Historical Campaigns

[plotulus]

Has anyone run one? I am looking to maybe play one with my dad, and I was wondering how anyone has managed the skill differences between modern day and ancient history.

[Unfortunate Son]

I would that then skills in Fantasy would help you out the most, as well as classes. I had to use that when I made an Ancient.

[filo_clarke]

We had a long running game set in Ancient Rome with quite a bit of travelling around ancient Europe. We then took the characters from that campaign, leveled the heck out of them and ran a campaign in the Dark Ages, centered around Viking history.

More recently, one of my players is about to start a campaign set in Berlin, in the 1960s. It looks like it will be a fun game.

For the ancient Rome game we borrowed heavily from skills and OCCs from Palladium Fantasy, modifying them as necessary for the time period. For the 1960s we are using modern-day classes, but being careful which skills we pick, or more specifically how they are implemented. Computer Operation and Programming, for instance, exist but are vastly different from their present-day counterparts.

We did a slight modification to character creation for the historical campaign; when rolling attributes/SDC we took the MINIMUM bonuses possible from morphus traits/Nightspawn characteristics. So if a given morphus says "Add 2D6 to PS" we added "+2", or add "1D6x10 to SDC", we added "+10". This was an attempt to make the characters semi-vulnerable to ancient weapons. Having something with 300+ SDC and Supernatural PS of 40+ is essentially an indestructible juggernaut against Celtic fighters with longswords and bows. Cutting those bonuses down to often less than 100 SDC and SNPS of 20-30 means that the characters were in danger of being overwhelmed by competent human fighters with mundane weapons. The campaign stayed larger than life, but the players rarely felt untouchable, and the air of horror was ultimately preserved.

[Tick]

I hope they reprint Transdimentional in some form to be updated with current ATB or Heroes Unlimited. It would be amazing since they could draw from reference for the TV show Deadliest Warrior!

[RockJock]

What time period are you thinking of playing in? The time period makes a huge difference with the skills.

[eliakon]

We did a slight modification to character creation for the historical campaign; when rolling attributes/SDC we took the MINIMUM bonuses possible from morphus traits/Nightspawn characteristics. So if a given morphus says "Add 2D6 to PS" we added "+2", or add "1D6x10 to SDC", we added "+10". This was an attempt to make the characters semi-vulnerable to ancient weapons. Having something with 300+ SDC and Supernatural PS of 40+ is essentially an indestructible juggernaut against Celtic fighters with longswords and bows. Cutting those bonuses down to often less than 100 SDC and SNPS of 20-30 means that the characters were in danger of being overwhelmed by competent human fighters with mundane weapons. The campaign stayed larger than life, but the players rarely felt untouchable, and the air of horror was ultimately preserved.

I very much like this system. I may need to steal borrow it for my own games. Historical or not. I find that the insane levels of SDC and stats and such tend to take away from the game and give it a high powered super hero comic book feel (which is not always bad... but it clashes badly with the idea of protagonists who are scared, and hiding in fear...)

[RockJock]

You can always drop the SDC level. Magic power level lower blah blah blah.

[Shark_Force]

We did a slight modification to character creation for the historical campaign; when rolling attributes/SDC we took the MINIMUM bonuses possible from morphus traits/Nightspawn characteristics. So if a given morphus says "Add 2D6 to PS" we added "+2", or add "1D6x10 to SDC", we added "+10". This was an attempt to make the characters semi-vulnerable to ancient weapons. Having something with 300+ SDC and Supernatural PS of 40+ is essentially an indestructible juggernaut against Celtic fighters with longswords and bows. Cutting those bonuses down to often less than 100 SDC and SNPS of 20-30 means that the characters were in danger of being overwhelmed by competent human fighters with mundane weapons. The campaign stayed larger than life, but the players rarely felt untouchable, and the air of horror was ultimately preserved.

I very much like this system. I may need to steal borrow it for my own games. Historical or not. I find that the insane levels of SDC and stats and such tend to take away from the game and give it a high powered super hero comic book feel (which is not always bad... but it clashes badly with the idea of protagonists who are scared, and hiding in fear...)

in the "modern" setting, there isn't much need. one single hound is 200 SDC and 54 HP. they should generally do 6d6 to 7d6 damage with a regular attack, which is probably supposed to ignore AR (they're described as being able to cut through anything, and that they've been used to carve up tanks. i don't care what your AR is, you're not more impervious to damage than a tank). and their intro fiction tells you *exactly* how to make them scary. there are lots of them. you don't *need* the enemy to be equally powerful on a 1 to 1 basis, so long as the enemy has 10 times as many minions, you run because if you stay in one place long enough to chew through 5,000 HP worth of enemies, more of them have shown up by then.

if that isn't enough, give them some backup from hollow men or dopplegangers with guns and radios to call in more minions if necessary. and remember, they aren't going to be too worried about spray and pray, because the bullets will mostly just bounce off of the hounds anyways, so just have them empty clips... the US government had plenty of bullets stockpiled, and the nightlords have no particular reason to worry about running out now that they own the US government.

and that's just regular mooks. the random schmucks of the enemy forces. there are thousands upon thousands of them, and if any of them get away they just heal up same as the PCs. if they really screw up, they might be facing enemies with magic (supported by a bunch of hounds, hollow men, etc), ashmedai infiltrators (500 SDC doesn't protect you from the nightlords finding out where you sleep), princes, avatars, or nightlords themselves, and that's just from the core book.

i mean, don't get me wrong, an individual nightbane can be pretty powerful individually. but there's what, like, maybe a couple hundred in any given city? (and that's probably for the biggest cities where nightbane congregate... small cities may have only a handful or none at all)

if your players don't feel threatened by the nightlords, it may be time to remind them who has the bigger numbers. the nightlords used to send thousands of minions out to fight each other for reasons ranging from amusement to hatred of each other to a desire for power to stocking their larder, and there is far more of all of that to be had by redirecting their energy towards earth. so what if your character has 500 SDC and 50 supernatural PS. the nightlords have sent a thousand hounds off to fight a thousand other hounds just for their own amusement, don't think they won't send 100 after you because they're afraid you might kill 99 before the 100th guts you like a fish. you think they won't have a dozen hunters dogpile on top of you to hold you in place while a mind-controlled slave detonates 50 pounds of TNT right next to your head, while they have another mind controlled slave filming the whole thing and uploading it to the internet in realtime so they can enjoy watching it later? think again. the only regret they might have is that they didn't get to enjoy torturing you before you died.

limiting the numbers for situations where the enemy is less numerous makes sense. limiting it in the standard nightbane setting? you just aren't thinking like a nightlord yet.