Showing posts with label Paranormal Friction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Paranormal Friction. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 01, 2019

The Patronage Of Paranormal Friction

You may or may not know, but I have launched a Patreon page. The reason for it is to help with funding the development of my paranormal fiction inspired and Fate-based role-playing game called Paranormal Friction.

If you have followed the blog for a while you'll know that this is something that I've worked at for a while now. I recorded a couple of YouTube videos for a couple of the very earliest playtest sessions. Honestly, I always figure that this would be something that I would write mostly for my own personal use and probably print off copies to use at conventions or home games.

The cover at left is a dummy image that I made up a couple of years ago out of some free clip art. I like the colorfulness of it.

It was probably close to twenty years ago now that I first encountered the genre of paranormal romance. I was at a Half Price Books, when I still lived in Cleveland, and as I was wandering and randomly glancing at shelves, I saw a book with the title Bitten, by Kelley Armstrong. You may have heard of Bitten from the Canadian-based television series that aired on SYFY in the United States (at the time of this writing it is available on US Netflix and I recommend it strongly). Since that book I have traveled through the worlds of Armstrong, Patricia Briggs, Gail Carriger, Devon Monk and others.

The books were filled with witches, magicians, werewolves, vampires, Fae and other things that go bump in the night (sometimes with a little grinding as well). What drew me into the fiction was things like the well-defined characters who were more than hard-bitten and grizzled anti-social loners. These were people who loved. People who had friends. People who were members of a community, who cared about the people around them and the places that they lived. I mean, yes, sometimes these characters wanted to be left alone so that they could drink their coffee in peace, but when bad things happened to people close to them, they got a to-go cup.

What I wanted, for a long time, was a role-playing game that would let me play games like the stories that I was enjoying. Some of them were close, on the surface they had supernatural creatures and people with weird powers, but the games fell out of step with fiction quickly. They aren't bad games, but they aren't what I was looking for, either.

I wanted a game that was simple. A game that could allow characters to have connections to each other, and to the world, in ways that were not only fictionally meaningful during play, but also could have some mechanical bite to them as well. I wanted the much-ballyhooed mechanics that "get out of the way" during play.

I have been a fan of the Fate rules since before Spirit of the Century ever came out. Those early free PDFs were so close to the game that I wanted, and unfortunately the variants of Spirit of the Century had an annoying habit of getting more complicated than they needed to be. And then came new versions of the rules: Fate Core and Fate Accelerated. I found the system that I needed to use in Fate Accelerated. The idea of approaches is a brilliant one, while being simple enough that I am surprised that no one hit the idea sooner in RPGs.

If you haven't played, the idea is a simple one. To streamline mechanics they came up with the idea of "What if, instead of coming up with a list of skills that outline what a character can or can't do, we instead come of with a list of ways in which a character approaches a situation? What happens when they do something forcefully or cleverly instead of having skills for all of the sciences, and the different ways that they can hit something?" It was pretty radical. And, it also opened up ways to achieve success in a situation without necessarily resorting to violence as well.

Don't get me wrong, there can be plenty of fighting and violence in paranormal romance fiction. It is just nice to be able to also have ways in an RPG where players can think outside of the box of combat when deciding their characters' actions. All of this meshed together for me, and I started combining material from the various Fate SRDs into a document and compiling it with the explanations that I have come up with for players who have never played the game previously, as well as codifying some of the things that I do when I run games for people.

I try to run my games as cooperative venture as I can. The story creation rules for Fate Core are nice because they give everyone in the group some level of input into the creation of the game's world.

So, all of this went into a pot, and over time as it cooked Paranormal Friction came out of it. I hope that you check out my Patreon page and, if my blog has given you any interesting content over the years, support me as I work to get the final yards of development done for it. There is also a Discord server for talking about the game linked through the Patreon page, and I hope to develop a community around the game.

Right now, as soon as you support the Patreon you get the current copy of my WIP document for Paranormal Friction in a text format PDF. There are still things that I am working to add to the game, and a few rough spots to smooth out yet. Hopefully you will become a part of the journey to get Paranormal Friction to the end, so we can all have a finalized game of it.

Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Hey Rose, Hey Madder...Hunter Rose For Fate Accelerated

Who is Hunter Rose? That's a question that many people wish that they could answer. A socialite and philanthropist, he wrote highly controversial novels that questioned societal norms. He was also the terrifying and vicious criminal kingpin known as Grendel.

From Wikipedia, for the uninitiated:
The story begins with an extraordinarily gifted boy named Eddie. Because victory in his endeavors comes so easily, it all seems meaningless. In despair, he throws a world-championship fencing match and becomes romantically involved with Jocasta Rose, a trainer twice his age. When Jocasta dies, Eddie leaves behind his life and takes on two new identities: Hunter Rose, successful novelist and socialite, and Grendel, elegant costumed assassin and later crime boss. Grendel is hunted relentlessly by Argent, a several hundred year old Native American man-wolf cursed with a thirst for violence. Argent works with the police in an effort to turn his curse to good.
Hunter Rose later adopts Stacy Palumbo, the young daughter of a mobster he killed. Stacy also befriends Argent. Hunter is a loving father to Stacy, but she betrays him to Argent when she discovers that he is Grendel. Grendel and the wolf fight on the roof of a Masonic temple. The battle results with Argent's paralysis and Grendel's death and unmasking. The police discover Stacy's role in this incident and that she murdered a governess to prevent interference with her plan. Developing severe psychological problems, Stacy is committed to a mental hospital until adulthood. After she is released, she marries her psychiatrist, but on their wedding night he rapes her and then commits suicide. The traumatic experience is enough that Stacy returns to institutionalization for the rest of her life. After she returns to the institution, she gives birth to a daughter named Christine Spar.
Grendel is also a contagion, a virus of aggression that infects people and changes their lives and their perception of the world around them. Christine Spar and Brian Sung were each effected by Grendel, after the death of Hunter Rose, and became versions of the Grendel itself.

Grendel, in the form of Hunter Rose, is about a seductive and affable evil. An evil that does monstrous things, but also believes in the protection and sanctity of children (partially due to "Hunter Rose's" own past life). But Grendel is also a cipher. Hunter Rose is as much of a mask as the one that he wears while acting as Grendel. He writes insidious yet seductive novels and acts as an assassin.


Hunter Rose can make an excellent protagonist for your Fate Accelerated games, because of the challenges and moral dilemmas that he can represent. My writeup of him is going to be for my Paranormal Friction rules that I am writing, but it is easily adapted to the baseline Fate Accelerated rules. The introduction of Grendel into your games can be a game changer. Do the characters come together to try to stop him? Do they fear the Wolf, Argent, and instead attack him...taking away one of Grendel's major obstacles (and the cause of the death of Hunter Rose)? What impact does a still living Grendel have on the world at larger?

Why, you might ask, am I writing this up for a game of paranormal romance instead of SuperFAE or baseline Fate Accelerated? Well, the difference between Paranormal Friction and Fate Accelerated are minimal enough to not make a big difference, and I find that as a seductive form of evil, Grendel can have just as much of a place in a paranormal world as does a vampire. And, we never really know conclusively if Hunter Rose is human or not...

Hunter Rose/Grendel

High Concept: Call Me Hunter Rose
Trouble: The Demon of Society's Mediocrity
Aspiration: I Am In Control Of This
Aspects: Rakish Socialite On The Town, Roguish Assassin For The Underworld

Approaches
Careful +0
Clever +2
Flashy +1
Forceful +1
Quick +2
Seductive +3
Sneaky +1

Stunts
Because I am a Clever opponent, I can substitute my Clever approach during physical conflicts and challenges by spending a Fate Point.

Because I have such a seductive personality, I can get a +2 to Overcome when using my Seductive approach.

Argent, The Wolf

High Concept: Cursed To Be A Survivor, Cursed To Be A Wolf
Trouble: The Grendel Must Be Stopped!
Aspiration: The Troubles Of My Long Past Need Lifting
Aspects: Driven By Justice, Being Unsubtle Is A Tool

Approaches
Careful +1
Clever +2
Flashy +1
Forceful +3
Quick +2
Seductive +0
Sneaky +1

Stunts
Because I am a force for Justice from nature, I can substitute my Forceful approach in social and other non-physical conflicts by spending a Fate Point.


Almost as little is known of the Wolf, Argent, as is known about Grendel. He assists the NYC police in certain criminal underworld matters, mostly drug and child sex-rings related crimes. No one is sure how long he has been in the city, or what he actually is. When Grendel started making sounds in the underworld, the two forces faced off. One of the concepts that the original Grendel story played with was the idea that "Good" could be ugly and inhuman in appearance, while "Evil" was handsome and seductive.

Their final conflict left Argent paralyzed and Hunter Rose dead. This wasn't the last time that Argent would face a Grendel. either. Their fates became intertwined through their battles.

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Paranormal Friction: Jimmy Jam (Sample Character)

Hopefully next week I am going to be starting up a new bi-weekly campaign on Google+ called Paranormal Friction. Anyone who knows me knows that I am a huge fan of paranormal romance, and one thing that I have wanted for a long while was a role-playing game that tackled the genre. Well, I got tired of waiting, so I started work on my own game. Paranormal Friction is a hack of the Fate Accelerated Edition rules onto which I am building guidelines for creating the characters from the genre. I am also hoping to work out a couple of sample campaign frames as well, because I think that giving worked examples helps when dealing with a genre that people might not be familiar with, or when dealing with people who might not be gamers (but fans of the genre) and would need a bit of guidance.

I really like the simplicity of Fate Accelerated. It gets right to the heart of creating cool characters, and lets you get to the role-playing with a minimum of effort. Thanks to the guiding design principle of the Fate Fractal, it also makes it easy to design things for a game (like magic and supernatural abilities) without having to come up with a long list of new rules and excepts so that a character can cast a spell. My approach (ha!) is to use the approaches that help define a character also define a character's supernatural abilities, along with their high concept aspect. This should make for a game that doesn't need a lot of extra rules and just reuses the basic concepts of the game's design to do a variety of things.

This is (probably) the first of a series of posts about the game as I work on it. Today I am going to post a sample character made up using the rules. The bit on the supernatural powers will probably be confusing, since it isn't in the baseline rules, but hopefully it will be easy to to figure out.

This is a sample character, Jimmy Jam, a half-demon wannabe rapper. Imagine that the demon with the silly headband (the art is a panel from the excellent Justice League Black Baptism miniseries) is our boy, Jimmy.

Jimmy wants to be a rapper. He mostly means well, but he has to deal with being the result of a night, regretted by his mother, that she spent in the bed of someone that she didn't know was a demon until it was too late. Jimmy has a lot of urges and emotions that he doesn't understand because of who his father is. He isn't always sure about the flames either. Jimmy has not yet met his father.

High Concept: Horny Demons
Trouble: Who Is My Dad?
Aspect(s): White Boy Rapper, Look At That Fire

Careful +1, Clever +0, Flashy +2, Forceful +3, Quick +2, Sneaky +1

Stunt(s)
Because I am a badass rapper, I get a +2 when I Forcefully attack someone in a battle of rhymes.

Supernatural
Creates fire in a Flashy way; Uses Fire in a Forceful way

Refresh: 3

And that is really all that there is to a starting character. That's the beauty of the system, for me. I write a paragraph with a bit of background and then go.