It’s a good sign when a playtest turns into a campaign.
Last saturday I gathered some of my regulars (and one of my irregulars) and ran a test session for Lone Wolf Fists (hereafter referred to as “LWF”). I wrote up a a quick scenario based off of one of the examples I suggested in the How to Pitch this Game section I’d completed around the jolly Fistmas holiday.
This had a twofold purpose: first, I wanted to see if the advice I’d given in that section was accurate, and second, I wanted to see how difficult it was to run that scenario as a GM new to the system.
Let’s start by reading that section, shall we?
Last saturday I gathered some of my regulars (and one of my irregulars) and ran a test session for Lone Wolf Fists (hereafter referred to as “LWF”). I wrote up a a quick scenario based off of one of the examples I suggested in the How to Pitch this Game section I’d completed around the jolly Fistmas holiday.
This had a twofold purpose: first, I wanted to see if the advice I’d given in that section was accurate, and second, I wanted to see how difficult it was to run that scenario as a GM new to the system.
Let’s start by reading that section, shall we?
……
Getting your Friends to Play: How to Pitch this Game
So you’ve read this book, got a fistfull of d10s, and you’re aching to see your friends fight their way through the post-apocalypse. Great! Now you’ve just got to get them on-board so you can play.
That can be the trick, huh?
Thankfully, this game is pretty badass: “You play kung-fu heroes in a post-apocalyptic wasteland filled with monsters and demon” is essentially the perfect pitch.
Maybe your friends are tough to please though; they might be veteran gamers with very particular tastes, for example. No worries; If you really need to seal the deal, the best way is to play!
A lot of games make this a goddamn chore: not this one. Character generation should take you five minutes, if that. Then they’ll each have a driven, powerful character, already embroiled in the intrigues and destiny of the World of Ashes and Ghosts.
Keep nimble and answer questions as they’re putting their characters together. Keep them talking to one another; their characters should be friends, or train under the same master, or be rivals, or lovers, or siblings, or parent and child.
Silence is your foe in character generation! The quiet guy who makes his character in the corner without talking to anyone is always the one with no connection to anyone and totally incompatible goals. He bails the second he can get away with it and constantly asks why his character would care about what’s happening to the other players, like you’re just going to run a side-campaign for his character. Don’t let that happen; get him out of his shell and talking during character creation.
(Thankfully, these are your friends we’re talking about; just keep them talking to each other about the characters they’re making and why they want to kick ass together and it’ll generally come together)
Start playing right away, and make it kick ass. Set their first scene on a battlefield, or with a demon smashing in a fortress door, or in a battle on top of a rig speeding through the atomic wastes. Don’t pussyfoot around: their first actions need to be their Effort Dice hitting the table and some chainsaw-brandishing psycho making a strong bid for Initiative.
There are a few key ingredients here:
- The player’s characters have to be in imminent danger. It’s not enough that some bigwig NPC is imperiled nearby; their characters need to be menaced. The army isn’t attacking some other army, it’s attacking you and your homeland. These barbarians have their shotguns leveled at your chest. “What do you do?” should feel like a threat.
- More has to be going on than this fight. The players need to be in a burning factory with only a distant skylight as an escape. They need to be on a speeding train, rocketing across a rickety bridge over an irradiated sea. Their attacks need to be punctuated by shells exploding in a collapsing trench.
- There has to be a reason for the action. This isn’t some random act of violence; this war has stakes that matter to the characters. The medicine on this train is the only thing that can stop the plague ravaging their clan’s territories. This bastard they’re fighting in the burning factory killed their family and it’s time for blood.
Don’t have a conclusion planned out; the fight is going to conclude, trust me. Let whatever conclusion happens set the tone for what comes next.
Feeling nervous about your friend’s characters dying? Sure, that’s reasonable; they’re rookies to the system and you just tossed them into the deep end with sharks. Their characters are as weak as they’ll ever be, and they have zero experience with the system; so this fight? It’s the most dangerous one they’ll ever have.
You got an ace up your sleeve though, slick: the Death Token. Don’t put it on the table. Player gets konked senseless? They’ll be fine, they’re just unconscious. That killing blow becomes a near-miss that sends them sprawling into some head-trauma and they’re fine. It’ll be fine. Give the other players ample opportunities to heft their unconscious friend to safety and they’ll get out of the scene intact. A little wiser, probably.
Follow the aftermath of the fight to segue into some really kick-ass Vertical Content. We’ve got a few good ones for you in the Setting section, choose two of your favorites and have them happening concurrently, linked to Anchors in wherever this fight wound up. I strongly suggest linking the opening fight to either or both of them; that way, “Let’s go after these bastards!” launches them right into the thick of some intrigue.
Then just, y’know, run the game. This thing is stuffed with nuclear mutants and wasteland scavengers and kung-fu master driving tanks. About the only way things can get boring for players is if they stay completely still in a totally safe place.
Put those safe places far away from them. That way, getting to them feels like a welcome reprieve from the dangers they’ve got to punch through to find them.
End the session before players start getting tired. Especially long sessions can test the real-world stamina of your players; don’t get to that point. after a few hours of thrills, end on a scene with a few unresolved questions.
Try to avoid ending the game in the middle of an Action scene; choose a nice Montage or Real-Time scene and wind it up with a nice Denouement. give ‘em an idea of what their characters lead off doing until next time and ask them if there’s something they want to start the next game doing.
After the session, get some feedback from everybody; your friends are never more honest than at the end of a gaming session. Take some notes on stuff they enjoyed or disliked. Poke them with some questions about the scenes you noticed them being especially active or quiet. Banter a little about the session; if a player did something cool, let them know about it! You’re their character’s number-one fan, after all.
That’s it! Run a tight session filled with thrill and adventure: if your players are talking about it afterward, they’re hooked.
……
It felt like solid advice while I was writing it; after all, I wrote the damn game, this is what I created it to do. But I’ve been at this long enough to know that actually playing a game is an entirely different beast.
I liked that train scenario so much I decided to develop it. Here are the spark notes I wrote for myself:
I liked that train scenario so much I decided to develop it. Here are the spark notes I wrote for myself:
……
Off the Rails
Introduction to Lone Wolf Fists
The Premise
The party is guarding the vital shipment of supplies by train to a refugee outpost.
Complications
A band of desert raiders plans to ambush the train. They’ve been joined by a deadly and mysterious saboteur. Also, the Prana-engine powering the train is hideously unstable. Finally, most of the last stretch of track is over a toxic ocean of liquid waste. Good luck hero.
Starting position
The party places themselves in the engine room, or among the 4 boxcars filled with supplies (In order from front to rear: food, medicine, tools, fuel).
Events
Introduction to Lone Wolf Fists
The Premise
The party is guarding the vital shipment of supplies by train to a refugee outpost.
Complications
A band of desert raiders plans to ambush the train. They’ve been joined by a deadly and mysterious saboteur. Also, the Prana-engine powering the train is hideously unstable. Finally, most of the last stretch of track is over a toxic ocean of liquid waste. Good luck hero.
Starting position
The party places themselves in the engine room, or among the 4 boxcars filled with supplies (In order from front to rear: food, medicine, tools, fuel).
Events
- Start: A rocket impacts the engine, rocking the train. The engine room is aflame, the conductor is injured, the Prana engine goes berserk and shifts uncontrollably into high gear, throwing out lances of radioactive lightning. Two dune buggies pull alongside the train, with barbarians leaping off and using giant hooks to grapple onboard.
- Round 1: Two groups of (7)Barbarians board the train, along with their Minor Hero, Chainhead (Effort 2, Fire Friend’s Attitude, Burning Piston Strike) and Poison Crow (Degree 1, Cunning, Balanced/Unarmed, Summon the Hellish Armament, Thirsting Knife Satisfaction, Silent Spider Legwork, Opportunistic Carrion Lunge). The terrain rocketed over is flat red dirt. The damaged Prana engine begins to build an unstable charge this round (Intellect 4 to patch-job)
- Round 2: The land abruptly ends, and the train is blasting over a rickety bridge, tottering over an inland sea of liquid garbage (Endurance 3 or acid). A bolt of toxic green prana fries the conductor if the engine hasn’t been repaired (Endurance 3, if somebody wants to take the bullet).
- Round 3: Midway across the sea this round. If not repaired, the engine begins to shudder violently; Senses 2 reveals that it will explode next round. Stuff you can destroy: Pushing a train cart off the track (Power Rank 6), ripping up the metal (Power 4), punching through the wooden doors (Power 3).
- Round 4: Nearly across now; the engine explodes and annihilates the track (Rank 6 disaster) spilling everyone and everything into the toxic lake if not repaired.
- Round 5: Across the lake, into desert and scrubland. The town is hoving into view; somebody has to stop this fucking train right now (Int Rank 2) or it’ll impact hard enough to destroy it (Rank 5).
- Round 6: Well I hope you stopped the train; otherwise it crashes with everybody involved into the town, destroying the train and a huge swathe of homes and people.
NPCS
Two groups of (7) Barbarians
Chainhead Minor Hero: Effort 2, Fire Friend’s Attitude, Burning Piston Strike)
Poison Crow Degree 1, Cunning, (Balanced/Unarmed)
- Summon the Hellish Armament
- Thirsting Knife Satisfaction
- Silent Spider Legwork
- Opportunistic Carrion Lunge
……
If I rewrite this as a more thorough introduction scenario, there’s going to be more to it; it’ll intersect with the actual map so that as characters topple off the train (or are violently ejected as it explodes) the adventure can continue from their point of departure. Although it didn’t come up in the playtest, I’d also include a section on running the adventure with a separated party (you just continue adhering to the turn structure, basically).
How it went
It was pretty exciting!
Two of my players had previously tangled with the system, so they had a pretty intuitive sense of what the game was going to demand of them. They chose Radioactive Scorpion and Silver Phoenix, respectively. My third player was absolutely fresh to the system; he went with Five Star Spirit.
I printed out the clan lore write-ups, updated with the newest version of the kung-fu, for the players to peruse. Following my own advice, I kept them talking while they read the fluff, so everybody chose distinct Archetypes and Dharmas (we had one each of Enlightened/Strong/Cunning, and their Dharmas were Metal Fist, Ruthless Tiger, and Rising Sun). They chose different weapons too; Reflexive, Reach, and Heavy.
Character generation did indeed take around ten minutes, even going through a significant chunk of the literature for the game. The players had a good intuitive sense of what they wanted from the write-ups of the clans, so that clearly worked. They were excited about the Dharmas too; as suspected, they helped them get into character with a mechanical build choice, so that launched them right into the personalities of their dudes without needing a more elaborate backstory. Overall I was really pleased with chargen: I feel like I’m on the right track with my approach.
Next, it was time to start playing and kicking ass immediately. I really wanted to strike while the iron was hot, so directly off generation I started establishing the scene; they’re mercenaries hired to protect this train of supplies. The shippers slapped a barely-repaired Prana Engine on the thing, and it’s rocketing top-speed across the wastes.
Once I got everybody’s positions in the train; an explosion rocked the whole thing. Someone had fired a makeshift scud into the engine and it was horribly damaged. Two dune buggies filled with wasteland barbarians pulled along both sides and leapt onboard. Initiative.
Round One
The first round saw a lot of impressive offense from the players, with strong initiative bids and huge attacks as follow-throughs. Notably, the Scorpion player set fire to a dune buggy which she then leapt on to keep punching barbarians she had already set on fire. Wonderful.
Phoenix blew up the other buggy, almost completely wiping the other group of barbarians out single-handedly. The few survivors leapt aboard the train to seek revenge.
The lone degree-1 foe, Poison Crow, jumped onto the train and made his way to the engine room. His mission was to prevent the supplies from reaching their destination; what did he care about these heroes?
He was stopped just short by the psychic defenses of the Phoenix, so he ended his turn summoning a Reach weapon to help him seize initiative in the following round.
Round Two
The second round brought reality soberly back to the players. The ground vanished underneath the two dune buggies (which began to careen into a sea of toxic garbage below) and a bolt of raw prana skeletonized the conductor. The party, prana-poor and beset by a horde of barbarians and a deadly degree-1 foe, realized they had to get strategic if they were going to get off this train alive.
Thankfully, Phoenix was able to survive an impressive onslaught from Crow by turtling up into a defense. I also got to have my first“game designer moment” after the Five-Star Spirit hit him with a bodily paralysis imbalance and he wasn’t able to defend himself for the remainder of the round, since he couldn’t move. I made a note to revise the wording of that imbalance to allow defense in the future, so it didn’t shut you down as soon as it hit you.
Five Star Spirit put the hurt on Poison Crow; piled up a ton of damage and paralysis Aggravation on the poor bird, leaving him blinded and his effort pool crippled. However, he did manage to sufficiently distract them from trying to repair the engine. I warned the party that round after next it was going to blow and they started to look nervous.
The Scorpion jumped back onto the top of the train, followed by Chainhead who was aching for a worthy foe. She blocked his chain-axe with Burning Piston Strike and drew him out into the next round.
Phoenix also de-coupled the leading car from the engine room, so it started pulling away… With Poison crow, the lone, blind passenger. Not going to lie, I hadn't considered decoupling the car. The player thought of a solution I hadn’t anticipated, and I absolutely loved it.
Round Three
There were two big events this round: the first was Chainhead versus Scorpion on top of the train, and the second was Crow’s last stand in the engine room.
Scorpion won initiative over Chainhead and boosted her attack with a Power action to launch the fool like Wile E. Coyote into the sludge below. A pretty conclusive victory, to be certain.
Phoenix took out two thugs with his psychic attacks and decided to use Heart to scare one of the remaining guys off the train. After painting the car with his buddy’s intestines, he turns to the dope and says “It’s time for you to leave”
“It’s time for me to leave!” he agrees, and leaps out the door. We all had a good laugh.
Crow continued to make himself troublesome this round; he hooked his magical spear into the leading car’s coupling and held the engine to it. Spirit was having none of it, though, and beat him to death with a flurry of punches. Finally, he kicked the wedgeded spear after Crow’s body into the garbage sea below.
Round three crystalized something for me: there are always at least three things you’re doing with your resources. You’re putting the pressure onto a foe with offense, leaving something back for defense, and pursuing your battle strategy with the remainder.
Round Four
The engine rushed ahead of the train by just below the explosion radius, plus a touch more track, and detonated. It took out a huge swathe of track, which the remaining cars were hurtling towards on momentum. Phoenix used his psychic strength to arrest some of the momentum, and Scorpion hopped down and pulled a spider-man in front of the train, the planks shattering under her boots as she applied her body as emergency breaks to keep the train from going over.
And that’s the first combat. Pretty great, all things considered. Surprisingly safe too; the players took like, four damage between the three of them.
How it went
It was pretty exciting!
Two of my players had previously tangled with the system, so they had a pretty intuitive sense of what the game was going to demand of them. They chose Radioactive Scorpion and Silver Phoenix, respectively. My third player was absolutely fresh to the system; he went with Five Star Spirit.
I printed out the clan lore write-ups, updated with the newest version of the kung-fu, for the players to peruse. Following my own advice, I kept them talking while they read the fluff, so everybody chose distinct Archetypes and Dharmas (we had one each of Enlightened/Strong/Cunning, and their Dharmas were Metal Fist, Ruthless Tiger, and Rising Sun). They chose different weapons too; Reflexive, Reach, and Heavy.
Character generation did indeed take around ten minutes, even going through a significant chunk of the literature for the game. The players had a good intuitive sense of what they wanted from the write-ups of the clans, so that clearly worked. They were excited about the Dharmas too; as suspected, they helped them get into character with a mechanical build choice, so that launched them right into the personalities of their dudes without needing a more elaborate backstory. Overall I was really pleased with chargen: I feel like I’m on the right track with my approach.
Next, it was time to start playing and kicking ass immediately. I really wanted to strike while the iron was hot, so directly off generation I started establishing the scene; they’re mercenaries hired to protect this train of supplies. The shippers slapped a barely-repaired Prana Engine on the thing, and it’s rocketing top-speed across the wastes.
Once I got everybody’s positions in the train; an explosion rocked the whole thing. Someone had fired a makeshift scud into the engine and it was horribly damaged. Two dune buggies filled with wasteland barbarians pulled along both sides and leapt onboard. Initiative.
Round One
The first round saw a lot of impressive offense from the players, with strong initiative bids and huge attacks as follow-throughs. Notably, the Scorpion player set fire to a dune buggy which she then leapt on to keep punching barbarians she had already set on fire. Wonderful.
Phoenix blew up the other buggy, almost completely wiping the other group of barbarians out single-handedly. The few survivors leapt aboard the train to seek revenge.
The lone degree-1 foe, Poison Crow, jumped onto the train and made his way to the engine room. His mission was to prevent the supplies from reaching their destination; what did he care about these heroes?
He was stopped just short by the psychic defenses of the Phoenix, so he ended his turn summoning a Reach weapon to help him seize initiative in the following round.
Round Two
The second round brought reality soberly back to the players. The ground vanished underneath the two dune buggies (which began to careen into a sea of toxic garbage below) and a bolt of raw prana skeletonized the conductor. The party, prana-poor and beset by a horde of barbarians and a deadly degree-1 foe, realized they had to get strategic if they were going to get off this train alive.
Thankfully, Phoenix was able to survive an impressive onslaught from Crow by turtling up into a defense. I also got to have my first“game designer moment” after the Five-Star Spirit hit him with a bodily paralysis imbalance and he wasn’t able to defend himself for the remainder of the round, since he couldn’t move. I made a note to revise the wording of that imbalance to allow defense in the future, so it didn’t shut you down as soon as it hit you.
Five Star Spirit put the hurt on Poison Crow; piled up a ton of damage and paralysis Aggravation on the poor bird, leaving him blinded and his effort pool crippled. However, he did manage to sufficiently distract them from trying to repair the engine. I warned the party that round after next it was going to blow and they started to look nervous.
The Scorpion jumped back onto the top of the train, followed by Chainhead who was aching for a worthy foe. She blocked his chain-axe with Burning Piston Strike and drew him out into the next round.
Phoenix also de-coupled the leading car from the engine room, so it started pulling away… With Poison crow, the lone, blind passenger. Not going to lie, I hadn't considered decoupling the car. The player thought of a solution I hadn’t anticipated, and I absolutely loved it.
Round Three
There were two big events this round: the first was Chainhead versus Scorpion on top of the train, and the second was Crow’s last stand in the engine room.
Scorpion won initiative over Chainhead and boosted her attack with a Power action to launch the fool like Wile E. Coyote into the sludge below. A pretty conclusive victory, to be certain.
Phoenix took out two thugs with his psychic attacks and decided to use Heart to scare one of the remaining guys off the train. After painting the car with his buddy’s intestines, he turns to the dope and says “It’s time for you to leave”
“It’s time for me to leave!” he agrees, and leaps out the door. We all had a good laugh.
Crow continued to make himself troublesome this round; he hooked his magical spear into the leading car’s coupling and held the engine to it. Spirit was having none of it, though, and beat him to death with a flurry of punches. Finally, he kicked the wedgeded spear after Crow’s body into the garbage sea below.
Round three crystalized something for me: there are always at least three things you’re doing with your resources. You’re putting the pressure onto a foe with offense, leaving something back for defense, and pursuing your battle strategy with the remainder.
Round Four
The engine rushed ahead of the train by just below the explosion radius, plus a touch more track, and detonated. It took out a huge swathe of track, which the remaining cars were hurtling towards on momentum. Phoenix used his psychic strength to arrest some of the momentum, and Scorpion hopped down and pulled a spider-man in front of the train, the planks shattering under her boots as she applied her body as emergency breaks to keep the train from going over.
And that’s the first combat. Pretty great, all things considered. Surprisingly safe too; the players took like, four damage between the three of them.
Freestyling
After the intro combat, the players were super-invested in the game, so we decided to keep going. What was I gonna do, waste that kind of enthusiasm? Screw that, I had to freestyle something.
If you have to do this, here’s a trick I suggest: make the players deal with the problem right in front of them to buy yourself some time. In this case, they had a train to get across a missing stretch of track before they could continue their mission. While they discussed their plans, I had a few minutes to prep something.
Since I’m super-creative, I just did a spin on Barter Town from Beyond Thunderdome. I liberally mish-mashed it with the Fire Nation from Avatar: the Last Airbender and the Flame Cult from Legends of the Wulin.
They did some pretty creative stuff to get the train across the gap: Phoenix levitated some track from the drink and Scorpion welded it with her fire powers; I ad-hoc’d this using the long-term project rules. They pushed the train with a combination of Phoenix’s psychic pull and Spirit’s power-boosted shove. They managed to haul the entire load into the station at barter town, to the cheers of the mohawked soldiery waiting there.
Since I’d just written this in a notebook in a matter of minutes, I didn’t have a lot of content, so it was regrettably a bit linear. The town had been taken over by a warlord named Fire God (sound familiar?) and the supplies were being commandeered by her army. On the other hand, they honored the contract and the characters got paid a hefty reward in gold coins. They were rare minted coins, something only done by the Golden Lions… Who had been the previous leaders of the town.
The party did some digging; they found a surviving group of Lion scouts who were being forced to fight in the town thunderdome. Pulling that thread revealed that Fire God had her sights set on conquering their leader’s domain, and the players concocted a brilliant and only slightly insane plan to blow up the fuel rendering plant to cause a distraction and smuggle the scouts out of town.
The plan went swimmingly, with the Scorpion blowing up the factory at ground zero but getting out without so much as singed eyebrows because of a Rank 5 Endurance action. Unfortunately, robbed of the ability to stockpile fuel and with a clear act of sabotage, Fire God fired up her tanks and mobilized for a blitzkrieg.
The players were able to exploit the Lion’s ability to move earth to get into a subterranean tunnel network, and that’s where we called it for session 1.
Feedback
The players loved the session so much that they demanded I run the next one, so that’s a good sign. There were a few other signs that the game captured them; the asked a lot of strategy questions and as soon as the session wrapped they started looking at advancement options.
This is the stuff I did when I first encountered Exalted many moons ago, and it was a sure sign that the game had totally grabbed me. It’s also the stuff they always do at the start of a big, deep campaign (last time we ran for over a year this was how the first session looked).
There’s certainly a learning curve; I found that I had to clarify the skill/attack divide, as well as the “number of 1-die actions per round” rule a lot (it’s one attack or skill, and as many initiative bids/defenses as you want). Because I combined the description of techniques in the body of their rules description, there was some confusion from the totally new player as to where the fluff ended and where the mechanics began (I should have known better than to do this, Exalted has always gotten really negative feedback for this exact thing).
The biggest lesson from this session was the tactical one: even I hadn’t realized how big of a bombshell round 2 was going to be. Try it yourself, if you’re feeling adventuresome. That second round really teaches players a lot about planning their strategy before spending all their prana and effort.
What’s next?
We just wrapped another session where I had a bit more time to prep. I’ll write that one up next, so stay tuned for that.
Design-wise I’m finishing both the Minor Dharmas and Zui consequences for the clans and the Gupt Kala rules. Those are going to hit the complete playtest document on the patreon first, then I’ll be blogging them up for ya’ll’s critique after.
Since I’m also prepping a small-scale campaign for the next month or so of playtest sessions, I’ll post that after everything else. If it plays well, I figure I’ll use it as the basis for the setting stuff I put in the book.
After all of that, there are still three important pieces of work to get done before I update the Eyebleed into a proper playtest:
- I need to complete my “readability and consistency” re-write of the current playtest document. This is pure, unadulterated pain, but important.
- I need to write the rules for poison, monsters, spirits, and a few other things so the rules referenced in the kung-fu don’t refer to handwritten notes in a binder alone
- I need to write a bunch of examples of vehicles, weapons, bad guys, mutations, imbalances, monsters, etc. so that GMs have a lot of stuff to throw into their playtests
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