Oblivion awaits: A review of Agents of Oblivion

I just purchased Agents of Oblivion, a new Savage Worlds game from Reality Blurs. I have the hardcover version on the way when they get around to printing it but for now, I'm reading the pdf. And it's pretty impressive.

Okay, so far not much to look at. The pdf is quite bland, most of the pages are without background or images. This is no bad thing as such, in fact it captures the mood of a professional agency quite well, but maybe a few more images would've been nice. But the real strength is in the mechanics.

The character creation section is very straight forward, as all Savage Worlds games tend to be, and there's a lot of new edges and hindrances. They've added more skills such as Demolitions and Forgery, which are good additions, I'd probably use them in other games too. And they've merged the skills needed for powers into three branches of the same skill. Like you have Knowledge (Occult) or Knowledge (History), you now have Channeling (Divine/Mystical/Paranormal). This is also a good idea that I'm applying elsewhere, it just makes more sense.

But really, it's in the GM's or 'Directors' section that the game gets really good. Two words: random generators. I love these things, they're just too helpful for a GM. It's something I really REALLY wish White Wolf would do for their games. There are two main tables, the mission generator and the creature generator, and in my opinion, both are awesome. They're easy to use and generate a wide variety of ideas that will inspire. The creature generator could be applied to any other Savage Worlds setting and the mission generator, with a little tweaking, could work for any game. I've gotta say, I'm very impressed with this.

So all in all, very worth your money, even just to supplement your Savage Worlds games.

Done Huntin'

So, my Savage Worlds-Hunter: The Vigil game is now over. And how did the systems merge together? Not great, but not too bad either.

First, the negatives, because it's alphabetical of course. The main problems I encountered were setting versus system. In general, the World of Darkness settings have always been about a world with a varied cast of thousands, all individuals. Whether it's a PC, the head of a vampire clan, a random passerby, a werewolf cop, they're all characters in their own way. Savage Worlds on the other hand is built to run medium to large fights with plenty of enemy minions to blaze away at. Sure, you could run a fight between PCs and a huge horde of vampires who all go down in one hit but that's not really what the setting runs on. I created golems and zombies to get around this problem, which worked well enough, but for a long running campaign, it would get stale. Secondly, as I mentioned in my last RPG update, it's tough to recreate long lists of powers. Which you sorta need to do when building World of Darkness style vampires. I barely used them, mainly because they were a side plot and possible set up for future, but it was tricky working out how the powers should work and not worth it for using them so little.

And now, the positives, because P comes after N you see? Overall, rolling skills in SW is better than rolling skills in nWoD. Failure at any level is still an option, as are botching and critting, but it is much easier to work out the chances of that happening and build fights around it. In SW, if Doug has a parry of 5 and the zombie rolls 1d6 damage, there's a 1/6 chance it'll score equal to or more and hit him. In nWoD, if Doug has a defense of 2 and the zombie has strength of 5 and a melee of 2 then it rolls 7 minus 2 for 5, then it needs to score one 8 or more on those 5 and what succeeds is the damage.....GAAAH!

Another positive is that since NPCs will be minions, this stops lesser characters from overshadowing the group. For the final battle, the group were accompanied by Jeremy, their Ashwood Abbey contact, and his (un)trustworthy machine gun. In nWoD, this guy would be pretty awesome in terms of stats, an experienced hunter with training in military arms is something to be scared of (so is the Ashwood Abbey but we'll come back to that...). In SW, he's still pretty good, he's firing on full auto and has a d8 in shooting so he's got a 62.5% chance to hit (told you it was easy to work out) and gets three rolls per round but he's not as good as a PC would be with the same situation, because they have the wild dice. Also, he had pathetic luck, his machine gun barely scratched the main enemy boss and he managed to KO one of the PCs who's player wasn't in the last session. Well done there Jez.

So all in all, it went okay. I don't think I'll combine the same setting and system in future but I certainly hope to run both separately.

Savage Ideas

So a while back, I bought an RPG game called Savage Worlds. If you're not familiar with it, it's basically a generic system that you can use to play quite a lot of things, like GURPS but rules lite instead of rules heavy, and usually a reasonable price too. The impression I get from reading peoples experiences online and from my own is that it's mostly used for shorter games and not for long campaigns, mainly because character advancement is quite short and would lead to generalisation after a while. I imagine it could work well in a long campaign but the GM would have to add to it themselves.

Still, having a game that you can pick up, throw a setting over it and be ready to go in under an hour is a very good thing. These days, most games are rules heavy and are frequently built around their own system instead of a more generic system (farewell d20 supplements...) which means character creation and learning the actual rules takes the group at least a session. For Savage Worlds (SW for short), the rules are fairly straight forward, character creation even more so, so all that's left to do is explain your setting. How long that takes is really up to you.

But there is one thing I've been thinking about lately; just what settings could you adapt with this system? After running a game of White Wolf's Hunter: the Vigil with this system, I think I've come up with a three questions to ask when wondering whether it will work.

1) Are the characters human or equivalent to human (ie Elves or Dwarves)? This is an important one, especially when you're adapting things like White Wolf games. In the World of Darkness games, characters are frequently not human, they're vampires or werewolves or changelings etc, and these are all better than your average human in some ways and worse in others. What this means is that either you give each player a list of new rules for their characters on top of the rules for the game, to represent them having to drink blood, burning in sunlight etc, which also means making up those rules, or you have to scale back standard humans so the PC race is still better than them. That's a real pain, and probably not worth the effort, so in these cases, I'd recommend trying something else.
2) Do you need a load of different 'powerz'? SW has rules for magic, but like the rest of it, they are rules lite. The spells are barebones and mostly linked to combat, which threw me at first, but after reading into it a bit more, this is deliberate. They've listed basic powers (shooting someone with a bolt of magic, turning invisible, telekinesis and such) and let the GMs work out the rest from those. Generally, all you need to do is say a spell counts as one of those in rules terms then describe how it looks. Need a fireball spell? That's the Blast power, which creates an area to damage enemies. Need a spell to cause ice spikes to shoot up from the floor? That's also the Blast power, just with a different name and description, so the powers are customisable.

...well, it's still Blast of course

But in some settings, such as White Wolf games or D&D, there's already a huge list of powers players can take. Generally, you'll end up spending a lot of time building each power in SW or have your players choose them from a list and build them as you need them, which is also going to slow you down.

3) Is the game really focused on selling loot? The one definite criticism I have of SW is that the equipment list is not very good. Okay, it's got a lot of entries and you can build anything you need based on that, but the prices are really all over the place. For example, a .50 cal sniper rifle costs more than a laptop. How does that make sense? A sniper rifle costs the military over £1000 to make, you can get a laptop for £400 if you're not too picky, and anyway, does this really balance the game? So yeah, this is only a minor problem but if your setting is based around raiding or trading for goods (Firefly for example), be prepared to spend time on price lists.

I'm going to be trying out this system in future, no doubt about that, so if I think up more questions, I will post them. With those in mind, I've thought up a few settings that could be easily converted to SW. I haven't seen any conversions of these so far, but I haven't looked too hard so if you know of one, or have made one yourself, feel free to link me to that :)

Fallout - okay, the weapons list would take some tweaking but I definitely think this could work. The SW core book has rules for radiation, stats for monsters similar to super mutants or robot drones, everythings pretty much done for you.
Halflife - again, a few additions to the equipment list and you're pretty much done.
Farscape - well alright, Hynerians will be a bit tricky should anyone really want to play one but apart from that, everythings basically a variant of human.
Pandemonium and/or Spite - these are already roleplaying games, made by Neoplastic Press. In Pandemonium, demons return to Earth suddenly, and begin causing mayhem in secret. As the world starts falling into chaos, you are recruited by someone working for the other side (probably) to hold back the end times. Spite is much the same but the other way around, Angels (which are no less monstrous than the demons) are here to 'cleanse' humanity of sin and your group is all that stands in their way. The players section of Spite and the Pandemonium rulebook are free on that link if you're interested, they're pretty good. Trouble is, I'm not a fan of the system at all. Easy answer, adapt to SW rules.
Lord of the Rings - I know there's games of this out there somewhere but I think a SW version would be a good match. Anything d20 can do, we can do better!
Final Fantasy 7 - This one might be a bit trickier, mainly because of all the magic types involved, but it wouldn't be that hard in the end. You could even adapt later games too, like 8 or 9, or maybe set a game in Ivalice based on Tactics Advance and 12. Of course, the later games have fewer fans so you might get fewer players but at least they stopped at 12 and definitely didn't ruin the series after that with tripe.

Correct me at your peril!

So there's a few ideas. If I get time and interest from my groups, I might set them up myself (and post them here) but for that's it for now.