Antipode’s Name Change

October 5th, 2008

After hearing some constructive criticism from a friend, I am convinced that Antipode is a poor name for that science-fantasy RPG.  I have some ideas for potential names, most of them centered around the more important pieces of Antipode (the relative strangeness of the characters, star travel, animism, magic, science, psychic power, diversity), and I am sure more will come up.  Right now, I am not sure what the new name will be, and this list may grow, but my current choices include:

  1. Realms of Machines and Mystics (abbreviated ROMM)
  2. Of Stars and Souls (abbreviated OSAS)
  3. Universal
  4. Antipode (keep as-is)

If you are here from The Forge, welcome!  I would bet you aren’t familiar with Antipode’s setting, so in short, it’s something like Star Wars/Trek with magic.  If you want more detail, Antipode is a mixture of hard-science-fiction and my style of fantasy, with a wide variety of character options (70+ races, for starters) and a detailed universe that is open to changes.  So, which one of these names do you like best?  You can answer in the comments or just send me a message via The Forge.

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Antipode, Halberd, and Superior Smash

September 23rd, 2008

Since my previous post here, some major changes have taken place with Halberd and to some extent with Antipode.  For one thing, the STAMP pools of Halberd have changed to be setting-agnostic, with the only requirement being that there are 5 of them. Antipode will use STEAM for its pools, standing for Soul, Toughness, Evasion, Agility, and Mind.  I have another, smaller game in the works that will serve as a basis for playtesting Halberd, and that one uses a different set of pools.  The game is Superior Smash, and it is a light-in-tone parody/blatant rip-off of a certain fighting game you may be familiar with.  The main difference is that this is a tabletop RPG, and so obviously it cannot involve twitch-based reflexes, button-mashing, or 3D graphics.  The concept is simple, and paraphrased from the intro,

Superior Smash is a free tabletop RPG that puts you in control of your favorite blatant ripoff of a popular video game character.  You will fight alongside other characters like yourself, doing battle with various creatures who also have been ripped off of video games.  You may encounter mind-controlled ripoffs of main characters as well, who are being manipulated by the group of villains known as The Bads.  All of these battles will happen for no good reason, but you might as well enjoy them.

It should promise good times, especially for players who are new to the genre.  An emphasis is placed on premade characters; these are meant to be modified, but can easily be used as-is.  Full rules will be provided on how to create your own characters when the game is released.  I intend to release Superior Smash free of charge on this website (although I haven’t decided on whether it will be a pdf, a web page, or a series of web pages).

Back on the topic of pools, Superior Smash uses a modified system of pools: LASER (Leaping, Armor, Sprinting, Energy, Randomness).  Each pool has different uses, but these depend mostly on the character and how it is designed to use those pools.  This differentiates Superior Smash from Antipode, which now uses a “low-pool, high-pool” mechanic.  This mechanic gives a character with 0 counters left in a pool certain penalties while giving characters with a high number of counters in a pool special advantages.  In Antipode, Soul is the pool that grants magic power, and when you have a high Soul, you can attack foes or support allies more than once in a single action.  When your Soul is low, you become unlucky, and your attacks miss sometimes, which isn’t normally what happens.  A normal description of some typical in-game action (and an explanation for why even though attacks usually hit, the hits only damage the target’s body some of the time) is: James attacks Hanna with the move Flamethrower Hand.  The move depletes its costs from James, and attempts to damage Hanna.  The damage of the move is 13, plus it depletes one of Hanna’s pools (let’s say Evasion) by 4.  Hanna responds with the Defense Nimble Dodge, which has a cost equal to the damage Flamethrower Hand is attempting to deal (13) that it takes from her Agility pool.  The move deals no damage because Hanna has at least 13 counters in her Agility pool left, but she loses a large number of them because of the effort she spends dodging the attack.  Described in game,

James pushes his hand forward, and he focuses a small cone of white-hot light into existence near his palm with a great deal of magical effort.  Hanna sees the cone and prepares to jump out of the way, making it just in time as a stream of brilliant white flame erupts through the air, going straight through where she was a moment ago.  Singed but unscarred, Hanna hits the ground with a tumbling roll and prepares to respond to James with her own attack.

Reworked pools aren’t the only changes to Halberd.  Chief among the new features is the Combat Schedule system for resolving turn order and available actions.  With this mechanic, combat is divided into counts.  A round consists of 8 counts, and any round can start at any count.  Each character now has a Combat Schedule that takes a round and says what types of move (an Action Move or a Boost Move) a character can use at a given count.  Action Moves are the most complex moves, and include attacks, aids to allies, drains (which aren’t attacks because they don’t deal damage, but do remove counters from pools), and fortifications (to increase your strength). Boost moves are simple moves that (should) involve less work on a player’s part to use; they are useful because they occur on a count before an Action Move can even be selected, but they cannot deal damage initially (special Boost Moves marked <LOCKED> can do damage, but they must be unlocked by an Action Move first).  A character’s schedule has 4 slots for Boost Moves and 4 slots for Action Moves, which can be in any order but cannot have two Action Moves in a row more than once or two Boost Moves in a row more than once.  So, you could have a schedule that reads, “1: Act, 2: Boost, 3: Boost, 4: Act, 5: Boost, 6: Act, 7: Boost, 8: Act” that describes a perceptive character who gets to act on count 1, but who isn’t particularly fast to act after spotting an enemy and attacking it once.  Every character’s Combat Schedule is up to interpretation, but they serve to put characters on different paths during combat and to challenge plans made beforehand to target certain enemies.  This should liven up combat, compared to the traditional approach in which a character acts once, then sits and waits to get attacked or aided until his turn comes around again.  Admittedly, it is a novel and different approach, and it remains untested, but that fact should change once I get a Superior Smash or Antipode gaming group together in the not-too-distant future.  There is plenty more to say, but I’ll hold off on it now that this post has reached 1000 words.  Thanks for reading,

Thomas (Tommy) Ettinger

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Halberd: what you need to know.

July 28th, 2008

The Halberd System is a set of rules that can cover many types of tabletop RPG.  If you have never played a tabletop RPG, I think the first paragraph of the last post should describe how it works pretty accurately.  Halberd is diceless but uses coins for randomization, is gridless and does not require miniatures, is move-based for almost everything (more on this soon), and is counter-based when it comes to tallies and things.  Halberd is fast to play; characters have simple statistics and it’s hard to make mistakes with things like adding up dice rolls if you aren’t using dice.  Halberd is even faster to set up; you need character sheets, notes of some kind (Post-it, or just strips of paper), coins/counters and that’s it.

Halberd is move-based, meaning (as I use the term here) that every character action falls into the category of a move.  Swords are character features that allow a character to use sword-based moves; the same goes for shields, guns, computers, wands, and so on.  Some item-based moves are granted by the item itself; a gun lets anyone who can wield it fire a shot.  Other item-based moves are possessed by the character but rely on having the item; these include moves that are acquired through training with an item and having experience with it, as well as moves granted by items, but not to just anyone. These moves that require a piece of equipment to be effective are called partial moves, a category that includes several other kinds of moves.  Really, partial moves are moves that are not always useful, but can be possessed in greater numbers.  In Antipode, psychic attacks are partial moves because they can only affect living characters and are ineffective against robots and the magical apparitions known as eidolons.  Technological hacks and exploits are also partial moves; they only affect robots and living creatures with cyborg implants.  Characters who can shapeshift also use partial moves; a move that requires a character to be in form X to use it is a partial move as well.  When a character would learn 2 normal moves, 3 partial moves can be learned instead.

Another key concept in the Halberd System is that of the pool.  A pool belongs to a character and holds a number of counters, the more the better.  In Antipode, characters have 5 pools, plus Health: Speed, Toughness, Avoidance, Magic, and Persuasion (STAMP).  Each of these pools is treated essentially the same at the table; that is, you remove counters from pools to protect against damage or fuel more powerful moves.  However, each pool is associated with a different characteristic of an entity, and the moves treat the pools accordingly.  For example, one move (a magic spell that conjures flames on and around the target) might drain the user’s Magic pool to make the move more powerful, but in turn would drain the opponent’s Speed pool and deal Blast damage to the opponent’s Health (which doesn’t often have the intended effect at first; more later).  A fast character (one with a lot of counters in his Speed pool) would be better equipped to leap, fly or teleport away from the flames, but a slow character might drop to 0 Speed and thus be vulnerable to damage from this attack and other Blast damage.  There are 5 different types of damage, each corresponding to a pool: Blast (tied to Speed), Strike (tied to Toughness), Aim (Avoidance), Spell (Magic), and Coerce (Persuasion, but this isn’t damage per se).  When a pool reaches 0, any attack that deals damage of the type related to that pool will deal its damage directly to Health.  There is no other way to deal damage to Health.  Now, about Coerce.  Negotiation and diplomacy are resolved with the Persuasion pool, which represents how convinced you are of your own position in any disagreement and how good you are at persuading people to come to your side.  Dealing Coerce “damage” lowers your opponent’s willingness to fight or even argue with you; this is represented as a series of stages.

These stages exist between two characters or groups of characters and are fluid.  Stage 1 means entirely opposed to you; some characters will start out with this attitude toward you and never flinch (robots who you can’t hack, for example).  Stage 2 means combative, but somewhat receptive to persuasion; if you can reach a character at this stage, they might give up on fighting you; if you can’t, they will fight you just the same.  Stage 3 means unfriendly; characters at this stage will not fight you, but might give you false information, ignore your pleas for help, or send you on your way to certain death, depending on how violent or malicious a person they are.  Stage 4 means neutral; this kind of character might tell you what you need to know if it is easy enough, ignore your request for directions, or walk away from a fight with you, for example.  Stage 5 means friendly; willing to help a little but not fight for you, and still able to be persuaded against you.  Stage 6 means eager to help; this kind of character will fight on your side if you share an enemy and they think victory is likely.  Stage 7 is unconditional support; these characters will fight to the death to save you and will probably not change their view any time soon.  Transitioning between these stages occurs by dealing enough Coerce “damage” to a character to equal their base Persuasion statistic (a base stat is the value a pool starts out in every encounter).  A number of counters are placed on the current stage in either the up or down direction, and when one reaches the right amount, the Stage changes and the counters are reset.  When this happens, the target changes Stage once in the direction of the Coercer’s choice.  Unlike other forms of damage, Coerce can reverse the progress of existing coercion by decreasing “damage” already done to the current Stage by some enemy; simply make up-Coercion decrease down-Coercion and vice versa.

There is plenty more to be covered in the Halberd System (next up: character traits, move traits, and actual statistics for a character), but having written over a thousand words here, I think I’m done.

Thomas (Tommy) Ettinger

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Antipode: what you need to know.

June 18th, 2008

Antipode is a science-fantasy tabletop RPG that could be compared to Star Trek with magic.  It uses the Halberd System for its rules; if you’ve ever played Dungeons and Dragons, it’s a little like that.  You are either one of several players or the Game Master (GM), with each player controlling one character and the GM controlling everything and everyone else that those characters encounter.  Players create characters before play begins, giving them a backstory, personality, and game statistics; these characters should be fully fleshed out and the players should be ready to role-play as them.  The GM can create his own characters, but they are more numerous and are usually less detailed (because they only are part of an encounter for a few minutes in most cases); the GM often uses pre-made characters if he doesn’t want to spend hours giving stats to so very many minor individuals.  Some of the things that make Antipode different are its streamlined approach to setup and play, its pure mechanics with less separate types of rules to keep track of, the fact that it doesn’t use dice or miniatures, and of course its radically different and very unique setting.  With the exception of the setting, all of these features are because of the Halberd System (which I will get to in a later post at some point).

The world of Antipode is governed by hard science and ubiquitous magic.  Science is based much more on current models of the future than say, Star Wars, with a wireless network fueled by magic and the strange physics of the world called the Mesh working its way into every possible nook and cranny of technology.  Learning is effortless, with information from the Mesh streamed directly into your brain through cyborg implants.  Magic is the main force opposing the hard-scientific laws of nature; it lets matter or energy be created from nothing, lets wounds heal instantly, lets objects and creatures teleport, lets large characters shrink to get into a building, lets plants grow before your eyes, and so on.  Most magic and even technology is based on the 14 elements; circuits for machines can use earth, space, darkness, fire or any element for wiring instead of being forced to use electricity (a phenomenon made possible through pseudomagic, which is the name for magic-seeming effects that are normal and non-magical in the Antipode universe).  On some worlds, life is easy, fed by magic and/or machines fulfilling every need and making lifeforms lazy.  In most places though, violence is ever-present because of attacks by hostile aliens, combat robots, greedy megacorporations, evil creatures from neighboring dimensions, monstrosities grown powerful by magic, simple crime, and countless other threats.  The universe is in desperate need of heroes, and the Player Characters (PCs) might just fill that need.

PCs and Non-Player Characters (NPCs) can be of many races, be they living or nonliving.  Humans have a significant role in the universe, but they come second in prevalence to the Sfyst, a species of bizarre-looking lifeforms with keen senses who evolved a hundred-thousand years before the Humans came to their current form.  There are many types of Augmented Humans (1 type for each of the 14 elements) as well, although most are less common than normal Humans.  There are the floating magical jellyfish called Vih (with their armored variants called Palk and their ghostly variants, the Sahnt), the militaristic and religious birds known as Kurguizh, the superior amphibian technicians called Laskrei, the multi-talented armless bipeds called Esyin, the stalwart, heavy-weapon-loving bugs called Cerpalli, and the big, dumb reptilian hunters called Zhand (with their smart, flying variant, the Zhallal).  Then there are the small, psychic camelids from a barren moon known as Ilapa, the huge, primitive, psychic behemoths called Nodebpe, the rapid and unpredictable shapechangers called Gyo, the genius, slow, robot-controlling brains-in-space called Argant, the slithering, fear-controlling snakes known as Glarosp, the infinite possibilities for Neighbors (demons, angels, or whatever else you want, hailing from a neighboring dimension), and of course many, many types of robots.

Antipode is set on a very large scale.  The entire universe is the playing field for the countless nations, corporations, and planets  — and of course the PCs.  You can get wherever you need to in starships that can either teleport in one shot to their destination at a warp hub, teleport in shorter jumps using space magic until they get to their destination, move faster-than-light using time magic, or send their crew into hibernation while the ship’s computer navigates them (a la 2001: A Space Odyssey, although hopefully without HAL 9000).  The rules are designed to be fluid enough to allow the GM to come up with locations on-the-fly as the PCs decide to go somewhere; without grids or miniatures this is much more feasible.

Well, I hope this is enough for an introduction to this game; Antipode is quite deep and takes some effort to fully grasp, but I think it is well worth it.  But if you’re looking for a premise that’s a lot less weird (that is, if you think Antipode is too unusual for your tastes) but still just as fun, try Elemental Warzone… which I will talk about next time.

Thomas (Tommy) Ettinger

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An introduction.

June 17th, 2008

My name is Thomas Ettinger, and I love to design and develop games. I am a third-year computer science student, and I have programmed a few games for class (including one networked RPG battle system written in C++ that I will discuss at some point), but I also design, develop, and spend plenty of time writing tabletop RPGs. Current projects (6/17/08) include Antipode, Elemental Warzone, and a few others that are mostly concept: Oko Mbasa is a medieval fantasy game set in a heavily-magical Africa, txtactics is a text based tactical RPG with some unusual and fun concepts, Wilderness is a sim/strategy game where you play as a pack of normal, realistic animals trying to survive, and LoserQuest is an entertaining and offensive parody of collectible-monster games, cheesy action movies, and our loser-filled society in general. I pretty much only play RPGs because of my poor reflexes and skill at playing tense games, but I enjoy playing, watching and working on a reasonably wide range of concepts (gotta love mindless action movies and kung fu, but smart thrillers like the Bourne Trilogy, sci-fi movies like Serenity, and documentaries on wildlife all find a way onto my TV screen).

Oh, I mentioned Antipode and Elemental Warzone as games I am working on. Antipode is a science-fantasy tabletop RPG with ever-present powerful magic as the counterpart to (relatively) hard science. I have explained it as Star Trek with magic, but it really has become more than that. You have very strange, mostly non-humanoid aliens, demons, angels, robots, monsters, etc. that are almost all playable, and each race supports a very different outlook for role-playing. There are many epic conflicts coming to the surface in the universe of Antipode, and the player characters will probably explore and take part in more than one of them. Elemental Warzone is another tabletop RPG using the same system as Antipode (the Halberd System, which I will get to later) that I am working on with Jules Robinson, another college student with full sketchbooks of detailed illustrations of characters for this game. Elemental Warzone is set in an almost-modern-day Earth being invaded by Elemental creatures, and takes place after a devastating war against those creatures gave much of the human population powers based on the 12 elements.
Both Antipode and Elemental Warzone are quite maximalist in approach to setting, but are pretty minimalist in regards to rules. They use the Halberd System, a moderate-in-complexity, incredibly flexible system with a focus on granting expressive power to the players and GM. Halberd is gridless, diceless, and counter-based, and uses the concept of moves to represent character actions, and in practice understanding the way moves work lets you understand nearly all of the system. I hope to sell both Antipode and Elemental Warzone as standalone books using a Print On Demand service some day. Well, I have written far too much, but I hope whoever is reading this blog found it interesting and will continue to find it so if they come back to read another post.

Thomas (Tommy) Ettinger

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