The Atom Unborn and: Inevitable!
almost 3 years ago – Sun, Apr 23, 2023 at 11:58:41 AM

It has swum in the collective unconscious since the dawn of humanity. A being of unimaginable power and boundless potential, waiting to be birthed into the world. It holds tools fit to forge a utopia on earth, or to scour the planet clean of life. It makes itself known through impossible inspiration, pushing scientists towards breakthroughs both fascinating and lethal. All pushing the world towards its birth, regardless of the consequences.

It is the Atom Unborn. And it's probably my favorite faction in Guns Blazing. 

What is the Atom Unborn?

As with all Supernatural Threats in Guns Blazing, there are two answers.

In Fiction: The Atom Unborn is a djinn that does not yet exist, embodying the idea of harnessed nuclear power. Until then, it gestates in the collective unconsciousness of mankind. Its adherents are many and varied: Some are utopian dreamers, some are professional scientists exploring the new frontier, and some are darker yet.

They see visions of hell unleashed. The power of the sun scouring life from the worlds of man and jinn. They witness the death of a species, and they embrace it.

Narratively: It is the nuclear age urging on its own birth, heedless of the consequences. It's the boundless potential of the 20th and 21st centuries, the incredible fruits of curiosity alongside its worst consequences. Modern medicine and health and luxuries and, well, the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation.

It is fundamentally amoral: It doesn't want to hurt people, but it also doesn't want to help people. It just wants to exist, and is already well along its way.

A History of the Atom

The Atom Unborn draws from the...mixed history of cutting edge science in the period. Many developments would have both horrific military uses and revolutionary civilian ones, and the human cost is enormous. 

There are obvious comparisons: The Nuclear Bomb and the promise of nuclear power, Haber, inventor of both the Haber Process and chemical warfare, and that old Tom Lehrer classic, Wernher von Braun.  But there are also plenty of less militarized casualties: Marie Curie, irradiated by her research. The Demon Core's victims, the Radium Girls, and more.

Dieselpunk and alternate history are genres full of experimental, impossible technology. Guns Blazing marries that tradition with the consequences of technological progress in the period to create something new. A new, terrifying force that may be ally, enemy, and resource all within a single campaign.

The Atom in Your Game

The Atom is scattershot. It exists in clumps: Research cells, home inventors, weapons development programs, and ultra-fringe political theorists. It isn't driving vast movements, not yet, but it's incredibly wide spread and not limited to villains.

Players can get involved with the Atom Unborn through perks with the Fission or Fusion keyword. Fission perks provide immense, overwhelming power at the cost of spiking your Toxicity (Pushing your character towards an unavoidable early grave) and dealing negative conditions to yourself. Fusion perks are much more measured, augmenting other capabilities rather than providing immense power on their own, but they also don't kill you.

Players might get these perks by experimenting on themselves, being exposed to strange technologies, or explicitly allying with various Atomic factions. Universities and experimental cadres in Mysore, brilliant inventors in the USA, desperate engineers in revolutionary movements, and more might offer players Atomic equipment and talents, either eliding the likely side effects or genuinely having no idea they exist.

Players may also interact with them as another faction in revolutionary politics, insistent that technology is the path to defining new nations in the wake of colonialism. Such groups might have varied ideals, but gravitate towards groups with the funding and influence to support their research regardless of whether that's healthy for the movement.

As an enemy, the Atom's representatives are irradiated foot-soldiers, experimental vehicles, and bright-eyed researchers. They're often a mix of anachronistic and hyper-futuristic: Sipahis and knights wielding irradiated blades and hefting machine guns like rifles. Lumbering, over-large tanks with brutal flamethrowers mated to the hull. They're well armored and often fairly skilled, but their abilities damage themselves as much as their foes.

Many are also deathly ill, victim of their experimental sciences as much as beneficiaries of it. Most have some variety of acute radiation sickness or similar ailments, with foes like the Radium Ghuls actively in the last stages of life.

These foes serve many masters, both as mercenaries and loyal parts of various empires. America, especially MacArthur's command, believe that the Atom is their key to the world stage. While in the realm of Jinn, the Sultan Al-Mudhib believes that it is his only chance at revitalizing a dying kingdom in a new age.

You May Also Like

While you're here, Soulmuppet Productions is currently kickstarting their next game, Inevitable. It's about sad fantasy cowboys try, and failing, to stop the end of the world.

 It's a focused, play-to-lose system about the story of these knights. Their reputations, legends, and the tales that will survive both them and the nation they serve.

Soulmuppet are good friends and an awesome publisher. I've worked on an adventure for their last game: Orbital Blues, and if their project continues to succeed I may be working on something for Inevitable! If you're interested in a more storygame experience than Guns Blazing, I highly recommend checking them out.

Final Week: A Worldbuilding Contest!
almost 3 years ago – Tue, Apr 18, 2023 at 06:28:34 PM

We're almost there! With twelve thousand raised, we're one week from closing out this Kickstarter. Thank you to everyone who's backed so far. If you want to propel this project towards our stretch goals and give us the strongest last week possible, I encourage you to tell your friends about the Kickstarter.

But! We've got happier news yet. For the last week of the campaign, we're gonna hold a worldbuilding contest!

Ali Attar's Discount Vehicle Catalog

Over on the Sufficient Velocity forums, the lovely admins have sponsored Ali Attar's Discount Vehicle Catalog a contest for anyone and everyone interested in Guns Blazing or weird early vehicles. 

The Catalog is a celebration of one of my favorite things about worldbuilding: Jank.

Lots of stuff just doesn't work well. The history of tanks, airplanes, and modern warships is filled with ideas that were bad. Not for any nefarious or cosmic reason, but because a designer got too ambitious, or everyone was just experimenting, or circumstance got in the way. 

Guns Blazing is no exception. The setting's mecha (called Walkers) arose basically by accident and vehicle design is exactly as much of a rolling disaster as it was in our 1920s. I wanted to exalt that dynamic, and what better way to do it than the game's first real community-building event.

To participate, just join the thread and make your own piece of Guns Blazing history. The top two entries will get art of their creation commissioned and (Potentially) put in the book, while the overall winner will also get a PDF copy of the game when it releases.

Nations: Mysore
almost 3 years ago – Thu, Apr 13, 2023 at 12:23:08 AM

We're a full two weeks in! At 11.5 thousand dollars, I think we've got a real chance of hitting our first stretch goal for VTT Integration, especially if backers share the project with friends who'd love the project.

But that's enough self-promotion. We've taken a look at your enemies in Guns Blazing, so let's take a look at your allies.

The History of Mysore

Historically, Mysore was a nation in southern India. Ruled by the Wodeyar dynasty, then briefly by Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan, it fell in 1799 at the end of the fourth Anglo-Mysore War and was thereafter a princely state in British India. Massive famines would regularly kill large portions of the population under British rule, with individual famines estimated as killing about a fifth of the local population. Deindustrialization and other colonial policies would cause significant decline in wealth and standards of living.

But Guns Blazing is an alternate history, and Mysore's fate is one of its big divergences.

Here, Mysore never fell. The Fourth Mysore War was delayed by about a decade and changing political climes (And the British intervention in a Marathan succession dispute) meant that the British Empire had less support from Hyderabad, and none from the Marathas, going into the war. Mysore survives, though it doesn't win the conflict, and with foreign aid continues to survive. 

By 1920, Mysore has gone from an embattled corner of the Indian subcontinent into a heavily militarized, technologically advanced regional power. It's the origin of the combat walker, has made gains against the English, and is now exerting its weight on the international stage instead of simply trying to survive.

The Republic of Mysore

Mysore is a constitutional monarchy with a structure based heavily on the First French Republic and the American government. The Wodeyar dynasty are legally Maharaja, but their position is purely ceremonial, while the descendants of Hyder Ali are technically the sultan, and their position is mostly ceremonial and extremely politically contentious. A legislative assembly and a president manage actual governance. 

Mysore has a heavily industrialized economy. There's a large farming sector, but it's best known for its industrial exports: Appliances, automobiles, engines, and an enormous quantity of weaponry. It has a significant, but embattled, labor movement and various socialist and unionist movements are increasingly popular in politics.

Mysore's foreign policy is inexorably warped around the threat of the British Empire. It bases its actions and alliances on how they will counterbalance the British in case war breaks out, or how they might prevent war from breaking out in some fashion. As such, it has rough alliances with Iran and France and arms an enormous number of insurgent and anti-colonial groups worldwide, often to the detriment of its formal alliances. Conversely, its friendship with non-British colonial powers diminishes its prestige in the eyes of peoples colonized by those powers.

Since the turn of the century, Mysore has begun to flex its power. Arms manufacturers have allied with both reactionary and anti-colonial groups to lobby for political change, often championing a hardline position against the British. Pan-Indian groups see Mysore as the head of a united India, while nationalist movements see the British Raj as an opportunity for Mysore to exploit and enrich itself as Britain has, and anti-colonial political parties want Mysore to stand alongside Persia as a bastion of anti-colonial sentiment throughout the world.

Mysore in the RPG

In the RPG, Mysore is an ally but not always a trustworthy one. From the perspective of player characters, a Mysoran supplier is an incredible asset! Well-supplied, eager for you to cause chaos, and without the vulnerability common to many insurgent movements. However, it's not always clear what part of Mysore you're working with and how well their interests actually align with yours.

Unless you're fighting the British. Then they're fairly uncomplicated in motivation.

It's also a convenient background for a player character: Mysore has a large anti-colonial movement and plenty of Mysoran veterans want to be better than their government often is. A Mysoran soldier who's opted to go Volunteer after leaving the army, or a Mysoran intelligence agent whose handlers may-or-may not know exactly what they're up to, is a flexible background for a PC.

Mysore in the Wargame

Mysore is one of the four launch factions in the Guns Blazing wargame. They're a straightforward and durable faction, with a focus on heavy armor, walkers, and vehicles. They're less flexible than others often are, lacking the numbers of the British, the flexibility of the Green Band, or the esoterica of the Majooj. But what they lack in mobility and stealth, they make up for in a torrent of heavy metal.

Mysore is designed to be fairly friendly to new players: They're forgiving of mistakes, straightforward to play, and can get away with smaller model counts. Their list is broken up between the straightforward Regular Army, and the janky-but-powerful Experimental Cadres, which feature such joys as all-casemate battle tanks,  irradiated heavy infantry, and sniper teams armed with light cannon.

The Squad System
almost 3 years ago – Mon, Apr 10, 2023 at 09:17:12 PM

Many combat games have a simple problem: Fights against huge numbers of dudes are really annoying to manage.

In video games, they quickly overwhelm your players or your operating system. In wargames, they bloat game length. In tabletop RPGs, they bloat game length and butcher the action economy. It's an issue.

So you get workarounds: Simplifying enemy logic, loading in stuff as it's needed, only resolving what you're paying attention to, etc. etc. TTRPGs have had more difficulty doing this successfully than other systems, Minion mechanics in 4e and Genesys have had promise, Exalted has its battlegroups (For better and for worse), MCDM is currently trialing its own spin on minions, and one of my first TTRPG contracts was on Formations. Hellpiercers, which is still funding, is trialing its own take on swarm mechanics as we speak.

But Guns Blazing is based on First Person shooters, a genre that relies on large numbers of dangerous-yet-disposable foes. It needs a way to handle a bunch of foes in a fight, and it needs this to work well and be fairly swift at-the-table.

Enter the Squad:

The Squad Trait

Many enemies in Guns Blazing have the Squad trait. Formatted as Squad (x), this trait all of Guns Blazing's minion rules.

If multiple enemies of the same type with the Squad ability are in a fight, they form a Squad. Squads simplify a group into a single enemy for the purpose of bookkeeping: They activate together, they make attacks together, they only roll once for opposed checks, if you have multi-injury squaddies, injuries are applied to the squad as a whole rather than individual foes, etc.

Each Squad has a Squad Rating (The number in Parenthesis). Squads gain a single bonus die per squad member who would normally participate in a check, and a single bonus activation per squad member, capped at their rating. Ie. Squad (1) Sporelings only gain 1 bonus Activation and 1 bonus die from swarming players in melee combat. Squad (3) Restitched Cogs gain 3.

This encourages approaching squads tactically: You want to slice corners and take Squads a few at a time to minimize their bonuses. Rushing in against the odds is risky (If, potentially, enormously rewarding). Squad bonuses and Ahadi's focus on opposed checks also provides Squads a bit of durability: Being up against a single, larger dice pool means that Squads are effectively a single, multi-wound opponent you're aiming to dismember and then finish off.

This also makes particularly large squads less overwhelming. While health keeps scaling, adding more enemies past the squad cap increases robustness, health, and area control without increasing morale, danger, or action economy.

However, each member of a squad is still an individual. They can be affected by status conditions, targeted individually, and have different weapons. You can have a sergeant, machine gunner, or named NPC in a squad without having to break them off as their own part of the initiative track. Some might even bring in their own special abilities that can be removed by killing the appropriate squad member.

Why Squads

The Squad system has its own tradeoffs: It's more tracking than, say, MCDM's current approach. However, the flexibility provides an important lever for DMs in an early-modern setting and for shooter-derived gameplay. It lets you throttle the threat of squads via specialists and run large fights with a minimum of overhead while still providing players intuitive tactical choices to make when engaging. 

It also works on the same logic as the rest of the system: You don't need to learn a new way that health, conditions, AoE abilities, or movement work. A squad attritions similarly to large monsters and hostile vehicles, maneuvers similarly to other infantry, and has similar damage output to other threats.

We're funded! & The Tier System
almost 3 years ago – Thu, Apr 06, 2023 at 09:07:16 PM

This was meant to be up on Tuesday but I, tragically, fell ill.

Fortunately, that means WE'RE NOW FUNDED.

Absolutely incredible. Thank you to everyone who backed for pushing us over this milestone. Over the next week (Health allowing), I'll be talking about our plans for STL files, stream kits, and supporting Guns Blazing after the initial book.

But before that, let's talk about character progression.

What's in a Level

So when I'm talking about character progression the mind goes to level and XP spend systems, which work differently but with the same end goal: Providing a structure for players to improve their characters in meaningful, discrete, and manageable chunks. The specifics vary quite a bit: D&D alikes use discretelevels, the Dark Heresy line has XP purchases with tier rankings based on XP spent, Storyteller uses XP purchases with tier rankings purchased with XP, PBTA games have their own methods of purchasing Advancements, and there are interminable other options. All of these shape how the game is played and how progression feels.

A leveling system is going to be a similar experience between players. While there are ways to level 'incorrectly', and therefore suboptimally, you can generally rely on characters getting the things they should as they go. You aren't going to get characters just missing important bits of their toolkit unless you've made a pretty unfortunate mistake. However, if you don't have a variety of options in a level characters in a given class are liable to end up overly similar to each other. 'Monobuild problems'.

A pure XP spend system is far more varied. You allow for a truly incredible variety of character builds: Whatever can be engaged with in your system is a valid basis for an entire character concept! However, this makes it easier to have characters that don't fit well in common game situations: A social face who has nothing to do when guns are drawn, a hacker who forces everyone else to sit down and twiddle their thumbs while they do their thing, or characters forgetting to purchase health and ending up very, very fragile at fairly high XP counts. It encourages pursuing flashy purchases with your carefully hoarded xp, which can result in extremely monofocused characters. 

I can go over examples and their downsides pretty much indefinitely. What's important is this: All of these approaches have their own limitations and drawbacks, you just have to pick what fits your system.

What are Tiers

Tiers are an XP-with-Tier-Ranking system. You have a Combat Tier and a Narrative Tier, each rated from 0 to 4, and each determining how skilled you are in that field. As you progress, you'll spend XP on various Perks, which give you additional power and play options. When you purchase a certain number of perks, or hit certain narrative milestones, your tier increases.

When your tier increases, you get a variety of passive bonuses. Additional skills, boosted Aspects, additional Injuries, etc. You'll also unlock requirements for new perks.

Tiers are tied together by default: Whenever you purchase a combat perk, you get a narrative perk. Whenever you increase one tier, you increase both. However, options are provided to separate these for your campaign. You can play a team of hyperlethal, Tier 4 Combat badasses who suffer greatly outside of it due to being at Narrative Tier 1, or a group of skilled professionals in their field at Narrative Tier 2 but who are in a survival horror scenario because they're all Combat Tier 0. Theoretically you could delineate by individual character, but it isn't recommended.

Why Tiers

I wanted the flexibility of a XP-spend progression system, but needed to constrain it to ensure a good play experience for new players. Guns Blazing is fundamentally a game about cool gun fights as much as it is one about colonial politics, so everyone needed to be able to engage with cool gun fights. Playbooks like the Captain and Engineer exist if you don't want to be rambo, but everyone needed a baseline competence that wouldn't fall behind their fellows because they wanted to grab some out-of-combat tracks.

As such: split-linked tracks. You get a solid combat build with the same resources as everyone else and a narrative build with the same resources as everyone else, and they increase at roughly the same speed. You can be better or worse at a given thing, specialize as you please, and differentiate your characters pretty dramatically, but you'll be on a basically even footing in gameplay when you're new to the game.

And, as the tracks have been codified as fully functional separate organisms, you can then de-link them for specific scenarios (Comedy of error with murder machines or survival horror), or split them up between players once you're more used to the system. You could even add new tracks if you have an idea for a subsystem or expansion. Like a less ludicrously detailed version of Battletechs many optional rules.

I'm not going to pretend it's a simple system, but I think it's a powerful one and one that I'm eager to see people mess with once they have the full game.