Scientific American offers up a short survey of apocalyptic visions to supplement their September issue, which I haven’t seen yet. Did your favorite apocalypse make the list?

Meanwhile, Web Urbanist offers up another slew and a half of apocalyptic visions, with lots of great (and horrific) imagery to back it up. I’ve had this tab open for more than a week. I just keep going back to it as I make notes for Razed.

The newest issue of Pelgrane Press’s feature collection, Page XX, includes an update on Razed, which I wrote especially for this issue. The piece also includes some images from playtest graphics and a scenario map, showing what the game looks like in its current, rough state. Head on over for a look at that.

Tomorrow night I run the last session of the current playtest campaign I’ve had going for Razed. The game is still in active development, but I’m moving cities and sadly leaving this play group behind, so I’m trying to wrap things up in a way that is halfway satisfying.

Read more »

This is from a somewhat out-of-date note I wrote to myself, intending to post here earlier. Still, it’s not too late to weigh in.

This is just a rough thought right now, but I may attempt to devise a new combat mechanism for Razed’s version of the Gumshoe system. To date I have been playing with the system as presented in Trail of Cthulhu and The Esoterror Factbook, to varying degrees, to make sure I grok them as they currently exist. They work.

Yet, still, I wonder if Razed doesn’t need something a bit different to help it feel distinctive, to give it a kind of action that’s frenetic and desperate, but not in quite the same way that fighting and fleeing eldritch horrors is in Trail of Cthulhu.

In our playtests to date, action in Razed has been chaotic and quick, but not always especially dangerous. It seems to be all or nothing — the characters emerge unscathed or almost dead.  Like in Trail of Cthulhu, characters often find themselves outgunned and on the run… which is good for about half of the encounters in Razed. But Razed also needs to handle wilder, more frequent combat while simultaneously being more merciful. (There are not, after all, a lot of well-stocked and working hospitals left.) Razed isn’t necessarily about action-movie stars, but it does need to facilitate more action-oriented play sometimes. Characters need to be a little more adventurous than ordinary folk, at the very least.

It’s a balancing act. Sometimes, the right thing for characters to do is hide out, hold their breath, and hope the alien menace moves by without detecting them. Other times, the characters want to make a coordinated strike against their extraterrestrial foes, using their combined might to hurt the invaders. And sometimes you want to battle it out on the back of a moving truck. Razed needs to be able to handle all of that, with individual scenes playing out for different dramatic purposes, while still being recognizably Gumshoe.

It’s a tall order, and the best fit might be to subtly tailor rules that already exist. But I have a few ideas I’d like to test in actual play, too, to see how they work. Stay tuned.

This is an exciting time in the design of an RPG — when lots of ideas are still on the table. But it’s also a tricky time to write about, because I’m sure some spectacular failures still stand between me and the final game rules. I don’t want to get your hopes up for a new combat system when one may not be forthcoming, but I do want you to know that the combat mechanisms of the game are still open for debate.

Music: Ladytron, “Destroy Everything You Touch”

Look at this list of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic stories from Wikipedia. It makes me feel hardly qualified to have my own vision for a post-apocalyptic world, for Razed, looking at how many of these stories I haven’t read or watched. Granted, it’s one hell of a list, and I’m not sure that I need to see Transmorphers before I’m qualified to use my own imagination, but still. Staggering.

How many post-apocalyptic stories do I need to consume before I’m ready to conjure my own and, more importantly, inspire others to conjure theirs? It’s obviously a ridiculous question. The goal of Razed isn’t to allude to the maximum number of apocalypses. The true answer, I think, depends on how real can I make the apocalypse seem during play, and how viscerally scary — and freeing! — can that apocalypse be made to feel in the text.

So that’s my goal right now: to be visceral.

This is one part of a multi-part look at the nature of the cataclysmic events that shook and tumbled the world of the post-apocalyptic survival-and-investigation game, Razed. These entries reference various popular media sources, especially movies, and shamelessly spoil them in the process.

So: Beware of Spoilers Beyond This Point.

Read more »

In the last Razed post, I talked about the crypt of civilization at Oglethorpe University. Today I’m talking about another of Georgia’s great post-apocalyptic treasures: the Georgia Guidestones. You’ve heard of these, right? These monumental megaliths were designed and erected by anonymous benefactors intent on helping humankind rebuild after the apocalypse. They include a message to future, post-apocalyptic generations, etched in eight languages on four massive slabs. They are advice to the people that come after us.

Wired had a great article about these back in its formidable puzzle issue; read that here.

How do the Georgia Guidestones play into Razed? Symbolically, mostly. They’re not magical. They don’t have special powers in any literal sense. Instead, I’m using them as narrative devices — indicators that the scale of the story is changing.

My current Razed campaign is about survival on a small, local scale. Our three protagonists aren’t in a position to rebuild all of civilization, they’re just trying to make things in their little refuge safe for a while. But my game is set in Atlanta, not far from the Guidestones themselves, so I wanted to roll them in somehow.

So, in my campaign, they’re a kind of pilgrimage destination for travelers on the highways of the kudzu-choked American Southeast. Not because they contain actual powers or invaluable knowledge — the apocalypse in Razed is still going on, really, so the pre-apocalypse is still a vivid memory — but because they are monuments to hope.

Or are they? The Guidestones are introduced in my campaign as dream imagery first, and then expanded into the reality of the player-characters after they make their first post-apocalyptic foray from the ruins of Atlanta to investigate what remains of Savannah. The characters discovered evidence of an expedition searching for the Guidestones (without GPS or the Internet) and have a choice to make: do they pursue their hope that Savannah is a safe zone, or do they turn from that path and visit the mysterious Guidestones?

What this shows, in part, is how exploration is investigation. Clues winnow an overwhelming number of destinations down into a digestible number of choices to pursue. The world is still a veritable sandbox, insofar as the characters are free to pursue leads in any order, as far as they like, but the GM doesn’t need to devise every square inch of the world for play. Rather, she can devise branching channels to explore and interact with, giving the players a combination of options (”Do we go to Savannah or to the Guidestones?”) and guaranteed storylines (because no matter which way they go, there’s a story waiting along the road).

Once the characters are exposed to the Guidestones, in a scenario called “Dreams of Savannah,” the megaliths start to insinuate themselves into the characters’ dreams — including into unwanted visions that seem to increase in intensity as the characters approach Savannah. The Guidestones become a powerful symbolic presence, and part of the dream language that makes up the visions of those characters who are subject to the transmissions of… but I haven’t talked about that here, yet, have I? More on that later.

What’s important is that dreams were a facet of the scenario’s storytelling before literal visions were a part of the story, but as soon as the characters were exposed to the Guidestones (through a copy of that very Wired magazine article, found in a derelict car left running on a dead highway), the Guidestones began to loom. It’s what megaliths are meant to do, after all.

The Guidestones are, for my campaign, a literary device. Part MacGuffin and part raw imagery. In yours, they could be something else. What they’re meant to represent, to my players, is the scary reminder that their characters are now on the other side of the apocalypse from the world that built those stones. History has turned on a terrible hinge, and the characters are now on the other side of it. Maybe, then, it is up to them to rebuild civilization.

One of my Razed playtesters sent me a link to this Damn Interesting article from 2006 about Oglethorpe University’s “crypt of civilization.” It’s a mid-20th-century time capsule in the form of a vault, welded shut in 1940:

Behind this door lies a 20′ x 10′ waterproofed room containing a menagerie of once-modern artifacts and microfilm records, placed there by men and women in the years between 1937 and 1940. If their goal is realized, the contents of this vault will remain unseen and undisturbed for the next 6,107 years. This ambitious project, which began in the dawn of the Second World War, is known as the Crypt of Civilization; it represents the first concerted effort to collect and preserve a snapshot of human civilization and technology.

The notion of future archaeology into our own culture was at the heart of my early designs for Razed, before the game took on more of an immediately apocalyptic bent. The notion, right now, is that Razed is still more of an investigative (and survival) game, and not a strictly archaeological one, but that dialing the setting forward in time is easy enough (and, if I’m lucky, might be the subject of a future book building on the Razed core). My game isn’t set thousands of years in the future; it’s set much closer to tomorrow.

Still, I can’t quite shake this crypt of civilization idea, and vaults of human culture are common features of Razed’s world. Every house left standing is a potential cultural relic, representing the character’s past and the player’s future — offering a glimpse of the heights we reached before we fell. The trick, however, is that Razed needs to open up as many avenues of investigation as possible, from our (admittedly broad) notion of archaeology to the opportunity to interrogate people who know The Truth.

At the heart of Razed is the question: Who killed Planet Earth? In the game’s default setting, the crime is still somewhat recent. The body is still warm. The planet is a crime scene.

And humans aren’t the only ones digging through the remains for vaults of our culture…

I waffled for a while about this. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to blog much about Razed while it was still in development, because I didn’t want to promise things that might get dropped or altered during development, and because I didn’t want too much of your apocalypse getting into mine. (More about that later.)

What changed my mind? My in-house playtest campaign. In the past few weeks, the game has begun to take on an identity of its own — or at least this particular campaign has — and that makes me think it’s now ready to stand up to some scrutiny. Not too much, not yet. To write, I need batteries, and if I’m not careful I’ll drain those batteries here instead of in the actual manuscript. I don’t want to spoil the game for you, or for your players. Razed is, after all, a game with a built-in mystery, which I call the meta-mystery, and while it’d be difficult for me to spoil it outright, I remain wary. (More about that later.)

Anyway, the means by which I can avoid draining my batteries here is by not showing you things that are still “soft,” developmentally speaking. A lot of Razed fits the traditional GUMSHOE rules pretty tightly, because I so often believe in that famous principle: If It Ain’t Broke. Things like the Civility Meter, on the other hand, are still in active development. The mechanics for settlements and safe havens, too.

Instead, what I’ll be blogging about is the thought process that goes into my design — the inspirations, the fears and the caution, the hopes and the aims. I’ll write a bit about the Razed campaign I’m running, and the difference between individual instances of play and the game as a whole. For example, I think my campaign is going pretty well, with its social tensions and human drama starting to simmer as they are, but systematizing play can be tricky. Even lousy games can be run well, right? I’m after a good game that runs great, at the least.

While I’m still revving up Razed over here, have a look as Bill White blogs about New World, the RPG about colonization and clashing worlds that he’s also developing for Pelgrane Press. He’s cooking something fantastic over there, it looks like. Where he’s wrestling against the entrenched ludological notion of top-down play that comes when we think of the word civilization, I’m struggling with expectations of the apocalyptic sub-genre, which also relate to that word: civilization. Don’t get me wrong, Razed is about battling aliens and scrounging treasures from the ruins of the previous civilization, but it is also a game about the ways that humans work together (or die alone), the ways they organize and control themselves and each other, and the choices and sacrifices necessary to save or rebuild — wait for it — civilization.

But more about that later.

When I’m running an RPG, like Razed, I make CDs to play during the game session. They help set the tone for key scenes and, just as importantly, they help me pace the story out during actual play. (If I’ve only played two or three tracks after an hour and a half of play, I know I’m in trouble.) Here, then, are some songs that I’ve been playing during the writing or playtesting of Razed, my new post-apocalyptic survival RPG coming from Pelgrane Press.

This is no complete list — my main Razed playlist, right now, has 186 songs. This is just an hour’s worth of material available for sale individually on iTunes. (Note: I don’t get any money from this — it’s just a nice way to give you samples of what I’m listening to if you don’t own some of these tracks.)

Some of these (like Tom Waits’ “Earth Died Screaming”) are meant to indirectly evoke the vibe and character of the setting — visions of apocalypse and aftermath. Other songs allude to favorite apocalyptic tales of mine (as “The Court of the Crimson King” alludes to Children of Men). Some are quiet mood-setting pieces for safe havens  from the terrors of the razed world, like Andrew Bird’s “Yawning At The Apocalypse” and Bear McCreary’s “Elegy” (played on a busted piano for the post-apocalyptic future-past of Battlestar Galactica). Meanwhile, others are action cues I’ve played during fights and chases. I just dig the mechanical rattle and momentum in “The Harvester Returns,” for example, and the weird machine voice of “The Invid Attacks.” And, of course, if we’re talking about music that I write to, I had to include multiple hits of Bear McCreary and Nine Inch Nails, in one form or another. (I skipped “The Day The World Went Away,” here, in favor of a couple of Year Zero remixes.)

I think this gives a little bit of a clue as to the kind of setting Razed will ship with. At the very least, I think it hints at where my head’s at, in terms of tone, right now.

Thanks for listening.