Category Archives: News

The Artifact 3e

It feels like we just finished the second edition and we’re already moving on to the third? Well really it’s this blog’s fault, oh and Tarnoc’s fault too. There were a bunch of things that just suddenly fell into place to make the game do what we always wanted it to do. Some of those things were the survival games posts, the Technobable monster, ideas about using stress points more holistically and then there was Tarnoc making me actually make the infantry combat simple enough to actually use.

Then there were little things that suddenly exploded. I’ve always wanted some way of hitting soft spots in armor or to get around shields with a well placed shot. I’ve always wanted vehicle combat to be more focused on sensors in a kind of submarine warfare where detection was key. When we started to look at using the fraction columns as modular successes all these things suddenly fell into place. At break neck speed no less. Initiative got a revamp in that it also determines how many actions the character gets that round, making it more central to play.

Then there was the defense rolls. I don’t know of many games that do what we’re doing here. I’m a little nervous about it but also excited. When we were looking at reducing the number of concepts that a player has to work through in a turn, we decided that having two sets of rules for attack actions and defense rolls seemed functional but not elegant. Until now, a character could roll for all the defense rolls they wanted, at no cost. This was so that characters didn’t get killed left and right. Attack rolls cost the character an action. This works but it’s meh, unsatisfying. But how could we make defense rolls cost an action and not get the character’s crushed when they were outnumbered? Some defense rolls seemed to apply to all attackers. Like if a character is hiding behind a wall. That should protect them from everybody. But dodging had only ever applied to one attack. When I thought about it, shouldn’t leaping around, possibly doing flips and somersaults make it harder for everyone to hit? So that’s what we went with. Defense actions affect everyone’s attempts to hurt the character and they cost actions. Failed your first defense roll? Spend another action to do another defense roll until you feel comfortable or run out of actions but it’ll also limit what the character can do that turn.

A lot of the writing in the book is very old. I mean decades, so I went through and rewrote a lot of it. Nearly all the rules are rewritten, the skills are almost completely rewritten with descriptions of why you’d want to use each one, a lot of the GM’s section is rewritten and that’s a lot. Character generation got a bit of a face lift, a few fixes and tweaks to equipment and I’m still looking to add more background for characters without creating pages and pages of new tables. I’m still thinking about how to do that.

Character sheets deserve a mention. They’re being rebuilt because there have been so many changes. We’ve talked about making a character sheet for every CO in the game to speed up character generation because most of generation time is writing all the stuff a character gets. I’m still mulling that over as to if it’s a good idea or not. It might work to have a CO card that lists everything that CO gets and have it printable on a 3×5 card like SPF does with skills.

Maps are not going to change, seriously, although the whole planet could use its own 500 page book of maps, I’ll leave any more details up to the players. Maps were one of my big things in second edition and took up a ton of work so I think I want to leave them alone this time. They’re not even in this rough draft yet because this is a text only draft.

What’s next?

I’m going to print this out as a playtest book and we’re going to playtest all these changes. We’re also recording audio to explain the mechanics of play so that new players don’t have to read all the text, they can just have it explained to them the way we would explain things if we were sitting at the table with you (hopefully more polished though). I can also move ahead on Tortuga (I think).

In the meantime, I’m making a plan to run a kickstarter for art. It would be amazing to pull in a few really accomplished artist to put in the finishing touches. I can work on improving some of the work that I’ve already done, maybe create an original piece or two but I’d like to get some real skill involved. I don’t have any artists yet lined up. I’ve kept my eyes peeled but haven’t yet seen anyone that I think I could afford and has a style that would work for The Artifact. If you’re reading this and would like to get paid via a Kickstarter for some art, let me know and we’ll talk. I could really use some great cover art.

What would that mean for The Artifact being a free game? For one, I’m putting the draft up for free. The system is not a secret, even if it’s not quite polished yet. In the end, the PDF will be free as it has always been. What I can add to that is releasing the game under Creative Commons. Therefore any rewards for a kickstarter would have to be printed copies of the book and maybe some swag thrown in for higher donation levels.

Can I run a successful kickstarter? I don’t really know. I’m not the best person to be trying to draw in support for a project. I’m kinda all thumbs when it comes to building any kind of following which is what a kickstarter is all about but when have I ever backed down from a challenge well beyond my ability? It’s the only way I’d ever be able to afford to really kick this thing up a notch professionally.

One last thing

One thing we’ve done here is break some legacy material. Not story wise but mechanically. I tried to limit this as much as I could because we’ve got a lot of legacy stuff. All the vehicles had to be altered to fit the new rules for Impairments and Advantages. This makes the old system of modifiers for piloting vehicles and using sensors is no longer supported. But that doesn’t mean you can’t use them! For instances like these, old equipment that used modifiers to the skill number could still be used as is or they can be migrated to the new system of Impairments and Advantages by doubling the old modifier number and using it as the percent of the Impairment or Advantage.

A bit ago, I wrote another article for Stuffer Shack. This time it’s about how to think through designing mechanics for a game.

Thinking About A Homebrew Game System?

I’ve wanted to do this for a while but getting started is intimidating. I spent some time recording and editing an introduction to The Artifact. It’s meant to be the first of several to get a player familiar with the game. Putting this together was a difficult process for me, I hope what I learned in recording speeds up the process for me next time.

The Artifact Introduction m4a file 11 minutes 2 seconds

The idea behind this first recording is that we often have new players mixed in with more experienced players. In getting prepped, sometimes I’ll have myself or Tarnoc sit off to the side with the new player and explain the basics. Sometimes we go off on a tangent, or deliver too much detail and the new player goes into information overload. Other times the player wants to know more and we’re busy with other issues so we hand them the book and say “Read the intro.” It usually takes them more than 11 minutes to do so and it uses up the mental resources they have to make decisions later (I’m big into this idea).

In the beginning, the reading of the intro was brutal to record. Reading straight from a text is not easy when you’re being recorded. I can’t tell you the number of takes I made to get it to how it sounds now.

At the moment, I’d have a hard time recording another one because 3rd edition is in flux. There are a lot of things changing (for the better we’re hoping) but once we nail down a few things I want to do a recording for event resolution (the core resolution mechanic) and then one that walks the player through character generation. Eventually I’d like to have enough audio files that a new player could listen to them on their iPod, and have a reasonably firm grasp on how to play the game without ever looking at a book. Obviously no one wants to listen to lists of skills or an enumeration of a starting character’s equipment but the idea is that the player could look at the lists and think “Oh, I know what these are all about.”

Let me know what you think of the effort. One day I might even move to *eek* video!

Chinese physicists have made a major teleportation break through by teleporting photons 97 Kilometers.

There’s also no shortage of quantum computing news.

While not a full quantum computer, this quantum simulator is a bit of a different approach.

And of course pew pew lasers are making headway. I used some of the earlier versions of the Firestrike for data on how lasers should work on The Artifact, specifically for the Engineer’s Resource.

Tourq Stevens invited me to put in a guest post over at Stuffer Shack. I’m honored to oblige.

A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats

Check it out and leave a comment with your thoughts.

For the third edition of The Artifact RPG a lot of the book is being re-written and I felt I could do a better job with the book introduction. This one doesn’t have the same kind of information density as the old one, but sometimes less is more.

We’ve got one chance at this. When things went bad on Earth, we came here. It’s getting worse every year, things are just unraveling back there. At first this planet was classified as any one of hundreds of high gravity exoplanets. Then new telescopes let us see there’s something going on here.

We’ve got the technology to go faster than light but it will kill a human because of mass dilation. So we send out hardened probes carrying teleporters. Then we can send in robots and eventually even humans. Most people don’t know that this planet wasn’t the first choice there were a few others that they tried first that wouldn’t support life. The government didn’t want to get people’s hopes up if none of them worked out.

This planet has a breathable atmosphere, liquid water, it’s warm enough, you’d almost think it was made for us. Well, for humans anyway, not necessarily for us. There’s already life here, very much like Earth, primitive green vegetation and animals.

Whenever we sent a rover out to bring back video of the planet, it would disappear. Finally they decided to sent people who also went missing. Then they tried a second time, to this day we don’t know what happened to them. Normally that would have been enough to raise a huge red flag but there weren’t any other options showing up so we tried again.

By the time the third expedition went in, it was armed with every precaution. They weren’t just the astronaut type going in this time, these were soldiers. They got there just in time. A few hours later and the probe lander with the teleporter pad would have been destroyed and we couldn’t try again for seventeen years.

That third expedition didn’t know who was attacking them but they managed to push back hard enough that the attackers ran. They left behind one of their wounded though and were we surprised to see who it was. The prisoner was, as far as we could figure, human.

They moved the teleporter pad to a safer spot and sent the prisoner back to earth. This caused a firestorm of debate. Some had thought another nation had hijacked the teleporter and was sending people in already but the facts didn’t fit. This prisoner didn’t speak a known language and when they brought him back he got so sick he almost died. Doctors pumped him full of antibiotics and antiretrovirals just to keep him from getting killed by things like the flu.

The third expedition also confirmed that the planet was artificial, that the planet was manufactured. This scared the politicians so badly that they almost had the teleporter destroyed. Any civilization that could build a planet and was so obviously hostile could easily wipe us out. The pressure kept mounting to scrap the whole idea.

If it wasn’t for a group of university student linguists that cracked the prisoners language we would still be on earth. They listened to recordings of the prisoner speaking and figured out what he was saying. Now we found out what was really going on.

The Prisoner was a Kelrath of the Geetin class. A slave for all intents and purposes. They weren’t the ones that built the planet but they had been there as long as their five thousand years of history recorded. He told us all about the planet from his perspective. He explained it’s basic structure. That there was a rocky core of the planet that served as a base for two structures that branch out in opposite directions. He explained that inside these structures is where his people lived.

Then he told us about the Chezbah, his people’s mortal enemy. All he knew about them was what he had seen in war. We almost didn’t know what to think when he described the inhuman monsters that they sent into battle. We quickly got the idea that the Chezbah were far more advanced technologically than the Kelrath.

Because the planet was built by someone, people on earth started calling it “the Artifact.” By 2079 the name was so often used, it was adopted as the planet’s official name. During all this, no one was really sure what to do. Most governments wanted to colonize the planet but no one was sure what would happen if we tired. In 2083 the Artifact Study Organization was formed by a coalition of governments. It’s goal was to investigate the planet, establish diplomatic contacts with the native people of the planet and pave the way for colonization.

The fourth expedition was sent out in August 31 2084. This group was far larger than the previous  expeditions. They set out to make contact with the Kelrath who attacked them in force. This was when we first met the Scimrahn who rescued the ASO expedition. The matriarch of the tribe saw this as an opportunity to win an ally and offered an alliance. This was the opening the ASO was looking for but it came with consequences. Joining ourselves with the Scimrahn meant making ourselves enemies of the Chezbah nation.

At first the ASO only offered economic cooperation with the Scimrahn but a coalition of nations that felt they could not wait for more diplomatic efforts made a treaty to fight along side the Scimrahn as an ally. This coalition called the Indo-China Alliance made the ASO feel that they would be left behind unless they agreed to a treaty of defending the Scimrahn from attackers.

It’s now 2085 by our calendar, we’re sending as much men and equipment as possible through our teleporters.

Let us know what you think, does this explain enough to get started? Do any questions come up when you read it?

So far a about 50 pages of the 200+ page book has been re-worked. The major effort is to tie all the rules elements more tightly together, explain things a bit better and improve the writing where I can.

The Artifact RPG blog is up for a SOTY! Please help out and vote. A link to the voting can be found here.

The Stuffer Shack does this great contest every year to find new websites that are working to make RPGs great. Some of the things that this blog has worked on is try and tease apart what makes RPGs a uniquely enjoyable form of entertainment and how to communicate their unique strengths to those that aren’t yet players. Another effort has been to take other aspects of fiction that work well in traditional stories like survival situations and get them to work better in games.

One of the best ways to promote RPGs is to remove barriers to people picking one up and playing it. One way we’re doing that is to provide free games. Free is good right?