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Dusters & Dragons Reviewed
280 Plays5 years ago
Eric and Chris sit down to discuss the Dusters & Dragons one-shot, the Genesys role-playing game system, and also just good GMing tips!
This episode is brought to you by the generous donations of our amazing Show Sponsors: Laura Pickrahn, Darrin Katzska, Irene Viorritto, Ryan Royce, Darrell DeLaney, Jessica Smith, Charles Compton, Richard Cree, Nastasia Raulerson, The Kamm Family, David Scrams, Elizabeth Clark, Rebekah Miller, deviouspoptart, Eðvarð Arnór Sigurðsson, Michael Clark, and Dustin Troupe.
Theme Music:
Neo Western by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4114-neo-western
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsorship
00:00:00
Speaker
The following episode is brought to you by the generous donations of Elizabeth Clark, Darryl Delaney, Ryan Royce, Darren Katska, Irene Villarito, Laura Pickron, Jessica Smith, Deavius Poptart, Natasha Rallerson, Richard Cree, The Cam Family, Charles Compton, Dustin Troop, Rebecca Miller, Edvard Arnoff, Michael Clark, and David Scrams, along with all of our generous patrons.
00:00:34
Speaker
D20 radio, your game is roll.
Introduction to Eberron Renewed and Guest Appearance
00:01:01
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Eberron Renewed, an actual play podcast set in the Eberron campaign setting. I'm your game master, Eric, but not for the one shot that we just did, actually. I got to be the most coveted role at a tabletop table. A player. I got to play a game. And that is because of my very esteemed guest this evening, GM Chris is joining us for this Eberron Reviewed. Hello, Chris. What is up, Cameron Nation? How you doing, Eric?
00:01:29
Speaker
I'm doing well. I'm excited to get into Dusters and Dragons and talk about this interesting new setting that you've kind of created and we got to the privilege of play testing for you.
00:01:41
Speaker
Extreme Alpha, yes. Yes. But yeah, it is just me and Chris tonight. To pull back the curtain a little bit, I put Philip, Jeff, Trevor, and Randy through like a four and a half hour long session zero last night until about midnight. And so they are
00:02:01
Speaker
recovering some strain from the endeavor that was our recording session last night. So it'll be me and Chris talking about it, and I'm excited to get to dive deep into it.
Character Building and Game Mechanics Discussion
00:02:13
Speaker
So let's just kick things off with episode one. So we kind of started the first episode off with some relationship building, and you showed us this graphic in Roll20, which was the platform we were using.
00:02:30
Speaker
to kind of facilitate some character building and some relationship building with an interesting twist on your part with the wrinkles that you throw in with the relationship. So where did you originally encounter that system and have you found that it's a pretty consistent tool to use in Genesis games? Like it yields positive results?
00:02:54
Speaker
That's actually the first time I've done that in a Genesis game although the concept is has been around for a lot of different RPGs I mean going all the way back to I think the first time I ever encountered it was shadow and wraith But you know, there's there's a ton of RPGs that have it and I don't know it's a lot of fun. It's one of those things that with with dusters and dragons It was kind of an interesting unusual mechanic that we don't really see in Genesis or in Star Wars, you know the the original narrative dice system
00:03:24
Speaker
Yeah. Well, actually, honestly, the last version of Warhammer would actually be the original narrative dice system if you really want to go grandpappy. But in terms of the modern narrative dice system that Genesis is based off of.
00:03:36
Speaker
You really don't see it. Nobody really has control over any aspect of your character except yourself. And to a degree, the GM. I think I was inspired to a large degree by the obligation system in Edge of the Empire, Fantasy Flight, Star Wars system. Which, while not as on the nose in terms of wrinkling, the player still determines what their obligation is, but the GM
00:04:04
Speaker
if its role determines how that manifests as a wrinkle in things. So it's something I was toying with. I kind of wanted to see if you guys do it. We'll see if it makes it in that version or in any version to the final product. So when the setting is eventually published. Excellent. Well, it did yield some really cool relationships that manifested themselves over the course of the one shot. So it went well, I think, in our particular case study.
Narrative Exploration and System Mechanics
00:04:32
Speaker
So the first big thing that occurs in the episode once the action gets rolling is, of course, the arrival of old Elijah stumbling through town and walking into the saloon to take a prospector. So obviously the party addressed that situation in... It was kind of a variety of ways of everybody making checks to like, maybe this will work. How...
00:05:02
Speaker
When designing the adventure or at least outlining the adventure, how did you see that encounter going, I guess? Did you think it was going to be more of a socially based or did you think combat was a possibility?
00:05:16
Speaker
I thought combat or a physically based skill challenge was going to have to happen because in that particular scenario, and as you get through it, he's not in control of himself. You can't really talk him out of it. Some of the more challenging things in Genesis as a good GM, when your player suggests the skill, you never say no.
00:05:37
Speaker
Yeah, you know, it's always always yes and it's like, yes, and it's going to be really hard or it's not going to have very limited effect, which is what we did a couple of times. Even you guys even had an incident where you kind of snapped him out of it briefly with a good social check. But in the interest of the story and what you guys eventually found out what was happening.
00:05:57
Speaker
um it it made sense that he was you know he's he's on a mission um the most unexpected part of that entire thing for me was the uh the triumph on uh randy's character's uh uh curse oh yeah which which caused the which which i figured gosh maybe we can just do it like a dispel the equivalent of a dispel action where it just the thing is so wigged out that it just worms its way out of him it can't be inside of him anymore because
00:06:24
Speaker
That was never originally a part of it. And then once that happened, it became kind of a mainstay. You guys kept wanting to do that or try and do it again, which I thought was hilarious. And that's just where the dice take you sometimes. Yeah, that's awesome. So I do have a question and it kind of gets into a later something that happens in the final episode or something we bring up. The fact that he came in and specifically like you, you described him walking in and grabbing one of the prospectors.
00:06:55
Speaker
Was that in the outline that the role that the prospectors were playing and how they were being targeted, was that originally part of your plan or was it something that once we asked about it, you were like, yes. Actually, I wasn't even like, yes. You guys were drawing inferences and connections that were never intended. Maybe they need prospectors.
00:07:16
Speaker
You guys are making this so complicated. He just grabbed the nearest yokel I wasn't gonna have him grab a PC because that's not fun or fair and you know, he just he just grabbed the nearest yokel and the reason you guys found all the prospectors eaten in the cave is because These this gang has been kidnapping stragglers alone on the frontier and those are gonna be prospectors. Yes, it was a lot simpler I guess then the grandiose the grandiose
00:07:44
Speaker
There's something in the blood where you're exposed to bluestone that they're drawn to. And I'm like, okay. Excellent.
Skills and Challenges in Gameplay
00:07:55
Speaker
So obviously at that point, everybody takes off to hop on horses and head for the iron carriage that's taking off out of town.
00:08:06
Speaker
Um, so obviously we get into a skill challenge, uh, which is, um, kind of, uh, for, for those, uh, for our listeners, uh, that know you from the order 66 and, uh, the forge, uh, they, they may be aware of your love of a good skill challenge. Um, but for those of, uh, our listeners that.
00:08:27
Speaker
maybe haven't been exposed to your shows or your particular brand of game mastering. What do you think the biggest virtues of a good skill challenge are, regardless of system, really?
00:08:40
Speaker
Yeah, so I mean the first time I ever, I know that this style of encounter mechanic has been around for quite a while actually in various RPGs. The first time I was ever introduced to it was as a homebrew thing, and I got to give credit where it was due to GM Brev, Brev Tanner.
00:08:58
Speaker
um who actually had a pants off dance off in a star wars game uh back for wizards of the coast saga edition role playing uh for star wars um where we were pairing off to try and literally win a dance competition um uh which was which was an absolute riot
00:09:15
Speaker
And from there, we house ruled it and started building our own rules. And then coincidentally, Wizards of the Coast released their own version of it. It was very similar to our house rules in one of the splat books they did for that system. So that was a fun, fun thing.
00:09:32
Speaker
And then, you know, I became such a believer in skill challenges from that system that I wanted to find a way to carry them into Genesis. Well, first Star Wars, you know, fans of Star Wars, and then Genesis, obviously, as it was. And the big thing about a great skill challenge is it allows everyone to contribute to a scene.
00:09:54
Speaker
Yeah, it allows the narrative I think even more powerfully in the narrative dice system and in Genesis than it did in d20 It really lets the narrative of the dice shine because your threat and your advantage and your triumphs and your despairs
00:10:08
Speaker
can radically impact what those checks mean. But you know, when it comes to a good skill challenge, you should, I mean, and I'm actually got a skill challenge handbook that's being written right now with hooli. And we will be publishing that on the foundry as soon as we're finished. And it will actually be pay what you want, because we feel these rules are so important that we want everyone to be able to access them, you know, regardless of your situation.
00:10:32
Speaker
But that's the big thing to a good skill challenge is to never say no. When somebody suggests something, a skill that's off the wall, let them justify it. And depending on how outlandishly ridiculous it is, you just increase the difficulty appropriately. Meaning if they actually managed to pull it off, it gets even better at that point.
00:10:55
Speaker
Yeah, I love the idea of being able to call on disparate people's skillful capabilities in order to accomplish a goal without necessarily having to shoot everything or without even having to be a social encounter, which is still a very limited encounter in its own right, limited to social skills.
00:11:12
Speaker
Yeah. Do you do ever and I don't think we really there wasn't the opportunity to do this in the confines of the skill challenge that we did to board the train. But I know and I've occasionally when I've run skill challenges in Dungeons and Dragons and I don't know where I pick this up if it was actually codified in like fourth edition, which I think was the first version of D&D or if it was in the fifth edition description. But they they somewhere I read recommending
00:11:42
Speaker
trying to discourage people from just repeating the same skill, like like trying to board the train, like trying to prevent somebody from just doing well, I guess I'll do writing again because that's the only thing that makes sense. And actually, I've occasionally codified it to where like you can't do the same one two times in a row just to try and inject some creativity into the players. Do you find that helpful? I find it to be extremely helpful. In fact, it's even a big sidebar in our in our.
00:12:08
Speaker
Ourself, no, we're writing. But I think the GM really needs to play it by ear. There's times where it makes sense and there's times where it doesn't. In this instance, we had a lot of players that were still very new to Genesis and we're still running their very first skill challenge. So I didn't want to limit them too much. But the big thing when it comes to any thing that a player wants to do, I find in Genesis.
00:12:34
Speaker
And this is kind of a holdover, a kind of sad holdover that D20 unintentionally taught us is people will be like, you know, Oh, I I'm not going to do anything. Why not? It's like, well, because I'm that's writing, I don't have any ranks in writing. Yeah. It's like, so I mean, I mean, this is an amazing dice system. You still have a chance of success, even with a couple of dice in your pool. And and even then I would have the other big one is I would have players that would constantly like
00:13:01
Speaker
When it came time to their turn, or especially if it was in the skill challenge, they would just stare at their character sheet like it was a recipe book and try and see those skills. They had high ranks in and high dice pulls and try and figure out how they could. And I would have these moments where it's like, no, stop, stop. Put your character sheet down. Don't look at your character sheet. What would your character do in this point? What would they do?
00:13:21
Speaker
And then, well, I try and jump on the train, but my athletics is crap. It's like, it's OK. Well, what other skill can we use to make that happen? How about coordination? How about vigilance? How about, you know, you know, OK, or, you know, and and there have been times even on the fly, I'll reduce the skill difficulty if I think it's a reasonable skill and they have crap ranks in it. Yeah. Because it's good role. Back when we were playing in, I believe, Pathfinder in a campaign that Phil and I were co-DMing.
00:13:50
Speaker
Uh, I was playing an elf rogue and I would constantly, um, when I was trying to jump or climb or do, do anything that you would reasonably roll athletics for, I would intentionally and rather long-windedly describe the park, the sweet parkour moves I was doing to justify rolling acrobatics instead of athletics. Like Philip would be like, so you just want to jump over the bar? Yes, but I'm doing it by doing a handstand and then flipping off of it in a suite. It's like, okay. Um.
00:14:18
Speaker
But no, I agree that finding a way to inject that creativity in. I mean, I used Skulduggery because I injected into Glorfin's backstory. Hey, he was a train robber. So, yeah. That was brilliant. I was like, yes.
00:14:36
Speaker
So yeah, just be creative with it for anybody listening that may be concerned about that. OK, so we get on board the train and I believe somewhere in here right at the end of the encounter with old Elijah is where the first episode ended. So we are firmly in episode two territory at this point, right? So, yeah, the train fight with all of us kind of getting spread out and around, I guess, let's just kind of talk through
00:15:04
Speaker
Um, how pear shaped it got when it came to an end. And, um, once again, um, I guess, what did you anticipate happening with the train encounter? Like, how did you see that wrapping up? I guess.
00:15:18
Speaker
I figured you guys would take them out, take the train, and find your way to the mine. That's ultimately it. And you say it went pear-shaped. Talk to me. Maybe I've just been playing Genesis and Star Wars way too long because I don't think it went pear-shaped at all. Why do you think it went pear-shaped?
00:15:37
Speaker
I'm just speaking from the fact that we derailed the train. Oh, yeah. That was always a possibility. That's the thing any GM who gets into the system will learn is that the dice rolls make for the most intriguing things. GMing the system is the easiest system I've ever GMed because you can do so much on the fly and there's so little prep you really need to do.
00:16:00
Speaker
But it's also one of the more challenging systems I've GMed in a very positive way because it forces you to really be on your toes. You learn very quickly to expect the unexpected and to roll with it. And a lot of GMs transitioning, especially from a more rigid system, like many D20 systems out there,
00:16:19
Speaker
Um, or God forbid, something like GURPS, um, you know, they, they, they, there's a bit of a learning curve where, where you're very used to consulting tables and very rigid rules. And, and you have a very specific way things can go and you have extreme control over the outcome. And, you know, this is, there's a level of player monkey wrenching in virtually every encounter that you never planned on. And, and it's fun.
00:16:50
Speaker
No, just to speak on that, the first time I ran Star Wars, the narrative dice, FFG version of Star Wars, it was purely because I was actually down in your neck of the woods before we knew each other at your local game shop and saw it on the shelf and was like, Star Wars role-playing game? Yes, please.
00:17:09
Speaker
And I think it was Randy and Philip were the first two players that ever ran that system for and boy howdy it was a nightmare because I was just looking at the tables like they rolled advantage and I was like okay here are the things that you can use advantage for you can gain strain. You can do this you can do this so which one of those very finite things would you like to do.
00:17:31
Speaker
And that's just not, it's, that is not how arguably any role playing game system should be ran, but certainly not the narrative die system, especially.
00:17:42
Speaker
So, yeah, Glorfin took his shot at the emergency break and derailed the train, and we continued our trend of making bad guys vomit up slugs, which that's just a wonderful visual for me personally. And we take off for the mines.
00:18:07
Speaker
So and that's that's the end of episode two going into episode three. So the next big moment, I guess, is Philip Matias' stealth check to try and sneak up on the one right outlaw and having the failure with advantage.
00:18:27
Speaker
Um, so obviously we, we all know how that ended up in, in our particular game with him managing to scoop behind a rock and using the advantage to have him come investigate instead of raise the alarm. Um, what are some other, like if you are on the player's side and you make that role in that scenario, or if a player asks you to adjudicate as a GM, what are some other ways when you have a role like that, that is a failure, but with advantage that that scenario could have gone?
00:18:57
Speaker
Well, the obvious one is he's discovered, but he manages to get the drop on the guy. So a fight ensues, but he's got heavy advantage going into initiative. Or if it's a triumph or something like that that he rolled, he might even get a free maneuver before anything shakes down. That's one of the more common ways. In retrospect, I actually wish that I had run that a little differently. Okay.
00:19:27
Speaker
One of the big differentiations between any of the narrative dice systems, whether it's the Star Wars RPG by FFG or Genesis, one of the big differentiations from it compared to other systems, including any edition of Dungeons and Dragons that's ever been published, is Dungeons and Dragons is a very discrete system.
00:19:52
Speaker
And what I mean by that is, okay, let's say we were to resolve that in fifth edition D&D. Okay, I need you to make a stealth roll to sneak up on him. Okay. Or he's going to make a perception roll to notice you. All right. I need you to make that roll every 10 feet. Okay. All right. I need you to make it every 10 feet. Oh, he spotted you. I need you to give me a deception roll in order to hide. Okay. He's come upon you. I need you to give me an attack roll in order to hit him.
00:20:16
Speaker
OK, it's a very, very discreet system in Genesis. You are encouraged. These these roles are these roles should be if you're doing that in Genesis. I mean, you can, but you're doing it wrong. The role should be monolithic.
00:20:32
Speaker
So to a degree, it's like, if Philip, I mean, it will be different if we were talking about a rival or a nemesis, but we were talking about a lone minion, okay, as a threat. If Philip had said that, I would have been like, okay, give me a stealth check.
00:20:47
Speaker
And if he had succeeded, he would have, the entirety of that check would have been to sneak all the way to the bottom of the canyon. And if he was successful, take the guy out. One check to do it. And then, and the thing is, when you make checks monolithic like that, you get to start having a lot more freedom and fun and less confusion about how you spend your threat and your advantage. Because when you have one check that's accomplishing more,
00:21:14
Speaker
You have more ways to spend that. Okay. Because at that point, it's like, okay, you failed with advantage. It's like, at that point, I could have said, okay, you got down there with your, you know, Phil could say, well, can I still take him out with my advantage? Like, absolutely. But he takes a shot at you and it rings across the canyon walls and everyone's literally do your presence now. Okay, you failed the stealth check, but you have advantage. So that's one less threat you have to deal with, right? That would be one way, you know, as an example, if he had succeeded,
00:21:41
Speaker
with threat, we could have had a very similar thing where he managed to get out there and take the guy out, but he still manages to get himself noticed, right? Or, you know, something else to that effect. So so yeah, the larger you can make those checks and more monolithic, the easier it is to adjudicate advantage, threat, triumph and despair.
00:22:00
Speaker
Awesome. Very cool. So then we depart and head down to the mine. We find the owlbears and the prospectors and we we crack the case and expertly solve exactly what's going on and why they're targeting prospectors. And then the the big final climactic fight that
00:22:26
Speaker
lasted around and a half, I think. It went by very quickly.
Genesis System and Magic Mechanics
00:22:34
Speaker
Was that how big of a surprise, I guess, was that to you or was it a surprise at all how quickly that final encounter went by? You guys rolled really, really, really well.
00:22:46
Speaker
OK, and that was the crux of it. And again, this was an alpha. I mean, the system, the settings not even finished yet. And, you know, I was testing a few things out. I made a huge mistake giving Philip's character two blue stone pistols.
00:23:02
Speaker
That's the one thing I would change. It was very fitting for the character build. I thought it would be a lot of fun. But as that session has informed me and I've continued to flesh things out and write, Bluestone is very rare and very expensive in its refined form to the point that you can actually work it into metallurgy. And as a result, I mean, that would have
00:23:22
Speaker
two bluestone pistols would be like a epic level piece of gear incredibly expensive and that's the thing i mean it ignored it ignored his soak i think i think i would have gotten an extra round at least out of the fight if it hadn't been for those two bluestone pistols um
00:23:38
Speaker
Uh, failing that, I mean, you guys just had some boss roles and that's just narrative dice. You just got to get used to it. Your average encounter in Genesis or in Star Wars, that matter last three rounds, maybe four, if you're lucky. Um, I mean, that's the average encounter length. And, you know, it goes, it goes by quick. You don't have it, you know, unlike Dungeons and Dragons, you know, where, Oh gosh, the big bad has 211 hit points. It's like, you know, you've got a wound threshold. If he's a really big bad, maybe it's in the low twenties.
00:24:06
Speaker
But I mean, that's, you know, if it's a dragon, maybe you get up there into the 70s or something like that. But still, it's that's that's that's really, that's really intense. So
00:24:17
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, it was it was interesting. And I wish I could say that was infrequent. But no, and I actually love that about the system. It happens all the time. Things go sideways. I've had times where where the players have just rolled crap, absolute crap. And the encounter is dragged on to five rounds and and we're getting into six rounds and half the parties down and you guys can't roll to save your life. And I mean, oh, man, if he had had another round to get off some more nasty psychic attacks,
00:24:46
Speaker
Yeah, I think things would have gone much worse for you guys. Yeah. And I think probably the aside from the insane amount of damage that Jeff and Philip collectively dealt to the big bad, obviously the other big moment in that final encounter was Randy Randy's attempt at casting a spell to paralyze the
00:25:14
Speaker
the big bad and rolling a glorious, wonderful despair on his check. Yeah. So. Yeah, I mean, that's that's magic in this system, baby.
00:25:31
Speaker
We had a fairly long conversation about that and how you almost scared Randy off of magic in Genesis in that moment. But yeah, just for our listeners that are using this opportunity to get their first exposure to Genesis as well along with
00:25:53
Speaker
Trevor and to a large extent, Randy and Jeff. Talk a little bit about magic in this system, because it is more than anything, I think the biggest departure from D&D, even even taking the dice into account. I think it's easier for somebody to wrap their head around dice than the magic system if they're very ingrained in the D20 mindset. So let's talk about that.
00:26:21
Speaker
So I'm sure, honestly, I'm sure all of your listeners are well aware of this, but D20 classically has used a type of spell casting referred to as Vancien magic, which was fantasy author Jack Vance, I believe, created that concept.
00:26:40
Speaker
The idea that you have very, again, it's a discreet system. Okay. You have a discreet spell list. These are the spells, you know, these are the number of days, times you can cast them per day. And then you got to go to sleep and you have to prepare them again. And they're out of your head. And more importantly, this is exactly what happens when you cast them.
00:26:56
Speaker
precisely what happens, okay? No variants unless you get some weird metamagic feeds or something like that, but it's like, here it is. And consequently, if you want variation, this means that we have 700 spells, okay? If you read a lot of fantasy,
00:27:18
Speaker
Vancy and casting is actually the abnormality in fantasy literature. I don't care whether you're going with the low yet high magic of Tolkien. I don't care if you're going with Earthsea. I don't care if you're going with any of the Sanderson novels and more recent times. Vancy and casting is actually the rarity. If you get into true fantasy literature,
00:27:43
Speaker
Magic doesn't usually work that way. Magic tends to work a very different way. You can do whatever the heck you want, however the heck you want it, but there are consequences for magic, and that it exhausts you, or it takes a toll on you, or it rips your soul apart, or there's something, you have to make a bargain with something awful to do it. There's always in historical fantasy been this consequence for using magic. Willy nilly, you can use as much as you want, but it's dangerous.
00:28:13
Speaker
Unfortunately, Dungeons and Dragons has trained us that that's not the way magic is supposed to work in a fantasy role-playing game. And Genesis takes the, I guess, more generalist approach towards magic. It says, no, you can do whatever you want to do. You can do it as many times as you want to do.
00:28:31
Speaker
but it's gonna cost you. It's gonna cost you strain. And thanks to the vagaries of the system, if you roll threat and despair, very bad things are going to happen to you. I mean, there is a separate table in the core rule book specifically for spending threat and despair on magic. And it's like two, three times as bad as the suggestions for spending it on like a combat roll, okay? One threat can inflict two strain or a wound on a player. One little bitty threat.
00:28:59
Speaker
Um, and that's, that's kind of what it is. But so that's the first, that's the first hiccup is, is a major differentiation is the fact that you can cast as often as you want, whenever you want, but it costs you too strained to try. And if you roll poorly, bad, bad things are going to happen. The second big differentiator is.
00:29:17
Speaker
compared to Dungeons and Dragons where you have a spell list of 700 discrete spells. And Genesis, you've got nine. Yeah. I mean, six in the core book, three in the expanded player's guide. And not everyone can access all nine either. They're, you know, it depends on what magic skill you're using.
00:29:39
Speaker
But those spells are incredibly broad. And that's the other difference. They're the most general version. And for those who may listen to the Forge podcast, we've done a huge recurring series on magic, where we spend a lot of time talking about this. And not only how it works, but also to design your own spells. And it's one of those things that a spell is a generalized thing. Attack.
00:30:10
Speaker
Barrier, dispel, heal, augment, okay, which is like buff basically, right? Curse. Like there are just a handful of spells, but they're ridiculously broad and they cover, they run the gamut of virtually anything you would want to do in some capacity. And in a structured encounter, they have a base effect that is actually very, very small and very limited.
00:30:36
Speaker
And it has a set difficulty. But what I love is that every spell basically has this, what would you call it, Eric? A menu? Yeah. Yeah. It's basically like a menu of like anywhere from half a dozen to 20 or more additional effects that you can just tag onto that base spell. Oh, oh, oh. OK, so you want to make an attack spell. You want it to be a fire blast. OK, we'll give it the fire descriptor. And that gives it the burn quality.
00:31:05
Speaker
Oh, you want to be a fireball, give it the fire descriptor and give it the blast quality. And you just start tacking these things onto the spell and everything you tack on makes it harder and harder to cast. It increases the difficulty to cast it. And you also max out at a max difficulty. You can't go above five purple dice. But that really changes the game for magic users to a very stark degree.
00:31:33
Speaker
Well, what I love about it is...
00:31:38
Speaker
Like if we look at Dungeons and Dragons and the spell lists that you have, you have these spells like Bigby's Hand or Tensor's Floating Disc or Mordenkainen's Sword that are like these named wizards that clearly, if they didn't invent the spell, at least popularized it. And in Genesis, you can be Tasha, like you can create the curse hideous laughter and like,
00:32:04
Speaker
in the narrative have people become known like oh have you heard about this new spell that this like rogue sorcerer has been casting on people like
00:32:14
Speaker
you get to create your own spells, which is super interesting. And there are so many resources out there to where if you want to have Fireball on your character sheet, you can write down like Fireball is like these effects. So it's Blast, it's Fire, it's all these things, and it's this much difficulty. And you can just have that there. And so you're like, well, I want to cast Fireball so I know how many dice it is. And you can play it that way.
00:32:42
Speaker
So it's not being taken away from you, but certainly I think Genesis did something interesting with magic users in that
00:32:54
Speaker
they didn't concern themselves with the balance of the power up against your more combat-focused characters. And instead, like you said, just made the consequences higher. Like, you might be able to do more, but you're putting yourself in a greater danger.
00:33:12
Speaker
Oh, you absolutely are. And there's some wonderful mechanical limitations to magic that combat-focused characters just don't have. When you get outside of attack spells or heal spells, virtually every spell has the ability to be maintained. That's another big differentiation between D&D. Spells are like, they last for this period of time.
00:33:34
Speaker
In Genesis, you have a couple of spells that are instantaneous. They're one and done. Everything else can be maintained, and that just means that you have to spend a maneuver each round to concentrate on it. You can maintain it potentially indefinitely.
00:33:49
Speaker
that leads to a wonderfully clever in play. And I really hope you guys experience this. I really hope that you guys can experience the fun and the mental chess game you start playing with yourself over action economy. Because you can, I mean, you only get two maneuvers around. That's it.
00:34:08
Speaker
So at most you can have two spells main that you're maintaining. That's it. Okay, well, I'm gonna let one go because it'll then last to the end of the next turn and I'm gonna kick off another one and Oh God, do I let it go to do this or do that? And and it's it create a lot of fun at the table. Yeah, a lot of fun, but don't
00:34:24
Speaker
Don't let the power of magic fool you. I have seen characters with great axes mop the freaking floor with a caster in one round. I mean, yeah.
00:34:40
Speaker
Yeah, well, and I also like because fifth edition does obviously for a lot of spells have the concentration mechanic, but it functions very differently than in Genesis, where basically you can you can maintain one spell via concentration. And when you take damage, your concentration might break. And that's about it.
00:35:00
Speaker
And it's only on one spell. As soon as you do another spell that you have to concentrate on, you're done. Yeah. And that kind of betrays like a lot of those iconic like thinking to Avengers Infinity War with Wanda spoilers for this like two and a half year old movie.
00:35:22
Speaker
Wanda trying to destroy the Time Stone in Vision's head while holding back Thanos on the other side and clearly putting an immense amount of strain on herself. She's clearly using two spells there, but it's putting an incredible toll on her. I like that with the action economy, if you're taking those two maneuvers but you're also taking actions potentially,
00:35:44
Speaker
you're accumulating strain. And so you have that moment of like the blood trickling out of the nose as you get closer to your strain threshold because you're putting your body under this immense amount of stress. And so I definitely think it makes for more cinematic and iconic moments with casting with the amount of freedom that you get. Yeah. So.
00:36:03
Speaker
Yes, and you made a suggestion earlier that you can write specific spells down. That is a marvelous tool for beginner players. In fact, I didn't do it for Randy's character, but I did that quite intentionally because I kind of wanted to crash course him into it.
00:36:19
Speaker
But if I'm running a con game, if I'm running a con game, especially with players that have never played a magic user before, I will give them three index cards that have like, hey, here's some pre-baked spells. Here you go. This is what they do. This is the difficulty. And I've just already added in the extra effects and what that to make Tasha's hideous laughter or, you know, blazing fireball or, or whatever it is.
00:36:39
Speaker
because it usually takes about a session for a player brand new to Genesis, especially to start to realize, oh, crap, I can do anything I want. And and then even players that are smart enough to realize that from the get go. It leads to analysis paralysis very quickly in game at the start. And that really starts to slow things down until you start to get a little more familiar with the magic system and you can just start
00:37:08
Speaker
you know, automatically knowing what those extra effects are without having to think about them. Yeah. And I think a really useful tool in that vein is kind of what you're talking about with skill challenges of if you have your caster kind of staring at their sheet, like, well, what do you want to do? I want to cast a spell. Well, what do you want the spell to do? Like, let's, let's resolve that. Like, do you want it to do damage? Are you trying to stop them? Are you trying like,
00:37:32
Speaker
don't worry about like constructing a spell right now. Just tell me what you want to do and we'll figure it out together. And I think that can translate, you know, you're, you're spot on. And this is something this actually, cause I was, I was realistic to the episodes prior to this, right? Um, to remind myself how the session went. And we actually had a couple moments like this in the game and it wasn't necessarily related to casting. Um, but it was, it was one of those, and this isn't, this isn't a Genesis thing. Every GM and any, any system should do this. When you see your player agonizing over their character sheet or humming or hawing,
00:37:59
Speaker
having this like, Oh, well, okay, well, no, I can't do that, because I took a maneuver. And I mean, you just as a GM, be a good GM, break them out of it, say, just stop, look at me, look at me, talk to me. What are you wanting to do? Talk it out. Yeah, talk it out. It's okay. And there's this, the the player versus GM mentality that unfortunately, a lot of folks have,
00:38:17
Speaker
It's almost like the player is making moves on a risk board without having to let the other party know what they're thinking so they can somehow surprise you with their brilliant tactics. And it's like, that's not what we're doing here. Tell me what you want to do. We'll figure out a way to get you to do it.
00:38:38
Speaker
Yeah, that was honestly just a moment as a player of going, there's literally I can't contribute nothing with this scenario, so I'm out. But yeah, and then that was the end of of the one shot after a very cinematic ending with a nefarious figure on a cliffside staring down at us with a tentacled snarl.
00:39:01
Speaker
Setting up the sequel. So so yeah, any any highlights or nuggets of wisdom that you you walked away from this one shot with that you want to share that we haven't already kind of covered. God, we've covered so much. Yeah. Oh.
00:39:21
Speaker
I mean, one thing I learned from this one shot is that I am the best at rolling dice and I hope that carries through. I was kind of shocked because y'all's rolling was just absolutely insane.
Character Customization and Narrative Balance
00:39:33
Speaker
I don't think I mean, nuggets of wisdom that may be new to listeners thinking about running Genesis, but are I guess old hat for me are. Don't over plan. Mm hmm.
00:39:49
Speaker
If you're not running a pre-made module, go in with an outline and some stat blocks because your characters will put things completely off the rails. They just will.
00:40:02
Speaker
because that's the nature of the dice in this system. And it's glorious. It's what I love most about this system. I was blown away. I was blown away that you guys just cinched the final encounter in a round and a half. Good gravy. And wrapping that up, I mean, yeah.
00:40:32
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's and, you know, I'm always of two minds when I'm actually playing in a game because I'm also a full time GM. And so I always see moments like that and think, like, I wonder what cool things he had planned for later on in the encounter if it would have gone another round. I wonder what else that thing could have done.
00:40:50
Speaker
So yeah, do you want to get into some listener questions from our wonderful patrons? I would love to. So we're going to kick things off with patrons from our Q&A tier, which is the tier that gets your questions bumped to the front of the queue.
00:41:06
Speaker
So our first one comes from Liz, and this is targeted at me and the other players. Just a quick caveat, some of the questions were directed at specific players that are not me, and we will make sure to get those questions answered in the Discord. We'll have them type up a response to your questions since we're not able to answer it on the air.
00:41:28
Speaker
Um, for the definite unanswered questions, I'll just go and give a shout out to Laura, Darren, Irene and Richard. Thank you for the questions and we'll get you the answers in the discord. Um, so Liz, uh, how was playing a pre-made character versus one you designed yourself? Um, and she references the last time that you ran a one shot for us. Uh, we were also playing as pre-made characters. Um, so.
00:41:53
Speaker
I it is and you can weigh on in this having having played on both sides as well. There is a certain level of excitement and creativity that I find in a pre-made character of finding it and then finding how how do I make this my own? Because obviously with a character that I create, it's my own from the get go and I can kind of craft it from the ground up.
00:42:17
Speaker
Whereas getting Glorphan in my hands and seeing the strengths and flaws and weaknesses that you gave him, how do I play in that space? I almost always get more excited when I'm doing a pre-made character just because I find that my creativity gets going more when I have restrictions and it's like, how do I make this work?
00:42:45
Speaker
What are your thoughts on playing a pre-made versus a created character, Chris? It's a different ball of wax. When you're doing a one-shot, I almost prefer a pre-gen just because I want to get the action going. So don't make me go through the headache for something that I'm literally only going to be playing for four hours. One of the things that I was really eager to try and test out the
00:43:09
Speaker
little mechanic we did at the start where you guys informed each other's backstory, um, to a degree. And, and I added a wrinkle is that took us, that took us what, Eric? 15 minutes. Yeah. And all in, all done. It took us 15 minutes. It, my hope was that it would help personalize and add agency.
00:43:34
Speaker
to your ownership of those characters. So similar mechanics like that I find to be really helpful if you're doing pre-gens. There's other little tricks you can do too. If you have a character backstory or a blurb and for pre-gens and a one shot for Pete's sake, keep it to a few sentences or a single small paragraph.
00:43:53
Speaker
Don't read it aloud. Give it to each of the players. Let them consume it and then spend that 15 minutes going around the table. Let them describe their character. Let them take the onus of that. That can really help if you're running one-shot characters too. Another good piece of advice I can give? I've never done it and I really want to.
00:44:15
Speaker
The person I've seen it do it the best is actually Katrina Ostrander, Katrina Ostrander Lee, who was for a long time a fiction editor at Fantasy Flight Games. Then she was an RPG producer. Then she went back into editing for Fantasy Flight. Then she left the organization to take another editing job. And then she did freelance. And now she's back at Fantasy Flight again as their creative head of story group, basically, overseeing all that from a fiction standpoint.
00:44:43
Speaker
When she was our guest of honor at Gamer Nation Con, the game she ran, she had created these character sheets where 90% of the work had been done, but there were key decisions left to be made.
00:44:58
Speaker
you know certain talent choices and she had like a little tree and certain skill choices and as at 10 minutes at the start of the session she would after explaining everything to the player say okay this is the character you've chosen but right now i need you to choose from these two talents in this tier which one do you want the character to take
00:45:14
Speaker
These two talents in this tier, which one do you want the carrier to take? You've got two unspent ranks at rank two in skills. Where do you want to put them from these choices? And that was a fantastic tool that got a ton of positive feedback from the players because they felt like they had a pre-gen and the ease of it, but they still had control to a certain degree over their pre-gen.
00:45:33
Speaker
Yeah, Phillip and I actually got to play in that game that she was running. And no offense to you or any other listeners who I may have played in their games at Gamer Nation Con over the years, but it's the best session I've been in. She's incredible.
00:45:49
Speaker
Well, and the way she structured that, like I ended up playing a droid because it was a Star Wars game, but she had physical appearance, multiple choice as well. And so, you know, you pick a droid and I was going through and one of the options for like head appearance was dreadlocks. And I thought.
00:46:11
Speaker
OK, and so just because she had that option there, I was playing a droid whose top cap had been blown off and he had taken the excess wires and tied them up in like a dreadlocked ponytail. And that was his look. And I never would have come up with that on my own. Like never in a million. I'm not that creative.
00:46:31
Speaker
And but like it's and she also had the front of the character sheet. She had it like folded into like a brochure style. She had it blank to where you could write your character. And she also encouraged people to like just regardless of art level, sketch your character, just draw them out just so you can visualize them and everybody else can visualize them. And so little touches like that go a long way to even if it's a pre-made character, getting your players bought into
00:46:59
Speaker
bought into the character. And one other thing I like about pre-made characters, we were kind of talking about Trevor like playing into the character and rushing back into the mind. With pre-made characters, especially one shots, you aren't worried about the next session. You're far more likely to take those big risks and do those big things because it's like, well, I'm never going to play this character again more than likely. So
00:47:21
Speaker
Let's do something interesting." So yeah. Irene asked me, which of Glorphin's crazy successes was your favorite? Shooting the worm off Randy's face, I feel like, just because it was such a dumb decision. And everybody responded exactly the way I wanted them to when I said, I'm going to try to shoot it off his face. And when it worked, it was just like, all right.
00:47:49
Speaker
Jumping back to Liz's question real quick, there was one last point I wanted to make about pre-made characters in one shot specifically. It's also important regardless of the thoughts that you have about the character, like when I was deciding how to play the character and exist in that space,
00:48:05
Speaker
reading the tone of the game as it develops because like with Glorphin's last name being Spurbottom and like him like calling that out a couple times and Philip giving him such grief about it or Matthias giving Glorphin such grief about it. I had actually come up with where the surname Spurbottom came from and why Glorphin was making such a big thing about trying to get
00:48:28
Speaker
the name out there. And if we, if the one shot had developed into a more dramatic tone, which I played in one shots that have like the cat Ostrander Lee one shot was, it was like rogue one 2.0. It was like, everybody died in the end. Um, but, um,
00:48:46
Speaker
So I had that in my back pocket where I had that backstory and that locked and loaded to throw in his face for mocking him, but it didn't match the tone. And so I was like, well, this is just going to be a bummer if I try to throw it in here now. So maybe for the sequel.
00:49:05
Speaker
Richard had the question, did the weapons have unlimited ammo? He didn't recall a discussion over how many shots each character had in their weapon. And he went on to, that's kind of a separate question. So go ahead and address the ammo question, Chris. Yeah, yeah. So Genesis handles this the same way Star Wars does for FFG. The answer is that unless the weapon specifically has the quality of limited ammo,
00:49:31
Speaker
And it will have a number behind it like limited ammo one or two or three at which point you then need to reload it. Weapons have unlimited ammo. And the reason is that's incredibly cinematic. Running out of ammunition.
00:49:46
Speaker
happens, but it happens as a result of threat and despair, where it's like, Oh, my gosh, you just fired your last shot. You need to pause and reload. Oh, my gosh, do you have a reload that you could do? And that can make for some very fun, intense moments. And what you'll find in Genesis overall, because it as Eric alluded to before, it's a it's a very narrative and cinematic
00:50:12
Speaker
system, it always bends the rules towards the cinematic and nothing is less cinematic than counting your ammunition until it becomes cinematic. Yes. As a result of becoming that narrative focal point in the scene. But now tracking your bullets or your arrows, that's just ridiculous.
00:50:29
Speaker
Yeah. And then Richard went ahead and followed up specifically for you, Chris. There were a lot of successful and triumphant roles in the early part of the game. And he kind of goes on to say, were you expecting that much success? And did the spur bottom game outright bypass any part of the adventure that you had planned?
00:50:49
Speaker
No, you guys didn't outright bypass. I've had that happen so many times in Genesis though, and you just need to be prepared for that and revel in it when it happens. Usually as the result of a social encounter that you fully intend to lead into a combat encounter, but they just do so darn well that they're able to get past it. But no, nothing was bypassed.
00:51:10
Speaker
And honestly, we handled it in a very narrative way. And honestly, it depends on what the players suggest for their triumphs. If they'd gone a certain way, we could have bypassed entire sections. Maybe the train heist never would have happened if they had rolled well enough and gotten there before the train was absconded with. There probably still would have been a fight, but it wouldn't have been... We would have skipped the skill challenge at that point, no doubt.
00:51:38
Speaker
Um, but you know, that's the thing that the player, what, while the GM has the final say, so the GM doesn't, doesn't dictate how positive dice results are spent, not, not triumphant advantage. The player dictates that the GM has to approve it. Um, but you know, cause like, Oh, that's a bit much or, you know, um, but, but ultimately, yeah, the, the player has that level of control. So it depends on where your players take it.
00:52:04
Speaker
OK. And then Richard had another question in rapid fire. What other careers are you considering for the Dusters and Dragons setting? Oh, boy. So we have we have the preacher. OK, so let's talk about the careers we had in the game. OK, we had the preacher.
00:52:29
Speaker
We had the You know what I could I could just pull up my notes, but I'm just gonna try and do this by memory So we had the preacher We had the the lawman. Okay. Mm-hmm. We had the gunslinger. We had the gambler all right, and then we had Trevor's character which the career choice kind of now I'm trying to remember what the curve is called
00:52:59
Speaker
I had just changed the name of it actually before that adventure. It's the patrician. Yeah. Which is basically the, you know, the well to do, you know, the equivalent of a noble, basically. Right. And so honestly, there are three others that are currently in the alpha. All right. So for a total of eight.
00:53:20
Speaker
Um, there is, uh, the first and more obvious one is there is the shaman. All right. Um, who is a, a primalistic magic user. All right. Um,
00:53:34
Speaker
Arcane magic does not actually have a career in this particular setting, but similar to the way that Bardic magic is handled in Realms of Terenoth, where you can, with a tier two talent, get access to it as a career skill, that's what I'm doing with Arcane. Because the idea is that the world has basically moved beyond that.
00:53:55
Speaker
right okay um where there's no dedicated career for the wizard right um that the world the world has kind of moved beyond that um but a shaman is which is very much in the new world okay um on the frontier um there's the shaman who is is the is the master of primal magic
00:54:13
Speaker
In addition to that, I'm waffling on the title of the career and I will really rely on a lot of beta feedback to find out if this career should even be included.
00:54:27
Speaker
because I don't want to rub people the wrong way, but one of the classic Western tropes is the soiled dove. The man or woman of the evening along with the patrician and to some extent the gambler is one of the more face-focused characters basically. The other career is the machinist.
00:54:54
Speaker
Okay, and the machine is because because again, there's it's it's you know We're in this in early Industrial Revolution time period right and so you've got you know You've got blacksmiths and you know people that are you know in essence working on I don't want to say Steampunk because that's not entirely accurate But it's it's that you know people people that are that are machinists, you know, they're gearheads They're weaponsmiths or things like that. Those are the those are the eight careers that I'm playing with right now But I'm really eager to get some feedback from the beta Once once we get out to it
00:55:23
Speaker
Awesome. Well, Darren had a question that kind of beautifully is led into by your previous answer.
Handling Sensitive Themes in Gaming
00:55:34
Speaker
Darren was wondering, when publishing a setting like Dusters and Dragons, how do you navigate slash avoid all of the racism and sexism kind of inherent in Wild West fiction?
00:55:46
Speaker
Oh, God. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So there's a few ways you can tackle it on the nose. Whenever I'm dealing with a subject that could be considered offensive in any capacity, for example, Game Nation Studios published a little RPG a while back called Everyone is John. Okay. In which the players take on the role of voices in a crazy man's head. Okay. Yeah.
00:56:10
Speaker
That's hilarious. It's fun. Mental illness is no joke. And so whenever I'm dealing with a taboo subject like that, we actually had a full page intro at the very beginning of the book to say, listen, please understand the vein in which we are taking this. This is not meant to make light of any of the serious mental illness problems that are occurring with people.
00:56:28
Speaker
You need to make your intent clear in a published product and the same goes and there are other RPGs that deal with topics like this and you'll find very similar things like basically saying look historically speaking this period of time in the real world was rampant with racism and sexism and and just you know, horrible horrible horrible things We are very intentionally not focusing on that because this is a fantasy world. Okay. Yeah
00:56:52
Speaker
And that's the other thing too. Do racism and sexism exist in your Dungeons and Dragons games or your fantasy games?
00:57:03
Speaker
as a general principle or rule? Not really. And we're really taking that setting and just advancing it to the Wild West era. The biggest danger in the setting for me in terms of ruffling potential feathers is the idea of having colonists dealing with a native population.
00:57:23
Speaker
And in early pre-alpha, Eric, you and I even had discussions about this. Yeah. Where originally it was going to be the equivalent of I was going to have elves and potentially orcs be the Native Americans of the frontier that didn't exist in the old world at all. But then you run into a lot of problems about how you portray these peoples.
00:57:49
Speaker
And the solution there is we're going to call it on the nose and be very blunt in the setting. We're going to have a lot of sidebars that talk about it as well to make sure the intent is known. But also we made a few smart decisions. I loved the idea that no, elves and orcs exist in the old world too. It's just that they have distant ancestors that made it across the great divide and developed their own civilizations here.
00:58:13
Speaker
And when you look at classical fantasy literature, especially Dungeons and Dragons tropes around elves and orcs, they tend to exist in very specific schemas. And so it's one of those things that's like, okay, you've got high elves and you've got wood elves. Okay. Going back to Tolkien. Well, great. So I've got my new world elves and I've got my old world elves. Okay. Um, you know, with orcs, you've got the ravening horde. Okay. Well, that's my new world elves or new world orcs, old world orcs, you know,
00:58:43
Speaker
They used to be like that once upon a time, but they've been beaten into basically a subclass. And that's a very on the nose thing that we'll tackle when we talk about orcs in the old world specifically. And quite frankly, it's no different from the way that orcs and half orcs especially are treated in Dungeons and Dragons most settings. Yeah. Yeah.
00:59:04
Speaker
And then when it comes to the sexism that's classically inherent, so much is incumbent on a writer and especially a GM, you change that by example. For example, I gave you guys five pregents. The de facto leader and lawman of the town and the sheriff was female.
00:59:22
Speaker
Mm hmm. Okay, just straight up and yeah, she kicks butt. It's those in and simple declarative tacit statements like that that you're making without making them inform the players the readers and everyone else whether it's through a pre gen you have an adventure, whether it's through NPCs that you create and stat blocks, whether it's through gazetteer style story building, the you you can enforce
00:59:47
Speaker
the lack of any type of sexist or patriarchal or matriarchal, for that matter, power structure in the world by those simple choices without even having to explain it. Yeah. We actually in the the Geek Pantheon Discord had a really engaging and kind of long discussion about the portrayal of orcs in fantasy settings and tabletop role playing games.
01:00:13
Speaker
through today and kind of the problems with that. And one of the things that I think we all landed on in agreement of, in something I really appreciate about Genesis, don't assign a morality to the entirety of a people group. Don't say all orcs are evil, because that's a good way to not fall into those as if you had this
01:00:36
Speaker
in your setting, the new world orcs, like you just kind of blankly said. And they're evil also. And it's like, well, are they all? But they're not. They're just their old world. I mean, they exist in a very different state of life. And it happens to be a very violent one. And honestly, you can blame Tolkien for that. But if you're really going to get into it. This is one of the reasons, Eric, that I love Eberron so much, that it's my second favorite setting of all time after Star Wars.
01:01:06
Speaker
I love Eberron so terribly much because it, one of the reasons, one of the many reasons is that it took morality and it put it in the toilet and flushed it away and said, nope, anybody can be anything because that's the way things are. Yeah. Um, and yeah, that's, that's also something. I mean, you go back to episode one of Eberron renewed, that was, uh, something that was pointed out of like, you come across some goblins, but in this setting, goblins are not.
01:01:33
Speaker
Target fodder. Okay, so Darian also had another question directed at us. Did you get any insights into the Genesis system during Dusters and Dragons game that will inform how you build your characters for Eberron?
01:01:48
Speaker
I mean, I will go ahead and speak for like Trevor, Randy and Jeff in that this is their first time building characters for Genesis. And we just spent a couple nights working on character builds and everything. I'm not going to spoil anything because we have session zero coming out.
01:02:06
Speaker
But I will definitely say that there were many references to the Dusters and Dragons one shot and how those characters functioned when they were building their characters. So, man, I hope you guys get into I don't want to spoil anything. I hope you guys get into the difficult decisioning that Randy had after playing a caster in Dusters and Dragons, because I think that's absolutely hilarious. Yes, it will. It will be very interesting.
01:02:31
Speaker
So, Randy's excited, if not a little bit uncertain.
01:02:37
Speaker
Okay, Irene asked, what were the baddies with tentacles? Mind flayers, was there a copyright reason for not naming them or just adding suspense? Yes, there's a copyright reason for naming them. Mind flayers, illithids are one of the few creatures that are copyrighted to Wizards of the Coast. I think owlbears might actually be as well. Now I'm not gonna get any problems running a one shot on a podcast, but I most likely wouldn't be publishing that.
01:03:06
Speaker
Yeah, anytime soon. I'd have to check on alabares, but I'm almost positive that mind flayers are so our beholders There's there's just a handful that they do actually happen to have the copyright on. Yeah
01:03:17
Speaker
Yeah. And for our side of things, I think it was just kind of acknowledging like our characters wouldn't know the word mind flayer. Like it's a creepy guy with tentacles on his face. And he's purple for some reason. So that was my motivation, at least for not saying the name out loud.
01:03:37
Speaker
Um, devious pop tart asked, uh, even though this was a one shot, uh, are there any plans loose or otherwise to continue this story? There's certainly space for a sequel for the, uh, insert gang name. I forgot the spur bottom boys. Come on. Um, um, I mean, never say never, I guess is the easy answer to that. That's up to you, man. If you guys ever take a break from the campaign, it's about to start and you want me to run the, uh, sequel. I'll do so.
01:04:05
Speaker
Okay, well, you heard it here first, folks. Maybe we can have you guys guest on the Forge for a live play.
01:04:12
Speaker
Yes, that would be fun. Yeah. Yeah. Get that synergy going. Irene kind of followed up asking, what were our thoughts on the pre-gen characters, favorite aspects of them? With with Glorphin, I really enjoyed Glorphin's weakness was poverty. And given like the rest of the strengths and flaws and everything, it was very clear. Glorphin came from nothing and managed to escape that.
01:04:40
Speaker
and will do anything and everything to prevent himself from living that life again. And so that's why when we killed the couple of bandits, he took their purses and didn't ask, hey, do you all want to divide up this money or anything? It was just like, nope, I'm going to take them. And so finding those little nuggets in the backstory to play up, I really enjoyed. So
01:05:02
Speaker
So something intriguing that we didn't, I think Jeff was the only one who did it. One of the interesting things about this setting is, and I don't know if you're going to be using it, Eric, and you'll probably get to that in session zero, but one of the things that the Taranoth setting in Genesis has is heroic abilities. For this, and I really love the heroic abilities concept.
01:05:28
Speaker
typically story point driven, once an encounter kind of thing, or once a session kind of thing that gives you a very cool special ability, but as your character increases their earned XP, it gets better and better and better. My take on that for this setting is doing something similar, but it's all revolves around an item. And actually, I actually call them totems. Okay.
01:05:53
Speaker
Um, where they're, they're not, they're not necessarily require a story point to activate or two story points to activate. Um, but they are, their capabilities do get better and better as you get more experienced because when you get into the, this it's, it's very much the wild west tropes. Characters have totems, whether it's the, the weathered tin star they used to wear or the, the
01:06:14
Speaker
the picture of Clementine back at home waiting for you, right? Or the bullet that never fired from your gun and it stopped you from killing somebody you shouldn't and you carried around. Like totems are very, very, very popular in Western trope mythology. So I include all those in your character sheets, but I think Jeff was the only one to ever actually activate his. Yeah, I think so. The 10 star,
01:06:45
Speaker
We're just bad players. What can I say? Honestly, you guys were rolling too well because I know a lot of your special abilities had to do with when you rolled poorly, you could do next. Yeah. Yeah. It was reroll. And I was like, well, I don't want to right now because I got five triumphs. Um, um, leopard wants to, uh, just kind of have a general rundown of the setting, like any, any major locations, factions, towns, et cetera.
Game World Mechanics and Setting
01:07:12
Speaker
Um,
01:07:14
Speaker
And like, does gunpowder work the same way as it does in the real world? Or is there some magic behind that? No, just basic gunpowder. But the fun thing about that is the alchemy skill is still represented in the world. And that's how you make gunpowder.
01:07:30
Speaker
among many other interesting kinds of things. At a very high level, I don't want to waste too much time diving into details here, but Dusters and Dragons is basically a Wild West fantasy or this weird west setting that, I mean, I'll be blunt, was really heavily inspired by games like Deadlands, where that's the concept of this general fantasy world typically set in a medieval time period, but you just advance that world's timeline several centuries
01:08:00
Speaker
to this early industrial age. So it still contains the fantasy elements that players know and love, but it's this literal mixture of fantasy and Wild West, right? Orcs and elves, dwarves and halflings, but six shooters, frontier exploration, stagecoaches, railways.
01:08:17
Speaker
And, you know, the thing is, like, in that regard, the setting should have somewhat of a steampunk flavor. And we'll talk about this in the tropes. But it's not because true steampunk, the fantastic elements of steampunk are always boiling down to weird science. OK.
01:08:33
Speaker
Victorian era science that's far beyond anything we could accomplish even today in the 21st century, but they can do it with steam and electricity, right? Here, that fantastical element isn't so much weird science, it's the fantasy elements of classical fantasy, magic and monsters. At another high level, so here, I'll tell you what, I'll read you the cover blurb, how about that? All right.
01:09:01
Speaker
It's been nearly four generations since the great divide to the West was finally crossed. The first explorers who left the old world for the new reported a wild and untouched land, a new frontier filled with rich resources and the promise of new lives and boundless opportunity for anyone bold enough to claim it. Since then, the frontier has grown, populated by an ever increasing number of settlers, prospectors, adventurers, and outlaws, all of whom seek a new and better life far from the old world and its rigidity.
01:09:30
Speaker
because the new world is about freedom, opportunity, and wealth for the taking. But the continuously expanding frontier is not without risks, as settlers soon discovered a vast land populated with creatures and denizens straight from the myths of the old world. Fantastic beasts, unexplainable natural phenomenon, wild natives, and a strange preponderance of rare magics, which seem woven into the very fabric of the land itself. It is a place of magic. It is a place of freedom. It is a place of danger.
01:09:59
Speaker
It is a place where an elf can leave their rigid familial caste structure and make a fresh start or perhaps risk a new life with the elven tribes of the new world to learn their ancient and mysterious ways. It's a place where an orc can rise above their subservient station in the old world and experience true freedom and the respect that only success and wealth can bring. It is a place where humans, halflings, and dwarves can use their skills, their wits, and their ambitions to carve out a home in a place of boundless beauty and even greater wonder.
01:10:28
Speaker
It is a world of dusters and dragons. Guitar twang. Yeah, that's basically it. The concept here is that the old world is very much Europe. We were only gonna even touch on it in the setting book because nothing should really happen there. But since forever, there has been the great divide. So imagine you take a sailing ship and you go west.
01:10:55
Speaker
you will eventually reach a crevice in the ocean, a literal crack that is a couple kilometers wide in the crust that just goes down into forever. And on either side of it is ocean that is just constantly spilling into this crevice, constantly. Very nice.
01:11:16
Speaker
And no matter how far north or south you go, there is the Great Divide. If you go further enough south, it gets too cold for anyone to really survive. But the Great Divide has always been there.
01:11:27
Speaker
Um, but a few generations ago as technology finally advanced, people developed this thing called a dirigible and they're very dangerous and very difficult, but it allowed for final exploration beyond the great divide. And they discovered the new world, this whole new continent, this frontier. And once that happened, um, also with the invention of the iron coach, which is the train, of course. Yeah.
01:11:52
Speaker
um uh you know and and with modern construction methods they actually were able to moor and build bridges across the great divide finally um and there's you know there's literally waterborne bridges that take the iron coach all the way from the old world to the new there's a couple of them um and when that happened it just opened up this whole new world but the new world is populated by a tremendous amount of fey which is the the generalized term for
01:12:19
Speaker
the monsters and magic of myth, which in the old world, even though you have humans and elves and orcs and halflings and dwarves, monsters don't really exist. I mean, that's the equivalent of fairy tale. Okay. Okay. You know, that's, you know, it's all fairy tale.
01:12:39
Speaker
And so upon coming to the New World, you start discovering, oh my gosh, this stuff from our mythology is actually real. It's alive here now. Maybe our mythology isn't mythology after all. Maybe it's actually history. And that's basically the setting. There's a few very established settlements near the eastern shore of the continent of the New World.
01:13:03
Speaker
Um, but you know, there's a lot of frontier towns as as expansion just continually continually goes um and the iron coach with it So that's the that's the that's the generalized setting. Yeah, um, and as far as sentient species you've got um You've got orcs and elves, um in terms of player character species in the new world um, and then you've got the old world as well and when it comes to orcs and elves in the actual setting
01:13:27
Speaker
you actually have two subspecies choices. Kind of the same way you do in Terenoth, where you have different types of elf or different types of cat folk or half cat folk, basically. And it's one of those things that if you want to play an elf, okay, you want to play an old world elf or a new world elf. You want to play an orc? Do you want to play an old world orc or a new world orc? And that's, yeah, that's basically it.
01:13:47
Speaker
Very cool. And you'd mentioned Deadlands. Leopard was also interested in your sources of inspiration. So were there any other big ones that you drew from? Oh, man. I mean, Deadlands is one of the most brilliant things ever, and everyone should play it. Deadlands was a massive source of inspiration for a lot of this. But also, I'm just a huge fan of Westerns and Kurosawa, for that matter.
01:14:12
Speaker
which some of the best spaghetti westerns are just Curaçao. I won't say rip-offs, I'll be kind and say homages. Remakes. So yeah, just being a huge western fan and a huge fantasy fan, it's one of those things that always makes sense and any chance I can do to release a product that has a orc dressed like a cowboy with a six-shooter pushing up the brim of his 10-gallon hat on the cover, that's all the inspiration you need, right?
01:14:40
Speaker
Yeah, of course. Just real quick, Arnor did ask if we were using World 20 or some other system, we were using World 20. Chris had done all the heavy lifting and built the character sheets in World 20 to where we could just click and roll. Liz did have another question about
01:14:59
Speaker
Like just for our next campaign, if we'll be using physical dice for the campaign or roll 20 sheets like in this one shot for now, roll 20 sheets are what we have to use. And then once we can be around a table together, we will start using physical dice.
01:15:16
Speaker
Kurt had the question. And you very heavily explored this. So we can just acknowledge the question. And then if there's anything you want to clarify, we can do that or move on. But he asked, why Weird West? What are some of the themes that you think your setting will help tables explore? What twists on standard fantasy are you most proud of? How long has the West been opened? And he acknowledges. It's understandable if some of these questions aren't answerable.
01:15:44
Speaker
But yeah, so we've covered a lot of it. The West has been open roughly for generations. OK, so you've got you know that that's that's kind of where we are long enough for a brand new species to develop. There is one species I didn't mention earlier that might be worth noting, and that was what Philip was playing, which was the Cambian, which is inspired in a sense by Tiefling to a large degree. But the idea is that there there
01:16:13
Speaker
one of the one of the core old world species had a kid that's half fae. Honestly, that started happening really with the first generation that settled.
01:16:24
Speaker
Um, so you've got it, you've got, it can be in a very interesting and they're an incredibly young race. So yeah, very cool. Um, Divas Park, Tark had the question, how much input, uh, did people have with GM Chris for their characters? Uh, none. Um, I know you did, uh, give our hope that Randy would take the caster just to get his feet wet with magic and Genesis, but yeah, we didn't, we didn't have any input. Uh, Chris provided those for us whole cloth.
01:16:54
Speaker
Um, and, uh, devious pop-tart, uh, final question that we have, uh, for you, Chris, uh, does, does Dusters and Dragons have careers and specializations a la FFG Star Wars, or does it use the talent, uh, system from Genesis to be more freeform and less defined? Um, for right now, unless things change radically, um, we are using the standard talent pyramid of the Genesis core rules.
01:17:20
Speaker
So we'll have careers and then the standard talent pyramid. Interestingly, in the most recent episode of the Forge, we actually talked to Sam Stewart about specialization and creation. And it's tough. You really have to decide what you want to do. And if you want to lock your players into that,
01:17:42
Speaker
And it's a pretty tremendous amount of work to do so and to make it balanced I'm at the point now where I really really really like the pyramid
01:17:53
Speaker
and generalized careers. So that's kind of what we're going to go for. Maybe by the time we have beta, we'll be able to, we may end up offering both in the supplement where it's like, here's generalized careers, or if everyone agrees, here's a bunch of specializations. We may very well do that, but that's a tremendous amount of work that also will, let's be perfectly frank, quadruple or more our play testing time and play testing effort.
01:18:21
Speaker
Yeah, no kidding. Because every single spec, and you need to have a minimum of three for each career, every single spec has to be play tested.
01:18:31
Speaker
Well, and you need to play test the different pads in it. I mean, that's the thing about Spectris is you can do them a bunch of different ways. So. Well, very cool. Well, thank you for joining me for the past hour and some change, Chris, to break down the one shot and Dusters and Dragons while I have a dogfight going on behind me.
01:18:54
Speaker
But yeah, we've kind of mentioned it in passing, but do you want to go ahead and plug your pluggables? Where can people, if they enjoy, if you all enjoyed this kind of discussion of breaking down a Genesis setting or product, boy, do I have a show for you.
Community Engagement and Podcast Features
01:19:11
Speaker
Yes, so I co-host two shows currently. The first that Eric is referring to this Genesis specific is The Forge, which I host with GM Houli and you can go to forgegenesis.com or D20 radio. Just click on the podcast link.
01:19:29
Speaker
where you can find Eberron renewed along with every other podcast on the network. Additionally, I'm also one of the co-hosts for the Order 66 podcast, which is devoted to the Star Wars role-playing game by Fantasy Flight Games.
01:19:44
Speaker
really getting into the crunchy nitty-gritty of Genesis and how it's built and designed. The Forge is really what you're looking for. And we've got an exciting thing that's going to be happening in our coming episodes. Actually, don't we, Eric?
01:20:02
Speaker
Um, yes, we do. Um, because you have gone through with the rest of your players, a pretty tremendous effort to port Eberron into Genesis. And there was a lot of really well thought out and wonderfully designed things you guys did, not just having to do with species, but having to do with new talents and careers, um, you know, heroic abilities, artifice, all kinds of interesting things. And I'm, I'm not shy in saying that I've, I've really enjoyed
01:20:32
Speaker
in the small limited capacity that I have been consulting to some of that, which has been a lot of fun. And we had always said when you started this that we were going to have you come onto the Forge on a fairly regular basis and have a small segment dedicated to exploring one of those things.
01:20:50
Speaker
So, you know, while Eberron renewed is very much devoted to the live play, the actual play that's happening, you know, people are going to be able to hear you pull back the curtain of the Genesis mechanics that you're using for your game on the Forge, you know, fairly soon. Yeah. Yeah. I'm excited. I'm really looking forward to that.
01:21:09
Speaker
But yeah, you guys can find obviously those two shows and everything else at d20radio.com. Yeah. Well, excellent. Well, I think we're going to call it an episode there. If you all want to be part of the conversation, head on over to our Facebook group, The Geek Pantheon, or
01:21:29
Speaker
as has happened this week, potentially the day this episode drops. Our Discord is now open range for anybody and everybody to come join us. We have some tiered channels for our patrons, so they still have the exclusive experience that they've come to enjoy.
01:21:49
Speaker
But given the current circumstances and a lot of people in our hobby feeling the strain of isolation and not getting around a table and not getting to have those fun discussions about gaming, we are, from this point forward, opening up our Discord for all of you to come join and be a part of the conversation there.
01:22:09
Speaker
Um, ask us questions directly, uh, things like that. So, um, there, there will be a, uh, invite, uh, link on both our website, the geek pantheon.com or in the Facebook group or on our other socials, Twitter and Instagram at the geek pantheon.
01:22:26
Speaker
We're also probably part of the D20 radio podcasting network, as we've been talking about. And our featured podcast this week that we're going to give some love to is the Guardians of the Wills podcast. So if you all enjoy Star Wars and you enjoy the stories of yesteryear from Star Wars in novel form, then Guardians of the Wills is the place you want to go check out. They cover all things Star Wars, but with a special focus on the Legends material that's no longer canon.
01:22:56
Speaker
And in their latest episode they focus on showdown at center point. On this episode, Neil and Dustin discuss the conclusion to the Corellian trilogy, also in their Cantina talk segment. They talk about their fanboy excitement with the newest episodes of the Clone Wars series. And so, yeah.
01:23:14
Speaker
and they have an exciting announcement in this episode at the tail end that you will definitely not want to miss. So definitely go give them a listen as well as all the other wonderful shows on the D20 radio network over at d20radio.com under the podcast tab. All right, Chris. Well, I appreciate your time and your insight to both run the one shot and then to come back and discuss it. And I look forward to seeing you over on the Forge.
01:23:42
Speaker
It's been a real pleasure. Thank you for having me. And peace, love, and good gaming, everybody. We'll see you next time.