That said, four weeks is still a pretty compressed design schedule. I’m thinking I’ll need to frontload as much non-design work as I can…which amounts to deciding what to pursue and research. I had two possible candidates in mind, a Post-WWII Yakuza game based on Kinji Fukusaku’s Battles Without Honor and Humanity (which I posted briefly about here) and a Vietnam War-era horror title I’ve had bouncing around in my head for a while. Frankly, ploughing away at Void and Steel for the past year or two has be pretty burned out on Japanese culture, so the Yakuza game went back on the back-burner.

Okay, with that out of the way, here’s the premise for my NaGa DeMon entry.

“Cambodia, 1967. A small MACV-SOG Special Forces detatchment crosses the border as part of Operation Daniel Boone, conducting raids and reconaissance along the Sihanouk Trail. Whilst engaged in a rescue operation to retrieve a downed U.S. pilot, the 1st Co CCS Exploitation Force encounters something unexpected – a terrifying mythical creature which will stop at nothing to destroy the invaders. Can this highly-trained unit survive when the hunters become the hunted?”

My inner 12-year-old loves Army Guys and Monsters – it’s true. I grew up watching military ‘men on a mission’ flicks – The Guns of Navarrone, The Dirty Dozen, Kelly’s Heroes, The Wild Geese – but the one I think is most appropriate to mention here is Apocalypse Now. Coppola’s epic retelling of Herman Melville’s Heart of Darkness is a perfect template for what I want this game to do. He may have played fast and loose with the facts, but I think there’s an emotional truth to Apocalypse Now – as Captain Willard and his men draw nearer to Kurtz the landscape becomes increasingly primitive and alien. The jungle itself is the enemy…I love the idea of something lurking in the foliage, something ancient and native awoken by these interlopers – something which will toy with them, play havoc with their psyches, something which will ruin them before finally tearing them limb from limb.

One of the driving narratives behind our understanding of the Vietnam War is the idea of the most technologically advanced civilization on Earth going toe-to-toe with a technologically inferior foe.  It’s true that North Vietnam had support from the U.S.S.R., but it’s remarkable when you consider the techniques used by the North Vietnamese in their guerilla struggle against U.S. forces – pungee sticks contaminated with urine and feces, thousands of miles of underground tunnels and bunkers, etc.  (As an aside: if you want to read a really good book about asymmetrical warfare, check out People’s War People’s Army: The Viet Cong Insurrection Manual for Underdeveloped Countries by Vo Nguyen Giap. Giap (who is now 100 years old and still kicking) led Vietnamese troops during the First Indochina War in the late 40′s and again during the Vietnam War – his book explains in stark detail how the North Vietnamese lost every single major military conflict against the U.S. and prevailed.)

In any case, the theme of an industrialized or imperialist nation at odds with an alien culture is not unique to Vietnam.  History is littered with such conflicts. For instance – on January 22nd, 1879 the British Army fought two separate conflicts against the Zulu nation resulting in one major loss (the Battle of Isandlwana) and one victory (the Battle of Rorke’s Drift). One could just as easy conjure up the many battles early European explorers fought with Native Americans, or the Romans against Picts in First Century Britain. Or hell, just turn on the TV or check out your favorite news site to see what we’re up to in Iraq or Afghanistan.

So on one level, the game is about the perils of leveraging military might – the dangers of adventurism. That might not be apparent to anyone playing the game, but it’s there under the hood nonetheless. It would be disingenuous to ignore it. Politics aside, however – the experience of gameplay is horror. The players should be made to feel as if they are completely and totally out of their element, facing a terror that their extensive military training and lethal weaponry cannot directly address.

The foe – and I’ll cop to this right out of the gate – is a Naga, a mythical multi-headed serpent capable of all kinds of supernatural mischief. One of the more tempting possibilities is the Naga’s supposed ability to take human form. What happens, for instance, when the Naga impersonates one of the group’s montagnard guides and leads them astray?  One needs only look at John Carpenter’s The Thing to see what happens when you sow the seeds of distrust among a group of highly volatile people. Plus, the hook of writing a game for NaGa DeMon which is actually about a Naga Demon is too tempting to pass up.

I should point out that I’m not the first person to tackle this premise in a fictional context. I can think of at least three films which are concerned with a similar premise – Su-chang Kong’s R-Point, Neil Marshall’s Dog Soldiers, and Daniel Myrick’s The Objective are all ‘soldiers against a supernatural threat’ films, and I guess if you really wanted to stretch it you could point to both Predator and Aliens as examples of the genre as well. At some point I’ll probably seek all these out and see if I can parse out any useful tidbits for my design.

That’s the starting point. I’ve got a lot of reading to do and some brainstorming ahead, but I think this is a solid premise for a game. Guess I’ll know for sure in 31 days.

The latest revision of the Void and Steel playtest document is now available. Functionally, it is very similar to the Death Frenzy playtest document released last year, with a few tweaks for clarity and to improve gameplay.

In addition, the graphics have been partially overhauled to reflect the new title and have been re-formatted to make trimming them out easier. Also, the file size has been greatly reduced, from 43mb to just under 3mb. Click the link below to download.

Void and Steel Playtest – 6/28/2011

(UPDATE: The playtest document has been fixed, the Move cards should read correctly now. If your cards read 0/0/0 in the bottom row, please download the new file or change them to read 0/1/1.)

Here’s a note I posted to boardgamegeek.com with regards to player balancing:

[...] the game is designed for two-player play at the moment. The game should be able to accommodate more players mechanically, but right now I’m trying to see how the basic mechanics work before balancing for multiple players.

If you do want to add more combatants to the mix, here’s what I’d suggest: each player needs a set of nine basic Move cards, and you’d probably want to add more Wound and Maneuver cards to the deck…with more than two players, you’ll likely go through these more quickly.

I’m working hard on polishing up a playtest document for the combat portion of Death Frenzy; this .pdf will include the complete combat rules and a full set of cards so you can print and play. I’m not sure exactly how this will be distributed, but primarily I plan distributing it to some local gaming groups and then farming it out to interested parties via digital distribution.

If you’re interested in playtesting Death Frenzy, please contact me at musashi@yellow-menace.com.

One thing I took away from the discussion was a re-evaluation of my recently developed loathing for D&D 4th Edition. I had a bit of an epiphany at Gen Con this year after a D&D game that left a bad taste in my mouth. It wasn’t the players or DM – it was the mechanics. For a long while I was a 4e apologist, arguing that while the game lacks in many areas (mostly narrative stuff), it didn’t actively prevent me from doing the things I liked in an RPG. Friends pointed out that while I was certainly able to squeeze fun out of it, I was clearly running the game in a manner that it wasn’t designed for.

I finally had a break with the system a few months back after my most recent 4e group recoiled in horror when I tried to add new narrative mechanics to help give shape to some of the freeflow RP’ing that was going on…basically to clarify motives and help the players seize some initiative. The result was reminiscent of Mutiny on the Bounty.

But that’s fine – I was tempted to throw it back on the players, that they simply had shitty taste in games. But I now see that what they want from the game isn’t necessarily bad, any more than what I had perceived as a more refined game experience. D&D fills a vital and necessary role in the ecology of gaming. Trying to change D&D into something it’s not meant to be, particularly transforming it into something esoteric or inaccessible, would be counter-productive to the hobby.

So fine – I can live with 4e. I won’t be playing it anytime soon, but I’ll stop thinking of 4e diehards as knuckle-draggers.

As for the rest of the discussion (you really should listen to it) – is Gen Con a gaming ghetto? I think the value of moving the hobby into more culturally diverse venues – like PAX – is indisputable, I’m not ready to call Gen Con or Origins a ‘ghetto’. Gaming-specific events are a great way to concentrate people with similar interests. PAX is a great way to reach out to the greater public, but role-playing games will never be more than a small segment of that community. It’s cool that someone like Wil Wheaton can fire up PAX-goers over something like Fiasco, but I can’t envision a scenario in which tabletop gaming is anything more than a small fish in a very big pond at PAX.

I’d love to be wrong, though…

What is 8-9-3? To be specific, 8-9-3 is a losing hand in the card game oicho-kabu…a sort of Japanese version of blackjack. The numbers 8-9-3 translate roughly as ‘ya’, ‘ku’, and ‘za’. Indeed – the yakuza reportedly took their name from this dubious hand of cards, seeing themselves as born losers.

8-9-3 will be an RPG set in post WWII  Hiroshima – the players will be yakuza gangsters, all members of the same clan, fighting to gain and preserve turf amidst the ruins of post-war Japan. I have absolutely no idea how the systems will work, although I think it would be neat to incorporate the odds and evens mechanic behind cho-han, the dice game you see played in many yakuza films. Hanafuda would also seem to be a neat mechanic, although it doesn’t seem to lend itself well to conflict resolution.

I don’t anticipate any active development on 8-9-3 to take place in the near future, but as GECKI nears completion I may make room for 8-9-3 as it seems like it could be a lot of fun to play.

The initial – and persistent – concept for Death Frenzy was to create a role-playing game system that emulated Japanese swordplay period dramas (also known as chambara). After the better part of a year playing around with different iterations of the systems (combat and narrative), here’s what I’ve arrived at as a set of design goals:

Death Frenzy is about emulating films, not history. From the time I first conceived of the game until this point the design has wavered between simulationism and abstraction. At the onset, I immersed myself in weighty tomes about Japanese culture,  swordplay, and martial arts. It quickly became clear that this was not the best way to go about designing Death Frenzy. Death Frenzy is about emulating a fictionalized version of reality, not reality itself. At one point in the design process I was heavily concerned with the mechanics of sword arcs and strike points and trying to apply the various minutiae I’d picked up concerning Japanese combat theory. It turns out that 99% of that stuff is completely useless when you’re trying to emulate the hack and slash action from Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo. It’s even more useless when you’re trying to engage players in the drama behind the hack and slash.

Two systems, one game. The fighting and narrative systems are designed to be self contained but compatible. Players who want a chambara swordfight card game can play just the combat system. Players who are only interested in role-playing can use only the story-game cards. If you want to roleplay with the option of grittier combat, use both. Those who choose the latter option will find that the two systems support and enrich each other mechanically (karma earned through roleplaying can be used to offset damage in the combat game, for instance).

Fast Play. As my gaming habits have matured I find that I’m less and less interested in being bogged down in 2-hour melee sessions against hordes of monsters, or spending needless time freeform roleplaying to get the party from point A to B. I want this game to get to the good shit quick.  Combat should be fast and furious, with a suitably high mortality rate. Interpersonal dynamics, either between the players or the NPC, should be equally quick and decisive. Character creation – often an hour-long process in many traditional games – has been whittled down to a two-card draw in Death Frenzy, allowing players to get started in minutes. A game of Death Frenzy should last no longer than the films it emulates – two to three hours per session, from character creation to end of play.

Death is not the end. In a traditional roleplaying game, players are typically very death-averse. And why shouldn’t they be? They spend hours at the gaming table crafting elaborate back-stories for their characters and gaining experience. A typical RPG character represents a significant time investment on the part of the player. This leads to styles of gameplay which can be antithetical to the fatalism that often characterizes chambara film, where major and minor characters throw themselves into desperate situations left and right – often with little expectation of survival. Death Frenzy will support this in it’s mechanics in several ways: quick character generation (as noted above) and a karma system, for example. Dying in Death Frenzy simply means that you draw two more cards to generate a new character, allowing you to get back into the game quickly and seamlessly. Karma points accumulated during play will allow you to re-draw character generation cards, thus emulating the effect of reincarnation influenced by the character’s past actions. Characters in Death Frenzy can indeed die a ‘good death’, and be rewarded for doing so.

No setup. Death Frenzy is designed to be played as a ‘pick-up’ style game. You bring the cards to the table, generate a setting,  theme, and characters and that’s it. Once the game’s initial state has been determined, the players and GM guide the story through their actions following a traditional Jo-ha-kyū dramatic structure. It’s this division of ‘acts’ which helps guide play and moves each story to a satisfying conclusion. There’s no need for a Game Master to spend his down time fidgeting with plotlines or NPC’s.

Campaign play. Despite being a ‘pick-up’ game, Death Frenzy will also be designed to work in a campaign structure where the plot of one game can carry over to future sessions. Metaplots can be developed and matured over several sessions (think of the Lone Wolf and Cub films vs. Seven Samurai, for instance). If the players liked the characters or setting from one session, there’s no reason not to keep the story going.

The second game I am working on is a chambara role-playing game tentatively called DEATH FRENZY. This game will utilize card-based mechanics to allow players to simulate Japanese period swordplay films like Yojimbo and Hara Kiri. The game will be subdivided into two systems – a combat system and a narrative system which can be played separately or combined to provide a customized gaming experience. The current plan is to sell each separately and as a combined package, giving gamers three options to experience the game.

I first mentioned Death Frenzy publicly on my podcast last week, which you can find here. Death Frenzy is currently 1 – 2 months away from alpha testing.