StrangeThing

Today we look at Games Workshop's weirdest attempt to adjust their dark military science-fantasy setting: the Tau. This essay doesn't exactly tie into my last Warhammer 40k essay. More of a tangent. I do have a direct follow up to Is Warhammer Satire  in progress.   The Tau were introduced in 2001 , to a sharply divided reaction from the game's fan base. There are four main criticisms of the faction, which tend to bleed into each other.  First off, Tau crisis suits were crazy strong when they were first introduced. They had a shoot-move-shoot ability that was obnoxiously difficult to play against. This has since been fixed, but it made a lasting impression on the player base. As I mentioned, the various criticisms against the Tau frequently get mixed up. Second, they looked and played very different from very other faction. Tau are very technology focused, with no trace of the mysticism that the other factions have. Tau are the lone atheists, in a universe full of g...

 For those that don't know, the Warhammer 40,000 setting was created by Games Workshop. It's a famously bleak space fantasy setting, summed up by the tag line, "In the grim darkness of the 41st millennium, there is only war." 

The epic battle between light and darkness! So many fantasy stories have revolved around this idea it hardly needs explanation. Light has the traditional aesthetics of the good guys. White and gold are the symbolic colors. It's the side that feels like home.  The Dark side is all black and red. The rituals of the dark gods are carried out in the dead of night, out of sight of decent people.  Sometimes the two sides are called Order and Chaos, or Good and Evil. Is Light always Good, and Dark always Evil? That's up to the table to decide. Mortals can always be  It may be that even the gods are capable of error. This is a style of Quick and Dirty magic. A tweak to default options of that magic system, to represent a character whose power comes from the Divine Light.  The table can decide what styles of magic are available in your game. A game world can have one or more styles of magic. The secular magic described in the original Q&D article can exist alongside th...

It's been a minute since I blogged here. In the past few months, I've run a Fate Star Wars game, flew to Minnesota for my grandmother's funeral, and dealt with the fallout of the election. I'm not sure which was the most emotional for me. That Star Wars game was a real learning experience. The game fell apart because of expectation miss-match. I was thinking Andor , they just wanted to shoot storm troopers. So we're talking about a new game, using the fantasy ideas I've been noodling on. Expect to see more fantasy stuff here soon. I definitely need to work on my GM skills. More details and atmosphere. More funny voices!  BTW: I'm on Bluesky and Mastodon if you want to follow me.

Long ago, I was talking about superheroes and games with a friend. He mentioned how superhero comics tend to make their popular characters immortal. If only for commercial reasons. We wondered what it would be like if it worked the opposite way, with supers burning out and dying young. In an RPG, you could give the PCs an overcharge mode, a sort of instant win button, but with an increasing risk of death each time you use it. I was struck by how that could give a game a strong theme of self-sacrifice. Then I forgot about it, until I got to a certain point working on my Fate supers game, the Gift. I call it Ultimate Effort.

Many powers let you act on a super powered scale. What does that mean?  The Gift normally only uses two scales: normal and super. Occasionally you might see a scale above super, usually called cosmic. Rarely, you might need an ad-hoc scale for sub-human power, like if a super villain hits you with a shrink ray.  When you take super scale action against super scale resistance, you don’t need to do anything special. Scale only needs rules when acting across scales.  Most of the time, a super powered character acting against normal resistance automatically succeeds. Don’t bother to roll in most cases. In an action scene, it doesn’t even need an action. If you do roll for such an action, roll with a +4 bonus.  If you've read Dresden Accelerated, that number will seem very high. It's the level described as "godlike" in that game. A smaller value would make for a more forgiving game. But it breaks suspension of disbelief if someone can lift 50 tons, and then lose a wrestli...

 I ended my last post with the list of mantles from my draft document. (Thank you blogger for making that image the thumbnail for that post. 🙄) You may have noticed some of the names are a bit overwrought, like they could be infinity stones or something. The language felt appropriate for a supers game.  In the setting, the term mantle, and many of their names, come from a super with psychic powers. He was one of the first to write about how the gift works, and his grandiose terminology stuck. So what's a mantle? It's a themed collection of powers that gives you a ready-to-play super hero in one step. Think of it as a template. Each one comes with lots of suggestions on how to customize it to fit your concept. I intend to make a section on making your own mantle, and character creation is essentially point-based. But it is very useful to me as a designer to have a list of character types that the game needs to support. Creating the mantles without a power list was actually eas...