Preview - The Phillipines
about 1 year ago
– Fri, Mar 07, 2025 at 08:29:43 PM
Ramadan Mubarak!
Today's subject is Guns Blazing's Philippines, written by the inimitable Pam Punzalan.
Pam is a good friend of mine and an excellent writer. We entered this industry at the same time and through a similar route, and have worked together on projects like Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel. She's also created the very cool Navathem's End and worked on Hunter: The Reckoning, Sina Una, Mnemonic, and more.
Her writing is vicious, incisive, and constantly impresses me. It was an honor to have her on the project and see her take on the Philippines.
Our History
In reality, the Philippines were colonized in 1565 by the Spanish, who were largely confined to Luzon and the Visayas as catholicism spread throughout the archipelago. The British invaded Manila in 1762, but left after two years, and Spanish rule continued until the Spanish-American war.
The Americans immediately invaded and conquered the fledgling Filipino republic and began an occupation. Insurgency would continue for a decade, and the Philippines would petition for independence repeatedly until an agreement was signed in 1934. The agreement mandated a ten year transition period and significant american power, influence, and basing rights in the new nation.
Then World War 2 broke out, the Japanese occupied the Philippines, and independence was only achieved in '46 after the war's end.
Theater History
The Spanish had serious issues expanding beyond Manila and its surrounds in Luzon. The British occupy Manila in 1764, but fail to expand due to supernaturally-empowered local guerillas and Spanish loyalists. They stick it out for more than a century, only selling their claim to the Americans in 1890, who would in turn only take the rest of the Spanish claims after the Great American War in 1905.
This proved a problem, as the fledgling colonial power was faced with opposition throughout the islands. In 1909, they broker a deal with the Katipunan, with American might backing a Katipunan-lead Commonwealth government.
At game's start, the Commonwealth is trying to work its way into the Visayan powers while actively fighting in Mindanao.
Theater Overview
The Philippine Theater is split between Commonwealth and non-Commonwealth controlled territory.
The Commonwealth, centered at Manila, is a subverted revolution. Allied with the Americans, they now seek to entrench their own power, legitimize themselves to the people, and conquer the rest of the Philippines. The ex-Kapitunero revolutionaries who compose the government are split between profiteers (and those making the best of the situation), and those who feel betrayed by the alliance with the Americans.
They are opposed by the Dugong-Lahi, a revolutionary group dedicated to the memory of Andres Bonifacio engaged in violent attacks against the Commonwealth government. Some of their members have supposedly transformed into copies of Bonifacio.
The non-Commonwealth regions are fractious, split between various cities and local communities. Most want to maintain their independence and local culture, and don't view themselves as part of a united Phillipines. These include the great city of Cebu and its Bird of the Black Tree; Davao and its supernatural protectors, and the small city of Dapitan, notable primarily for being the place of Jose Rizal's exile.
Threats here are myriad. Skirmishes and battle with the Commonwealth-American army, vicious Aswang, vengeful Sundo, religious violence, and the social intrigue of anti-colonial movements.
First Look
You can get a look at the current draft of the manuscript on the Guns Blazing discord server.
New Year, New Update: Printing Woes and Progress!
about 1 year ago
– Fri, Jan 31, 2025 at 03:19:50 PM
Progress
Combat Phase chapter is currently feature complete, but formatting for the pre-genned character sheets was not actually in the files recovered from my laptop when it died. As they're a nice-to-have rather than a developmental priority, I've put them on the backburner and will get to them when I get to
Most of the work this month was making things easier to read and understand. I think I managed to do so with a minor terminology change.
Previously, all actions were made of smaller component actions. This made referring to actions kind of a pain, and many of the obvious alternatives (Skills and Moves) were already being used elsewhere in the text. As such, the component actions are being called verbs, with different types of actions being analogous to sentence structure.
This changes nothing mechanically, but it reads more intuitively. A Complex Action is a sentence with two verbs, ie. "Mahmud ran down the corridor and shot a guard." A Rushed Action has one verb, "Mahmud pulled the lever.", and a reaction is one verb in reaction to someone else's sentence. "Mahmud pulled the lever while Hadia covered him."
I'm hoping that this means a quicker on-ramp for new players once the book is out.
Similarly, a few sections are expanded and moved around to make things easier to understand. Cover and line of sight was a sticking point, so they've been simplified slightly, while detailed Theater of Minds rules have been cut for space.
The Narrative Phase is technically complete, but will be waiting to go to the editor for a while: Some of the organization rules and guidance may end up making more sense in the GM advice section as it's not player facing. As such, Narrative Phase will probably go to the editor alongside GM advice, which will be near the end of development.
Additionally, one backer who hadn't gotten an art piece due to a google forms error has gotten that art piece. I believe that's all the outstanding high-end rewards handled.
Next Steps
Setting, Character Creation, and Character Options are next. Character Creation needs to be streamlined, but Character Options needs to be adjusted as I've moved the weapon and equipment tables from the Combat Phase into this chapter.
You will hopefully see two updates in February. One will cover India, Pam Punzalan's excellent take on the Phillipines, and Perks, and may include a preview copy of Pam's work. The other should be either a revamped quickstart or a look at the Opposition chapter, depending on how aggravating it is to remake those pregens.
Print Issues
This is gonna be less in depth than I'd hoped because I'm still waiting on emails from some companies, but the long story short is that I've had some issues with the planned printers now that we're getting closer to stuff getting done. As I've said before, I'll go into detail in the eventual post-mortem, especially as I am still waiting on word back from the printers.
Currently, I've had several potential printers become nonviable or raise issues that may make them nonviable. I'd be more pressed about this, but it's more annoying and time-consuming than a danger to the project: We're doing well on funds due to how I've approached the delays caused by getting married and moving cross country.
Additionally, I can always have DriveThru RPG handle fulfillment. It's not my ideal solution, but it should be acceptable quality and if it makes international shipping painful, I'm in position to cover at least some of the costs for backers.
Work Schedule Updates
I'm currently scaling back the contracts I'm going to be taking through the end of April so I can dedicate more time to getting the book done. One of the big issues with overrunning the planned development timeline was that the time I could actually work on Guns Blazing decreased dramatically. I had to pay rent and expenses, didn't want to dip into the kickstarter funds to do so, and had burned through the time and resources I'd allotted for not Freelancing full time.
I've got that buffer back in place, so I'm hoping that two months of near-full-time writing will be what I need to finish this.
Entering Layout and Convention Season
over 1 year ago
– Thu, Nov 14, 2024 at 12:46:54 PM
Kickstarter has eaten two drafts of this post so this will be brief:
There was no update last month. This was because A) I had an unexpected dental surgery that went very poorly and B) I have a lot of travel in the last three months of this year. Of the last twelve weeks, I'm going to be spending about half of them away from home.
Most of this is convention season! I've got to travel for work and to pay the bills. This also includes prepping for and following up from convention season, so there's less time to work on the book. I am also now down my laptop, and so am restricted in my ability to work while away from home.
I was hoping to have this update be 'The Combat chapter is off to the editor' update but because of the aforementioned we're not quite at that point yet. The mechanics are all there, the user-friendliness is not.
Good News
Chapter 0 (Intro) and Chapter 2 (Core Rules) are through layout. They'll be getting some spot art later in the development cycle but they are ready to go. With some luck, other chapters will be joining them shortly.
Bad News
A full accounting of bad news will wait until the project is shipped and I put together a retrospective. The only thing I will note here is that my laptop died while traveling and it is unlikely that many, or any, of my files will be recoverable. Everything is backed up, and all the most crucial files had already been transferred to my desktop after the move, but many of those backups are a pain in the ass to work with.
This is eventually going to slow down getting the book through layout, but for now it's just really annoying. It means that I can't get meaningful work done while traveling, so convention season is going to be less productive than hoped.
Next Steps
The Combat Chapter should be going to the editor by the end of the month. After that, there'll be some radio silence until a a substantial update in January, and I hope to include the core rules and revised pregens in manuscript form with that update.
The Final Overhaul Part Three: Narrative Phase and Misery
over 1 year ago
– Wed, Sep 04, 2024 at 06:16:44 PM
The Kickstarter's been done for a year and I've been workshopping versions of Guns Blazing's narrative phase for something like three.
And I still hate all of them.
Authorial Intent
Guns Blazing isn't meant to be an artistic magnus opus. It is, to be perfectly frank, the setting I had that A) paired well with the system I wanted to design and B) people were willing to pay for.
But, unfortunately, I do actually have an artistic statement to make with the game and, more specifically, with its Narrative Phase.
Guns Blazing should be a game where murdering a problem is simple and straightforward and even minor political progress is a nightmarish tangle of clashing personalities and systems outside of your control. Where the world is just bigger than you and you control less than you think even if you wrestle yourself into leadership of an international organization.
And so far none of them have done that. And I'm not really willing to put this game out without that basic building block at least functional. Or if not functional, then at least a real, honest swing for the fences.
The Correct Solution
Now, my attempts so far weren't all bad. One was basically just Blades in the Dark, and another was basically just Flying Circus. And those are incredible games with great frameworks for running an organization that do a solid chunk of what I want.
I could lightly adapt it for Ahadi's dicepool system and I'd home free. Silo in the bits of Flying Circus that work better, call it a day. It'd probably even be a good game!
Unfortunately, they're built for very different assumptions about player agency and control. Blades and Flying Circus are both games where the default assumption is that you're running an organization. Your employees might go on strike in Flying Circus, they might flip in Blades, but they are broadly assumed to be under your management.
They aren't expected to go off, do their own heist, and kill a friend of yours in the process. Or violently schism and start feeding people to an aquatic embodiment of political infighting. Or change the organization in unpredictable and occasionally negative ways.
And even that's solvable! I could make fairly minimal changes to a blades/FC fusion and call it good enough.
And I don't want to do it, which is more of an indictment of me than anything else at this point. I'd prefer Guns Blazing be something wholly new, for the narrative phase to be as novel as combat.
But, ultimately, you've all paid for a product that exists rather than something that matches the exact contours of my brainworms. And I've spent a year failing to make something I'm really happy with.
So we get my solution, which isn't quite the easy, good, and quick mashup but has roots in both games and hopefully does something interesting with it.
Guns Blazing: The Narrative Phase
"-so if you are ever in a revolutionary underground movement that's seeking to overthrow the state and institute a new form of government, keep an eye out for the weird quiet kid who just hangs around doing chores. Shoot that guy pretty quick, okay." - Robert Evans, Behind the Bastards, on Nicolas Ceausescu
The central conceit of Guns Blazing's narrative phase is this: The world is changing at scales impossible for single humans to fathom and no-one is in control of it. The grand organizations that change the world have a life of their own and even those nominally in charge of them never have as much control as they'd like. Everything has unforeseen consequences and bizarre knock-on effects and anyone who claims to be fully in control is incorrect or lying.
And into that, you are thrust: A few glorified apes with particularly dangerous sticks.
The narrative phase revolves around Organizations, Clocks, and Downtime Actions.
Downtime Actions
Combat is where characters in Guns Blazing are powerful, but its effects are tactical. Failure is death, but success just means you're incremented a casualty statistic and forced someone to try again later.
If you want to accomplish things, or just want to maintain your ability to fight the enemy, you have to take downtime and, ideally, actions in that downtime.
All downtime actions cost Time. Once all characters pick a downtime action or opt not to bother, the GM picks a downtime clock (See below) and ticks it, and all the actions resolve. As such, you are always on a race against the clock.
And that's a big deal, because a lot of basic functions require downtime. Healing injuries? Downtime action. Recovering Stress? Downtime action. Investigating? Downtime. Replenishing ammo? Downtime. Travel? Downtime.
Additionally, many downtime actions are gated behind the support of an organization, or get better if an organization supports them. Organizations can provide you guns and ammunition, help you hide, provide you cash, treat your wounds, and can even help you blow off stress without consequence.
But they're only willing to do this if they're happy with you. You can work around that, but it's always going to be at a cost
And if you want to score big wins, want to win independence or end a systemic injustice or better society rather than wreck some shit, you need organizations. More on that later
Clocks
Clocks work like you'd expect from Forged in the Dark games. The main divergences are:
- Clocks might be designated as Downtime clocks, which measure some longer term event and only tick as a cost of Downtime actions.
- You are expected to always have at least one Downtime clock on the field.
Organizations
Everything, from nations to corporations to resistance groups to non-hierarchical communes to your local card game group, is an organization. Each Organization is made up of smaller Organizations until you get to individual people.
(You can, perhaps, make a philosophical argument for each person being made up of organizations within their psyche but I gave up on the overt disco elysium references very early in development)
Each organization has a scope, constituency, structure, ideology, and resources. Constituency, Structure, Ideology, and Resources are simple, keyworded descriptions of who the organization serves, how it works, what it wants, and what it has. Scope is a stat that determines how widespread an organization is, ranging from 0 ('less than a dozen people') to 6 ('Global').
Higher Scope makes it easier for organizations to do things and harder to meaningfully effect them, but also makes them clumsier. They're more likely to invoke unintended consequences when they do things, and it tends to take longer for them to take action. Mechanically, it increases the Complication rating of actions taken by or with the help of that organization, makes them capable of taking action on larger scales, and provides hefty bonuses to actions at smaller scales.
The keywords associated with Constituency, Ideology, Structure, and Resources (Theoretically there's a cool acronym here, and I'll post an update with it once I come up with one. RISC, maybe?) are simpler. They just tell you what the org can and will do, as well as what it likes and the consequences of basically everything it does.
That last bit deserves explanation. And gets us into that Robert Evans quote!
Even if you work your way into an organization and take over it, you're not actually controlling it like a 4x strategy game. You're using the mechanisms of that organization to do things and the people in that organization will try to accomplish your goals with the tools available to them.
If you tell a [Criminal], [Corrupt] organization to do basically anything they are going to take bribes and break legs. If you tell an [Fractious] [Bureaucratic] organization to do the exact same thing and get the exact same roll, you're going to get a lot of office infighting and regulation.
Guns Blazing, as the name implies, deals with a lot of violent, iconoclastic organizations with a vested interest in serious changes to the social order. And to enact large scale reforms, you need big organizations that ramp up the Complication rating of doing stuff.
So if you fuck up, or you trust the wrong people, or you keep backing the helpful, quiet guy who backs your violence without question but doesn't seem to have much in the way of actual ideology...
Well, things can get very bad very quickly.
And if you refuse to play ball with any of the imperfect, clumsy factions that have a shot of improving things, you can find yourself with no-one willing to help you actually accomplish anything.
July Update: Wheels Keep Rolling
over 1 year ago
– Fri, Jul 26, 2024 at 05:29:39 AM
Bad News
Testing took longer than expected. It's been hard to get enough people online at once, The Captain got exposed as non-functional and several rules needed simplifying or re-wording for ease of play.
As such, we're now about two to three weeks behind schedule. I was hoping to be testing CharGen at this point and I'm still tweaking combat rules and playbooks. I've opted to call this Done for now, though the Engineer may be tweaked in the future.
Good News
Combat now functions in the way I want it to. The Introduction is edited and off at layout, and we've got some great new art.
Here's the Chapter 0 header art from Raya Sarkar and the Chapter 3 header art from T Shirley!
Next Steps
I'm aiming to have the character creation chapter and a subsection of Perks released within a week or so to test character creation. With a little luck, the Combat chapter will be heading to the editor and the Core Rules will be headed to layout within that timeframe.
