Mustrum_Ridcully

This is the second part of Campaign Setting - Caprica and the 12 Colonies

I am a great fan of Battlestar Galactica.

Unfortunately, the show is over.
Fortunately, the makers are actually creating a new series - and it is set in the same "setting", but before the first Cylon War.

The show is called Caprica and the pilot is out on DVD. I watched and enjoyed it, and I am looking forward to the series so far.
(In related news, I am looking forward to the soundtrack, since I love Bear McCrearys work on BSG, Terminator and now Caprica. )

I know there is a BSG RPG out there, but I always felt that Galactica was too confined to make me feel comfortable with the idea of running a game there.

But Caprica is another matter. You've got 12 worlds colonized by humans. It is not Earth, it's not a colony of Earth. The setting is science fiction, but it's not a space opera with large Empires, full of aliens and anything. In many ways, it is still Earth, except with a different history, different cultures and religions, and a little more advanced technology. Sure, they can travel space faster than light, but they don't really go far.


And so I thought - hey, Caprica might actually make a decent Campaign Setting. The humans and many details are still like on Earth, but the history is different and less well known, giving a DM and players more freedom to redefine things.
That was the first idea. The 12 Colonies have enough stuff to explore - be it the Colonial history, the relationships between the Colonies before the Cylon War, the role of large corporations and criminal organizations, the appearance of Cylons, the first Cylon War, the struggles of the 12 Colonies after the first Cylon War, the Faith of the 12 Gods and the "One True God" - There's lots of stuff to explore.

But then I thought a little further - how about adding ideas from Dark*Matter? Or how about adding my ideas for a "spacefaring" Mutants & Mastermind game?

There are a few games set on Earth or based on Earth being the origin of mankind. How about replacing Earth with Caprica (or the 12 Colonies)? Earth, its history and its customs, they are not relevant. Earth is just a myth from ancient religious strictures, at best a side-line to the 12 Colonies and definitely not the origin of mankind.

But we still have a setting full of people "like us" with a few twists. One could run a superhero game set on Caprica. Or how about Shadowrun? Dark*Matter is obviously possible, too. (One might replace the Grays with "Angels" perhaps? Or with the 12 Lords of Kobol?)

There are a lot of interesting possibilities. Even as I am writing this down, I find interesting concepts (I came up with using Shadowrun while composing this blog entry!)

I don't know yet if I will actually go this route. I might do it, I might not. My Dark*Matter/Aerth idea actually used elements of our recent history, and it wouldn't work so well on Caprica. But other stuff might work great!

I don't know if the creators of the Battlestar Galactica Game will also create a Caprica game, or if there ever will be one. I kinda hope someone will pick it up.
Generally, I'd love to see the BSG:TNS/Caprica world to become a real "franchise" (though we might have a very small timeline to work with, unlike in Star Wars or Star Trek), but at least Caprica could become a good and interesting campaign setting.

It would be cool if someone would also make it work with different genres. Just like the authors of the show of Galactica and now Caprica are using it as a vehicle to tell their stories, others could use it tell their stories. With the right mixture of fleshing out details and leaving them open, one can create a setting that can be used for everything one could use on Earth - but remove most of the stuff one doesn't like. (Of course, it might be more interesting for writers that want to explore politics and philosophical thoughts that are harder to talk about if you refer to real world nations, cultures and religions. You get freed of "political correctness", and also gain a new angle on a topic).
From the Gamer angle, one of the advantage is that many elements of the campaign setting are still understood, and even if not - the world is still very similar to ours, at least in the "every-day" situations that we'd almost feel at home - but are still prepared for surprises.

So, what do you think? Wanna create your own [Genre] Caprica game? Or rather stay on Earth? (Or on Oerth, Eberron or Dere?)

Recently, I had an idea on how to combine several things I found as interesting to use in a game (as DM). There are a few thoughts lingering in my head that I am trying to make into a coherent game or campaign.


I have been working on concepts for a new "modern" campaign for quite some time now. Either as a successor to my D&D 4 campaign, as a off-and-on game, or maybe for my online group.

The original idea was running a d20 Modern campaign, and when I looked into d20 Dark*Matter, I found a lot of stuff I liked, though I wasn't "convinced" by the entire setting. I'd probably still do something homebrew. My idea was an "Aerth" (unfortunately a name already taken) - an alternate Earth, very similar to our own, but a few things that seem historic fact might be wrong.

Thanks to the many comments and recommendations on Mutants & Mastermind and a little thanks to movies like The Dark Knight or Watchmen, I finally decided to buy M&M 2, just to see what it was all about.
I wasn't sure what to do with it, though. Should I adopt my d20 Modern idea and add supers? A Heroes like campaign? Should I reuse Torgs Terra setting? Or how about something more far fatched - a future where mankind travels space, and there are a few superheroes from every planet and colony?
I didn't know exactly...

What I definitely think is that M&M 2 might be a good solution to an unfortunate problem my gaming group faces at the moment - some people have to work at the week-ends, and that is the only time we can meet to play at all, which leaves us struggling to have enough players for a decent D&D game. But a different game, with less focus on parties of PCs might work fine even with just one DM and two players.


That was the gaming side of things. But there's also a "story"/media side of my idea.

I am a great fan of Battlestar Galactica.

I decided to split this blog entry in two parts. It felt too long to read in one go. At least if I or "Short Attention Span Joe" was supposed to read it.

A recent thread on EN World asked "Is D&D 4 charmless". I don't know the real answer to that question (I think that's subjective). But it reminded me of something else and I answered (paraphrasing) "D&D 4 is shameless."

My reasoning behind this is based on my view that D&D 4 in a lot of ways is a design without compromises.

The goal of the D&D 4 design seems to focus on usability and play at the table, and the ability to facilitate a style of play where players face challenges in a fantasy world context, created using transparent mechanics and tools for helping the DM to gauge such challenges.

Other concerns are at best secondary, and there are no attempts to make compromises for other goals.
A common complaint is that certain rules are not designed for world building or for creating verisimilitude.
The rules regarding hit points and healing surges do little to explain what really "happens" in the game, but they are designed to support both long and short term resource management in the game (healing surge "triggers" per encounter and healing surges per day). Similar things can be said about the Encounter/Daily power rules or Action Points.
The DMG contains little information on how to build a "consistent" world (though as I pointed out, you can still use them for that purpose, but it is not what the DMG discusses much), it focuses on what kind of challenges are fair and appropriate for PCs.

Your AC and Reflex defense can be either based on Dex or Int. This gives Wizard a good AC and Reflex defense by default - but he doesn't get the previous edition staple "Mage Armor" to boost it further. One could still explain his half level and Int bonus to his defenses as a result of such spells, but the rules don't suggest anything like that. If it's something that typically applies all the time, it lessens playability if you have to keep book on something that can be taken for granted. The few occasions where it is not granted do not justify the book-keeping if you are focusing on utility and playability.

Skill Points have gone away. You are trained or your are not. The number of ranks in a skill do not matter at the table, only your final modifier. If it's not a concern at game time, simply it.
Certain skills don't even make an appearance - Craft, Perform, Profession are just gone. Very often, such skills are only character background, and they don't find much use during an adventure and the challenges you take. They are more for color then determining success and failure in crucial tasks, so off they go.

I must say, I admire this "No Compromises" approach. But I see that it can also be very off-putting or outright appalling.

If you can craft weapons and armor, it's something your character can do. It should be found in his mechanical representation. And damn, sometimes you might actually want to make a check or make it a challenge. But the designers figured out that this doesn't happen often enough to warrant spending character resources!)

You want to know if your character has still arrows sticking out from him or if he is fine and dandy. Restoring Morale with some shouts might be all nice and dandy, but then distinguish between my morale hit points and my injury hit points! But no, the designers figured that this would add to many special cases and make balancing classes too difficult or outright impossible.

Orcus (Clark Peterson, Necromancer Gamers) was one of the first EN Worlders to talk a little about his PHB 4E, and I remember he mentioned one of these little "No Compromises":
The Dragonborn - a race that had never been a D&D core race before, a race that is not Tolkien fantasy, and a race an unfamiliar player might not identify himself with first - was the first race described in the book. No compromises to utility - Dr comes before Dw and certainly way before Hu in alphabetic order. And that's the order people will search for if they are looking for a specific race description at the table.

I think that also makes 4E shameless. It is not ashamed by the fact that it has new fantasy races. It is not ashamed that certain rules don't "make sense" if they just work and provide interesting challenges.
A little of this "shamelessness" might have always been inherent to D&D - yeah, Dungeons with tons of monsters might not make a lot of sense, but let's gloss over that for the fun of it.

And yes, I think that also makes it okay if some people find this unappealing, bad taste, and do not like the design. Sometimes you might except these compromises - there are conflicting goals and you actually want both, and the game used to make these compromises. 4E is not that game.

There are, of course, also dangers to the "No Compromises" approach. I think a particular danger can be in regards to settings - one of the design goals is to ensure that every supplement can be used with every setting - but there is a risk that you eliminate the entire point of the setting - providing a unique fantasy world.
One could make a point and say that this actually is no longer a "No Compromise" approach - one hand, you want everything to be used with every setting, but on the other hand you want actually different feeling settings. A real "No Compromise" approach would require to have only one setting or to have elements that are specific to one settings and make certain supplements useless (or at least less useful. A book detailing the Astral Sea is not applicable for a setting that doesn't have the Astral Sea.)

I suppose one of the things WotC might want to do is to reintroduce compromises, even if it dilutes the original design goals. It might be what they need to do to bring certain players back. But they have to be very careful - aside from finding the right compromises for "lost" players, they also risk losing those like me that admire the fact that there are no compromises. Maybe future DMGs or an Unearthed Arcana for 4E can do a lot here.

Preparing for an adventure I might soon run in an live online game, I looked at the skill challenge rules again. I noticed something that I had missed so far:

Seems like there are a little more suggestions on how scaling challenges can be achieved, though it still focus on the perspective of party level and doesn't look at it from a game world consistency perspective.

We are currently (among others) running a "Warhammer" campaign with D&D 4. Our current adventure reminded me again that firearms are not as uncommon in Warhammer as they are in D&D, so I thought up a few ways to implement them.

So, there are basically two variant implementations that might best describe the technological advances in weaponry. It's all "pressed" into the D&D 4 rules framework, so I hope it doesn't break the game balance or anything.
You can mix and match the described items to fit your idea of your technological level of firearms. I describe a few magical enhancements for firearms that are available even in the lowest levels of the heroic tier - to support the rareness of these weapons, you might restrict the availability of the enhancements to a higher level and require that a firearm must always have one of the suggest enhancements.

The basic idea is that a firearm is a mix of magical and alchemical item. So people with the Alchemist or Ritual Caster feat should be able to build them. But feel free to define them as purely alchemy or purely magic. The implementation is overall closer to a magical item, because I avoided the disconnect between "cheap" ammunition that higher level characters basically can forget to count and alchemical ammunition that might have costs like alchemical items.

You can either require the Enchant Magical Item Ritual or the Alchemist feat for any character to build a firearm.

Muzzleloaded Firearms
Muzzleloaded firearms are loaded seperately with gunpowder and bullet. The process is very slow, and it is difficult to fire more then one shot during a typical combat. They are crude compared to modern firearms, but still considered very dangerous.

The Hand Cannon - Level 1 item
The hand cannon must be loaded with gunpowder and shot before being fired. Loading the weapon takes a lot of time, so it is mostly used in the beginning of a battle.
Level 1: 360 gp; Level 11: 9,000 gp; Level 21: 225.000 gp
Item Slot: Weapon (Two-Handed)
Power (Encounter - Firearm): Standard Action. Range 15/30. Attack: Dexterity +1 vs Reflex. Hit: 2d4 + Dex damage.
Level 11: Dexterity +3 vs Reflex. Damage 2d6 + Dex
Level 21: Dexterity +5 vs Reflex. Damage 2d8 + Dex

The Arbeques - Level 3 item
The Arbuques is a more advanced version of the hand cannon.
Level 3: 680 gp; Level 11: 17,000 gp; Level 21: 425.000 gp
Item Slot: Weapon (Two-Handed)
Power (Encounter - Firearm): Standard Action. Range 20/40. Attack: Dexterity +1 vs Reflex. Hit: 2d6 + Dex damage.
Level 11: Dexterity +3 vs Reflex. Damage 2d8 + Dex
Level 21: Dexterity +5 vs Reflex. Damage 2d10 + Dex

The Musket - Level 5 item
The Musket can be reloaded much faster then hand cannon or Arbuques.
Level 5: 1.000 gp; Level 15: 25,000 gp; Level 21: 625,000 gp
Item Slot: Weapon (Two-Handed)
Property: If you spend a standard action reloading this weapon, you can recharge its encounter power.
Power (Encounter - Firearm): Standard Action. Range 20/40. Attack: Dexterity +1 vs Reflex. Hit: 2d6 + Dex damage.
Level 11: Dexterity +3 vs Reflex. Damage 2d8 + Dex
Level 21: Dexterity +5 vs Reflex. Damage 2d10 + Dex


The Musket is basically the firewall "non-weapon-weapon" variant. It can be fired every other round (and a feat might improve this to shooting every round). The biggest disadvantage - it is not a weapon attack, so all your nice weapon powers are useless.

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Cartridge Firearms
Cartridge firearms use a combination of bullet and gunpowder, making the reload process faster and yielding more reliable results. This is a requirement for firearms as weapons.
All firearms are considered superior weapons. A two-handed firearm can be equipped with a bayonet, allowing its user to use the firearm in melee as a spear.

Pistol: Prof +3; Dmg 1d8, Range 15/30, Price 200 gp, Weight 2 bl, Group: Firearm; Properties. High Crit, Load Minor
Rifle: Prof +3, Dmg 2d4, Range 20/40, Price 300 gp, Group: Firearm; Properties: High Crit, Load Minor
Bayonet: Prof +2, Dmg 1d8, Price 5 gp; Weight 1 lb; Group: Spear; Properties; Reach

Bullets (10): 20 gp

New Enhancements

Repeating Firearm - Item Level 2+
Note: If you want to give your firearms a feeling of rareness, this might be the minimum required enhancement for them.
The typical firearm of the old world has these properties.
Level 2: +1 - 680 gp; Level 7: +2 - 3,400 gp; Level 12: +3 - 17,000 gp
Level 18: +4 - 85,000 gp; Level 23: +5 - 425,000 gp; Level 28: +6 2,125,000 gp
Weapon: Firearms
Enhancement: Attack and Damage Rolls
Critical: +1d8 per plus
Power (Encounter - Firearm): Standard Action. Make one basic attack against the target, but the target is resolved against the lower of AC and Reflex. Regardless of success, until the end of your next turn, your square and all adjacent squares are considered obscured due to the smoke from the explosion. (Granting concealment against attacks from any square in the burst or any attacks directed at any square in the burst.)


Semi-Automatic Firearm - Item Level 3+
This group covers revolvers and modern auto-loaders. The bullets is fed from a magazine or a cylinder, allowing a fast firing rate with minimal effort by the shooter.
Level 2: +1 - 680 gp; Level 7: +2 - 3,400 gp; Level 12: +3 - 17,000 gp
Level 18: +4 - 85,000 gp; Level 23: +5 - 425,000 gp; Level 28: +6 2,125,000 gp
Weapon: Firearms
Enhancement: Attack and Damage Rolls
Critical: +1d8 per plus
Property: You can reload this firearm as a free action.*
Power (Encounter - Firearm): Standard Action. Make two basic ranged attacks, attacking two adjacent targets. Each attack is resolved against the lower of the targets AC or Reflex Defense.

*Optional: This is pretty simple, but again, counting bullets in your magazine is a little annoying. Fell free to adapt this. Also, I don't bother to distinguish between the intracities between a revolvers "reloading" mechanism and that of a modern auto-loader pistol. I am not a gun nut!

Shotgun - Item Level 4+
Shotguns can be used to use fire shot, allowing you to cover a wider area. They lack in range.
Level 4: +1 - 840 gp; Level 9: +2 - 3,400 gp; Level 14: +3 - 21,000 gp
Level 19: +4 - 85,000 gp; Level 23: +5 - 525,000 gp; Level 28: +6 2,625,000 gp
Weapon: Rifle
Enhancement: Attack and Damage Rolls
Critical: +1d10 per plus
Property: Reduce the long and short range by 5 squares each.
Power (Encounter - Firearm): Standard Action. Make a basic attack against all targets in a Close Blast 3. The attack is made against the lower of AC and Reflex of the target.
Level 14 and 19: Close Blast 4
Level 24 and 29: Close Blast 5


Full-Automatic Firearm - Item Level 5+
Automatic firearms reload bullets automatically and allow even faster firing rates then of semi-automatic weapons. The blowback from the shot, the expanding gases from the explosion, or magic allows continuous fire.
Level 5: +1 - 1,000 gp; Level 10: +2 - 5,00 gp; Level 15: +3 - 25,000 gp
Level 20: +4 - 125,000 gp; Level 25: +5 - 625,000 gp; Level 30: +6 3,125,000 gp
Weapon: Firearms
Enhancement: Attack and Damage Rolls
Critical: +1d8 per plus
Property: You can reload this firearm as a free action.
Power (Encounter - Firearm): Standard Action. Make a basic attack against all targets in a Area Burst 1 within range. The attack is made against the lower of AC and Reflex of the target.
Level 14 and 19: Area Burst 2
Level 24 and 29: Area Burst 3


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Feats

Combat Engineer (Heroic)
Prerequisite: Int 13 or Skill Training in Arcana and Thievery
You gain proficiency with all firearms, siege weapons and bayonets. When making an attack with a firearm, you can substitute your Dexterity Modifier with your Intelligence Modifier for the attack and damage rolls. When making an attack with a siege weapon, you can use your Dexterity Modifier in place of your Intelligence Modifier for the attack and the damage roll.

Rifleman (Heroic)
Prerequisite: Proficiency with Firearms, Rogue
You can treat a Firearm as a crossbow for the purpose of Rogue weapon powers and sneak attack, and you can treat a Bayonet as a light blade for the purpose of Rogue weapon powers and sneak attack. When using a firearm or a bayonet, your sneak attack damage is reduced by one die.

Quickload (Heroic)
Prerequisite: Proficiency with Firearms, Dex 13+
If a firearm (including a muzzle-loader) has a reload time of a standard action, you can reload it is as a minor action. if it has a reload time of a minor action, you can reload it as a free action. You still need both hands to reload your firearm.

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For detailed discussion, see also the house rules thread on this topic:
Firearms for D&D 4E