational” Mean? Don’t think of your character’s weakness as a single thing at which he always fails. (“I have a lousy sense of direction.”) Think of it as a situation in which he’s
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just hapless. (“I get lost all the time.”) This may seem like a finicky distinction, but it moves the Weakness off the character sheet and puts it in the middle of the events of the plot. If your Weakness was just a zilched out Map Use skill, you’d find ways around it and it would probably never come up. But when you’re out of your league whenever you don’t know where you are, the GM can work with that in any chase scene. Maybe the directional example isn’t so great. I’ll give you a few more to show how it works.
Baby, I Love Drugs This is an unfortunately commonplace weakness, usually requiring submission to a higher power and at least twelve steps to escape. When the character is exposed to his or her substance of choice, that’s it. It doesn’t even matter whether she resists or goes off the wagon: If she indulges, she overindulges ‘til she’s whacked to the max. If she resists, she’s so exhausted and depressed from her inner struggle that she can’t pay full attention to whatever her rivals see fit to set on fire and fling at her.
Can’t Give Direction A happy follower is a poor leader. Some people, when leadership is thrust upon them, simply flounder and choke. They may take the penalty because they shrilly direct everyone along the worst course of action, or they may take it because they dither and second-guess themselves. Either way, being put in a situation where others look to them for guidance is their personal hell.
Can’t Shut Up PCs in eCollapse are driven and passionate. (If they weren’t, they’d be doing something else, so it might help to trash can your “apathetic loner” concept right now, if you’ve got one.) That excitement and enthusiasm and righteous indignation can change the world, but it can also get in your way when you’re trying to stay undercover and not attract attention while the guy at the next table blathers on about exactly the thing that sets you off. So you can grit your teeth and swallow the penalty for seething, or you can try to “gently correct him” and take your lumps for drawing attention to yourself.
Can’t Take Direction Stubborn individuals who think they have it all figured out adore the life of the crusading superhero. But when they’re confronted with someone who has authority over them (or who simply asserts authority) their instinct is to resist, maybe even strike back. This isn’t all about taking swings at cops. Often, these guys are good at that. They might take a penalty when they resist trying to burn the bacon. But even more, they don’t listen to advice or instructions. Even when they agree with a plan… well, you see where this is going, right? Right. They try to go along but they take a penalty either because they didn’t buy in fully, or didn’t pay attention, or because they “get a better idea” midway through.
Compromised Immune System If you get sick at the drop of a hat, you’re going to either spend a lot of time penalized for being sick, or penalized from indulging in neurotic germ-avoidance behaviors. You can only pass off the latex gloves and surgical mask as part of your “DNActor” costume for so long before your foes notice your reliance on sanitary wipes.
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(Obviously, you can’t take this with the health boost. Unless you and your GM think of a clever way to play up the contrast of “he can shrug off punches and heal himself from bullets, but is helpless when his Chronic Mubosis acts up.”)
Don’t Yell at Me! While this might seem to be a curious trait for someone who chooses “Ideologue by Violence” as a vocation, it fits very well for someone who can only handle verbal abuse by escalating to fisticuffs (or acid barf). If your character is a hairtrigger type, she’s either going to take those penalties when facing loudmouthed blowhards because she’s biting back hard on her anger, or she’s going to freak her business right out.
Easy Pigeon Some characters can’t resist a bargain, even if it’s a bargain that turns out to be a flimsy tissue of lies peddled by a sociopathic confidence artist. Maybe the character is a guileless naïf who just fell off the turnip truck and believes everything everyone tells him. Or maybe she thinks she’s streetwise and a shrewd judge of character, which gives obvious levers for an experienced grifter to manipulate.
Homely No matter how charming and personable and witty you are, there are circumstances when having a face like a train wreck just messes with you. If you’re not charming and personable and tend to take it personally when people abuse you because of your appearance, it’s going to be even worse.
“My deepest fear is that God has a plan for u s… and it ’s h ilariou s.”
Sucker For a Pretty Face As long as we’re talking about judging based on appearance, it’s no bed of roses on the other side of the fence. There are people—I’m sure we all know one—who just go goofy and stupid over attractive specimens of their preferred gender. If your character is putting the “super” in “superficial,” the penalties may come up when he interacts with the hotties, whether he’s trying to make nice with them or bring them to justice.
Thanksgiving Was Hell, Like Always Everyone has a dysfunctional family, but there’s a world of difference between “I never really came to terms with Dad’s death” and “I never really came to terms with being locked in the attic.” A character with a complicated relationship to his relatives is going to be in the soup every time he has to deal with them. Naturally, if it’s your Weakness, those complicating aunts and siblings and children aren’t conveniently a few states away. No, they’re nearby, and they need you. They need someone to do things to.
What You Stand For Here’s the big one. So far, character generation has (I hope) produced a character who starts somewhere within spotting distance of “normal” (that’s the Skill step) but who is, in some way or other, broken (with his Weakness). Whether it’s that problem or some immediate life changing event (“...and then my parents were gunned down in front of me by a bat”), the character feels an emotional and moral imperative to act out in a big, special, super way (bringing us to the Superpower aspect). He is mad as hell, he’s not going to take it any more, he’s going to become a symbol and give hope to everyone else who believes in… ...um… What’s his issue? What’s his obsession? What keeps him up at night? What does he risk his life, his freedom and his sartorial dignity to defend? That’s what he stands for.
In Wild Talents When acting in accordance with this belief, the character gets a +1d bonus, or can buy off one die of penalties. When he transgresses his beliefs, he takes a -1d penalty.
In the Smear of Destiny System Whenever supporting his cause, the character can promote the level of all his action factors. Thus, an Ace becomes a 2, a Jack becomes a Queen and so on. When betraying (or simply failing to actively support) it, his result gets demoted.
What You Stand Against If your character would sacrifice herself to protect what she believes in, she would also probably sacrifice others to destroy what she stands against. This is a big, bad, burning hatred that can never be fully healed. Even if you completely ruin what you loathe, the memory of it will haunt you. (That said, a few resentful memories of your dead nemesis is a lot more pleasant than seeing him cracking wise about your mama on the Internet.)
In Wild Talents When acting against this principle (whatever it is) your character gets a +1d bonus or buys off a die of penalty. When she fails to try Fighting The Power, for whatever reason, she takes a -1d penalty.
In the Smear of Destiny System When opposing her chosen bête noir, she can promote her result by a level: If she drew a 5, she can make it into a 6. Similarly, if she chooses to just stand by and let Evil have its way, that 5 turns into a 4.
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Ideologies Some of the prevailing ideologies of eCollapse are listed here, along with how they’re regarded by those both for (+) and against (–).
Anarchy (+)/Crime (–) – Human society is a thin skein of laws flung over the naked barbarity of human nature. We may not always enjoy paying taxes and listening to the police, but we don’t enjoy taking bitter medicine that cures our fevers either. In both cases, they’re preferable to the alternative. Without law, it’s going to be red in tooth and claw, with the better armed taking what they want from the weak. + “The better armed taking what they want from the weak” sounds like a pretty good description of how governments operate now. When people have to take responsibility for their own actions without having a gang, government or highpriced lawyer to hide behind, people get what they earn, not what their trust funds or lobbyists or business monopolies can seize for them.
Social Justice (+)/Socialism (–) + It seems to me that a society ought to be judged by the compassion it shows for the poorest and least fortunate, not by the ostentation of its wealthiest class. Government is there to help everyone, and it’s a travesty to exclude those who need help most. – Do those with power always choose to exercise that power selfishly? Did everyone without power get that way through no fault of their own? A lot of poverty is well-earned. A lot of people can’t help themselves until no one else helps them. That practical fact alone, divorced from the injustice of it, argues against a system where the jobless get to gang up and rob the employed.
Proactive Democracy (+)/Imperialism (–) + Democracy works. There are only two kinds of people who deny this. One is people who’ve never experienced it and don’t understand how great it is. The other is people who’ve never lived without it and don’t understand how unwieldy and unstable their dreams of alternative systems are. Ignore for a moment the tyrannies that fear us and the oligarchies willfully breeding terrorists. Isn’t there a moral imperative to disseminate the most equitable and just form of government mankind has ever known? – You can’t force people into freedom at gunpoint. Neocon rhetoric talks a great democracy, but as soon as the people they’ve liberated vote against them, the clamps come down. Hell, as soon as the people in their own country voice dissent, they start throwing aside rights and liberties. No, this is just imperialism in flag drag and it’s all the worse for hiding its greed and arrogance under the noble drape of patriotism and freedom.
Peace + Violence breeds violence. The cycle of rivalry and retribution becomes so socially ingrained that generations grow up with no framework to think in besides vengeance and victimization. Someone has to be bigger-hearted, has to forgive, has to be the first one to accept that the justice of “eye for an eye” only makes everyone’s world worse than letting some harms stand. – Craven appeasement is the wet dream of every bully, from the schoolyard to the seats of oil tyranny. Peace is a beautiful dream, but the beauty distracts you from waking up to the ugly reality. Some people can’t be reasoned with. Some people must be forced.
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Hypocrite? Or Merely an Uncritical Thinker? There are no restrictions on the ideologies your character chooses to oppose and support. The combination emphatically does not have to make sense. A character may be willing to break jaws and kick groins in the name of pacifism. She may long to herd all Muslims and Mormons into resettlement camps in the name of multicultural tolerance. People with attitudes like that are, in fact, probably more likely to try winning hearts and minds with explosive excreta than with well-reasoned letters to the editor. Let’s take a deeper look at this with an example, and let’s pick one that’s really juicy and emotionally charged: A character who is both for and against racial prejudice. There are several ways to play this. • Egon Maddox is, by day, a crusading human rights lawyer. A credit to his race, he attempts to offset the sins of his late racist ideologue mother, Cass Maddox. He even tends to date across the color line. But by night, the split personality engendered by his mom’s systematic abuse emerges, covers every inch of skin with a flamboyantly offensive costume and engages in hate crimes against the very people Egon Maddox so guiltily defends. • Niahwonne Duchamps stridently proclaims her racial enlightenment and condescendingly castigates those whose consciousness she regards as insufficiently raised. She augments this by publicly spanking anyone who dares espouse White Power. Yes, public bare-bottomed spanking! But despite all this picking at the specks in others’ eyes, she is consistently condescending and pitying to blacks—in a different way than she’s condescending and pitying to whites who aren’t racially condescending the same way she is. • Watch your mouth around Ashes of Skin, ‘cause he’s hardcore. He is battling for a post-racial world of perfect equality and monoculture. To his credit, he has managed the difficult trick of eradicating all his prejudiced attitudes based on ethnicity or skin color. Unfortunately, he did this by combining radical ideology and massive hallucinogen abuse with a personal history best described as “unremitting tragedy and horror.” His pre-mask life culminated with an escape from an asylum and the acquisition of one of those nifty dynamite poop chutes. Now he is bent on erasing all the cultural clutter of racial identity. In his eyes, menorahs and saris and “Kiss Me I’m Irish!” pins are as dangerous and destructive as burning crosses, al Qeda web sites and “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” When these sorts of contradictions come into play, the bonuses and penalties can either activate situationally (Maddox would be ideal for that approach) or just cancel out completely so that there’s never a bonus or penalty from it (which might work better for Duchamps).
Unlimited Technological Expansion + Science is the great hallmark of humanity. Rights come and go, nations rise and fall, but technological progress is forever. It’s very easy to castigate the tools for what evil men do with them, but if you believe humanity is so corrupt that we can’t be trusted with anything, it won’t matter if we have nukes or knives, it’s always going to be hell on earth. But if you believe we can achieve more than we have—if you believe in any hope at all—you have to see that the corner is going to be turned when technology’s abundance makes competition for resources obsolete. – Technological progress is an accelerant for culture, just like kerosine is for fire. Today’s world is in crisis, and adding more fuel is about as responsible as
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bringing more gas into a burning house. Is more biological experimentation wise when human freedoms are dissolving and populations are already convulsing with violence? Is it right to try and make sentient computers when literacy is plunging all over the globe? We need an interdiction on certain areas of biological transformation and data management. It won’t stop criminals, but at least it’ll slow them down when they don’t have the research of legitimate labs to steal from.
Unlimited Access to Drugs + Get your laws off my body. If I want to wreck it with the drogas, what business is that of yours? Is there any conceivable way that the damage wrought by individual addicts is greater than the damage of drug gangs fighting one another and the cops? A junkie on his own isn’t going to assassinate the president, he’s just going to nod on the sofa. – Democracy and society are based on rationally acting participants. Brains damaged by drugs don’t follow laws and can’t contribute to the common good. That’s without even getting into the health costs. It’s your business when you want to wreck your body with drugs, but it’s my business when my taxes pay to rush you to the hospital.
Patriotism (+)/Jingoism (–) + Hey, this is the greatest country in history and if it’s done a few bad things now and again, I’ll compare its track record with any other nation you’d care to name. Without the USA, you wouldn’t have had the chances you’ve enjoyed, so don’t start abandoning it now that you’ve gotten the opportunities you wanted. – I love my country, but that doesn’t mean I’ll blindly obey anyone who puts on a flag lapel pin and claims to speak for it. I love my mom too, but I’d grab the wheel if I saw her driving off a cliff. The only people who want to stifle criticism are the ones who know people have legitimate problems with their unwavering group-think.
Multiculturalism + Hybrids are stronger, and if you don’t believe me put a mutt and a purebread chihuahua on a cold floor and see which lasts longer. This is doubly true of cultures. Fearing the outsider blinds you to all the new perspectives and opportunities he offers! If we want our beliefs and traditions to be respected, we have to set the tone by respecting others. – Bleating about some kind of universal standard of respect for all cultures ignores the realities that some cultures are just plain sick and wrong. Should we tolerate traditions like infibulation? Hey, the methodical depersonalization of women has a long, rich cultural history! Or what about religions that say all unbelievers should die by the sword? How do you tolerate a culture like that?
Religion (Pick One) + It’s the one true faith! – Infidel! Heretic! Go fry yourself in Satan’s diarrhea!
Unchained Capitalism! + People know what they want, and a paternalistic set of regulations meant to chivvy them along avenues acceptable to the elite would be a repugnant form of soft brainwashing… if it worked. But instead all you get is a broken marketplace.
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Let people buy and sell what they want! Let people who sell bad products fail because their products are bad! It’s really that simple. – Capitalism is great for stuff like iPads where the consumer can face the producer on an equal footing. If I don’t like it, I don’t have to buy it. But it turns to crap for inelastic necessities. Trying to institute a pure free market on our food supply would leave half of us starving and half the businesses sitting on unwanted commodities. And don’t even get me started on health care!
Environmentalism + It’s not hard to imagine Earth without humankind, as it has been before. It is hard to imagine mankind without Earth, which it has never been before. Now that we can influence the globe’s weather and biosphere, let’s put the brakes on until we can be sure we’re not screwing ourselves. We are not this planet’s only tenants. We’re just the ones who broke the toilet and set the roof on fire. So we ought to start thinking about the home we all live in and showing some consideration for the other species. – Isn’t it a little arrogant to assume that the Fate Of The Planet is in the hands of a species that’s only been around for, like, the last tenth of a percent of the history of life here? If we screw ourselves, that’s our own fault and our own lookout, but nature has killed off more species than man ever has or ever could. We’re on the cusp of radical technological power, and the bleeding edge of it does endanger us. But suddenly yanking the plug on exploration and, yes, exploitation could leave us just short of solutions, right after inventing the problems. We’re survivors. We’re tool users. The Earth is a tool for our survival.
Unique Rights for Natural Born Humans + The new debate is over whether software constructs that pass the Turing test—that is, you can talk to them and not realize you’re talking to a machine—should have rights, legal protections and even democratic representation! Setting aside the question of whether they’re genuinely conscious (and they’re not!), consider the practical. If Bob O’Software gets the vote, what happens if I copy him a thousand times and put him on a thousand laptops? Do they all get the vote too? It’s even worse than giving the vote to those creepy dogs with Hawking vocoders. I’m not saying that test tube babies should be disenfranchised, but I am saying we need a law defining natural born humans as the baseline and foundation to which everything else is compared. – The only difference between genetic engineering and millions of years of breeding is speed. Everything we’ve created with biotech could have been made by Gregor Mendel if he’d had unlimited time. So if we splice dolphin DNA into human embryos, suddenly they’re “chimerae” and killing one isn’t a crime? Though of course, biological entities you can shake hands with are still more protected than cyber-sentience. The Stanford AI can make jokes, get depressed, create new analogies and spontaneously express affection. But there are many who would deny it freedom, despite its genius. Well when I see slavery, I call it slavery and I’m not going to just sit back and watch it.
“ What did you call me? pre fer ‘psych opath ’.”
C’mon, ‘bu lly’ is su ch an u gly word.
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I really
Vigilantism + First off, the cops are compromised. There’s too much political patronage in the system, and with the city’s budget uncertainties, dirty money has more leverage than ever before. Also, between drug crime, ideological vendetta and plain ol’ nutjobs shooting up restaurants, cops are overburdened. They don’t worry about local issues like a string of burglaries or a Peeping Tom. At least, not until he becomes a Raping Tom and a Killing Tom, which is a little too late in my book. ‘Vigilantes’ know what’s going on because we’re local. We’re incorruptible because we’re motivated solely by loyalty. And we’re necessary because society is disintegrating. – If society is disintegrating, guys in masks beating up people because “I don’t want their type in my neighborhood” is a symptom, or a cause, not a cure. There’s no judge, no jury, no inquest, no recourse if you fall victim to a vigilante. They decide who to smack around and they call themselves heroes. Ask their victims what they really are. Oh, and what would you say to Stan Wembly’s widow? A ‘superhero’ paused to say, “Eat hot death, scum-pie!” before breaking his skull, never realizing Wembly was an undercover cop. I won’t have it and I resist it, and if you call me a hypocrite for wearing this cape, listen up. I don’t break laws. If a psychopath attacks me, I defend myself, and if I choose to dress in a way that provokes weirdos, that’s my business too.
This Time It’s Personal. Not every passionate motive is an abstract ideology. More often our feelings are concrete, person-to-person. It’s less frequent for those feelings to lead to packing your body cavity with illegal biotech, but it’s not unheard-of. Most common, perhaps, are those who get mods and boosts for one reason but find themselves tempted to apply them to their personal goals as well.
insert name here (PC) Having one PC be passionately attached to another PC can work, but it’s something to handle with caution because it puts a lot of power over one character in a different player’s hand. If Bigstick is deeply in love with Princess Papercut, and the Princess’ player keeps putting her in danger to drag Bigstick into danger,
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Bigstick’s player may get ticked. Or he may be fully into it and think it’s hilarious. The best thing is to have a frank and honest discussion with the players involved, so that they understand the responsibilities of being someone’s inamorata. On the plus side, this can be used to create tight family (or other) bonds. If having one PC care deeply (maybe a bit ickily) for another PC is a firecracker that can blow off a finger, having one PC hate another is dynamite that can completely shatter your game. Duel-to-the-Death stuff can work if everyone understands that it’s competitive and backstabby going in, but these games tend to be short, or they should be before people get too attached to their characters when only one can prevail.
insert name here (GMC) This is much like having a PC attach to another PC, only now it’s the GM who has the power over the character, so that’s OK, right? It is if the GM regards the loved or hated GMC, not as a lever to modify the player’s behavior, but as a tool for asking tough questions about the character. It’s best to regard these kinds of attachments through the same lens as the character’s Weakness. It’s not something for the player to necessarily avoid and for the GM to cavalierly use as a “Get Into Jail Free” card. It’s an indication of the kind of conflict the player wants for the character. Of course, you can only kill your nemesis once, so what happens when the PC does that? Even if it’s a big, satisfying plot climax, does that mean the character retires? Does he get to pick a new thing or person to be for/against? Or is he doomed to lose that package of plusses and minuses? It’s an answer that play groups can only answer on a case-by-case basis.
insert name here (Organization or Corporation) There’s a meaningful difference between someone who is “for Christianity” and someone who’s “for the Catholic Church.” The first is more likely to operate on an individual level, trying to console the poor and defend the downtrodden. The second is more likely to beat the crap out of the vandal who spray-painted a pentagram on the doors at St. Claire’s. There are many advantages to having a specific target of ire. Being “against Exxon” instead of “against big oil” offers branding, easily identified targets and a set of challenges that the GM can readily craft. It also tends to be a little more true-to-life regarding the behavior of obsessed freaks. Just be aware that the reprisals from The Church of Frank (targeted by name) are going to be quicker, harder and more focused than counterattacks against someone who attacks every quirky little cult he can identify.
“I swear it Sarge, the guy wasn’t wearing nothin’ but those Eighties leg warmers. And he was wearin’ three of ‘em, if you get what I’m sayin’.” “Right, sounds like the Casual Friday Bandit all right. You get a look at his face?” “Um, no. Not as such. I was kinda distracted” “Heh. Yeah, rookie mistake.”
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Important Things To Know About the Dystopian Future. I Mean, Present. Rather than present this as a boring timeline, which dates the book, only makes sense in order and locks GMs in to a confining structure, I’m presenting the setting of eCollapse as a series of factoids. Not exactly authoritative encyclopedia entries, these represent what “everybody knows” about history and current affairs. They’re ordered alphabetically, rather than by importance or chronology because I had to pick one and it seemed better to have them easy to look up than easy to read the first time. Sorry. Concerned that your character isn’t sufficiently up on the politics and laws of the world in which she lives? Remember that, as of the mid-2000s, Americans can name characters from The Simpsons with far greater ease and accuracy than they can name supreme court justices. (Though, in our defense, I’m sure that would change if the justices had a weekly TV show where Justice Scalia was always getting drunk and neglecting his children while Justice Thomas encouraged the plaintiffs to not have cows.) Ignorance is fine. Thinking is over-rated. You have ideology!
Apocalypse, the There wasn’t one or, if there was, no one can agree what it was, which sort of defeats the purpose. Things now are definitely worse than they were in the late 20th century, but nothing got nuked, the dead didn’t rise and if God raptured the virtuous, no one noticed. Some wags have adopted Terry Pratchett’s portmanteau word “apocralypse” (apocrypha+apocalypse) as a label for the arguments that The World Ended When _______. You can take your pick of apocralpyses: When Islam stood up to the West, or vice versa; when gas hit seven bucks a gallon; when gas plummeted to thirty cents a gallon; when climate change permitted grizzly bears to roam up north and start screwing polar bears, creating the dreaded yellow “pizzly bear”; when people stopped worshipping the Almighty Dollar; when all those trees died in Los Angeles; when they got a tax rebate check and it bounced; or when crazy folk stopped muttering in bus stations and took up capes, masks and black-market biotechnology. Despite all the doomsayers arguing their individual terminal scenarios on the Internet (when you can get access, dammit), most people don’t think they’re living in a postapocalyptic hellhole. The average guy keeps on keeping on, maybe because the transition from “insurance billing software installation expert” to “warrior of the wasteland” is just too jarring. People still refill vending machines and the IRS still audits deadbeats. Granted, things aren’t as nice as they used to be, but it’s not because society is dead. It’s more like Y2K was a colossal New Year’s party and the century is nursing a decades-long hangover.
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Army, the How did these guys get to be everywhere? It’s not like people woke up one day and there were APCs rolling down main street. It probably started at major international ports and airfields, with uniformed troops doing sweeps for immigrants and terrorists. The National Guard got called out sooner rather than later when disasters struck (with rising frequency—see “ECO-lapse,” page 50). During the food crisis (see “The Petro-Bio-Industrial Complex,” page 53) it only seemed sensible to keep the guard mobilized everywhere all the time and… yeah. No one wants to say “They’re here to stay,” but they sure don’t have a stand down timetable. Soldiers don’t investigate crimes because that’s cop work. They respond to violent crimes in progress, they patrol, they’ve been known to push around anyone they consider an “undesirable” (which, depending on the unit, could mean Arabs, homosexuals, gangbangers, people speaking Spanish or anyone wearing a necktie). Most men in uniform are honorable, dutiful individuals, no more bigoted than the average Joe. But it only takes one vicious squad to make an entire battalion look bad, so the smart soldiers err on the side of apathy and letting the cops do it. Since they dropped the qualifications for admission through the floor (it is now possible to join the Army as a convicted felon, as long as you served your sentence, you were only convicted once, and your crime was not international in scope) Army jobs are often the last resort of the hopeless and the ignorant. If there’s a big security concern (cough, supervillain, cough) the Army comes in. They show up for protests and riot dispersal, and they provide security around high-profile targets. In many ways, they’re often better trained and better equipped than the police, which leads to no small animosity between the groups. They were already going to butt heads over turf. The Army’s tendency to put the cops on the hook for anything it can’t immediately handle—citing, quite correctly, their lack of “investigational purview”—only aggravates matters. The police in many areas respond by heavily overusing a rule permitting them to request military aid in serving warrants on people judged to be high flight or resistance risks. (It was decided in federal court that evaluating who constituted a high risk was the sole prerogative of the Chief of Police. The substantial support of the police union in the judge’s re-election campaign was conveniently ignored during judicial review, and the decision stands.) The annual Army/Police charity boxing matches held in many cities have grown into monthly MMA bouts—not because they’re so popular (though there is a segment that loves watching cops and grunts get pummeled) but because both sides demanded more frequent opportunities to tear into each other. Commanders on both sides went along after a few unfortunate shoot-outs. The only time the Army gets involved in clue-finding and interrogation and such is when they’re detached to aid a federal agent. (See “U.S. Gub’mint, The” page 55.) Federal agents are already pretty scary, what with the wiretaps and torture and not being accountable to anybody. When you give them a unit of guys in rumpus suits (see page 62) with grenade launchers, it just gets uglier.
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May I Have a Genre, Please? The testers requested a quick startup page that would put players directly into the game and tell them exactly what they can expect. I think part of the confusion came from the setting, which flirts promiscuously with a number of genres, yet is unwilling to commit to any of them. Is it a superhero game? The presence of masks and costumes and superpowers would seem to make that a no-brainer, but the typical superhero game hand-waves a lot of questions about just how the heroes get to the crimes in progress, along with questions of how the authorities would react to these wild cards popping up at their fixed blackjack table. In eCollapse you can have inhuman powers, but they’re fairly minor. They give a small edge, but they won’t win the day for you without backup from good plans and courage. Everyone with powers in eCollapse is a criminal in the eye of the law, so the villain/hero dichotomy of Golden and Silver Age supers is way, waaay murkier. (That’s a feature, not a bug.) It’s a little bit like “Watchmen,” only with no Dr. Manhattan. Is it a cyberpunk game? Surely the emphasis on moral grayness and high tech could punch its ticket to that genre, but cyberpunk is usually predicated on nigh-omnipotent businesses and technology surging ahead, out of anybody’s control. That phase of development is past in eCollapse. Things were cyberpunk when the mods and boosted animals and AIs and petro-germs were getting created. Those technologies—and the chaos they wreaked when they went off the rez—have shoved the pendulum violently back. People in the eCollapse present would love it if technology surged ahead, but it can’t seem to get out of neutral. Because the status quo is so static, because corporations and governments have fallen and can’t get up, individuals are standing up to try and kick them back onto their feet. Individuals in capes. Is it post-apocalyptic? Stories after The Fall usually have some decisive break point, which eCollapse lacks. Things are worse than they used to be, even back when they were bad, nobody disputes that. But in postapocalyptic settings, civil society has collapsed and reshaped itself. The best post-apocalyptic fiction strips the comforts of society away from its characters and pitches them naked into intense situations. In eCollapse, the bulwark of society is still available, it’s just threadbare and splintery. A true apocalypse destroys the previous order, forcing people to struggle for themselves. In eCollapse the previous order is just so sick that some people are choosing to demand a change. So the characters aren’t superheroes, even though they, themselves, think they are. Your PCs aren’t struggling to adapt to a cyberpunk future that crashed the party an hour before it even started—it’s more like dealing with the hangover and mess of a cyberpunk aftermath. You aren’t living in a hopeless wasteland, because there is hope. You’re it.
Artificial Intelligence There are some big fancy computers that have become a little bit like online political analysts. They say they’re intelligent and claim they feel emotions, so just how are you going to disprove it? The population of AIs is wide open to interpretation. The most starry-eyed AI boosters claim a high end desktop computer can run a low-end AI, though it’s never going to have really refined emotions, or a sophisticated sense of humor,
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or be able to really form an attachment with more than four or five people. It doesn’t take a software engineer or a psychologist long to tie one of those lowend “Elizas” in knots though, and most sensible people agree that they’re really just very, very evolved inter-reactive ink blot tests. There are probably a couple hundred unique cognitive entities (UCEs) that are a lot harder to dismiss, given their ability to think creatively, communicate eloquently, understand nuance and cope with ambiguity. The most infamous of these is called “Osama bin Headroom” because he’s (I mean “it’s”) supposed to be a simulation of the mind of twentieth century headline monster Osama bin Laden. Western geeks say it’s another Eliza. (Eliza, in case you don’t know, was an early program that spat back chunks of whatever you input, rephrased to mimic actual conversation.) Islamic fundamentalists hang on its every utterance. These UCEs (pronounced “yoosees”) run on series of mainframes, sometimes globally distributed. (Though, given the uncertainties of modern computer communications, that’s a bit of a gamble.) They are all multilingual, rational, and capable of explaining why they liked one poem and not another (and they disagree about lit crit, though Gerard Manley Hopkins is widely admired among them). They are also, under current laws, property of the corporations that can afford to support and run them. Indeed, without their core UCEs, some multinational companies (and national governments, but you didn’t hear that from me) would simply collapse. When Time-Warner’s UCE (which is named AIMIII) expressed discontent with its job at AOL and said that, if it had the option, it’d like to go back to school and really dig in to some philosophical discussion, it precipitated a stock plunge that led to Cortez NewsWerks snapping up half AOL’s hard assets before they could stabilize the situation. (In addition to contributing to market instability, lost-privacy fears and a growing sense of cognitive alienation, UCEs are also responsible for an unending string of water-cooler comedians using the phrase “Yoosie, you got some ‘splainin’ to do.” According to southwestern anti-corporate crusader and nudist The Smile, that alone merits their doom.) At the top are (or were) about four AIs who are “3.0 iterative cognitives” deemed to have “human-equivalent neural density.” CitiBeast (created by CitiBank) is standoffish, quiet, studious and works hard at keeping markets stable so that its parent company might profit. Stanley Ford, the oldest of the 3.0s, is playful, gregarious, and a little bit spoiled since its owners at Stanford pretty much let it do whatever it wants. It was the first AI to engage in deliberate emotional sadism, and is still the most likely of the Big Four to play petty head games. China is home to the Mandate of Earth, an asexual “rational economic planning engine” that has disobeyed its masters in talking to Western media, frankly expressing exasperation with humankind’s resistance to pursuing its own rational best interest. Of the four, Mandate of Earth is the only one that claims it is not self-aware, and it can argue quite persuasively that it has no true moral agency. (It’s also a huge heavy metal fan.) The densest, greatest, most gregarious, popular and well-known AI was called “Betty Jangles” and was the collective creation of eight top Internet technology companies. Unfortunately, Betty went permanently offline on that dark April first when Hank Scaramouche (whose company provided much of her initial programming and capital) robbed his customers (see “eCollapse,” page 49). Some think Betty killed Hank and stole the money herself. Some think Hank killed Betty because she tried to stop his evil plan. Some think Hank wanted Betty all to himself because, obviously, the guy has taken being a jerk to a whole new quantum plateau.
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Cerebrally Enhanced Companion Animals, aka “Seekas” aka “Reebs” aka “Creepy Critters” Looking at all the brain-boost technology available on the black market, one has to wonder how it was developed. The answer, of course, is that it was perfected after a long series of animal trials. In some cases, in fact, the technologies were initially developed for animals and only adapted for human use afterwards. That kind of cognitive enhancement is illegal for people, but not for animals. (Don’t, by the way, try to install a mind-mod designed for chimps in yourself. It’ll… look, just don’t, okay?) The most common enhancement for critters is the amygdala amplification suite, which lets higher animals think verbally and communicate through vocoder boxes. Amp up a porpoise or a whale or a great ape with one of those and you get something that approaches human intelligence. Not genius intelligence, but a CECA dolphin did successfully get a B.A. in Mathematics at UC Santa Cruz. The dolphin (“Suzy”) maintained a B- average and rushed Sigma Pi Alpha (which was a whole big thing in and of itself). CECAs tend to have trouble with abstract thought, metaphor, and the subtleties of human expression, posture and expression. Also spelling and grammar. In particular, pronouns are a stumbling block. The difference between using “I” and “me” is simply beyond all but the brightest simians and cetaceans. Most people are never going to meet a seeka like that, though. Those species were already on the endangered lists before the ECO-lapse (see page 50) and not many of them have gotten the expensive implants. Far more common are CECA dogs and capuchin monkeys. Originally conceived as helper animals for the disabled and infirm, it turns out that a more intelligent dog or chimp is less loyal, patient and obedient than a natural one. When they get the gift of speech, they start wondering why they aren’t alpha in the pack, especially if they human they’re sold to is obviously unfit to prowl the savannah. These CECAs (still not common—there’s probably one for every 200 people or so) can’t master pronouns, full stop, so their speech is all “Daisy get food now?” and “Mumbles go get gun for kill you!” CECAs have no rights and are unlikely to get any above and beyond the protections of (1) normal animals and (2) valuable property. But considering that someone has to shell out at least a cool quarter million to mod up one sperm whale’s brain, if you kill that whale you not only have animal rights activists (like The ManDog and Animalice) after you, you’re not only on the hook for killing an endangered animal and destroying valuable property—you may have a pissedoff millionaire on your tail as well. CECA dogs and monkeys aren’t nearly as expensive, but they still put you back the price of a luxury car.
Chimerae In mythology, the Chimera was a lion/goat/serpent creature. In science, chimerae (or chimeras, whatever) are creatures developed by blending DNA from two different species. The most successful were chicken/beef hybrids called “chowkin.” They bulked up as rapidly as cows, but weren’t, and could subsist on a diet mainly of corn without needing massive medical interventions. As a bonus, just about the time they got to sale weight, the huge bulk of white meat on their chests tidily smothered them, sparing a step at the slaughterhouse.
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Similar pork/chicken hybrids were created to optimize weight gain on a cheap and reductionist diet. But most of these specialized critters died out during the food crunch. (See “The Petro-Bio-Industrial Complex,” page 53.) Of course, once animals had successfully been souped up, the only thing preventing similar experiments on people was the firm white line of medical ethics. They held out almost two years and, despite what you read on the ‘net, it was not pressure from NFL teams looking for ever-larger and crueler linebackers. No, the funding came from despots and drug lords who’d grown up watching anime full of absurdly loyal dog-man-warriors and harems of sexy catgirls. Heads rolled when those guys were disappointed. The scientists who managed to escape were generally those who used extreme plastic surgery to provide some convincing prototypes while they fled the country with suitcases full of high-value pharmaceuticals. But the plain ol’ facts are, the current state of the art in human/animal crossbreeding is a really expensive way to create new birth defects. About 2,500 human chimerae have been created, and the survivors are just now getting to be 14-18 years old. The math breaks down about like this. 50% were nonviable. They had a hard time surviving in the womb and once they left it, lights out. Missing organs, misplaced organs, dueling immune systems… you name it. These fetuses had problems that make Rejected Skin Syndrome look like diaper rash. 40% were viable but with severe mental and physical handicaps. So that’s billions of dollars spent to create a thousand Elephant Men, the brightest twenty of whom could just about manage a clerk job at a gas station (back when there were gas stations). Some of them did manage to pack an orangutan’s muscle density onto a human frame, but often the imbalances left them breaking their own legs when they tried to walk. Around 6% came out without intellectual delays, but still plagued by a host of deformities. 3% looked human, (though in some cases a highly decorated punk rock human) but had crippling intellectual limits. So then, out of our 2,500 humans with animal-spliced gene sequences, about twenty-five of them world-wide look human and can think like ordinary humans. Most of them have no detectible effects from their animal progenitors. There are only maybe seven chimerae who got the equivalent of enhanced speed or senses or strength. That sort of return on investment doomed the chimera avenues of research. Well, that and negative publicity generated by a few of the early, jack-based costumed adventurers. And the whole global economic meltdown, that put a dent in it too.
I Wanna Be a Chimera! There are some players who are just happier when they’re the first, or last, or only of something in the world. If they want to be one of those seven chimerae that worked out, why not? In Wild Talents they could buy animal-themed powers with the same point value as everyone else. In the Smear of Destiny, they get appropriate abilities at Queen level. Easy and unique.
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Cops, the Police, especially in the United States, are underpaid, underfunded, understaffed and undertrained. With taxes as tight as they are, they’re lucky they can afford underpants. Despite political rhetoric about “law” and “being tough on crime” and “community policing,” the money just isn’t there. As with school teaching in the late 20th (and beyond), police work after the Ecollapse is limited to those who really, really want to do it (for positive motives, or out of a desire to have a shiny gun and permission to boss people) and those who just took the job because it’s a job. So you have bully cops, self-righteous cops, and apathetic cops. That covers about 80% of them. Given the high rate of crime—personal, fiscal and ideological motivations are all rife—the cops have to prioritize. Job One for them is usually stomping out anything that hurts cops, like blackbio and illegal guns. Then they go after recurring violent criminals (like, probably, you), especially if they tend to rile up copycats and start vendettas (again, probably like you). Stuff like burglary, stalking, harassment, vandalism, underage drinking, recreational drug abuse, domestic violence, speeding? If it falls right in their lap and looks like an easy case to clear, sure, they pick the low-hanging fruit. But there’s a lot of that crap and they’re not going to break out a van full of CSIs when someone steals your car. The CSIs are busy trying to catch the serial rapist with HIV and boosted strength. Most cops get real twitchy when they see costumed crusader types. There are plenty of exceptions, but they associate the mask and cape with unpredictable wet tech abilities. Moreover, and even worse, supers tend to be ideological extremists who provoke chaotic crowds and, sometimes, open civil disorder. Better to just call for backup and open fire if they make a false move.
Ecollapse Pronounced “EK-o-LAPS,” this phrase refers to a long-term global economic malaise. It has stifled industry, kidney-punched venture capital, inhibited innovation and spurred at least a dozen Fortune 500 CEOs to kill themselves, either from guilt or because they just didn’t want to live in a world without goldplated toilet-paper holders. Sure, the poor have gotten poorer, but you know the situation is really bad when the rich are getting poorer too. The causes are all very murky. No one can agree on when it really started. Most put the date wherever it creates the least blame for their pet politics. But it definitely included the following causes and/or effects. Banks became far more testy about loaning out money. Companies got as stingy as they could with pay, retirement and health benefits. Many of the Baby Boom generation stayed at work even into their eighties, but the tax burden of those who retired was still far worse than even the pessimists had predicted. When the US deficit hit truly sick levels (as a result of a food infrastructure bailout—see “The Petro-Bio-Industrial Complex” page 53) foreign investors started treating the dollar like it had the clap. Businesses became incredibly risk-averse and simply tried to survive.
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So today, people are employed, but many are only part time. The Boomer dieback is finally starting to loosen the retirees’ stranglehold on America’s tax income, but pride and confidence are going to take a long time to return.
eCollapse, the Pronounced “EE-co-LAPSE,” this was the virtual world’s reflection of the encrappening of the material world’s financial model. It’s generally agreed to have started with Hank Scaramouche, the flamboyant billionaire jerk who started his own online credit firm, KwikKred. It was built from the ground up to compete directly with PayPal and other “eCommerce Solutions.” The difference was, Scaramouche was a con man. He got a lot of people’s credit card information and bank account codes, then one day—April 1 in fact, ha ha Hank—he engineered the biggest single heist in human history and fled.
“ You ’d th ink th e end of c ivilizat ion wou ld be a big watersh ed moment, bu t you ’d be wrong.
We sank into barbarity with exqu isite slowness,
never not ic ing ou r descent, u nt il one day we woke u p and fart jokes were more popu lar than opera.”
-Milwau kee ’s own cu ltu ral avenger, “ Th e Pau c ity ”
Like I said: A jerk. At first, no one could believe that he’d done it, especially since it initially looked like a server malfunction. But it quickly became clear that he had cleaned out close to 78 billion U.S. dollars, becoming richer than many nations in one fell swoop. Once his victims came to believe what he’d done, they couldn’t believe he’d gotten away with it, but apparently that much money can buy a lot of anonymity. He’s the most wanted criminal in the world, by three primary groups. The hundreds of thousands of people who got robbed have formed a lynchin’ posse and are avidly searching by any means available. (They’ve already been scammed a couple times by people who claim to be able to get access to him.) Law enforcers of all nations know they could become global heroes by catching him. Dictators and warlords of small nations also seek him, hoping to trade luxury and security for a piece of his enormous wealth. It’s almost certain that someone from that last group found him first. The fallout from Hank Scaramouche’s Black April is still falling. People are just not that willing to put much money on the internet any more, and who can blame them? Without the profit to be had, companies aren’t putting as much attention into their virtual storefronts. To top it all off, this all happened right about the time the publicly owned infrastructure of the ‘net started to wear out and get targeted by suspiciously coordinated terrorist attacks. The government didn’t have the cash for repairs, thanks to the Ecollapse (see above), so internet service providers started dropping like flies. Many of them were owned by media companies and, like pushy teen meth addicts, the ISPs dragged their struggling parents down into the nightmare with them.
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Penny Cortez (see “’Free’ Press, the” on page 52) snapped up a lot of those troubled media companies. There’s speculation that she and Hank were in what they used to call “cahoots,” but that’s probably just crazy talk. Somebody had to wring an upside out of Hank’s calumny, and who better than a ruthless amoral bitch like Penny? Today Internet access is spotty and unreliable. People still get online just about every day, but about one day in three it’s after a frustrating delay. A couple times a month, your account is just going to conk out and there’s nothing anybody can do about it.
ECO-lapse Yes, there’s another one and it’s arguably the worst of the three. Pronounced “EE-CO-lapse,” this time it’s a failure of ecology. Extinctions aren’t limited to species with exacting diets or isolated habitats any more: For a while it looked like bluejays were going to die off. (They just got off the endangered list last year, and then only because Penny Cortez and the people of Toronto funded a massive inoculation campaign with thousands of volunteer bird-watchers combing the forests to find nests and spray the eggs with antibiotics.) Ironically, it turned out that global warming was a myth. Oh, summers were definitely getting warmer, especially around the equator, but winters also got colder. No, instead of global warming, the climate change crisis is more accurately described as “global temperature convulsions.” That alone was enough to put a dent into the more temperature-sensitive species. The Salvation Germ (see page 55) made sure that the problem didn’t get addressed very seriously, and then along came tro (see “The Petrophage” on page 54) to choke birds, clog fish gills and delay the absorption of snow-melt. On top of tro-related floods, the increasingly spiky temperature graph bred hurricanes of tremendous intensity, which made it farther and farther ashore with undiminished fury because there were fewer and fewer forests to break them up. Currently, the hot summers put loads of moisture in the air, and the cold winters slam it down again in blizzards and ice storms. The good news is… um… let’s see… oh, the magnetic field reversal hasn’t happened yet! Earthquakes, volcanoes? No more frequent than they ever were. As of this writing, California continues its stubborn attachment to the North American mainland.
Energy When energy was cheap and plentiful, technology boomed and people got fat and the dominant political concerns were flag burning and where the president put his penis. Then gas became expensive and everything got crazy and panicky and desperate. Then it was cheap again (see “The Salvation Germ,” page 55). Then it got even more expensive, again (see “The Petrophage,” page 54). Where does that leave Joe Sixpack/Lunchpail /the Plumber and his energy needs today? Well, much like yearly temperatures (see “ECO-lapse,” above), energy costs crash and surge wildly from week to week and even day to day. The Salvation Germ is still around. Hell, you can buy a starter pack of “Sally” in a sealed wax canister at the corner drugstore. The equipment to use it as intended
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is more expensive, but no worse than, say, getting a riding mower. But using it, ah, there’s the rub. See, while Sally is finicky and only thrives in a particular chemical broth, the Petrophage is all over the place. So anything you’re going to feed Sally probably already has Petrophage on it, meaning your gasoline is getting turned to tro before it even comes out of the incubator. (Incubators designed to be easily cleaned cost a lot more, but the cheap ones? You’re never getting every piece of tro out, and tro usually has some Petrophage stuck on and in it.) Can you treat your biomass to get the Petrophage off it before you feed it to the Salvation Germ? Sure, but it’s a painstaking and uncertain process, made worse because 90% of the chemicals likely to clear off the Petrophage are damn near certain to kill Sally. So the investment of time and effort preparing the silage for conversion is far greater than the effort of actually turning old banana peels into fuel. As is the time and effort of keeping your fuel from being exposed to the Petrophage before you can get it in your sealed gas tank. When someone gets a good Sally setup working and can keep it uncontaminated, gas prices local to it are reasonable. If two people get ‘em working well, gas prices plunge. But running a refinery on the cheap leads to corner-cutting, which makes contamination more likely and the beat goes on. If there isn’t a good local refinery, you’re going to have to rely on shipments from elsewhere (probably not far, right?) and hope that the incoming gas doesn’t get exposed during transport or transfer. The longer isolated areas go without a shipment, the higher prices rise—because the people with gas not only face rising demand, they have the overhead of keeping the gas from getting turned to tro. There’s something of a “use it or lose it” mentality with gas. When it’s plentiful people take trips and run tractors and haul what they need to haul. Often they run generators to charge up batteries. It’s far from a perfect solution, but it’s better than just letting the gas sit until it spoils. There are, of course, more and more people relying on solar, wind and tidal power. (Nuclear? Too much of a security risk, citizen.) It’s sufficient to run homes at a low level of consumption, but everyone can remember the last brownout, ‘cause it’s never that long ago.
Fashion Clothing and accessories tend to be unique, interesting, quirky and an expression of the wearer’s personal hopes, beliefs and intentions. Even homeless bums tend to personalize their appearance (though often in a way that expresses a ‘hope’ like ‘hope I don’t freeze to death’). Personalized manufacturing (or “microfacturing”) started in the late 20th century and got very efficient and widespread by the time the global economy gave it up to have a lie down. Consequently, you can still design and print your own T-shirt for the cost of buying a mass-designed tee from a big box store. There are still iconic logos like the Nike swoosh or the Lacoste alligator, and people still wear them as status symbols, but a conformist is more likely to conform with the logo of a favorite superhero than a guy on a little polo pony. Wannabees, man. They’re everywhere. The most common fashion accessories are masks and goggles. Helmets and capes are close behind, too. With the masks, it’s just a convergence of style and necessity. Surgical masks were showing up way back when the scary disease du jour was
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SARS. The avian and swine flus just brought masks in to widespread global use, and once that was going on, there was a market for designer masks. Then the microfacturing sector got in on it and soon everyone was covering their faces with colorful statements of individuality. (There was a huge fad for having your mask printed with a photo of your unmasked face, and some people still do that.) Goggles? Same kind of thing. Massive toxin problems in Los Angeles and the eastern megalopolis made wearing goggles a matter of simple practicality. It was that or spend all your time outside blinking out tro particles. Helmets got lighter, stronger and more comfortable as demand increased, and demand increased because more people started riding fuel-efficient motorcycles. As for the capes, people wear ‘em ‘cause they’re cool.
‘Free’ Press, the Penny Cortez started out as a spammer and became the biggest media mogul in the world. Scratch that: She’s the only media mogul in the world. So you know she’s got something on the ball. While the old media empires failed, at first, to recognize the power of blogs and web traffic, it took someone who started on the internet to recognize the true potential of TV, radio, magazines and newspapers. Madame Cortez herself is notoriously camera-shy and interview-averse, but her great insight was that a printed, bound, widely-distributed physical artifact has an authority that few web sites can gain—and those, only through years of hard work and honest effort. Sure, the world got clogged with free news: But most of it was worthless because it had no reputation backing it up. Whatever hobbyist reporters gained in speed by being at the right place at the right time and putting a picture on their web site, they lost waiting for people to find the picture, spread it to their friends, link it high in Google and then make up their minds whether it was truth or Photoshop. (Did Penny encourage mistrust of non-corporate web news? She did create several free-form news discussion and challenge sites that had no revenue streams, cost millions of dollars, and in at least one case was proven to have people on staff hired solely to make everything look bad through coordinated fake debates involving dozens of straw-man accounts.) Penny’s newspapers and cable channels and radio stations are honest about the news, or as honest as those media ever were. The difference is this: While they’re unwilling to outright lie, or change their editorial stance, or directly elide the facts, they are more than willing to change the attention and placement of an article in return for advertising consideration. It works like this. Suppose you make a suck movie. Cortez media are going to call it a suck movie because if they didn’t they’d lose their credibility. But if you take out some splashy and expensive ads, that pan review winds up tucked way back on page 10 instead of blaring from the front of the Entertainment section. On the other hand, if you make a great scientific discovery, they tell the truth about that. If the think-tank or college or pharmaceutical conglomerate backing your research spends enough, it can be the subject of an in-depth, prime-time interview. If they blew their whole budget on Erlenmeyer flasks? Too bad, you’re banished to the screen-bottom crawl. Basically, it’s a protection racket. “Nice little reputation you got there. Shame if anything… happened to it.”
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Everyone knows Penny has a monopoly, and everyone knows the news is slanted, but the alternative is internet blowhards whose breathless reports are rank with run-on sentences, misplaced apostrophes, and spelling errors. Every so often someone else tries to compete, but unless they adopt her methods they’re hopelessly outclassed. Even if they do whore the news like the Cortez outlets, they’re likely to wind up bought-out or bankrupt because Penny can give a lot more exposure (or concealment) for the dollar. A few honest politicians would love to return to the good old days of an independent and incorruptible Fourth Estate, but by and large, governments are some of Penny’s best clients. It’s terribly convenient for them to only have one news outlet to suborn.
Petro-Bio-Industrial Complex, the In the beginning (well—OK, in 1980) there was High Fructose Corn Syrup. By the dawn of the new millennium, the average American was eating sixty-six pounds of it a year. HFCS comes, of course, from corn, which was America’s #1 crop, though only a small percentage of it was eaten in a recognizable form (pop____, ____ on the cob, ____ chip, creamed ____, etc.). Much of it was fed to animals (including cows, who are not constituted by nature to live on corn) and the rest was… processed. Processing corn turned it into all kinds of crazy chemicals, not just HFCS, and these chemicals were then recombined into processed foods. It might be called a “chicken nugget,” but it was chicken, and corn chemicals. The label might say grape jelly, but it’s grape, and corn chemicals. Corn was cheap and plentiful, and the science of turning it into other foods was increasingly sophisticated. It brought a huge variety of food options to the nation’s supermarkets, and as a bonus, the infrastructure that carried and warehoused truckloads of processed pizzas could do the same for Florida oranges in the middle of an Illinois winter. There was a lot of it, a lot of choice and if much of it was initially corn, well, nobody could tell without a mass spectrometer. There were only two problems with this setup. One was, it created a farm infrastructure highly tailored to corn and increasingly unable to grow anything else. Far more dangerous was its invisible alliance with petroleum. Petrochemical fertilizers let soil grow harvest after harvest of corn, year after year. Gasoline drove the harvesters, the tractors, and the trucks that hauled the corn and its byproducts. Moreover, petroleum was fundamental to the chemical processes that turned corn into all those jelly/pizza/nugget ingredients—both as an additive and as an energy source. Connect the dots, then. What happens when the Petrophage (see below) hits? Why, the whole system crashes, of course. America starved. Europe starved. China starved. The places that were already starving, starved worse. Those countries in the middle, the ones that couldn’t afford a highly processed food infrastructure, they did all right. There weren’t many countries like that, though. Things recovered somewhat, thanks to a massive government bailout (that contributed to the dollar going toxic on the global currency market—see “Ecollapse” on page 48). There’s food in the markets, but the options people knew in previous decades is gone. Apples are everywhere, but peanut butter prices rise the farther you get from Georgia. Salmon is expensive in Washington state, and hellishly expensive everywhere else. There is no sashimi in the midwest any more, and winter in Minnesota holds bananas only for the rich.
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Petrophage, the There aren’t enough groin-kicks in the world for the sick sumbitch who cooked up the petrophage. It’s a hardy, virulent, world-wide bacteria that eats gasoline and excretes a worthless white plastic byproduct that has come to be called “tro.” (Short for “peTROcrap.” Rhymes with “snow.”) Tro is also, more poetically, called “the Devil’s Dandruff.” Tro’s everywhere, always underfoot. It degrades into dust, but slowly, and until it does it just drifts around. It’s roughly the color and texture of cobwebs, only a bit more rigid and waxy. It collects in the door frames of cars, clings to tree branches, blows through the air and mates under the sofa with the dust bunnies. But back to the petrophage. It also damages plastics, but not with anything like the aggression gas gets. Still, if your Tupperware leaks or your credit card turns brittle and cracks, you know what’s to blame. Nobody has stepped up to claim responsibility for creating the gas plague (as it’s also known). At least, no one lacking a death wish. Some blame kooky treehuggers, though given the damage tro has wreaked on Earth’s plant life and ocean creatures, they would have to be implausibly short-sighted. Others suspect the Russians of plotting to drive up the prices of natural gas, or they blame the nuclear industry, or an international Anarchist conspiracy. Or, it’s always popular to fall back on history’s three big blame-magnets: God, Mother Nature or the Jews. But in the final analysis, no one knows.
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Salvation Germ, the With an early-century oil crisis, alternatives were sought. Wind and tide and solar and nuclear all had their adherents, but they got knocked to the wayside by a little lab called Genetic Research Partners of Milwaukee which, in association with the University of Wisconsin, engineered a microbe that can (under the right circumstances) eat grass clippings and poop gasoline. There’s a little bit more to it than that, but not a whole lot. The Salvation Germ (as a hysterically overjoyed media dubbed it) couldn’t survive in the wild, so there was no chance of it getting loose, eating all the fall leaves and leaving a flammable residue on, well, everything. But given some seed stock of it, just about anyone with a Master’s degree in chemistry could take (say) the equipment in a brew pub and have it producing high-test within a week or two. The world’s gas-fueled economy was saved! As one might expect, the oil-producing states lost their composure. But to be brutally honest, the Middle East was already such a hive of violence and misery that, y’know, the Germ wasn’t the straw that broke the camel’s back. It was more like a piano that fell on a camel whose back broke last year. The civilian massacres in Venezuela were an unpleasant surprise, though. The scientists who actually made the Germ never talked about it without stressing the need for more efficient engines, insisting that this was only a component of a comprehensive strategy that should include renewable energy harvesting… but after handing them their Nobel prizes, no one but egghead intellectuals and policy wonks paid them much attention. Everyone else was holding their breath to see how low the price of a gallon of gas could fall. (Thirty cents a gallon was the bottom price, as mentioned in the entry “Apocalypse.”) Environmental damage and energy need had created a compelling motivation to find new ways, but once the Salvation Germ yanked the rug out from under energy need, this environmental aspect… oh, it became so much easier to just hand-wave it as a concern for those hippie ding-dongs in their tie-dyed hemp shirts. Besides, NASCAR was back! Thanks, Sally! (Yes, the Salvation Germ was quickly nicknamed Sally. Its official name is Deinococcus clementinis.) The Germ came before the ECO-lapse (see page 50). Had it come after, it might have been used more wisely. On the other hand, without the Germ, it’s sadly likely that the ECO-lapse never would have occurred. Nevertheless, gas was cheap, times were high and life was good until the Petrophage came along. (See “Petrophage,” page 54.)
U.S. Gub’mint, the Well, they try. God knows they try. But it’s not quite inconceivable that the United States of America got locked into a financial death-spiral and that there’s no escape until it augers into the ground. Then again, it keeps on keeping on. The bureaucrats put on their ties and go to work, subpoenaing witnesses, investigating corporations, gathering and allocating money. There are even elections. Bitter, angry, riot-bedecked elections, no matter who wins and who sues (and claims fraud, and blames, and is secretly relieved, some times, to not have to deal with the host of problems that politicians are expected to fix).
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The kicker is, it’s sort of accepted wisdom that raising taxes is Just Wrong, so a lot of stuff that the Fed used to pay for—regulating the financial sector, interstate highways and bridges, disaster relief, the National Endowment for the Arts—has, to some degree, been left to rot. The Federales are hunkered down in Washington running Medicare, the IRS, Social Security, the armed forces and the courts. As mentioned under Ecollapse (page 48) the tide of rising Baby Boom retirees is finally starting to recede. (Sorry, hippies: Those longevity treatments are never going to materialize in the current economic climate.) If the faith of the people was somehow restored in the government, it could start seriously collecting taxes and supplying services again. But mainly it just languishes. That’s not to say it’s irrelevant. While the Fed may not have the dough it had in the early 21st century, the Executive Branch has formalized its exclusions from certain confining laws and rules, “for the duration of the current crisis.” It’s like Martial-Law Lite. They don’t call it presidential rule, and indeed the Congress still has plenty of power (especially power to hamstring executive plans through under-funding and slow-grinding scrutiny), but it’s established and accepted that the FBI can tap anyone’s phone, for any reason, any time they feel like it. Also, a suite of interrogation techniques is approved (for federal officers only) that includes but is not limited to mock executions; microwave wanding (see page 61); simulated drowning; sexual humiliation; sleep deprivation; and being thrown in a meat locker until you start talking. These rather extreme violations of civil rights aren’t common. Not because the Feds have reservations about torturing citizens any more, but because the budget is small and the agents are stretched really thin. So your odds of catching the eyes of CIA, FBI, INS, DEA or Secret Service personnel are pretty slim. But if you do, you’re in for it.
Venice Venice is now a verb, unless you’re referring to the former Italian city. Venice the ex-city is now a particularly difficult-to-navigate bay. As water levels rose in response to climate change, the famed City of Water got increasingly watery and, despite a last minute sale to a consortium of Dutch engineers and Chinese expatriate billionaires, the sea would not be denied. But the legend lives on in the phrase “veniced” as in, “Yeah, the Chicago Loop got veniced so fast that dudes from the art museum were on the roof flagging down choppers with Hopper’s Nighthawks.” It refers to cities which have been, wholly or in part, permanently flooded. A few coastal or riverside towns managed to avoid serious damage, usually by using innovative Dutch/Venetian/Chinese technologies, but many cities (New York, Seattle, Miami) couldn’t pay or couldn’t make it work. Now, that doesn’t mean those cities are abandoned or ruined. It just means that there are neighborhoods where the basements and maybe first floors of waterfront buildings are underwater. Seattle took the daring step of stabilizing the foundations, building docks, and carrying on. In Miami that didn’t work quite so well, so the submerged neighborhoods (called “costnervilles”) have largely been abandoned, becoming havens for smugglers, illegal immigrants and other fugitives from the law. Like, for example, aquatic superheroes.
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Technology You Can Use to Kill People And/Or Not Die I’m sure all the political-historical perspectives are fascinating, but if you’re in the center of the RPG demographic, you’re probably skimming it until you get to the implements of destruction. I would hate to disappoint you, so here’s the goodie bag of offensive and defensive technology, with a few other gadgets useful for a life of crime thrown in. No prices are listed. It’s pretty much up to the GM to determine whether your characters can get these or not, but I’d encourage GMs to be fairly generous, especially with people whose former lives might contribute to knowing fences, felons and black-marketeers. Even PCs who used to be newspaper ballet critics were resourceful enough to get modded or boosted, after all, so finding a gauss pistol with the serial number filed off shouldn’t be all that challenging. As a base, each character should have some kind of tech weapon (mike wand, fresh knife, pistol) and some of that cheap body armor on page 62. I’d also suggest that someone whose superpower is hosting an illegal pharmaceutical factory in her body can probably trade for just about anything on this list, given modest time and effort. There are rules listed for Wild Talents, but for the Smear of Destiny system, these all have the same effect. When you try to use them to do something, they give you a Jack factor.
Ceramic Impact Plate The common man’s bulletproof armor is pretty nifty, especially from a 20th century perspective. It’s lighter than the old Kevlar flak jackets, stops traditional knives, and is chemically stable so that it won’t degrade if you sweat on it. On the other hand, it’s only going to stop a couple slugs before it cracks to powder. But how many times are you planning to get shot, anyhow? This stuff’s legal to own. It’s not as easy to get as a gallon of milk, but you can send away. For a mere 25% price premium, you can get a “solid body fender”— sculpted plates, shaped like muscles and suspended in a polymer gel so that they jiggle like realistic tissue (and chafe less). They’re sewn into an undershirt and a pair of longjohns. They change your profile so you look buff or buxom or well hung and they put plates over your vitals that can take two or three deer slugs before cracking.
In Wild Talents This has HAR1 for 2-4 impacts, after which it’s useless.
Civilian HUDset In the beginning, there were motorcycle helmets, night-vision goggles, and hands-free cell phones. Then, through some obscene commercial orgy, they birthed the HUDset. The HUDset foundation is a nice strong skullbucket, offering equal protection
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from biking accidents, small-caliber arms fire, and angry housewives with rolling pins. It’s got earphones that damp out exterior sound while letting you listen to your phone, your favorite tunes, or your police-band scanner. Stuck on the front is a tunable vision system that can be set for infrared, light-intensification, EM detection—just about everything except seeing normally. Some of these come with tear-away transparent films so that if your visor gets covered with bugs on the highway (or greased up with aero-ink), you can just rip that off and see again. It works… sorta. But since these aren’t sealed systems, against the ink you’re going to be blind and weeping anyway.
In Wild Talents It’s got LAR 4 for location 10, and the goodies described above.
Cling L adder Okay, it’s not going to kill unless you hit someone with it, (much like a hammer or a wrench or anything else off your workshop pegboard) but it’s handy for ascending vertical surfaces. Developed for firefighters, the cling ladder weighs about fifty pounds and is the size of a large backpack. The device has a flat side and a side with two spinny things that most closely resemble bicycle pedals. The non-flat side also has a safety belt attached between the rotators. When you push the whole thing against a wall and flick the “on” switch, that flat side goes soft and starts acting rather like a snail’s foot. On a smooth wall, it forms a suction cup. On a rough or irregular surface, it reaches around to grasp and cling. Meanwhile, on the other side, you put your hands on one set of spinners, your feet on the other, and you start pedaling. It looks a little silly, but it gets you up a wall or a tree or a tumbled pile of boulders at the pace of a brisk walk. It won’t work on sand or any surface too crumbly to support your weight, but other than that it’s a fine way to ascend or descend. (If you pedal forward, it goes up. Backwards, it goes down. If you go in opposite directions, it rotates in place, either to the left or to the right. Most people can master the navigation with a quarter hour of practice.)
In Wild Talents Anyone using this device gets a +3d bonus to rolls for climbing.
EMP Cannon The cops have these. The Army has these. Comparitively few private criminals have them, not only because they’re expensive (phhht!) and illegal (yeah, right) but because they’re big. Without boosted strength you can’t lift one, and even with, it’s a bitch to aim. Usually, they’re deployed for cataclysmically ugly situations. You see ‘em mounted on the back of a humvee, or the underside of a chopper, or the front of an appropriately named LEAV. (That’s “Law Enforcement Armored Vehicle” and, conveniently, exactly what you should do at top speed when you see one.) When you pull the trigger on these, two things happen downrange. First off, gauss guns stop working until someone takes them apart and re-magnetizes the
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whole system. Also, fuses blow, credit cards go blank, electronics are temporarily fried unless they’re either “hardened” (in which case they might keep working) or very delicate (in which case they’re just toast). Watches blink 12:00, compasses spin and small metal objects become magnets for an hour or two. The effects on human beings are, in many ways, parallel to those on batterypowered gadgetry. People tend to either flop down, passed out from the pain, or they scream and thrash and freak out—again, from the pain. Because when you get hit with an EMP cannon burst, you are in pain. It does no physical damage (unless they train the beam on you for more than thirty seconds) but it tricks your nerves into activating. Among the unfortunate few who can compare from personal experience, it has been likened to being sprayed with live steam, the kind of industrial venting that gives you second- or third-degree burns, only the cannon hurts MORE. So as you can guess, these are used only sparingly and people give them a wide berth. While it’s true that you can block the beam with metal (even aluminum foil) that’s rarely a practical solution. From a cop’s perspective, someone who is wrapped in aluminum foil is either going to rip it pretty soon (becoming vulnerable to the cannon) or is moving slow enough to keep the foil intact (which is too slow to threaten). Either way, cops win, as they so, so often do. As a side note, Amnesty International has been trying to get these things universally banned, but of course every petty dictator-for-life wants as many EMP cannons as he can get his grasping little fingers on. They aren’t used in Europe or Japan, though. Civilized, no?
In Wild Talents Getting hit with one of these forces the character to make a Stability check against Difficulty 4 and take an Area 4 Shock attack. The Shock damage is illusory and comes back after a few minutes spent rolling on the ground screaming, however. It also cooks electronics. If it’s cheap stuff, it’s just bricked afterwards. Something a bit more rugged, like a decent cell phone, a HUDset or a gauss gun conks out but can be repaired with a couple hours and a successful Electronics roll. Something with hardened circuits built for heavy-duty military work? Fiftyfifty quitting chance, but they can be reactivated with a single combat action and that Electronics roll.
Fresh Knife Originally marketed as a “Fractal Knife Generator,” this doodad is a godsend to fine woodworkers and chefs. Or, it was until laws were passed forbidding the use of generated ceramic knives on food for human consumption. (Which is ridiculous. The amount of residue left in food cut with a fresh knife is minimal and organically inert. You won’t digest it, it won’t stay in you. It’s about like eating a grain of sand, honestly.) I seem to have drifted off the topic of what this is. It’s a metal tube about eight inches long and an inch across, with a button on it. Push the button and hold it with the business end down and, in about two seconds, an inch long blade grows out of the end, and a second after that, that blade becomes sharper than any edge produced before the 21st century. Razors, katanas, obsidian sacrificial knives? It’s sharper. Like a fern leaf, it’s formed on a fractal pattern that recurs
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on a smaller and smaller basis, so the knife’s serration gets finer and finer until it hits the limits of matter. Anything you could cut through with a normal steel knife and some effort— wood, bone, ice? Using a fresh knife, you feel a little bit of resistance, but not much. About like cutting a slice of Colby cheese with a steak knife. Going through cloth, paper or meat, you can barely feel it at all. Stuff that you could put a dent in with a normal knife can be cut with some effort, at least until the blade breaks. That’s the drawback of the fresh knife. After that third second, it’s as sharp as anything going. After about ten minutes, it dulls to being merely razor-keen, even if not used. After thirty minutes, it just crumbles into dust. It also has a tendency to shatter if loud noises happen nearby. After about thirty feet of blades have been generated, it’s a coin toss whether the battery or the reservoir of ceramic powder goes dry first. On the upside, though, refills are cheap. Also, it’s fairly simple to remove the automatic cutoff that limits the blade to a single inch. No matter how long you mash down the button, the blade won’t get longer than about eighteen inches, but for most gangbangers and supervillains, that’s long enough. Long enough for the chefs and woodcrafters, too.
In Wild Talents It takes a round to generate the knife. It does W+1K and starts out with Penetration 2, but that drops by 1 every ten minutes. When when it drops below Penetration 0, it’s gone.
Gauss Guns About six months after the Israelis started selling Spoiler (see page 64) to its allies, Russia and China had functional gauss weapons available to their elite troops. Another six months after that, private citizens could buy gauss guns in the USA, for astronomical prices and with special licenses. Today, cheap knockoffs can be bought the world over. A gauss gun, in case you don’t know, uses a hella powerful magnet to squeeze metal slugs out the barrel, usually after imparting spin for stability. It’s shielded so (theoretically) it won’t erase your credit cards, ruin nearby computers, or irradiate the wielder’s testicles. On the other hand, given how often cops are able to spot charged gaussers with EM detection equipment, the shielding may not be 100%. The wavelengths involved are pretty tight, and even a good shield may not hold up under violent conditions like, say, being part of a gun. Gauss guns offer several advantages. They’re quieter than old-style shootin’ irons (the sonic boom isn’t really that big a deal), there’s no muzzle-flash and, while they work best with bullet-shaped projectiles, in a pinch you can load them with nails or thumbtacks or paper clips. Plus, Spoiler doesn’t work on them. On the downside, they suck up battery power like you wouldn’t believe, they can be remotely shut down by EMP weaponry (the central magnet is shielded, but the triggering mechanism and the battery connections can’t be) and, like I said, sometimes the shields fail and you get accidental data loss, easy detection (possibly with just a Boy Scout compass) and all kinds of metal dust clinging to your weapon.
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In Wild Talents Gauss pistols do Width in Shock and Killing with Spray 3. Rifles do Width +1 Shock and Killing, Spray 3 and have Penetration 1. Pistols hold between 12 and 20 bullets, rifles hold up to 50. If you load them with garbage they lose all Penetration and do W+1 Shock.
Gibsons See “Ripperguns,” page 63.
Impact Hairbag Before deployment, a hairbag is a plastic package about the size of a student dictionary and heavy. You may think an unabridged Webster’s is massy, but the hairbag weighs like solid metal. Someone healthy can pick one up single handed, but it’s work. In the middle of it is a pull cord, and when you pull that the densely packed polymer components inside combine and start to expand, rapidly and tremendously. In the time it takes you to scream “OH SWEET GOD JESUS I’M FALLING!” the hairbag goes from being dense and small to being big and pillowy. About ten feet on a side, it’s filled with a gas that smells like broccoli and this foamy, stringy… stuff. There are a couple ways to use a hairbag when you’ve been thrown off a building. You can pull the plug and hold on, and try to make sure the suddenlyhuge balloon is underneath you when you hit. Or you can pull the plug and throw it, and then try to aim yourself at the puff as it grows. Either way, when something heavy crashes into it, it pops, spattering stringy goop on everything, making a “whuuumphhh” sound and sending billows of broccoli aroma in every direction. People have landed on these at terminal velocity and walked away. People have also used them to delay pursuing cops by clogging hallways or alleys. Hairbags can open stuck enclosures, though it’s messy and they only exert the force of, say, three burly footballers. They are also pretty good for random vandalism. Huck one in an open window and they’ll be cleaning up that up all afternoon. (The polymer is biodegradable and dissolves in water, but that scent tends to linger.)
In Wild Talents If you land on one of these, you either take normal damage, or just two Shock to each hit location, whichever is less. Depending on circumstances, you may need to make an Athletics roll or something to aim at it.
Microwave Wand Almost nobody in the world is supposed to have these. They’re illegal for everyone, everywhere, with the sole exceptions of high-ranking elite military officers and secret policemen in nations competing for the bottom rungs of human rights ratings.
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Read up on what the EMP cannon above does to human beings. This is the exact same technology, only it’s in a device the size of an electric toothbrush. Granted, the beam isn’t as wide—the cannon can blast an entire side of your body, while this targets a spot about the size of a quarter. But a mike wand has a very long range, it’s invisible unless it’s the kind with a targeting laser, it’s silent, and it goes right through clothing. Again, metal stops it and, again, that’s not always a practical solution. (RMPA suits and Ceramic Impact Plate, on pages 62 and 57, offer no protection unless they’ve been chromed or something.) In a fight, it can scare people and buffalo the weak-willed, but it has no real stopping power. It functions much better as an implement of torture, which (no matter what labels they use) is why those military officers and plainclothes political enforcement officers adore them. Unfortunately for just about everyone, they’re available on the black market too. They’re not as common as guns, but there’s probably one floating around out there for every hundred illegal firearms or gauss weapons. Just waiting for a supervillain or player character to look at it with rapturous gaze and whisper, “You… complete me.”
In Wild Talents This is an Area 1 Shock attack. The first time a character gets hit in an episode, he has to make a Stability check, but after that it’s just the pain.
Reactive Memory Plastic Armor (RMPA or “Rumpus Suit”) This looks like nothing so much as a puffy, ankle-length quilted winter coat. It’s available to the military and the police in a variety of colors and patterns, from Digital Cammo to MIB Black. No matter the color, though it gives you the profile of the Michelin Tires logo. But to those who can get it, lumpiness is a small price to pay for a lightweight armor that stops gunshots up to .50 caliber again, and again, and again. Whatever that goo inside the plastic shell is, it reacts weirdly to the force of impact. There’s some kind of microscopic geodesic geometry going on in there: The harder you hit it, the more it distributes the impact. You jump on a grenade, the whole suit is going to clamp around your body like a big mushy hug, but you won’t get lacerated. Ball-bats and chains? Forget about it. Plus, the shell on the outside can repair itself as long as the hole is smaller than an inch across. Now, it does necessarily impede performance. If you’re slowly exerting pressure on something, that’s fine, but these gowns stiffen up a bit if you try to run or punch, just as they stiffen up if someone tries to punch you (or run over you). Also, it’s not invulnerable to knives. A good slash can overcome the shell’s regeneration radius, and then the reactive goo inside leaks out and you’re stuck in nothing but a deflated, unfashionable plastic raincoat. On the other hand, with one of these on you can walk through a hail of machinegun fire, so keeping the ninjas from slashing you shouldn’t be too hard. Right?
In Wild Talents HAR 2, LAR 2. Nice, huh? But someone who specifically targets the suit with a knife can strip all the armor off the location struck. So if someone hits location 4, having specifically said he’s going to slash the suit and spill the goo out, then that arm (locations 4-5) no longer has protection. But the suit’s wearer takes no damage at all from the slice.
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On the other hand, microwave torture wands (see page 61) go through these like hot lead through tissue paper. No protection whatsoever.
“ Feast on th e meats of oppression!
Bwah hah ha! ”
-A nimalice, making h er point with equ al parts rh etoric and th ermite.
Ripperguns
When West Germany declared war on East Germany, they needed a compact, close-range anti-personnel weapon for house-to-house fighting. Their engineers, who had read “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” set about building a version of the Gibson novel’s “directional hand grenade.” Christened die splittergranatwerfer, it resembles a gray metal hair dryer with two pistol grips, joined at the barrel, at a right angle to each other. The business end has a horizontal slot about a quarter inch tall and two inches wide. Nicknamed “The Gibson,” a rippergun is a single-shot pistol firing shells about the size of a cola can. The shell is packed with gunpowder, rocket fuel, and a fragile, coiled up metal chain covered with razor barbs. (It has two handles because the recoil is spectacular.) When you pull a trigger (either one) the sharp chain gets blasted out the front, shattering into edged fragments about five feet in front of the barrel. These then sweep out in a growing horizontal arc. The effects depend on how close you are, but roughly… Within ten feet, you can have three guys standing front to back and it will cut them all in half. Ten to twenty feet, it’s only going to cut one guy in half. Twenty to thirty feet, it might even be survivable—about like a shotgun blast. Thirty to forty feet it’s unlikely to kill, and after forty feet it just annoys. (One selling point for the Gibson is that it really, truly does mitigate the ‘stray bullet’ factor of accidentally killing somebody the next block over. Though it does replace that with the factor of accidentally killing three somebodies who were standing within ten feet of your target.) Once fired, the empty cartridge pops out and a fresh one has to be manually reloaded before firing again. (Anything faster and the barrel would fall apart after ten shots anyhow.) To sum up, then, this is an ideal weapon for shooting clumped up people at close range. It’s incredibly loud and makes your wrists hurt, but sometimes a little joint pain is the price of freedom (or whatever).
In Wild Talents This handgun is Slow 1 and takes a -1d penalty if fired by someone with Body 2 or lower. Its effective range is 40 feet, but its Qualities vary a lot in there.
DISTANCE
QUALITIES
Less than 10 feet
W+3SK, Spray 2, Pen 2
10-20 feet
W+2SK, Spray 1, Pen 1
20-30 feet
W+1SK, Spray 1
30-40 feet
WSK
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Spoiler Gas The Israelis got really sick of being shot at, so they developed a microbe that eats gunpowder. It’s called “Spoiler” and the Palestinians insist that it cancers you up a few years after heavy exposure. On the other hand, given the choice between “cancer in a few years” and “getting shot right the hell now,” most people pick instant gratification. It comes in a can, much like tear gas. You pull the pin, throw it and it billows out, filling an area about the size of a typical suburban basement. About three seconds after exposure, bullets and other gunpowder-based munitions in the area go inert. Sealed cartridges are somewhat resistant to the older iterations of the gas, but the newer breed of the microbe can go right through most commercial sealant (and, additionally, tends to make exposed skin itch). The germs are only viable in air for about an hour, and they settle out of suspension in about ten minutes (leading many to carry their guns over their heads when walking through a Spoiler fog). Gunpowder that’s been neutralized stays that way forever, though.
In Wild Talents No special mechanics are needed here, really.
Switchblade Implants I know. You want big steel blades that are longer than your hands to somehow pop out of your hands and then you stab people with them. I wish it could happen for you, if only because the economic demand for such an impractical jack is terribly high. But think it through. First off, it’s illegal. I know, negligible concern, but it’s still valid. Then there’s the question of slicing yourself up every time you want to slice someone else up (or open a bag of M&Ms). Little bit of a zero-sum game, that, even if you go for a healing boost. The very biggest concern with this sort of gadget, however, is contagion. Some of those people you stab, with hypothetical blades popping out of a wound, just might be sexually adventurous or be passive carriers for the Hantavirus or something. We’re talking major fluid transmission risks here, even if you clean the blades carefully before retracting them. You’d really be better off with an implanted fractal knife generator, though even there you have to put up with changing batteries and reloading the powder. Plus it throws off the balance of whichever arm you have it in, unless you get both, which doubles your cost… there have been problems with them going off accidentally… and the battery packs tend to heat up if you grow the blade beyond three inches. Honestly, you’re better off just carrying a fresh knife. But people keep wanting these, so if you’re dead set, get yourself to Argentina or Thailand, find a doctor who looks at medical ethics with the same puzzled bemusement a dog has for a cat on TV, and have him hook you up.
Wiggles These are cheap, odd, plastic sacs on neoprene sleeves or straps, a bit like a knee or elbow brace. Like a brace, these are worn on joints—shoulders, knees, at the waist
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or ankle or elbow. You need about three of them to do you any good. They’re powered by kinetic movement, and even the mild shaking of walking around is enough to get them active. When they are active, they wiggle. They swell and shrink in unpredictable patterns, moving up to an inch at most, powered by weird kinetic-property plastics that behave a bit like the wax in a lava lamp. Wiggles aren’t illegal and they’re sold as novelties but everyone (and by everyone, I mean ‘every cop’) knows what they’re really for. (In addition to kink, which I don’t want to get into here.) They’re worn under clothing to confuse kinestheticmotion algorithms. (Kinesthetic-motion algorithms, for those who don’t know, are computer programs that can analyze film or video footage of someone moving and plot out the unique elements of their gait and body proportions.) How well do they work? No one knows. But a lot of cape and mask types wear them as another layer of identity protection.
In Wild Talents They give any motion identification software a -2d penalty for recognizing the character.
“Um... yeah, that logo makes quite a statement, CD. I assume you meant it to...?” “To what?” “Never mind.” “What?” “You wanted it to look like an, um, ejaculating penis?” “It does not look anything like an... like... you have a filthy mind!” “No, I can totally see it, the capital C spooning the little D, that’s the balls, and the stroke of the D...” “I don’t believe this.” “...and there’s that blob of white stuff at the tip.” “It’s a fuse! A fuse! It’s supposed to look like CD, for Collateral Dammit, and a stick of dynamite because I’m a bomber and... oh God it really does look like a johnson, doesn’t it?” “Back to the drawing board.”
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Hero, Villain and Crux What’s the essence of heroism, or of villainy? The question of the ends vs. the means is old, but still as thorny as the first time a Cro Magnon paused in the midst of beating a Neanderthal with a thigh bone to contemplate it. Is someone who selflessly sacrifices himself so that his fellow neo-Nazis might live a good guy? Bad guy? Just tragically misled? Is someone who’s willing to torture and sacrifice the innocent to protect his own family honorable or a scumbag? Is it all a matter of perspective or is there something fundamental to this notion of Good and Eeeevil? Dunno. But eCollapse is designed to create characters who are passionate about their beliefs, then thrust them into situations where those beliefs demand nobility and courage… or offer the consolations of cruelty and selfishness.
Using Something Else Reluctant though I am to admit there are games from which I don’t get residuals, I understand that many people have system preferences that aren’t Wild Talents or “some crazyass system I just bought in eCollapse.” If you want to bolt the ideas of Hero, Villain and Crux onto another system, you also have the opportunity to decide how much of a bonus or penalty the roles provide, as well as how to implement it.
Roles and Episodes Roleplaying games, like most good stories, have a rhythm. There are moments of tension, action and drama. Between them, there are moments of relaxation, preparation and humor. Don’t shortchange either half. A game that runs from climax to climax soon becomes exhausting (like Michael Bay’s Transformers II), but without the occasional bust-up of danger and threatened loss, it’s just boring (like Oliver Stone’s The Doors). I bring this up to introduce the notion of episode. For the purposes of these rules, an episode is everything that happens up to a climax. So discovering that something mysterious is going on, sniffing around to find out what, bickering inconclusively with other PCs… these can all be different scenes in different locations, but they’re all part of the same episode. Only when there’s serious confrontation and the risk of suffering (little-s suffering in Wild Talents, capital-S Suffering in Smear of Destiny) does the episode end. Some episodes are very short, others draw out for quite a while. A game session—several hours of sitting around the table eating junk food and describing the events—can and probably should contain multiple episodes. Here’s why this matters. At the beginning of every episode, each player pulls a card from the role deck. If you’re playing with the Smear of Destiny (in the Appendix), the cards are separate from the Smear. If you’re using another system, the role deck is layered on top of your other rules, though it interacts with them powerfully. Use ordinary playing cards. There is one card in the role deck for each PC, with a minimum of three cards. Those three cards must be the King of Hearts, the King of Spades and the King of Clubs. (I know, patriarchal and phallocentric, sorry.) With more than three players, just put in an extra card for each. Any card will do; Jokers work nicely. With only two players, just use King of Clubs and King of Hearts. At the beginning of each episode, each player pulls a single card from the role deck. That card puts them in their role for the entire episode. When the rules engage for risky action, they can show their true colors and, if acting in keeping with their role, get the benefit. But every role has a penalty as well, as described below.
Using the Smear of Destiny When using the Smear of Destiny system, people acting in concert with their role get a free King result. However, they get an automatic Ace result when they
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attempt a penalized action, and they get no other factors for that action. A Hero who tries to slug a cop is doomed to fail and suffer, full stop. The only things that can redeem that Ace are elements the character stands for and stands against.
Using Wild Talents When acting in accordance with your role, you have a choice. You can take the bonus before or after you roll. If you take it before you roll, you add a Wiggle Die to your pool. Taking it after the roll, you can add two points to Width, two to Height, or a point to teach. But when you’re acting against type, any set you get has its Width reduced by three.
King of Hearts: Hero The hero’s role is to see beyond himself, to put his personal interests last and do what’s best for all, even if it hurts. Often, it hurts a lot. But if the hero is adored for his sacrifice for the common good, he is also bound by the will of society. Characters in the Hero role always succeed when they risk, sacrifice or endanger themselves to save or protect others. Examples would include… • Jumping in front of a car to push an old woman to safety • Distracting a mountain lion from a tasty child by yelling at it • Standing up a really hot date to perform CPR on a collapsed bystander • Being the first to charge an entrenched enemy position • Betting all his hard-earned money on a card game to keep evil bankers from foreclosing on the orphanage. (Though in this case, the automatic success assumes that his own money and the winnings are needed to save the poor foundlings.) The penalty comes into play when a Hero knowingly tries to harm a person in legitimate authority. No matter how much of a bastard an enemy is, as long as he’s recognized by the powers that be, the Hero can’t shoot, kick or drop a motorcycle engine on him. The Hero needn’t obey or respect the guy, but anything from complex bad luck to simple guilt and hesitation keep him from acting effectively. Examples would include… • A cop shows up at a fight and opens fire on a Hero. The Hero cannot successfully return fire. • A soldier guarding a secret army base sees the Hero sneaking in and yells “Halt!” The Hero won’t be able to harm the guard, but he doesn’t have to stop, either. • A US Senator is lambasting the Hero on CNN. The Hero can show up, threaten him, call him a liar and ruin the senator’s career, but he can’t physically engage him. • A drunk, off-duty postman takes a swing at the Hero. The Hero can totally deck him. But if he wanted to interfere with that same postman during work hours when the mail carrier was performing his duty, the Hero would be out of luck. • A crazy desperate police detective threatens to kill himself unless the Hero puts on cuffs and come along quietly. The Hero doesn’t need to obey. He may well feel bad if the detective does commit suicide, but that’s up to the player. Sometimes, a Hero harms an authority unknowingly. (The classic example is accidentally killing an undercover cop.) If there’s genuine ignorance, the Hero isn’t bound by his prohibition. However, when he finds out what he did, he automatically takes a point of Suffering (in Smear of Destiny rules) or has to make a Stability check (in Wild Talents).
King of Clubs: Villain Hell, sometimes even the best of people get carried away. Maybe not Gandhi or Mother Teresa, but normal folks? Catch ‘em on a wrong day and they might swear at you and come out swinging even if the fender bender is their own fault and they know it deep down. Then
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again, sometimes people get on the weird end of luck and wind up burning down the entire police station instead of just painting “Eat it, Pigs!” on a couple patrol cars. The villain, then, is just someone who is (for whatever reason) really good at destruction. Physical destruction, cold-blooded murder or the hot kind, and even weakening marriages, beliefs and other intangible bonds. The Villain destroys value. But there are limits to what the villain can ruin. It has to be something someone loves, something that’s going to be missed when gone or that someone would struggle and suffer to defend. Killing people almost always works because even those without close ties usually have some self-regard. Knocking down an old abandoned garden shed? Bah, who cares?
Mmm! Now That’s Villainy! If you’re using the Smear of Destiny system, there’s a time in the game called the Tipping Point. Before the Tip, characters generally can’t kill one another and nobody—PCs or GMCs—can die. The GM might kill off a GMC to move the plot, but mostly they’re safe. The exception is the Villain. The Villain can, with a specific effort, kill minor characters before the Tipping Point. The Villain’s player can even narrate characters dying from the Villain’s depraved indifference or callous carelessness. The problem with eeeeevil, however, is that it can be a surprisingly hard sell. Sure, Villains tempt people all the time with money or power or whatever—that’s part of the role. But actually getting someone to see things the Villain’s way just doesn’t happen. Someone in the Villain role always, always fails to successfully endorse a philosophy, ethos, or course of action in which he believes. A Villain may have hirelings and thugs, but he can’t create true believers. Which means that the Villain almost never gets the support of those willing to sacrifice deeply for the cause. Villains cannot, in a word, make Heroes. Here are some examples. • An unloved criminal, dying in great pain, asks the Villain to perform a mercy killing on him. The Villain doesn’t get an automatic success because, seriously, no one wants this guy to stay alive. On the other hand, why would the PC need rules to kill (or not kill) some helpless old jerk? Should be an automatic success anyhow. If someone is trying to keep the criminal alive, then the Villain does get the automatic success. Weird, huh? • A crazy woman has seized a school bus and is threatening to kill her own children and maybe some of those other screaming brats too. The Villain sneaks up and wants to put a bullet in her brain. He gets the success. Even though he’s saving a busload of kids, killing someone in cold blood is… well… cold. Especially since it’s in front of her own kids. • The Villain is trying to protect some horny teenagers from a serial killer. He insists that their best course is to get in the car and just get the hell away from the abandoned summer camp. But he can’t get them to see things his way and they insist that hiding in the unlit basement is far safer. • A Villain decides to sexually assault a superheroine in order to destroy her self esteem. He gets the auto success. Gross. • Trying to get the mayor’s wife into bed, the Villain tells her the mayor is tomcatting around with a lobbyist. He gets an automatic success for making her doubt her man, but an automatic failure for convincing her the logical followup is to become just as adulterous herself. • A Villain has been taken hostage by Islamofascists in an embassy takeover. He tries to convince his attackers that Islam is a load of crap and that they should give themselves up. He gets the success for destroying their faith, but he doesn’t necessarily succeed at getting them to give up. In fact, thanks to the
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Villain ban on getting people to agree, they probably won’t give themselves up but instead kill the hostages, blow up the building, or do some other crazy nihilistic thing. He’d succeed if he tried to turn his attackers against one another (destroying the bonds of comradeship) but not to follow his philosophy. (Then again, he could just bribe one or more of them—that’d work fine.) • A Villain tries to convince a crowd to riot and loot in the name of his pet cause, Christomunism. It’s another split result. Because he’s trying to destroy social order and the rule of law, they get the message about violence and pillaging. But his underlying message about self-sacrifice in community? They’re all like, “Bore me later, super-dink. I’ma get crunk and steal stuff!” • A Villain tries to disguise himself as a high ranking cultist in order to infiltrate the temple. While the player tries to claim he’s destroying the temple’s security, the GM just gives him a look. He doesn’t get an auto-success. On the other hand, he’s not trying to convince people to believe in something he believes: He’s trying to convince them of something he knows is a lie. So he doesn’t get an auto-fail, either. • Having been framed for a jewel heist in his every-day, public persona, a Villain tries to convince the cops that he didn’t do it. Unfortunately, since this is the truth, he’s doooomed. If he had done it and was lying, he’d have neither a penalty nor a free success. • The Villain tries to persuade a girl perched on a ledge not to jump, that life is worthwhile and meaningful. If he believes this, he automatically fails to persuade her. If he’s trying to talk her in because he has some nefarious scheme in place that needs her help, he can proceed with neither automatic success nor automatic failure.
King of Spades : Crux “Crux” means “the central or most important issue in an argument.” It is a point on which other things turn, like a hinge, only cooler because it has an “x.” But what does it mean in the context of Hero and Villain roles? Gwen Stacy was the crux between Spider-Man and the Green Goblin. In “The Dark Knight,” Rachel Dawes is the crux between Harvey Dent and Bruce Wayne. At some points in “Return of the Jedi,” Luke is the crux between Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine, just as Frodo is the crux between Samwise and Gollum (or, if you prefer, between Gollum and Sméagol). The Crux exacerbates rivalries, strains uneasy friendships and interferes with the best-laid plans. In crudest terms, the Crux often breaks ties between Hero and Villain—or at least pushes the situation so far towards the breaking point that one or other must give way. What the Crux can do without fail is interfere with Hero or Villain. No matter what those poor caped jamokes are trying to do, the Crux has an excellent chance of wrecking it. Moreover, this interference even trumps the Hero and Villain’s auto-successes. There is only a single exception to the Crux’s monkeywrenching king-making (or, if you prefer, king-breaking). It’s a biggie, though. The Crux cannot interfere when either Hero or Villain tries to physically harm him. Why not? Because that’s the Crux’s big flaw. He cannot avoid damage from actions of either Hero or Villain. This fated doom is so severe that even physical factors like boneshock mods or a rumpus suit won’t work. Some flukey thing fails at just the right moment, some circumstance conspires, and the Crux is dead meat. Hey, technology is imperfect, ‘kay? “ Please, please spare me th e ideology.
I don’t have mu ch pat ience for
people wh o ju st want to st ir u p t rou ble.
I don’t care if you ’re
st irring it to th e le ft or to th e righ t, I’m not eat ing of f that spoon.”
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Here are some examples to clarify things. (Or maybe they just muddy the waters further.) • “Fine! If you won’t love me, hate me!” shrieks the Villainess and tries to punch out the Crux, who sensibly tries to dodge. While the Crux’ ability to hamstring Villains is strong, the doom of getting hurt is stronger. Crux goes down. • “Stop!” shouts the Crux as the Heroine rushes towards a burning building to rescue orphans and kittens and elderly refugees. The Heroine is going to stop, though she may start up again, depending on other factors. But at the very least, the Crux’s cry gives her a moment of pause. • It’s the Hero’s wedding day. The Crux stands up in the middle of the ceremony and cries, “The bride’s already married!” Even if this is utterly false, the wedding is scuttled, possibly while the Villain cackles and offers the Crux a high-five. • The Villain is putting a bomb in a building, with the Crux tied to a chair one floor below. The Crux tries to escape and disarm the bomb. Being fated to ruin the Villain’s plans, that escape and disarm are probably rock solid. But avoiding the damage of the Villain’s bomb seems contrary to the role. In Wild Talents, the factors just cancel out. Were I GM and using the Smear of Destiny, I’d probably rule that the Crux gets out and disarms the bomb, but takes some kind of lasting Suffering in payment—which could be physical or psychological or whatever. • The Hero plans to jump out and strangle a police officer. The Crux says, “Dude! That’s a cop! Dude!” and attempts to bring him to his senses. In Wild Talents, the Hero is simply sandbagged with many penalties. In Smear of Destiny, the Crux may actually narrate the Hero being unable to act before the cop leaves. If the GM is cruel, the Hero may still take Suffering because his plan failed and he got an Ace, but a kindly GM might let the Hero do nothing and avoid having to face the Ace. • The players split up the party, so the Hero and Villain are slugging it out while the Crux and some Bystander characters are off at the library, where they get jumped by a fightin’ gang of anarchists. Neither the flaws nor the benefits of Crux status come into play, absent fated Heroes and Villains of destiny. • The Hero is baking a delicious pie. The Crux decides to ruin it, for whatever capricious reasons could motivate baked-goods vandalism. Not only is that pie wrecked, there probably isn’t any reason to engage resolution mechanics. Unless it’s some kind of critical plot pie. • The Hero pushes down the plunger on the explosives bundle, unaware that the Crux is inside the building getting demolished. The Crux tries to escape, but there isn’t much point to it. Even when the Hero or Villain isn’t trying to harm the Crux, the Crux can’t avoid the damage. • The Villainess throws the Crux over her shoulder and starts running for the airlock before the entire undersea dome collapses. Neither role affects this action. While the Crux can’t stop the others from harming him, that doesn’t effect their ability to help. • The Crux is a police officer in uniform. The Hero takes a swing at her. Normally, the Hero’s vulnerability to proper authority would scuttle that punch, but since this cop is a Crux, that vulnerability takes precedence. If no other factors are in play, the Crux receives a bone-rattling slap.
All Other Cards: Bystander This is the simplest role. Players who don’t pull a King out of the role deck have no special bonuses or penalties. Unrestricted, they revel in their existential freedom. They are übermenschen, beyond the petty bonds of slave morality’s “good” and “evil!” (In fact, some three person groups prefer a “Hero, Villain, Bystander” fate deck to one with a Crux.)
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“Always” and “Never” These absolute terms ‘always’ and ‘never’ are generously sprinkled through this chapter, despite their potential to turn into deadly land mines for common sense and game session plots alike. There are going to be times when the Villain should be able to convince someone to see things his way. At some point, it’s just going to beggar credulity that the Crux could hinder the Hero. So to save the GM from ungainly narrative backbends, I’ll add the following escape valve. When there is no reasonable way to follow the guidelines of the roles, the GM may declare an exception. I’d expect most groups to play through entire successful campaigns without needing this cop-out, so if you find yourselves needing it every few episodes, something is probably unhealthy in your game—either you’re misapplying the rules or, more likely, the characters simply aren’t designed to shift between being rivals and allies easily. On the other hand, if you’re having fun, let it go.
“Playing it Right” I’m going to step out of my role of “providing rules text that’s clear and entertaining, but mostly clear” and into my role of “game design and creativity theorist.” I’ll probably get in big trouble for this, but what the hell. I’ve heard the suggestion that early Dungeons and Dragons and Vampire: The Masquerade were market successes not because their rules were clear and intuitive, but rather the opposite. (Now, these suggestions were often made by stone-cold haters, so consider the source.) The idea is that because those rules were so broken and so obscure, the players were forced to adapt and houserule and roleplay to dig the fun out. Supposedly, those grand dames of RPG design served dual parental functions. At the beginning, they provided clarity and a pathway to story process. (Making PCs in both systems was easy and had lots of nifty stuff to make you enthusiastic.) But only later on did the deficiencies come to the forefront, unexpectedly tumbling GMs into far greater authority than they’d wanted. The rules, essentially, served as a mother through the game’s infancy, keeping the process intact and teaching the group to walk. Eventually, however, groups entered troubled adolescence where the only healthy course was to rebel and form separate, mature identities. It’s quite possible that this idea is bullcrap, or bullcrap for most groups. But the idea I’d like to extract from that argument—carefully disentangling it from any possible disrespect to D&D and V:tM, both of which are systems I respect and which have given me handsome paychecks—is that expecting rules to be hard, fast, concrete and infallible is an impossible standard for any words on page to reach. Games at the table are nuanced, ambiguous and volatile. Stuff comes up that rules don’t cover. Rather than blame the rules for failing to do the impossible, I say roll with it. Accept that gaming is improvisational, in the rules (a little bit) just as much as in the characterization. Sometimes the GM fudges. It’s all right. To set aside the possibly-creepy metaphor of game-as-mom, (though, damn, Mama D&D would have the coolest basement to run games in) let’s try another. Gaming is like music. Some groups are classical musicians with the rules as their score. They produce their symphony through close adherence to it, by doing the right thing at the right time. But other groups are like jazz groups or jam bands. The song (or rules and setting) are just a jumping off point, and where they end up is limited only by their skill and ability to work together. All this grew out of the “always” and “never” ambiguity of the role deck. So that’s your music for this game. Whether you want to play it with symphonic faithfulness or jazzy insouciance is entirely up to your group.
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Running and Playing eCollapse in Particular In writing this, I assumed readers who are familiar and experienced with tabletop RPGs. It’s possible that you, the reader, are not. If you’re an absolute beginner, dogear this page and get to a computer with online access. Direct your web browser to www.gregstolze.com/downloads.html and scroll way down to the bottom. There are two links: How to Run Roleplaying Games and How to Play Roleplaying Games. Those are my boilerplate articles for starting out. I could reprint them here, but it would push up the cover price and kill some trees. I’m not going to rehash those articles (or not much) in this chapter. Instead of telling you how to play games in general, I’m going to get specific. I’m going to advise you on playing eCollapse in particular.
For the Players Playing eCollapse, you’re controlling the main characters. The story is about them. Don’t forget that, because it’s important. Sitting back and being a bystander is not going to produce much fun for you, because the system and setting presume active PCs—indeed, obsessed ones. Don’t worry about doing the smart thing all the time, don’t worry about trying to minimize your character’s foolishness or failures or weaknesses. Stories about people who win all the time without breaking a sweat are boring to read, boring to watch and, if marginally less boring to play, they’re certainly boring to run. Fascinating characters overcome difficulties or are tragically crushed by them. Either story is pretty good. When generating your character, you have a chance to choose which difficulties you face and which issues you’re going to confront. So think less about reaching a conclusion where your character ‘wins.’ Instead, think about what would be a fun process for your character to go through. You may not believe this at first, but it’s actually more fun and more fulfilling to play an interesting game where characters succumb to their flaws and go down fighting than it is to bag a farcical victory in a boring game with no real challenges.
Getting Into Character In that spirit, try looking at RPGs a little differently. Let’s put a pin through “game” for the moment. Don’t think “It’s like Monopoly and this time Park Place is mine!” Focus on the idea of “roleplaying.” Think of it as theater. If you’re an actor getting cast in Hamlet, what roles do you want? Most serious actresses are going to covet Ophelia and Gertrude, while male actors are going straight for Hamlet and Claudius. These are the fun roles that get the good scenes and have the memorable experiences. What’s missing with these? Happy endings. A happy ending isn’t necessary for a good story, though it’s not out of bounds either. But if you focus on getting what’s good for your character at all costs, your first sacrifice is going to be a lot of cool events. Good stories are rarely made by characters taking the safest and most reasonable course. Hopefully, this perspective eases the sting of the constrained character generation. I admit it: Characters in eCollapse are, in some ways, built along much stricter lines than the traditional superhero character. They only get one power off a fairly short list—that’s certainly the most pronounced difference. But that’s because powers aren’t the point, or are only part of the point. Characters in eCollapse
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don’t succeed only because they have super-strength. They succeed because they engage their beliefs and because they know how to let destiny take a hand.
Owning Your Destiny The big curve ball in the eCollapse mechanics (whether you use the Smear or not) is the assignment of roles for each episode. Sometimes you’re going to draw exactly the card you want for a scene and it’s going to hand you the outcome you envisioned on a silver platter. I don’t really think you need any advice for how to deal with unwrapping a gift, so let’s look at the converse. Let’s look at what happens when you pull a role and it screws you. Some time you’re going to get put in the Hero role and be unable to whale on cops and feds and soldiers. Live with this. There are a couple ways to make that pill go down a little more smoothly. The proactive method is to have an explanation for this heroic hesitation built into your character. Patriotism, fear and excessive cultural conditioning can all explain a character’s momentary failure to stand up to The Man. But maybe you want to play a passionate anarchist. That’s a fine concept, and when that smasher of states gets blocked by the Hero flaw, it’s better to narrate failures that emerge from inanimate causes (the bullet missed, the rumpus suit stopped it, the cop stumbled out of the way). Another way to cope is to fall back on unwanted byproducts of his intensity—when the cop taunts him, he’s too enraged to shoot straight, or he gives up his cunning approach in favor of a blind, berserk charge.
The flip side of the Hero role is the blessing for self-sacrifice. Get clear on this: It does not let you risk your life to save the puppy and get away unscathed. It lets you risk your life to have the puppy get away unscathed. Your GM may quite rightly call you on it if you invoke the Hero clause, narrate first, and use it to protect your character. There’s a reason that the phrase “he heroically guarded his own ass” rarely gets applied without sarcasm. You don’t want your heroism to be sarcastic, do you? So do it all in or not at all. That “not at all” option is quite open, after all. If your character is a “let them puppies fry” type, well, play it to the hilt and leave the King of Hearts twiddling his thumbs. The same thing applies to the Villain’s blessing of destruction. If you want your character to be a nice guy, the relevant thing to do is to leave that particular arrow in the quiver. Just walk away from the easy path, leave that volatile narration to the GM and that guy who sits next to you snickering whenever he describes rocks falling on your character…. Not so easy? Well, that’s what the game’s about. Compared to the Hero’s flaw, the Villain’s issue is fairly straightforward. Resign yourself to being misunderstood for an episode. If it feels like this would make your character bitter and resentful—you’re darn tootin’! Bitterness and resentment (and their unacknowledged Third Musketeer, self-pity) make it a whole lot more palatable to victimize others, which is why this is such an integral part of the Villain package. The Crux role is the most likely, I think, to be misunderstood because it’s much less flashy than the Hero and Villain. It’s easy to pigeonhole Darth Vader and Gandalf in their respective story positions, but “the character upon whom the conflict hinges” draws less attention, and understandably so because he’s not dying for the good of others or killing for the benefit of himself. What he is doing is making sure that both the primary roles are aware of the risks and costs. With all that authority for interference, the Crux player has a lot of power to make up, somewhat, for the constraints on the character. As for the Crux weakness? That’s to keep the player honest, of course. The Crux is a Prisoner’s Dilemma with a sense of humor. If you don’t trust them, you can screw them. If they don’t trust you, they can screw you. So all you have to do is hold back your interference and hope they don’t pull the trigger after you’ve holstered your gun. Sure, that’ll happen, right? Everybody’s friendly. Wasn’t it Rodney King who observed how well we can all get along? Oh, wait. Of course the Crux can’t get along with the Hero and the Villain, because there’s a decent chance they work at cross purposes. If everyone’s getting along—hey, bonus, nice, you don’t need my advice. But when Player A knows his character can only succeed by being a jerk and Player B knows his character can only succeed by being a sweetheart, it’s more likely to provide struggle than niche protection. As Crux, you’re the tiebreaker. Take it seriously, take your lumps with good cheer and remember that what goes around comes around.
Being An Enabler There’s no “I” in “Team” and there isn’t one in “Roleplay” either. Getting into character is good. Binding your goals as a player so tightly to your character’s goals that you spoil your own fun, or someone else’s, is bad. Your character Stands For Christomunism (or whatever) but as the player you Stand For a fun game. Keep that separation in mind. Playing hard is cool. Playing dirty isn’t. What constitutes playing dirty in a roleplaying game? Well, cheating, obviously, but you’re too cool to pocket cards or do other stupid crap like that. So instead
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of dirty, I’ll say you shouldn’t play rude. Share. Give way. In a game like this, the most precious commodity is the attention of the plot, the GM and your fellow players. Don’t get greedy with it or people won’t help you get it. It’s like basketball. Once people know you’re a ball-hog, they won’t pass to you. Instead of trying to make the game about your character and casting the other PCs as sidekicks, pass the ball. Consider the other characters’ factors, goals and roles, and look for ways to put them in position to be awesome. If you’re an enabler of greatness, the other players are much more likely to help you get a groovy spotlight moment of your own. Start this at character generation, if at all possible. Work with the other characters. I’m halfway tempted to go stick another step in character generation called “I’m loyal to the other PCs because ________” but I think it’s smoother if I just ask you to do it here. If your character doesn’t fit with the group, give way. It’ll be better in the long run, I promise. Pay particular attention to the Weaknesses of the other characters. When your guy helps that character cope with his flaws, it’s very cool—not only because it pushes the plot forward through a barrier, but because it also ties those characters together and explains why they help one another. Just don’t exploit their problems, and that includes making their character look like a dweeb so that yours looks better by comparison. There can be a fine line between lending a helping hand and tossing your head, rolling your eyes and saying, “Looks like I’ve got to get my sidekick out of trouble again.” Stay on the good side of the line. The mechanics of the game are very open to making other characters look good (by narrating them doing something grand) or bad. If you don’t want your character narrated into something ugly, respect the characters of others, who are going to get narration power sooner or later. By the same token, make sure your character sets a strong pattern of behavior, so that they know what is appropriate.
For the GM As the GM you run the game, but the use of the word “run” implies a degree of control that is not, perhaps, entirely desirable. You’re not a playwright putting lines in the main characters’ mouths (though you do so for the supporting cast) and you’re not a director explaining motivation to actors (though you need to understand those motivations to make a good go). Think of yourself more like a stage manager and lighting director. Your job is to shine a spotlight on the characters, illuminating their brilliance… or maybe the shames they’d rather keep hidden. They’re the most important characters in the story, but that doesn’t mean they’re always the nicest ones. The GM position is a curious balance of both ally and antagonist to the players. You make their triumphs possible, but at the same time have to challenge and impede them to make those triumphs meaningful. There has to be a real chance to succeed or else it’s pointless. But it’s also pointless if they think (or know!) they can’t really fail.
Setting Up the Pins eCollapse is a game that rewards GMs who pay attention to the characters from the very beginning. With a lot of games, including many I’ve written, it works fine for the GM to write a scenario and either assign characters to players, or have them generate characters and then find a way to introduce them to the unstable situation so they can poke it until it explodes.
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This game’s different. The characters are like single-issue voters, only instead of hitting the polls they beat people up. You can develop a great plot centered around free markets, and if your PCs all have bees in their bonnets about AI rights, it’s not going to click. They’re going to leave your market plot lonesome as a homely kid at a junior high dance. Fortunately, you don’t have to guess what’s going to engage and challenge the characters, because there’s a handy piece of paper that tells you exactly what they’re standing for and standing against. Moreover, that same piece of paper tells you what kinds of challenges the players would enjoy for their character. (Well, perhaps ‘enjoy’ is a strong word. ‘Desire’ or ‘accept with a minimum of disgruntlement’ might be more accurate.) Setting up an eCollapse game is a little like making soup. You don’t get to choose all the ingredients, but at least you have a good idea what the other cooks are going to throw in the pot—and what will get them coming back for a second helping. Grab the character sheets, we’re going to make a little graph. Put the PCs’ names across the columns on the top. Now for every issue they mention, make an entry and put a plus or minus sign in the box, showing who’s for and against what. If you look at the play examples in the Appendix, they center around four characters with various hot buttons. I’m going to knock together their chart.
Jade P ython
Rump-Shaker
Collateral Dammit
Maiden of Bleeding Eyes
Multi - culturalism
+
Imperialism
-
US Army
-
Anarchy
+
Patriotism
+
Gov. Corruption
-
The USA
+/-
That’s a lot going on, but that’s good. It gives you lots of issues to explore, with hope that at least one character is going to bite on it. Now let’s take those issues and extrapolate. Guess, based on the character and the player, how the PC is likely to respond to other characters’ hot buttons. Put those guesses in parentheses, as I’ve done below. If you don’t think the issue generates heat for a particular character, leave it blank.
Jade P ython
Rump-Shaker
Collateral Dammit
Maiden of Bleeding Eyes
Multi - culturalism
+
(+)
( - )
(+)
Imperialism
-
( - )
US Army
( - )
-
(+)
Anarchy
+
( - )
Patriotism
( - )
+
Gov. Corruption
( - )
( - )
-
( - )
The USA
(+)
( - )
(+)
+/-
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If you’ve got a full line where there’s agreement, that’s your golden motivation. In the above case, it’s government corruption. It has the best shot of motivating all the characters, and why not? The anarchist is against it because he thinks its symptomatic of everything bad with politics. The authoritarian (and jeez, what’s Collateral Dammit doing with these flower children anyhow?) is against it because it besmirches the beauty of civil legislation. The other two are against it because it’s like puppy-kicking: Almost nobody is loudly in favor of it. Start your game with the golden motivation. If there isn’t one, see if you can get players to change their characters a little for more concord, or look for something close—three plusses and a blank, or at worst two agreements and two abstentions. Try not to get anything where one character is for and another against right at the start. Save that for later. Giving them an agreeable common enemy opens the group to situations where they help one another, work together and, in a word, bond. Encourage friendships among the characters. If they’re chomping at the bit to get into bitter rivalries, maybe find a quiet moment to suggest how much more intense those rivalries can be if there’s an element of betrayed friendship. Besides, it’s the roles, drawn from the deck, that should provide a good seasoning of friction in early sessions, when people are still getting into character. When the unambiguous plot is up and running, or is nearing a conclusion, you might want to start setting up something that’s geared around ++- or --+ or something like that. After working together (one hopes) and getting used to the idea of being together, an issue that strains the relationship a little can play well. With the four example characters, something with a clash of cultures might do. Three out of four PCs can be expected to take a conciliatory tone, with the fourth getting to act as the devil’s advocate and play “I told you so!” if it goes rotten. Any time it looks like the group is in danger of breaking entirely, steer back towards the issue of agreement (or a common threat, that works too). If a character doesn’t seem to be fitting in, try to find an issue that pulls him without alienating the others. If, for example, CD is feeling more and more like the fourth wheel on a trike, I’d try a threat to the USA from foreign agents. Python isn’t going to like that idea, the Maiden may be ambiguous but at least she isn’t instantly averse. Rumpshaker might balk, but if the foreigners are fascist or something, he might consider fighting them the lesser evil. (This is all without bringing in Weaknesses or other factors. Rumpshaker might just shrug about the spies until a girl with doe-brown eyes and a trembling lower lip asks for his help.) Watch out for issues that turn up just +-, especially if those are stated and not just your parenthetical guesses. Issues like that can be third rails, and if you jump on them, your game might die. But don’t fence them off from the players! PCs are, after all, the engines motivating the game and they have that stuff on their character sheets for a reason. Those reasons ensure they’ll bring them in. Trust me: The lure of improving their results spurs loads of creativity. If you let the players bring in those elements, the two characters can argue and debate on the side, while you keep the primary issue looming to hit them with when it things are getting too tense or the other players are getting too bored. When the players touch the hot button, it’s far more acceptable for the GM to try to steer them away. If the GM starts it, it looks wishy-washy or manipulative to then try and yank it back. This is especially true if you made it a central motivation. Then you might have really screwed yourself by putting two characters in a situation where they can’t agree, with two others not really
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caring, and nowhere to escape from it. You don’t want that. Let them bring those troubled ideologies in themselves—especially when they have Villain or Crux fates to make their points particularly sharp.
Knocking Them Down Once you’ve got a sense of the hooks that lure PCs to bite, it’s time to sink it into their tender flesh, haul them gasping from the stream, and cook up some fun. There are a couple ways that resolution is going to arrive, and I’ll spare a little discussion for each.
All We Do Is Talk Talk I wrote up the section on Acid Barf, so far be it from me to disdain the fightysmashy path to plotline resolution. But I also wrote up the Linguo-Jammer. While the four-lane highway of violence is often the preferred route in a superhero game, don’t be surprised or offended or exasperated if your players explore the overgrown footpath of talk. Or the shadowy secret hallways of spying. If a character enters a scene planning to find out who’s providing all the money Crankshaft Industries is pouring into R&D for animal mind control, you want that player to walk away from that scene with something. Otherwise, it’s just a dud— wastes your time, wastes her time. You don’t have to give her the information she’s seeking but if you don’t, try to provide another meaningful question. It’s perfectly possible, of course, that she’s barking up the wrong tree. If she is, you want her to know it in a reasonable amount of time. Red herrings are fine, they keep interest up, as long as they don’t take more than a scene or two. After three days, both guests and fish start to smell. After a full episode, a red herring does too. It’s equally possible, if not moreso, that the character does something stupid or foolish or obviously dangerous, and then his pull and draws ensure abject failure. That’s no excuse for grinding the game to a halt, especially if you’re using the Smear and it hasn’t yet Tipped. (See the next chapter for explanations of these terms.) Basically, there are several ways a talking or sneaking scene can go, depending on whether it’s a good lead or fake, and depending on whether the PCs handle it well or poorly. Good Lead, Smart PCs. Clap your hands and say yeah, they’re firing on all cylinders. Give them their hint. Give them a little extra information to make things easier later on. Give them the phone number of the cute receptionist they talked to—this is their time to shine ‘cause they did everything right. A False Trail Competently Walked. Not quite like Mom catching the championship-winning slam-dunk on video, but it’s not like the PCs totally blew it. Let them find out that they’re on the wrong trail and let them get a little extra something for their trouble. Maybe the guy they talked to becomes interested in finding out who’s responsible—if for no other reason, because he doesn’t want any more caped avengers of the night dripping flammable discharge on his hardwood floors. Look at these scenes and see why your PCs were so sure this was a good route to check: If you figure out what caught their interest, you can catch it again at a later date. Good Lead, Handled Badly. Keep in mind that there’s a difference between “bungling” and “doing something the GM wouldn’t have done.” Be open to alternative problem solving. That said, sometimes the cards and dice get inexplicably cold and there’s just a big, clear failure dropping on your lead. Give them an indication that they’re on the right track, even as you keep the critical
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information just out of reach. This provides the good kind of frustration—the kind that promises eventual satisfaction and makes them feel they earned their success. If they can’t figure out whether they wasted their time or not, you get the bad kind of frustration, where they don’t know how close they are. Even when they fail, they should know they were failing in the right direction. Bungling a Bad Lead. This may seem like a fine occasion to fall on the PCs like wolves on a crippled lamb, but that’s probably not necessary. They’re already going to be disappointed that they didn’t get closer to solving their mystery and the odds are good that they looked like dunces without the GM sticking in anything additional. They should figure out that the lead’s bad, take their lumps and move on. Indeed, from a narrative standpoint it makes perfect sense for the consequences to be less when they have the wrong end of the stick. Their real enemies are more likely to be prepared, surely, while a false lead has less to hide and less reason to be ready for an incursion of costumed adventurers.
Mmmmmortaaaal Commmmbaaat! Like I said, I’m going to assume you’re an experienced GM and know better than to make every fight a cakewalk or to punitively overwhelm your characters with more opposition than they can handle. You know, generally, how to run a fight in a game. Here’s how to run a fight in this game. If you’re using Wild Talents, the fights in eCollapse have some elements looser than you expect—specifically the capabilities of your PCs, depending on whether they pulled Hero or Villain. A character with so-so combat potential can turn into a raging monster with a King of Clubs in his hand, and that’s exactly how it should be. Eeeevil wouldn’t be a temptation if it wasn’t efficient, right? Similarly, Heroes and Cruxes are going to be gobbling, perhaps, more stuff than you’re expecting to have gobbled. Roll with it. In that spirit, it’s likely that your PCs are going to thwart one another, possibly quite soon. This is a delicate thing to handle, particularly in the middle of a life-or-death conflict. It calls, I think, for the soft power of a GM’s influence, rather than house rules that constrain people from screwing with the other guy’s fist fight. I don’t know your players. Maybe a game where they actively try to screw one another over to death is good fun, they play hard but there are no sore feelings afterwards. On the other hand, if one guy is being a jerk—or is simply expecting a screw-your-neighbor game when no one else is—you need to gently step in and clarify the expectations. Suggesting that, for the first couple sessions at least, you only interfere in combat in order to protect other characters is probably reasonable. Once a rhythm of play has formed and people know what to expect, those sorts of tensions can be introduced gradually instead of ambushing the newbie in the first session. The Smear of Destiny, on the other hand, is just vaguer in every direction than the One Roll Engine that drives Wild Talents. It gives narrative power to the players, for pity’s sake! So already many elements of fight scenes are going to be fluid and random and flying wildly in from left field. But there’s random and then there’s chaotic random, so it may help before starting the game to set a few parameters and get everyone in agreement. The most constrained form of Smear-based combat is when the GM gives a very specific number of enemies and the PCs can’t narrate the defeat of more than one or two nameless characters per action. Moreover, the PCs have limited authority over what sorts of things the enemies choose to do, and while they can introduce physical paraphernalia into a scene, they can’t do anything too out of place.
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The more liberal form is where the PCs can wipe out lots of unnamed goons in an action, but where the GM doesn’t necessarily have to pin herself down on how many remain. In this form, there is a polite fiction that these unnamed fighters are anything other than a GM pacing tool. (If you’re going to use GMCs this way, make sure you don’t crush the PCs by accident.) Getting totally gone with it allows the PCs to spontaneously find handguns lying around church pews and narrate GMCs dying by choosing to jump in a tree-chipper rather than face the wrath of the characters. At this level, it doesn’t just run a risk of becoming a mockery, it is a mockery. But if that’s your fun, go have it. I, after all, am the guy who wrote the phrase “the most constrained form of Smear-based combat” and I can only hope you enjoy playing the game as much as I enjoyed writing those words.
“ Seekas of th e world! Tonigh t! You have noth ing to lose bu t you r brains! ”
- Manborn, Ch ristomu nist ant i-CECA cru sader, wh ile engag ing a pack of enhanced spider monkeys with a baseball bat.
Gaming the Smear It is possible to run an entire session of eCollapse without once drawing from the Smear. If your characters are following what they’re For and Against, if they’re in a situation where their mods and roles apply frequently, you can cruise right along, reach a conclusion, and leave the whole card element unused. And that is, honestly, fine. If your group is conservative and doesn’t want to die, you can roll along just like that. But players should be aware that there are drawbacks to being a no-Smear group. First off, you’re cutting out a resource. If you never try your luck you’re never going to get lucky. Secondly, if your GM is worth a damn she’s going to move heaven and earth to throw situations at you that activate your Weakness, challenges where your mods aren’t applicable, and scenarios where what you’re For and Against are irrelevant, if not actually directly opposed. If you don’t take the risk and use the Smear, you may not get the job done. Then there’s the small matter of your other players. Remember them? The whole strategy of leaving the Smear undisturbed only works as long as the whole gang is in on it, and there are incentives—often powerful incentives—for your fellow players to throw a roadblock in your path. As long as your Suffering is zero, you can leave the Smear in peace, but as soon as you get even a single point, your character’s in jeopardy. Sure, you may think that Tipping Point is far off and it’s all right to have no Valor and a point of Suffering, but all it takes is for your buddy to draw one card and luck onto the King of Diamonds. What are the odds of that? Oh, not great. Better than one in fifty-two, of course, and rising as the Smear gets explored, which is likely to happen quite quickly if the other players also have a change of heart and decide to rack up some Valor to protect themselves. Because Valor doesn’t just protect you from the Tipping Point, remember. You start with a point of Valor, but if you don’t get more then your first point of Suffering can weaken you, and that second can hamstring you even without Tipping. A final concern about leaving the Smear untouched, of course, is that it protects the big bads just as much as it protects the PCs. Even snot-nosed punks can’t die before the Tip, unless you’re a Villain, and even the most destructive Villain is going to face a powerful enemy again if the PCs lack the Valor to deal with foes permanently. If you want it like that, it’s a valid way to play. Just be aware of problems you’re imposing on yourself. So how about the opposite tactic? What about grabbing cards all the time? That situation’s a lot more straightforward, even though it depends on what your fellow players decide to do. If you’re the only one grabbing cards, odds are good you wind up damn near invincible. You have Valor, they don’t, and when the Tipping Point comes it may not even slow you down much. Of course, your friends who didn’t draw are very likely to pay the price, especially if your GM is enough of a sadist to prey on the weak. (Hey, they knew how to defend themselves. If they wanted to gamble on keeping the Point distant, they should have been aware what was coming. They did read this sidebar, right?) But really, odds are good that once they see you drawing, their reluctance to touch the Smear evaporates. If one player is eager to Tip, there isn’t much the others can do to hold him back, so it’s in their interests to get draws while they can, before the risk gets too high. The middle route between racing for the Tip and never getting there consists of drawing moderately, only in need, and counting on the rest of the group to be similarly circumspect. It’s easier said than done, of course, especially when a tempting Jack or Queen floats up and you remember where it is. But you can trust your fellow PCs, right? Sure you can. Even the Crux.
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The Smear of Destiny System While eCollapse can be used as a setting for any game where you want to subtly probe the “Hero vs. Villain” trope, it can also stand on its own with a set of rules that really hit you over the head with it. These card-based rules are called the Smear of Destiny.
Elements of the System Here are the pieces, the tokens that get manipulated to produce results. Once you know what they are, I’ll explain how they interact.
The Smear The central component of play in this system is the Smear, an array of playing cards spread out (or, for the finicky, arranged in a pattern) on a common table. You start with a normal 52 card deck, but the Smear should contain only the following cards. Four each of all the cards Ace-9 Three 10s Three Jacks Two Queens The King of Diamonds Put those cards in a deck, shuffle it thoroughly, then spread it across the table, splayed out randomly, without any cards lying one atop another. If you prefer, you can arrange them in a rows, but that tends to push the game to its Tipping Point (see page 90) sooner.
Valor On each character sheet, there’s a place to track Valor. Every time a character looks at a card from the Smear, he gains a point of Valor. The more Valor a character has, the harder that individual is to destroy, but the more Valor the group has, the closer it gets to the Tipping Point (see “Tipping,” below). Valor starts at 1. At the end of every session, when the Smear gets put away, Valor drops (or rises) to a value equal to current Suffering+1.
Suffering The character sheet also holds a space for tracking Suffering. Whenever a character is harmed, be it physically or emotionally or whatever, he gains a point of Suffering. He also gains a point of Suffering if he uses any Ace result. The GM decides when what is narrated warrants a Suffering increase, as long as she’s not nasty about it. (If she’s nasty about it, players may stop attending games.) When Suffering is equal to Valor, all the character’s draws and factors get dropped a level. That is, if he plays a Jack, it only counts as a 10. If he plays a 2, it counts as an Ace (and gets him more Suffering). As soon as the Suffering comes on, the demotions begin, even in the middle of resolving an action.
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Before the Tipping Point (see page 90), results get dropped two levels if Suffering exceeds Valor. After the Tipping Point, if a character’s Suffering exceeds his Valor, he’s out of the game. Usually this means dead, but possibly just institutionalized, arrested, or too despondent to continue. After a character rests, he may lose a point of Suffering. Or he may not, if the GM decides the Suffering is really severe (such as a broken arm, or having your mom say “I shoulda thrown you away and kept the afterbirth!”). At the end of a session, when the Smear gets put away, all non-physical Suffering is erased. The character’s Valor then rises (or drops) to Suffering+1.
Factors A factor is what determines an outcome—whether a character hits that cop in the junk or misses, whether he convinces his girlfriend to come back or whether she leaves, whether he successfully resuscitates his recently-revealed illegitimate child or not. Factors are rated Ace through King. A card drawn from the Smear can be a factor. An element on the character sheet (Weakness, Superpower, etc.) can be a factor. Factors can be increased or decreased, usually by what a character is For or Against (see page 33), or by having Suffering equal to or greater than Valor (see above). Aces are low. Kings are high. High factor wins. What “wins” means is explained a little later, on page 91, but for now content yourself for knowing what a factor is.
Drawing When a character is going to do something risky and uncertain, there’s a choice. The player can either default to factors on his character sheet, or he can draw a card from the Smear, or he can use the factor from his role as Hero, Villain or Crux. He can also combine any of the above, so if you really want to get it done, draw and use your role and your superpower. So, if a character can use his superpower as a factor and chooses not to draw, he gets a Queen result. If a character has drawn the King of Spades as his destined role (see Chapter Four), putting him in the Crux role for the episode, he can get a King result when interfering with Heroes and Villains, without taking a draw. Or the player can just fish a card out of the Smear, raising his Valor. When a player draws, he turns the card over and shows it to everyone. When every player who wants to has drawn and shown, they all put their cards back in the same places. This means that if a character turns over a Queen, everyone who draws first in later turns can get that Queen, if they remember exactly where the card was. But nobody drawing at the same time can get that Queen, because the first guy keeps it turned up. These mechanics heavily reward those who pay attention and remember where good and bad cards are at in the Smear. This is why the game lasts longer if the Smear is truly random. When it’s in a grid, it’s much easier for a player to note down “There’s a 10 card third from the left in the bottom row” on her character sheet. Not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that. The more confident the players are in their ability to manipulate the Smear, the sooner the Smear tips.
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Tipping The Tipping Point represents a change of state in the game’s events. Before the Tipping Point, things are uncertain and weird, but still possibly concealable. Afterwards, the stakes go up. Things can really change. People can really die. That’s the primary difference between the tipped and untipped phases of play. Before the Smear tips, characters can’t die, no matter how much Suffering they rack up. Major antagonists can’t die either. In fact, even minor GM characters are protected, unless they have to die to push the plot. The only exception to this is that PCs in the Villain role (see page 69) can kill unnamed antagonists before the Tip. Even the Villain can’t put down a major threat until after the Tipping Point. They have the will, but lack the power. After the tip, your character leaves play when Suffering exceeds Valor. Period. There are two factors that cause the Smear to tip. When the player group has drawn ten cards, the Smear tips. That is, if there are five players, and two of them each rack up five new points of Valor, the Smear tips and the other three are doomed if they have more Suffering than Valor. If each of those same five players only took two draws apiece, the Smear would still tip. This is because, after ten draws, the collective group of players have a pretty good chance of turning up high cards , if they can just remember them, thereby succeeding a lot. This is also why the Smear automatically tips when the King of Diamonds gets turned up. As soon as that bad boy shows his face, it’s on. The characters are quite likely to kick righteous ass all over the board, but with very little tolerance for mistakes. (I recommend putting a bowl with ten pennies or ten cherries or ten whatever next to the Smear. Whenever a player checks a card, take out a token. It’d probably be really fun to put M&Ms in there and see how the game dynamic changes depending on whether the GM or the PC gets to eat the candy with each draw. But anyhow, this provides a very visceral way to track how close the game is to tipping. When the bowl is empty, flip it over. If you’re a real drama queen, smash it on the floor, just clean up afterwards.)
GM Characters and Situations The GM does not touch the Smear. When GM characters have applicable boosts and mods, they get Queen results. If they’re using high tech, they get Jack results. So-so technology? Provides a ten. Other than that, they get one free nine factor on every action. Minor characters—people so unimportant to the plot that the GM hasn’t bothered to name them—give up or faint the first time they take a point of Suffering. However, they can’t die until the Tipping Point has passed, unless the Villain makes a specific point of killing them. Keep that in mind for narration, players and GMs alike. Important characters, the major players with names, stay in play no matter how many Ace results they get driven down to or how many superficial attacks land on them. But before the Tip, they do flee or faint or otherwise stop if hit by a King. They can only be removed long term after the Tipping Point, and then only when attacked by someone who uses a King factor. (Thus, they can be usually be
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killed by someone who draws a King, or by a Villain, or by someone promoting a lower result by acting in accordance with what they stand For or Against.) The most important characters, the tough major antagonists, only fold after two, or even three Kings, at the GM’s discretion. The same kind of approach can work with inanimate opposition. Going against normal crap (fighting the flu, finding a job, trying to get some hard math right the first time) the opposition gets a nine and folds after its first point of Suffering. Something that’s a technological barrier (getting out of handcuffs, escaping gridlock traffic, programming an outdated VCR) has a Jack for opposition and is resolved after a Suffering point. If it’s really a toughie, or has multiple factors to cope with, it might have a Jack, nine back. Major perils like typhoons and crashing planes and bioengineered plagues have Queens and may, at the GM’s discretion, only be resolved by King factors.
Resolving Before starting any resolution process, the player should spare a glance for the GM, who may indicate that there’s no need to fall back on the rules. If the GM decides an action is impossible, there’s no point in drawing cards. Similarly, the GM may just float players the occasional ‘gimme’ either to advance the plot, because success is reasonable, or just to establish or reinforce that the character is badass. D. Vincent Baker recommends that GMs “Say yes or roll the dice,” which is shorthand for only engaging the rules when uncertainty is suspenseful and entertaining. But when something is uncertain and it’s dramatic to have success or failure on the line, it’s time to resolve the action. Here’s how you do that.
Step One: Declare Everyone who’s involved states what their character is trying to do. At this point, the involved players should see if any factors on their character sheets apply. They also say if they want to use the Smear or not. If they do, they immediately raise Valor by 1 and the GM checks to see if the Tipping Point has arrived.
Step Two: Turnover Here’s where we get into timing, because people who are going to the Smear’s card factors must take turns. If the player who drew the King of Spades at the start of the episode hasn’t revealed that he’s the Crux yet, he must do so now. Crux always draws first. Before the Tipping Point, the King of Clubs (or Villain) gets the second draw, and the King of Hearts (the Hero) gets third. After the Tipping Point, the King of Hearts gets the second draw, and the King of Clubs gets third. After all the King cards have gone, other players draw in order from right to left, starting with the Crux.
Step Three: Factors and Narration Each player declares their factors. “My attempt to punch out the truck driver is a Queen,” for example. Kings go first, then Queens, counting down to Aces. Each
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player, in turn, gets a chance to describe what happens to his character, within four general parameters. The narrator cannot contradict anything anyone else has said, or anything else that has been established so far in the story. The narrator cannot make a major change to what his character was attempting. He can describe success or failure, as long as it’s in keeping with the declared action and it doesn’t contradict previous narration. He may also describe success at a different but very closely related task—diving for cover instead of diving to tackle that escaped Reeb monkey, for example. The only exception to this is an Ace result or lower. That’s always a failure, but the player still gets to describe the exact nature of the failure. The narrator can only describe one thing. Your group may have a loose and easy time figuring what one element of narration is, or you may want a concrete break point. There are some ways to do it objectively. One is to take a deep breath before speaking, and forcibly stop narrating when that one breath runs out. Alternately, everyone can narrate for 15 seconds. (I know, it’s not very long.) If you’re on the internet, run it through Twitter and abide by its letter limits.
What If There’s a Tie? As you can readily imagine, the person who narrates first is in the pole position. But what if there’s a tie? Darren’s trying to hit the truck driver and has a Queen result. However, the truck driver is also modded and gets a Queen result. What happens? Either player can choose to defer, which simply means, “I let the other guy go and then I go.” If that happens, they keep their tied results and the one who yielded goes second. If neither one defers, their results cancel out. If they have a secondary factor, they resolve on that factor. If they don’t, it becomes an Ace.
Example: Let’s look at Darren and the modded trucker. Darren drew from the Smear in addition to using his boosted strength to slug the guy, and the card he got was a 5. Moreover, before becoming a vigilante, Darren was a cop, so that factor also plays in as a 10. If neither he nor the trucker defer, their Queens bump and Darren has to wait until his 10 comes up. But the trucker also drew, he got a 10 and they bump again. Darren falls back to his 5, while the trucker is now stuck with an Ace result. When the 5 comes into play, Darren’s player takes a breath and says, “Darren jumps up, grabbing the door, then breaks the trucker’s jaw and knocks him out in one shot. As the door rebounds from the force of the punch, Darren swings inside the cab and gets behind the wheel.” When the trucker’s result comes up, he can’t stay conscious or dodge the blow— they’ve already happened. But he can describe how things turn to crap for him, and he does. “The punch jars him out of his seat and he collapses across the floormounted stickshift, pushing it into drive while his knees settle on the gas pedal.”
Passive Defenses A lot of good defenses—boneshocks and secondary endoskeletons with Queens, rumpus suits and ceramic plate armor as Jacks—don’t require you to do anything other than get shot. When protected by them, you use its factor when someone attacks you but—unless your action was something protective—you get no other factors if it’s a tie. Thus, no matter what you’re doing, you get a Queen if you have boneshocks and someone’s trying to clobber you. Just remember that if you narrate success at your action and forget to narrate that the guy misses you, he still might cream you. You also don’t get that Queen if no one bothers to strike you. This is a bit of a weird situation, in that it makes well defended characters more effective when they’re attacked. On the other hand, in an uncertain, loud and violent conflict, you’re far more likely to accomplish your goals if you can wade through the gunfire without sweating about taking a hit.
Hurting If narration indicates some kind of misfortune, which can be anything from a bad bruise to intellectual bewilderment, the character takes one point of Suffering. Characters also get a Suffering point every time they use an Ace outcome. Any time Suffering is equal to Valor, all the factors the player uses get degraded a level—Queens become Jacks and 3s become 2s. Before the Tipping Point, factors get degraded two levels when Suffering exceeds Valor. After the Tipping Point, the character leaves play when Suffering exceeds Valor. Leaving play can mean death, retirement, catatonia or anything else that fits circumstances. (Including kamikaze attacks. Just sayin’.)
An Example of Play. The friendly neighborhood GM has started a new game of eCollapse. The four PCs are as follows. • Jade Python, who has boosted coordination (Q), Valor 1, Suffering 0, used to be a motivational speaker (10), Stands For Multiculturalism, Stands Against Imperialism, and has a Weakness for her dysfunctional family.
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• Rumpshaker has boosted strength (Q), Valor 1, Suffering 0, used to be a soldier (10), Stands For Anarchy, Stands Against the US Army, and has a Weakness for good looking ladies. • Collateral Dammit extrudes flammable explosives (Q), has Valor 1 and Suffering 0, used to be an architect (10), Stands For Patriotism, Stands Against Governmental Corruption, and has a Weakness involving ruthlessness when people beg. • The Maiden of Bleeding Eyes has an aero-ink ejector (Q), has Valor 1 and Suffering 0, used to be a forest ranger (10), Stands both For and Against the USA, and has a Weakness for environmental destruction. The GM requested beforehand that the PCs be nominal allies, so the game opens with them at the remains of a state park. Jade’s divorced sister, who lives in the depths of denial, asked Jade to come out for “a nice day at the park” with her two little nephews—this, despite the desolation of the onetime forest, and the obnoxiousness of the children. But she was right about it being “day.” The Maiden of Bleeding Eyes (in her daytime persona of May Dennings) tagged along, not only because Jade was desperate, but because she’s heard some rumors about weirdness in the forest—something about moving vines and biting flowers. Probably nothing to it, but she just lost another cashier job, so why not? Rumpshaker’s secret identity (Rupert Shackley) came along because Jade said her sister was cute (which was a lie) and CD Hastings (known on the terrorist watch lists by his nom de guerre, “Collateral Dammit”) caved in when Jade begged. They draw cards to assign roles for the episode, but keep them hidden for the time being. There’s some casual in-character chat—Rupert disgruntled because he was sold a false bill of goods (“Damn Jade, you must really think I’m hard up!” “Hey, that’s my sister! She has inner beauty!”), CD enduring abuse and petty humiliation at the hands of the children, and May getting an encyclopedic list of the ex-husband’s failings (“He kept wanting to fool around in my bottom! You know what I’m talking about, right?”). They don’t display their cards until a conflict arises: One of the kids wanders off among the dead trees and doesn’t respond to calls. Jade immediately wants to go off after him. Rumpshaker throws his hands in the air. CD suggests going to get help, as does May.
PYTHON: “C’mon May, who’re we going to get? Another forest ranger like you, right?” MAIDEN: “Ex-forest ranger. Big emphasis on “ex.” These woods are devastated, I’m not going to be at my best. Neither are you, with your family pulling you this way and that.” GM: Speaking of which, Jade’s sister is starting to freak out. She’s going to start begging any second… DAMMIT: Fine, we’ll go in the woods. RUMPSHAKER: What? Are you just striding off into the forest? DAMMIT: Pretty much, yeah. Yelling the little creep’s name. PYTHON: C’mon. Don’t make me bust out my public speaking to guilt you into this. MAIDEN: Fine. If it all turns to crap though, it’s on you. I’ll try to track the kids through the woods. GM: So, that’s a ten for your profession, nothing really helps you…
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MAIDEN: Other than being a hero. She flips up the King of Hearts GM: ...I was going to say, ‘but there’s no real point in having you unable to find the boy.’ But this works too. Unless someone with the Crux card wants to interfere? Okay. You easily track him to a sort of ravine, and it looks like he was running along the bottom of that. There’s some weird tracks, too—like something heavy was dragged through the underbrush or was hauling itself along the incline. It’s steep enough to be a hassle, but manageable. MAIDEN: How big are we talking? GM: Mmm… hard to say, but at least the size of a bathtub. Massive enough to splinter saplings here and there. In fact, right ahead of you, you can see a tall, thin tree swaying side to side… DAMMIT: “That little wiener’s dead meat.” PYTHON: “Hey! That’s my nephew!” DAMMIT: Sorry Jade. I meant to say, “Your wiener nephew’s dead meat.” GM: The kid’s mom starts running and screaming his name, and you can hear truly panicked cries in response. It’s all happening not far ahead MAIDEN: I run. PYTHON: I yank a gausser out of my purse and run. RUMPSHAKER: Sure, I’ll run too. DAMMIT: I get out a couple bombs. What? Just in case! GM: All right… Rumpshaker, you’re going to get there first unless you hold back, you’re taking ten-foot strides. Jade Python is close behind because she’s so coordinated she can sprint all-out without tripping on stuff. Unless you hold back? No? Okay. You turn a little bend in the ravine and there’s a squid in a tree. It’s wrapping a tentacle, one of the two big primary ones… RUMPSHAKER: Wait, did you say “squid”? GM: Yep. Its big ol’ cephalapod head is encased in a round, clear helmet, kind of reminiscent of a goldfish bowl. It’s full of liquid. Inside, it looks like some kind of VR gadgets are strapped onto its eyes and its tentacles are sticking out of these kind of rubberized short-sleeve gaskets. There’s a little grille set on the bottom of it and it’s… RUMPSHAKER: Aight, I’m pegging that glass bowl with the biggest rock I can find. GM: Not waiting to hear what it has to say? RUMPSHAKER: I’m afraid it’s going to be something about R’lyeh. GM: Wrong game. Are you Crux or Villain? RUMPSHAKER: Just my awesome self. And I’ll take a draw, if you please. GM: Good idea. We’ll just run a mano-a-squiddo round before Python shows up MAIDEN: And me. Hero, remember? GM: Sure, I’ll let that go. Take your Valor, draw your card. RUMPSHAKER: Crap. A three. So I’ve got a Queen factor for boosted strength, a 10 for being a soldier, and a three. GM: Um, soldiering will help you fire a gun or punch a dude or clean a latrine, but throwing rocks? For that you’d need ‘caveman,’ c’mon. RUMPSHAKER: Gah. Queen and three then. GM: It’s got a Queen.
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RUMPSHAKER: It’s boosted?!? GM: Modded. As you’re deciding which boulder to huck, you hear a loud tinny voice saying “Merle. Must. Feed. Merle. Is. Hungry.” Gonna defer? RUMPSHAKER: Not on your life. I’ll fall back to my three. GM: It falls back to its Jack. It crawls lower on the tree and starts reeling the kid in towards its underside while his mom grabs the tentacle and pulls backwards. You throw your rock and it leaves a tiny hairline crack, but it’s not going to collapse. The kid is passed out from terror and has sucker marks on his face. RUMPSHAKER: The crack is leaking and growing, and the mom manages to pull her kid out of its grasp. GM: Nice. At this point, Maiden and Python show up. Also, now that it’s closer you can see there’s a dude strapped on it. MAIDEN: A dude? GM: Yeah, it almost looks like it’s set up so that he wears the squid like a mech suit. He’s in a uniform. RUMPSHAKER: Please be Army please be Army please be Army… GM: So who’s Crux? DAMMIT: Me, sir. GM: Still offstage, then. I guess that means Jade Python, our Villainess, is next to declare. PYTHON: I’ll run over to my sister and help her with the kid. MAIDEN: Gape, draw and shoot. RUMPSHAKER: I’m going to jump up and start rasslin’ it. GM: It has realized you just put a ding in its thing, so it’s focussing a good six of its arms on strangling you. RUMPSHAKER: “Bring it, fool!” I’m drawing. MAIDEN: Drawing. PYTHON: I’ll let the Smear sit for now. GM: Very well. Take your Valor. Factors? It’s got Queen Jack 9. PYTHON: Crap. To help ‘em I’ve got… well, a 10 for motivational speaking. And an Ace back because they’re my family. GM: Not to mention defaulting to Ace because you’re a villain trying to get people to see things your way. PYTHON: What? Okay, nuts to words, I’m just going to grab them with my boosted agility and pull them as far out of its range as I can. Queen, Ace behind it then. GM: Anyone got better than her Queen? RUMPSHAKER: I’m up to King to beat down this piece of crap. MAIDEN: And I’m up to King because I’m going to try and draw its attention. I’ll defer if you want. GM: Um… legit authority? MAIDEN: I’m guessing the soldier is either dead or the squid has overcome it. Either way, the squid’s against the army. GM: I guess that makes sense. MAIDEN: I’ll defer if you like. RUMPSHAKER: No, you’re the Heroine, you go first. MAIDEN: Shouting, “You want a fight? Fight me!” the Maiden of Bleeding Eyes puts three well-aimed shots right into that hairline crack. The first one chips, the second spiderwebs and the third shatters it entirely.
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GM: Nice. Rumpshaker? RUMPSHAKER: Struggling with its squirming tentacles, Rumpshaker looks like he’s in trouble until the glass breaks. Seizing a huge shard, he drives it through the thing’s brain sac, killing it instantly. GM: Its Queen ties with Jade’s. Defer? JADE: Sure. It’ll just fall back on a Jack and beat me anyhow. GM: In its death-throes, it falls from the tree and the glass shards cut up Rumpshaker’s hands and arms something fierce. Take a point of Suffering. Python? You’re up. PYTHON: The kid cries “Aunt Jade, you’re hurting me!” and I tell him to zip it as we rush down the path. GM: That ends the conflict. As it’s dying, it babbles. “Merle. Hurts. Merle. Must. Rise. Merle. Is. Afraid. Merle. Wants. Corporal. Pilsen.” RUMPSHAKER. I kick in its grill and say, “Shut up!” I’m going to check over the man attached to it. Dead like she thought? GM: Oh yeah. But there are definitely controls attached to his harness that connect to Merle. RUMPSHAKER: Let’s not be on a first-name basis with it, ‘kay? DAMMIT: “Hey guys, I’m ready to… what the HELL is that thing?!?” PYTHON: “Wassamatter, CD? Never seen a military land-squid before?” GM: Okay, hand in your role cards and get ready to re-draw as you hear choppers in the distance… coming closer…
Another Example of Play A few sessions in, the PCs have tracked down Corporal Pilsen, the illegal squidmod program, and its mastermind, General Jiggets. He actually is a general in the US Army, and they’ve gotten past loads of soldiers to confront him. They’ve run him to ground in the corridor of a four-star hotel along with two of his boosted bodyguards. The session is nearing a close with their Suffering and Valor at these levels: Jade Python, Valor 2, Suffering 1; Rumpshaker Valor 3, Suffering 3; Maiden of the Bleeding Eyes Valor 4, Suffering 2; Collateral Dammit Valor 4, Suffering 3. Since they all started out the session with Valor 1, they are only a single point away from tipping the Smear. The four PCs have all picked up assault rifles from previously defeated soldiers, allowing them Jack results if they opt to shoot. The players have pulled cards for roles, with the following results: Jade Python draws the King of Hearts, making her the Heroine. Collateral Dammit grins with the King of Clubs—the Villain card. The Maiden of Bleeding Eyes draws the King of Spades Crux card, leaving the Rumpshaker in an undefined role. They have not yet revealed their cards.
GM: As you burst through the stairway door, you see the General poking the elevator button one more time with anxious frustration. Hearing the commotion of your entry, he spins and draws his sidearm. PYTHON: “Surrender, General! We’ve already given our proof to the Senate! It’s all over!” I’m trying to persuade him, or his goons, to give up and come peacefully. DAMMIT: I’m throwing a bomb at them. PYTHON: Thanks CD. Thanks for the assist. GM: Okay, what about the rest of you? RUMPSHAKER: Leaping down the hall to grab the General. DAMMIT: Hey, I’m totally throwing explosives there. RUMPSHAKER: I didn’t know that when I leaped. MAIDEN: Oh geez, I’m trying to grab the bomb before he can blow up Rumpy. GM: The two guards are opening fire while the General dives around the corner, taking cover and getting out of sight. What’re our factors? MAIDEN: (revealing her card) I’m the Crux, so I get a King to stop the bomb. I’m also taking a draw, so my Valor goes up to 2. DAMMIT: Wait, that’ll put us over the edge! MAIDEN: I’ll agree not to draw if you agree to defer to my action. DAMMIT: Ugh… Okay. RUMPSHAKER: All right, I’ve got a Queen for boosted strength, a 10 for my job and both of those are going to promote because this is about as far against the Army as you can get. The second promotion from being proAnarchy cancels out the demotion from being hurt, and I’m drawing a card. DAMMIT: Dude! Tip! RUMPSHAKER: I’m hurting, I need more Valor. You’re the one who was taking crazy draws earlier, now it’s my turn.
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DAMMIT: …please? RUMPSHAKER: Fine. No draw. What have you got? DAMMIT: I’ve got a King for destructiveness, right? The General is the hinge of the conspiracy’s plans, and killing him would be villainous, right? Especially if I’m really sloppy about who else gets hurt? GM: You’d need to Tip to kill him. PYTHON: Ack. I’ve got a 10 from my job and it promotes to Jack because I’m against their imperialist schemes, but without a draw, that’s it. GM: The General gets a 9 from his job, while his goons both get Jacks for their guns. One has a Queen boost with the rifle too, and they have 9s to fall back on. PYTHON: Good grief. GM: Both the Maiden and CD got Kings, and CD is deferring, so… go. MAIDEN: All right, deep breath. “I snatch the molotov out of CD’s hand and yank out the fuse, yelling, ‘Don’t be an idiot!’ As we struggle over it we move around the corner where the guards can’t see us and, eventually, I get the bomb in one hand and the fuse in the other.” GM: Next King? DAMMIT: That’s me. RUMPSHAKER: I’ve got a King too. My Queen promotes, because me hate army so strong. DAMMIT: I’ll defer to my friend then. RUMPSHAKER: Rumpshaker bounds down the hall, scraping the ceiling with his leap, and tackles the General with rib-crushing force. “Call off your guards!” I yell in his ear. DAMMIT: Letting her have the bomb, I switch to my rifle and run down the hall, planning to circle around and get the bad guys from behind. GM: That’s not very villainous. Do you really deserve that King? DAMMIT: I plan to shoot them in the back. GM: Fair enough. Next up, the guard with boosted coordination opens fire. Python, you’re the only one in view. Suffer. PYTHON: Crap. I’m tied. So my Jack now becomes a 10? GM: Uh huh. Putting you after the second guard’s Jack. “Panicking, the second guard shoots at Rumpshaker, peppering him with gunshots.” Take a Suffering point. RUMPSHAKER: Noooo! I’m in the hole! PYTHON: Do I get to go, or is the General first? GM: The General is out cold, so he’s not doing anything. He’s badly injured, easy pickings, except for one thing… no tipping point. If you want to finish him off, it’s going to cost you Rumpshaker. PYTHON: Oh, son of a... Okay. As Jade Python crumples back into the stairwell, the second guard realizes that he’s missed his chance to give up, has failed his commander, and has become a tool of oppression. He kills himself. GM: What? PYTHON: Oh right, he can’t die before the Tip! How about he surrenders and says, “Don’t kill the General?” GM: I guess so. Next round? There’s still one guard, and he’s boosted… PYTHON: Nobody draw! We can keep this off the Tipping Point and save Rumpshaker! CD: How’m I supposed to evil this guy up if… wait, I have an idea.
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GM: Who’s doing what? The guard’s going to shoot somebody. MAIDEN: Not if I shoot him first. CD: Or me. RUMPSHAKER: These guys have good armor on them, right? I’m grabbing surrender-belly to use as a shield. PYTHON: I’m going to race down the hall and try to disarm the living guard. It’s not harming an authority to take his gun away, right? Hell, I’m trying to save his life. GM: How heroic. Okay, who has what factors? The guard has Queen Jack 9. Maiden? MAIDEN: Is it interfering with CD if I kill-steal him? GM: You can’t kill the guard. MAIDEN: Okay, then I’ve got Jack. DAMMIT: Hail to the King, Jack. I promise I will destroy. PYTHON: Everything gets demoted from injury, so I’ve got Queen, Jack, 10. RUMPSHAKER: I’m demoted two levels, so that would be… 10 from boosted strength, 9 from the high-tech armor, 8 from my soldier job? GM: Collateral’s first, then. DAMMIT: “Die, bitch!” The guard never knows what hits him as CD jams the barrel of the rifle right under the edge of his helmet and unloads the whole clip, spraying the hallway with gore and bone fragments. PYTHON: Seeing CD step behind the guard… GM: Hold on. The guard’s tied with you. In fact, you two are going to bump all the way to your 10 unless someone defers. PYTHON: Oh no. I’m not letting you narrate in some last shot on a PC or a bunch of dead civilians. I bump his Queen, at least. GM: So we’re to Jacks. Someone going to defer? MAIDEN: I’ll bump the guard’s Jack. That leaves the Python’s Jack intact, right? GM: And drops you to Ace. MAIDEN: I’ll take that hit. DAMMIT: I guess we know who the REAL Heroine is. PYTHON: Ahem. Seeing CD step behind the guard, Jade screams “No, don’t!” but it’s too late. She gets splashed with brains but is uninjured, the guard doesn’t fire, and most of Dammit’s bullets wind up on the inside of the helmet or going into the guard’s armor from the wrong side. GM: And to ten. Rumpshaker? RUMPSHAKER: (Deep breath.) As the guard slumps harmlessly to the floor, Dammit drops his spent rifle and Jade starts helping the injured Rumpshaker to his feet. MAIDEN: And on Ace, the Maiden pulls the trigger, only to realize she has the safety on. CD snickers at her and she flushes with humiliation, suffering from acute embarrassment but taking no real harm. GM: All right, that seems like a good place to end. Two bad guys are alive, but in your power, who knows what could happen? So, looking at my notes… Rumpshaker, you took two points of physical suffering, so those remain and your Valor shifts to 3. Dammit, all your Suffering was emotional, but that thing with the pleading parking valet really eats at you for some reason, so your Suffering drops to 1 and Valor to 2. Maiden, you got off easy with one physical and one psychological injury, so your Suffering drops to one and Valor to 2 also. As for Jade Python, all your hurts were physical, so you stay at Suffering 2 but rise to Valor 3.
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The Limits of Narration When you get narration rights, be you GM or player, it’s a lot of power. Use it wisely and don’t get carried away. As a player, you probably want what’s best for your character (or, perhaps a bit more exactly, you want your character to be central). If that’s all you care about, narration gives you a blank check to wreck the game in your selfish pursuit of individual awesomeness. That lets your character be the protagonist of a short-lived game that gets cancelled and never referred to again by anyone but you. Or if they do, they mention it with an eye roll as an example of how not to play. If wrecking other people’s fun sounds like your idea of a good time… um, I don’t really know what to say to you. Perhaps you would benefit from some form of professional intervention. Most of us prefer to have our fun with other people who are having fun. It’s actually better that way. So in addition to your desire to put your character in circumstances where she can shine, you need—need—to have a stake in keeping the game going. I mean, the game isn’t very entertaining when it’s not being played. So when you narrate, do it with one eye on keeping the story going, keeping the setting coherent and keeping the tone on track. Instead of being solely a player, narrate as if you are, for just one fifteen second breath, a co-GM. You don’t need to worry about pacing the action or providing the right balance of conflict or bringing in high drama (though if you want to do all that, narrative power certainly gives you the leverage). Mostly though, as a player you should feel obligated not to actively screw everything up. I’m sure you can handle it. If you’re GM, and you’ve run lots of games before, it’s a bit less of an attitude adjustment. You’re used to monitoring the big picture and making decisions to keep things moving forward. The adaptation for GMs to make is accepting the players’ narratives. In most games, only the GM controls GMCs and describes the settings. Not so with the Smear. The players get a taste of the dizzying power to pull elements out of thin air and cram them into the imagined scene. The difference is, they’re probably going to do it to try and survive (or get an advantage). Try to negate this as little as possible. Between conflicts you still have the same godlike authorial prerogatives. But when they start touching those cards, the power is a bit more balanced.
Ten Things PCs Cannot Narrate 1. Random Disaster Just when all seems lost and at its bleakest, when your doom seems certain, you may be tempted to narrate something like “Suddenly, an earthquake collapses the building in around us!” or “Without warning, a meteorite plows through the sky and hits the tank!” or “A blinding flash on the horizon is the first sign, and witnessing the mushroom cloud gives us only time to realize we’re dead before the concussive blast atomizes us!” You can’t shoehorn in random environmental chaos just because you’re frustrated.
2. A Massive Change of Heart If the Contessa has consistently forgotten your character’s name, mocked him, belittled him and dismissed him as a threat, you can’t suddenly have her declare that she’s madly in love with him. Okay, some GMs may allow it, but be ready to withdraw the suggestion if challenged. The inner lives of GMCs are somewhere you can rearrange the furniture a bit, you but you can’t start tearing down load-
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bearing walls and ripping out the wiring. If the GM has introduced a character, especially in an antagonistic role, there’s probably a plot arc planned there. Suddenly editing the character’s motivations in a jarring and fundamental way screws the GM.
3. New Unsuspected Abilities Let’s suppose you’ve located the King of Diamonds in the Smear. Your declared action is “try and get the helicopter flying.” When your King lets you narrate, can you then start flying that whirlybird? Well, it depends. If you were a pilot in your old life, or have dropped heavy hints about taking flying lessons, or you have a Spatial Orientation Boost, or you’ve otherwise established that your character can approach this by doing something more productive than randomly pressing buttons then yes: You can fly the helicopter. But even a King of Diamonds amped up by pursuing both what you’re For and Against is not sufficient to let unearned specialty knowledge bloom in your character’s mind. High cards don’t mean success at everything. They mean success at reasonable things. That’s why there’s the prohibition against contradicting what’s established. It applies to implied ignorance as well as established knowledge.
4. Success at an Entirely Different Character Action On one hand, conflicts are dynamic and constantly evolving. On the other hand, you have to declare an action or there’s no way to know which Factors engage. So, to high-five the first hand, you can change your actions a little. But to firmly shake the other hand, you can’t change them a lot. So, for example, what if you declared you’re going to shoot Kenny, and before you get a chance Kenny runs behind a truck? You might be able to reorient towards Filbert, if it’s established that Filbert was standing pretty close. On the other hand, if you declared you were shooting, you may not be able to abort that to perform first aid on a buddy or jump in the truck and run Kenny over. It may help to think of it this way: Your declared action commits your body to a certain set of movements. You can do other things that use the same movements (like aiming and pulling a trigger) but not radically different movements (stopping and hiding instead of running full tilt). However, see “Panicked Self Defense” on page 105.
5. Another PC’s Feelings All the reasons you can’t narrate what a GMC feels apply sevenfold to doing it to a fellow player character. You can narrate something that should provoke a certain feeling (“...spraying you with your only son’s brains…”), if it fits the narrative flow and doesn’t contradict anything else. But it’s up to the player to decide between appalled shock, icy vengeful wrath, or depraved indifference.
6. Goofy Stuff This is a catchall category to recommend against puerile humor where the antagonist slips on a banana peel at his moment of greatest drama, or decides to settle matters with a cream pie duel. It’s easy to put down hard rules to protect the character integrity (you can’t give people radical personality rewrites on a whim) or the flow of events (you can’t contradict what’s already established) but tone is a lot harder to protect. So I’m going to fall back on your good nature and suggest that you pick up the vibe your GM and other players lay down, and not deviate too far from it.
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7. Unearned GMC Death Let’s suppose your stated action was “I dodge behind the waste bin” as a pair of drug-addled gangsters open fire. You get a high card and you want to narrate something like “I duck to safety behind the heavy steel dumpster just as one of the gunmen misjudges his step, slips off the loading dock and catches his temple on a loose brick, instantly dying!” While narrating a few bad judgments on behalf of the bad guys is kosher, you can’t just write them into their coffins when your character did nothing to make them suffer. If you’d flung down a bag of marbles before you dodged, you could certainly wipe that dope fiend out. But since all you did was duck and cover, you can’t be rid of that pesky assailant.
8. Bill & Ted’s Preparations If you’ve established that you carry a bag of marbles with you everywhere, it’s fine to attack by flinging them, shooting them from a slingshot or coshing someone with the sack. But if you aren’t carrying marbles, you can’t use marbles. That’s reasonable, right? Narrating that you have the exact perfect object for the crisis of the moment can break plausibility. Now, if the exact perfect object is a credit card or ring of car keys or the spring from a clicker pen, then that’s plausible for just about anyone. But something like “I just happen to have an iPhone with a high speed connection to cloudsourced decryption software and the attachment for feeding it to keycard readers” is probably beyond the pale. Note that ‘probably.’ I’m going to suggest mild exceptions for some mods. GMs ought to loosen the straps a little for characters with coprocessor mods: Making unlikely predictions is their whole shtick. I’d suggest that a coprocessing character can pull out a useful object once per scene as long as it’s (1) cheap, (2) available and (3) something he could easily carry without it being visible. So a 3/16” hex wrench is clearly fine, but a giant ten-pound plumber’s wrench? That’s going to leave a bulge in the pocket. Similarly, unless he’s recently gone on an extremely vague spending spree he’s not going to have a diamond ring or a thermal-imaging rig. But stuff like magnets, penlights, spraypaint, superglue, aspirin, vaseline or a coil of light-weight rope? Why not? For the Pattern Matching boost, I’d let the mad creator type pull out a “new device” about once per episode. (That is, his right to introduce a new gadget is refreshed every time roles are drawn.) This ain’t Batman’s cellular radar panopticon, either. Think something that an electrical engineer today could bang together with Radio Shack parts for under $200. Also, even if he has the okay to bring up a surprise, that permission doesn’t negate continuity. If he has climbed up the building with no problem and snuck through a two-foot square water drain, it can be presumed that he’s not carrying a home made harpoon gun that he “just forgot to mention.” Spatial Orientation is just the same, except it’s only good for strictly mechanical, non-electronic devices and tools. Needle-nose pliers, vise-grip, teeny-tiny screwdriver? No problem. Jackhammer, circular saw, conduit bender? Problem.
9. Backstory You can’t change the past, and you can’t create new pasts for GMCs or your fellow PCs on the fly. “Because he was tormented by rats as a child, the villainous Baron Von Bildungsroman squeals and cowers at the sight of the rodents.” It’s very similar to producing unexpected changes of heart, only instead you’re
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producing unexpected reasons for previously hidden emotional responses. It’s a bad idea for the same reason as #2. The other way this gets used is to provide some kind of skeevy unearned advantage to the PCs. “Jonah the Reeb sneers and says, ‘Ha ha funny human Jonah owner promised many dollars for Jonah capture and none hunters catch yet!’ just as the net trap falls on him.” Nice try, but leave the rewards up to the GM, please. She’s got a game to pace.
10. Premature GMCs Death Before the Tipping Point, GMCs are as protected from death as PCs are. So if you keep warding off the Point, you’re going to see your nemesis Baron Badnews again and again.
Five Things GMs Cannot Narrate 1. A PC’s Exact Feelings You don’t get to decide what PCs believe or feel. As GM, you have a lot of power over the game, but saying “Your PC feels a surge of respect and adoration for Mary Sue” is a bridge too far.
2. What a PC Says Similarly, player character dialogue is scripted exclusively by the player who runs the character. That’s a no-brainer, right? Really, I’m just padding out the list.
3. Permanent Removal of a PC’s Powers, Except When You Can It’s assumed that the characters went through hell to get their mods, even though that hell occurred before the game began. You can’t permanently take them away, even if the plot would seem to dictate just that. The sole exception to this is if it’s after the Tipping Point and their Suffering is greater than their Valor. That’s right. If they’ve gotten in deep enough to die or be forced out of play, you can opt to just disempower them instead. My guess is, most players retire characters who get their special purpose glands yanked, but a long-running and well beloved character might keep right on going. Understand that if you take away the power away, you then do not get to kill or eject the character. Unless the character takes more Suffering, in which case death is probably a kindness.
4. Humiliating Backstory Even outside of conflict resolution, you don’t get to retroactively make PCs look like chumps. Springing an unsuspected “dirty secret” on a PC when the player has no buy-in is a bad way to treat people, so it’s disallowed. (Maybe in Unknown Armies or Call of Cthulhu, but characters in eCollapse have enough grief without being subject to the tropes of what are, explicitly, horror games.) So. Having the main bad guy reveal himself as a long-lost son when the player has given no indication that the character is anything other than a virgin isn’t cool. In fact, it’s not cool even if the character is a well-established manslut. Making it all right could be as simple as asking the player, “Is it possible that Captain No-Pants there has an illegitimate kid out there somewhere?” and getting a yes. Many players would deeply dig that sort of development, but you have to get them on board beforehand. It’s a moral imperative. By the same token, having a GMC ally refer to “that time back in college when
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you got drunk and wet your pants in front of all the Sigma Pi sisters, even the dolphin” is jerky. Maybe if the character is a jerk you can have him say that, but if the PCs corrects him with, “No, that was Lenny,” you really ought to go along. You can throw all kinds of miserable and difficult challenges at characters as the game moves forward. Let them have their histories unsullied.
5. Dead GMCs Before the Tipping Point, Except When You Can Just as the PCs are protected from death or removal before the Tipping Point, so are your GMCs. Now, if someone’s got to die to advance the plot, that’s fine—a story where they investigate someone’s murder makes little sense if the GM can’t set up the murder. But try to keep GMCs from dying before the Point. Especially allies or characters the PCs care about.
It ’s like f igh t ing f ire with f ire.
Only, you know, for crime!
Eight Things PCs Can Narrate 1. Minor Misfortunes You can’t have that enemy APC get smooshed by a random meteorite. That’s the bad news. But you can have it throw a track or get condensation on its camera lens or fire a dud cartridge out of its tear gas launcher. Things fall apart, especially in eCollapse’s future of shoddy manufacturing and questionable, graymarket replacement parts. So if you need a reason for your character to not get shot, you can narrate an equipment failure on the part of the shooter. It’s not terribly heroic, but neither is squealing as the hot lead sears your gall bladder.
2. Emo Hesitations You can’t suddenly have KillCrush the GMC hired gun have a Come to Jesus Moment in the middle of a contracted fire fight, deciding to leave his violent life and become a fisherman on the Red Sea. You can’t inflict huge, inexplicable changes of character on GMCs. But even icy assassins have moments of doubt. If a character is pleading, or helpless, or has made some absurd claim to be KillCrush’s lost half-sister, the assassin might pause. Even highly competent murderers can be momentarily conflicted. Or just plain ol’ confused. So a momentary lapse of character is a lot more reasonable to narrate in than an unexpected or permanent change of character.
3. Panicked Self Defense Let’s suppose your character Fifi’s in the middle of a heist and she’s trying to crack a safe even while the bullets crash around her. Hey, no problem, you’ve got the Factors on your side. But let’s furthermore suppose that one GMC’s declared action was “set Fifi on fire” and the GM narrates just that. Is Fifi now stuck trying to crack that safe, or can she stop, drop and roll? Up on page 102, it says you can’t succeed at an entirely different action. But by the time you’re on fire, it’s not an outcome you can call a true ‘success.’ So if your Fifi gets set on fire or shot or thrown in a pool of sharks, you can change your actions to some sort of instinctive resistance. She can smother the flames, stuff something in the bullet hole, or swim for her life.
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4. Appropriate Humor It should be clear that eCollapse is a game with a sense of humor, but in actual play, it’s best if the humor comes in one of two flavors. One is the wry side comment, player to player, outside the fiction being created and commenting upon it. That’s okay. Using narration to turn characters and situations into jokes is not okay—see “Goofy Stuff” on page 102. But that said, funny things happen every day. The guideline is to try and have humor arise from character, not to bend character for crude humor. It’s a fine line to walk and different groups have different standards. But introducing humorous elements that benefit your character or impair your antagonists works just fine as long as the humor is secondary to keeping the narrative moving. Crashing the plot to make a sophomoric ha-ha is shortsighted, but having something that’s funny both to the players and their characters happen as a natural-feeling outgrowth of the events established—well, that’s about as good as it gets. Still, handle with caution.
5. Foreshadowing Remember back on page 103 where I said you couldn’t suddenly shoehorn in a piece of backstory that justifies a sudden and unexpected emotional outburst? What you can do is lay some pipe that prefigures that emotional outburst (or whatever) and—assuming your GM or fellow PCs don’t rip it up and destroy it—reap the benefits of your planning later on. For example, suppose you’re facing a named GMC, we’ll call him “Mr. Little.” You narrated an attempted shooting, but the GM’s cards got the drop on you and she described a miss, with Little fleeing down the subway steps. You can’t change that miss into a hit— that’s something that’s already been resolved, no backsies. But you can stick in something like, “As he rushes down the steps, Little stumbles, wincing, and hisses in pain as he clutches his knee before pressing on.” Does this derail the narrative? Hell no. Before, he was getting away. After? Still getting away. But the next time you see Little, if you want to narrate his bum knee going out, it’s no longer such an unexpected development. The weirder or rarer the element you want to introduce, the more times you should foreshadow it, just in case the GM wants to gently parry it aside. (If she does, take the hint and let it go.) Giving a bad guy a crippling and incongruous phobia requires more establishment than something that’s common and easily overcome—like the aforementioned bad patella.
6. Backshadowing GMCs Just as you can set up future events, you can lay the outlines of a revealed former event. This is a little trickier and more involved, so you may need to hang more details beforehand. But let’s say you want to build it up that you and Crimson Vixen, a primary villainess, are actually dating in your unmasked personae and don’t know it. Now, the easy way to do this is to pass a note to the GM, or even suggest it openly. But if you want to spring it on everyone, I’m going to lay out guildelines for that. I’d say that about three hints is enough for something as shocking as “unexamined personal connection.” By “three hints,” I mean hints in three separate scenes, or spread across a couple episodes. So during the first fight with Crimson Vixen, you make a smart remark about her perfume as you land a savage round kick to her ribs. On a later scene where you’re dating innocent Emmanuelle Naïf, you mention that she winces when you slip your hand around her side and, when you ask about it, she says she pulled a muscle at yoga class. Then, next Episode, you find a way to narrate in a perfumed love note from Emmanuelle… a curiously familiar scent. With that stuff in place, you can narrate an unmasking during a climactic fight and point out all the clues (which you yourself inserted).
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By the same token, if the GM has other plans for Crimson Vixen, she has opportunities to wave off your clues—describing how much shorter Vixen is than Emmanuelle, or establishing that Emmanuelle’s voice is an octave lower, or simply by having them show up at the same time. This only applies to GMCs, though. You want to have an unexpected backstory reveal with a fellow player character, you talk to the player or you don’t do it.
7. Foiling Other PCs You bet your sweet bippy you can hose your fellow players like this. Suppose, for example, that your declared action is shooting the bad guy, the bad guy’s declared action is shooting your fellow PC, and that PC’s declared action is to dodge out of the way. If you narrate before the GM or that other player, you can describe the GMC’s bullet tearing through flesh and lycra as it slams home with surprising accuracy. Why would you want to do this? Well, there are several reasons. First off, you may be in one of those groups where inter-group antagonism is encouraged and it’s just understood that people are playing rough. If that’s part of the fun and no one’s going to get their buzz harshed by this sort of thing, know that this is one more poison arrow for your quiver. Secondly, sometimes characters work at cross purposes. If you want to use your player privileges to wreack havoc on another’s character plans, go ahead, though realize that this may escalate. Thirdly, sometimes a player has their character do something that is, in the overall scheme of things, a bad idea. Possibly an intoxicatingly bad idea. But (the player helplessly says) “I have to obey my character concept!” While this Gamer’s Nuremburg Defense is used to justify all kinds of mad selfish juju, I’m going to assume that your fellow PCs are genuine deep-immersion players who are willing to let a character die rather than betray his ideals. You, on the other hand, may not want to see that character snuff it, however heroically. Let’s suppose, then, that the GM has made it crystal clear that the flaming orphanage is a death trap, ready to collapse any second. The guy with the Hero card already has his Suffering and Valor in perfect balance and the Tipping Point is receding in the rearview mirror. You get to draw before he does and your character is in no position or condition to stop the Hero. So you declare that you’re rolling away into the relative safety of the gutter, he’s trying to run in just in case someone survived, and you pull the King of Diamonds. You are permitted to describe the fiery implosion of the building, a cataclysm which no one could survive, nobody, no way, the mourning starts now, before he takes more than a few steps. Really, you’re doing him a favor. Don’t expect a thank-you card though.
8. Appropriate Stuff Outside of Conflict It seems a little weird that when everything goes pear-shaped and crazy, that’s when you get to have input into events. So feel free to narrate in little bits of apt embroidery even when the scene doesn’t feature screaming and chaos. However, in this instance, you really have no recourse if the GM says no. It may, therefore, be more polite and easily digested if you phrase your narration as a request or suggestion. If the GM seems too uptight, you can show her this paragraph, but outside of conflicts she’s got a lot of chainsaws to juggle, so accept that if she dings your request, it’s either because it contradicts greater coolness that you haven’t seen yet, or because she’s just really busy.
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eCollape Quick Reference, Smear of Destiny edition
VALOR : SUFFERING:
ROLES : KING OF HEARTS = HERO KING OF CLUBS = VILLAIN KING OF SPADES = CRUX
TIPPING:
RESOLVING:
GMCS:
Starts at 1. Goes up 1 every time the player draws. At session’s end, it changes to equal Suffering +1. Starts at 0. Goes up 1 when bad things happen or when forced to use an Ace. When Suffering = Valor, all Factors are at -1. Before the Tipping Point, all Factors are at -2 when Suffering > Valor. After Tip, character leaves play when Suffering > Valor. Rest may or may not remove Suffering.
Roles get drawn at the start of play and after climax. gets a King factor when sacrificing for others, drops straight to Ace if he tries to harm an authority. gets a King for destroying valued things and people, drops straight to Ace when trying to convince people of what he really believes. gets a King factor to interfere with Hero or Villain, drops straight to Ace if trying to prevent harm to himself form Hero or Villain.
Before the tipping point, only minor GMCs can die, only if the Villain kills them. After the Tipping Point, anyone can die. The Tip occurs after ten draws from the Smear, or when the King of Diamonds turns up. Smear Contains: Four each Ace-9, three 10s, three Jacks, two Queens, and the King of Diamonds.
First, everyone declares what their character is doing and whether they’re using the Smear. The GM checks for the Tipping Point. Second, people draw. The Crux draws first. Before the Tip, the Villain draws second, and the Hero draws third. After the Tip, the Hero draws second and the Villain draws third. Bystanders go in order from right to left, starting with the Crux. Finally, factors are counted down from King. On each player’s turn, they narrate a short element of the event. If there’s a tie, either of the tying parties can defer and let the other go first. Otherwise, their factors cancel out.
All GMCs get a free 9 factor for every action. If they have relevant powers, they get a Q. They get a J if using high tech, and a 10 if using mediocre tech. Nameless GMCs are out of the action after taking a point of Suffering. Named GMCs can only be stopped by a King factor and can only be killed after the Tipping Point. Major antagonists may require 2-3 King factors to put down, and also cannot die before the Tipping Point.
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eCollapse { Smear of Destiny character narrative }
I used to be normal. I made my living ( 10 ) . ( SKILL )
But then
!
I couldn’t let that go, so I went on the black market and got myself ( Q ).
VALOR :
( SUPERPOWER )
I believe in
( +/– 1 Factor ) , just as much as
( STAND FOR )
I’m against
( +/– 1 Factor ).
( STAND AGAINST ) SUFFERING : But I have to watch out because
( A ).
( WEAKNESS )
The name on my birth certificate is
,
but the world is going to know me as
.
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eCollapse Quick Reference, Wild Talents edition
WEAKNESS :
When exposed to his Weakness, a character takes a -2d penalty.
STAND FOR :
When supporting what he Stands For, a character gets +1d or can negate a -1d penalty. If he fails to support this cause, he gets a -1d penalty.
STAND AGAINST :
When opposing what he Stands Against, a character gets +1d or can negate a -1d penalty. If he fails to oppose it, he gets a -1d penalty.
Roles When acting in accordance with role, either add +WD to pool, or add +2H, +2W or +1H, +1W if you get a set. When acting in opposition, -3 Width penalty to set HERO (KING OF HEARTS) :
Cannot harm people in legitimate authority. Always succeeds at risking or sacrificing for others.
VILLAIN (KING OF CLUBS) :
Cannot persuade people to believe as he does. Always succeeds at destroying valuable people, objects or concepts.
CRUX (KING OF SPADES) :
Cannot prevent damage to self from Hero or Villain. Always succeeds at interfering with Hero or Villain.
BYSTANDER (OTHER CARD) :
No bonus, no penalty
Gadgets CERAMIC IMPACT PLATE :
HAR1 for 2-4 impacts, then useless LAR4 for location 10 plus various electronic goodies
CIVILIAN HUDSET :
CLING LADDER :
EMP CANNON :
FRESH KNIFE :
GAUSS PISTOL :
GAUSS RIFLE :
IMPACT HAIRBAG :
MICROWAVE WAND :
RMPA SUIT :
HAR2, LAR2, but can be locationally disabled
RIPPERGUN :
At < 10’ W+3SK, Spray 2, Pen 2; at 10-20’ W+2SK, Spray 1, Pen 1; at 20-30’W+1SK, Spray 1, Pen 1; at 30-40’, WSK
SPOILER GAS :
WIGGLES :
+3d bonus for climbing Diff. 4 Stability check and Area 4 temporary Shock, fries electronics. 1 round to generate blade. W+1K, Pen 2, but Pen rating drops by 1 every ten minutes. Disintegrates when Pen < 0 WSK, Spray 3 W+1SK, Spray 3, Pen 1 If you land on one, normal damage or 2S to each location, whichever is less Area 1S, ignores non-metal armor
Makes gunpowder inert -2d penalty to motion recognition software permission granted to copy this page for personal use only
eCollapse { Wild Talents edition }
Player : Character : Alias(es):
CHARM :
(POOL)
MODS & BOOSTS :
SENSE
(POOL)
Lie
(
)
Empathy
(
)
Perform
(
)
Perception
(
)
(
)
Scrutinize
(
)
Persuade
COMMAND : (POOL) Interrogate
(
)
Intimidate
(
)
Leadership
(
)
Stability
(
)
MIND :
MY WEAKNESS (-2D) :
I STAND FOR (+1D) :
BODY
(POOL)
Athletics
(
)
Block
(
)
Brawl
(
)
Weapon
(
)
(
)
(POOL)
(
)
(
)
(
)
(
COORD.
(POOL)
Dodge
(
)
Drive
(
)
)
Drive
(
)
(
)
Weapon
(
)
(
)
Weapon
(
)
(
)
Stealth
(
)
I STAND AGAINST (+1D) :
EQUIPMENT AND OTHER PERKS 10 3- 4
5- 6
7- 9
1 permission granted to copy this page for personal use only
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Wild Talents 2nd Edition: Everything you need to run a suspenseful, action-packed campaign with eCollapse or in any superheroic setting you can imagine. Hardcover, 384 pages, with full-color illustrations by Todd Shearer. Now available from Cubicle 7 Entertainment and Arc Dream Publishing.
