Basic Roleplaying . Net

So, with the imminent arrival of BRP in print and it already being available as PDF, and the fact that I can see the light at the end of the tunnel (ish) on a first issue of Uncounted Worlds, I thought it was time I turned my thoughts back to After the Scouring.

It looks likely that I won’t be running this again this year – the Thursday Group’s real life commitments are such that playing time’s at a bit of a premium, and we’re having fun with a RIFTS game at the moment; well, with the setting anyway – every session is regularly punctuated with ritual cursing of the game system and the atrocious layout of the rule book… And by the time we finish the RIFTS run it’ll be winter and I have to run Call of Cthulhu or one of the players will hurt me. But everyone’s expressed an interest in returning to the setting and characters of After the Scouring, so it looks like I have a golden opportunity to port the setting from RQIII to BRP in advance of playing again next year.

So, my intention is to develop my ideas of how I’m going to do After the Scouring using the new BRP core rules here, as a sort of ongoing journal.

Some clear objectives need spelling out in the first instance. AtS was always intended to capture the “real world changed in strange but ultimately explicable ways” feel of classic British post-apocalypse SF (Sword of the Spirits, Peter Dickinson’s Changes trilogy, John Wyndham’s Chrysalids) I read as a child in the shadow of mutually assured destruction in the 1970’s. So ultimately, although there are supernatural elements to the setting, the feeling should ultimately be that these are somehow manifestations of a superior understanding of the universe (if not an actual superior technology). And I wanted the sense of distance from the change in the world to be close. Settings like Dreampod 9’s excellent Tribe 8 are great – but I didn’t want the “fall” of the old world to be mythology – I wanted it to be close and viscerally immediate. In the second half of the game we played last summer, the characters met an NPC who not only lived through the Scouring, but was sufficiently old at the time of the Scouring that he remembered watching CSI: Miami and of course one of the player characters was actually born before the world changed as well.

So those are the touch stones of the setting. When I ran the game last year, we basically just used RQIII with a few tweaks. I need to spell out those tweaks, and see which ones are key and which we just tinkering. I also need to think which bits of RQIII that aren’t in BRP were providing essential elements of the setting and thus need recreating. So that’s the topic for the next post or two I think.

So, the final installment of Alex Hardings account of the opening adventure from my RQIII campaign - After the Scouring – which charts the aftermath of the defeat of the Warlock of Blandford Forum…

As it happens raiding the tower yielded a few useful things, namely a pop gun in a box (which I think makes me look very intimidating, although I’m not sure Jasper and Brian are convinced. Possibly that’s because they’re in on the secret that I have no idea how to make it work…) and a pile of the Warlock’s journals which piqued Jasper’s monetary interest. Depressingly however, it also yielded some bizarre skull thing with feet that kept running off every time we tried to catch it. According to Hold-On the fact that the irritating little bugger existed at all meant that the Warlock wasn’t actually dead, despite his amazing nosedive acrobatics earlier. I was headed downstairs to break that irksome piece of news to Jasper and Brian when I realised they weren’t alone. While I’d been distracted by reprovisioning, a whole band of Bournemouth polymoffs had arrived at the tower and, despite Marcus’ best attempts to distract them, their leader hadn’t been fooled in the slightest and had sniffed our two out (and I do literally mean sniffed!). I’m not entirely sure what they said to him, but it must have been convincing because he apparently decided not to kill them (or even tell the rest of the polymoffs we were there) and took the whole band off for some serious celebratory drinking! You know, I’m suddenly starting to see the appeal of polymoff life!
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So, as promised, the next installment of Alex’s journal, resuming in the woods above the bridge at Durweston, east of Blandford Forum…

As it turned out avoiding that detour was maybe a bad idea. We reached Durweston without anything particularly exciting happening and settled in for the night on the reasoning that it would be easier to cross the river in daylight rather than darkness. Everybody was being very polite about which watch they were going to take, so I nabbed first (means I don’t have to get up in the middle of the night or first thing in the morning!).

My wake up call the next morning was Jasper’s bloody great boot in my face. Personally I’m far more partial to a hot cup of coffee but, given that there were three dead people shambling up the hill towards our camp, I decided to let that pass. I’m starting to come round to the opinion that the dead these days really aren’t like they used to be. I mean, if you’re dead, surely it would be far politer to just lie down and rot rather than wandering around, stinking the place up and disturbing the well-earned sleep of honest, law-abiding (it’s been at least a week!) citizens! I contemplated trying to explain this to them, but they didn’t seem to be in the mood to talk, so I figured it was probably best to let my sword do the explaining. My sword is good at explaining – it’s short and to the point! Today was no exception to that and I was my usual brilliant self (although possibly it would have been a better idea not to make the dead man’s head explode because then I wouldn’t have ended up with a mouthful of rotten brain – but don’t tell Jasper I said that!).
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Alex Harding is one of the characters in my Thursday game: a brash, cocky and invincibly cheerful thief and con-artist. Nineteen years old, she has never know anything but the blasted world after the scouring. The following is written by her player, Laura Tucker:

Okay, if I’m being really honest about it (and this is just between you and me) I have to admit that it is kind of my fault that we got caught up in this job in the first place. Of course, there are a number of mitigating factors. I don’t think we can blame the existence of bars and taverns on me and I know I’m not responsible for the brewing of sweet, sweet wine. You also can’t really hold me accountable for the blathering of snitches or for the fact that the New Sarum guard don’t really have a sense of humour or an ounce of generosity in their entire bodies. I really should have kept my mouth shut though. I mean, I know the Prince takes a dim view on provisioning expeditions into Salisbury. It stirs up the polymoths, which makes everybody’s life miserable, and, while I know the ends justify the means, not everybody seems to understand that.

So there we were, me and Jasper, in a cold, miserable, damp cell waiting to be tried for indiscretions we hadn’t even committed yet! Jasper’s my partner by the way. He used to be a soldier until he met me and realised there were actually far more interesting things to do in life than guard caravans in the Prince’s name. He complains. A lot. On the plus side though, he’s a good man to have around in a fight and has even managed to wriggle us out of a few sticky situations in the past. Not this one though. We were headed to trial and it didn’t look promising. Of course, I could have got us out of the cell in a second with the chicken bone I stole from the madman in the other cell, but getting out of New Sarum would have been tricky and we’d have ended up on the road with no weapons and no gear, with winter biting at our heels. Even I’m not that good!
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So reading too much Tribe 8 recently, and a discussion with Ben Monroe about a “Stress” mechanic for RuneQuest III, lead me to a new campaign setting, currently in use for my Thursday evening game:

July 2nd 2014, 12:17:32 GMT. In the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland, a unique collision event occurs. At the Great Circle of Mortimer’s Crossing, in the realm of Shistaval, Queen Mab of the Houses of the Exile attempts a great weaving to escape the oncoming night.

Two events collide. A door is unbolted, briefly, just as a battering ram is applied to the other side…

The scouring expands at near light speed, with a depth of some 700 milliseconds. Inside the wave front space, time, matter and energy have different properties. After its passing, things are almost as they were before. Almost.
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