A Righteous Infliction of Links Manifested by an Appropriate Agent

You're always gonna have problems lifting a body in one piece. Apparently the best thing to do is cut up a corpse into six pieces and pile it all together. And when you got your six pieces, you gotta get rid of them, because it's no good leaving it in the deep freeze for your mum to discover, now is it ? The I hear the best thing to do is feed them to pigs. You got to starve the pigs for a few days, then the sight of a chopped-up body will look like curry to a pisshead. You gotta shave the heads of your victims, and pull the teeth out for the sake of the piggies' digestion. You could do this afterwards, of course, but you don't want to go sievin' through pig shit, now do you ? They will go through bone like butter. You need at least sixteen pigs to finish the job in one sitting, so be wary of any man who keeps a pig farm. They will go through a body that weighs 200 pounds in about eight minutes. That means that a single pig can consume two pounds of uncooked flesh every minute. Hence the expression, "as greedy as a pig".                                                   

                                                        -Brick Top (Snatch)

What a bloody brilliant movie Snatch was. Not that the former has anything to do with this post nor the mini review of the NEMESIS rpg that you can read HERE. No what this post is about is me doing you ORE game masters a favour. Below are a bunch of links I thought might prove useful for the NEMESIS system all in one handy dandy place. No thanks needed, thats just how I roll hombres. In particular the links to the character sheets will prove pretty useful since the core rules don't seem to include any. The NEMESIS in a nutshell from the totally rad Swords Against the Outer Dark blog looks like it will also come in pretty handy. If your reading this and you have any additional links let me know and I can add them to the list.

NEMESIS RPG Tools & Links

• The NEMESIS RPG - Download the core rules here.
• The ORE Toolkit - A 165 page toolkit by Dorian Hawkins of 1000 Monkeys 1000 Typewriters.
• NEMESIS Character Sheet - (colour) By coyotegrey from RPG.net
• NEMESIS Character Sheet - (black and white) By coyotegrey from RPG.net
• NPC Damage Silhouettes - 18/sheet NPC damage trackers from Arc Dream Publishing.
• CoC Spell Conversions - A RPG.net thread with a ton of CoC spells converted to NEMESIS 
• NEMESIS in a Nutshell - Wicked awesome quick rules reference sheets by Shane Mangus.
• Cthulhulike - A Call of Cthulhu Conversion Document by Shane Ivey.
• Greg Stolze - NEMESIS/ORE creator's website.
• Dennis Detwiller - NEMESIS/Delta Green creator's website.
• Arc Dream Publishing - Publisher of ORE, Delta Green, Godlike, and other really cool shit.
• The Cult of ORE - A Google Group dedicated to the One Roll Engine.  

My New Nemesis

Published in 2006, NEMESIS is a generic horror RPG that uses a hybrid of the One Roll Engine (ORE) rules from Godlike, and the Madness Meter from Unknown Armies. Created by Greg Stolze and Dennis Detwiller this 52 page PDF can be Downloaded free of charge HERE.

The rules are an interesting twist on dice rolling mechanics. The One Roll Engine utilizes solely d10s and is designed to provide all the information needed in one roll. Task resolution is done by rolling a dice pool (maximum 10 dice). Dice pools are created by taking the skill you want to use (skills are rated in dice with human average of 1-5) and adding dice from from one of six associated ability scores (the 6 scores are rated in dice with human average of 1-5). Success is determined by making matches. The height and width of your roll determines how successful you are at an action. Width equals how many matching dice you have, hight equals how high those matches are. So for example if you rolled a pool of 8 dice (for example 4 for the Body ability, 4 for Martial Arts skill) and got a 4, 7, 8, 4, 6, 9, 4, 1, your roll would be noted as 3 x 4 or a width of 3 and a height of 4.

The other interesting mechanic is the Madness Meter. This was first seen in the Unknown Armies RPG and functions as a way of tracking a characters mental health. There are four gauges that track: Violence, the Unnatural, Self, and Helplessness. Characters can become hardened to sanity blasting effects or become unstable and descend into madness. I feel like this system helps emulate real life mental trauma better than say the Call of Cthulhu sanity system.

The core mechanic is relatively simple and with additional rules adding layers of complexity. The system itself seems to lend itself to tinkering and seems like they would be able to handle most if not all genres without a problem. While technically there seems to be enough here to run a game and its available free I personally feel like the NEMESIS document is incomplete. It feels like there should be a little more meat on this things bones. A minor thing but I feel it bears mentioning. Lastly these days I find myself more and more of the mind that RPGs should be setting specific as opposed to being generic. Again just an opinion. Lastly there is a Call of Cthulhu/Godlike Conversion Document available for download that would work well as a guide for converting the massive back catalog of Chaosium material out there.

Final thoughts. This seems like a very cool system. I feel like it captures that line between the crunch and rules light system I'm looking for. I defiantly wanna tinker around with the rules a bit and see what I can do with them. In particular I think they would make a great replacement in a Call of Cthulhu campaign.    

Dennis Detwiller On Delta Green & Creepiness

On his blog Nothing Can Stop the Blog Dennis Detwiller (one of the creators of Delta Green and founder of Arc Dream Publishing)  discusses how to creep the fuck out of your player's and run a damn good Delta Green campaign.  The original article can be found Here but I'm reposting it here since I know most people (like myself) are lazy fucks. I think it hits all the right notes in terms of not only how to run a DG scenario well, but any horror or conspiracy game.

Delta Green: Creepiness, A How To Guide

By Dennis Detwiller

I have played in many (many, many) Call of Cthulhu games. All but a very few have failed — at some point — to creep me out. It’s hard to play without guessing where a scenario might be going, especially with such a long and deep history with the game and creating for it. Still, there’s always some magic.
And those few scenarios that did frighten me… wow. Those few have made all the other games more than worth it.

How do I bring the scares to my Delta Green game? Read on.

The Mundane is the Backdrop

Delta Green is rooted in the mundane. The more you cement the conspiracy among things the things the players know, trust and understand, the more striking the moments of sheer terror unlocking the horrible secrets of the universe will be.
Have Stephen Alzis meet them at a 7-11, have the Dimensional Shambler manifest in a TARGET, note the details of destruction of a MAJESTIC hit in a home by describing the tipped coffee table and blood soaked PEOPLE magazine with Justin Bieber on the cover.
Secondary to this concept is this: moments of true mythos horror should be few and far between. Think of your game as a symphony, and only at the most special moments is there a crescendo. A symphony composed only of crescendos is boring. Choose the moments when the mythos appears carefully, make them count, and make them hurt.

Nothing is Certain
If Delta Green players are confident in their associates, their relationships, their methods: you’re doing it wrong. They should live in fear of double-cross, of being hung out to dry, of being set up. Anyone could be compromised, anyone could be a puppet for a non-human intelligence, any new lead; a trap.
A good example of this is:
An agent was driving his shit Thunderbird, and I kept describing the awful brakes and the squealing noise they made. He decided to take the car in. When he was paying for the job, the mechanic handed him an odd, gray box and said:
“Oh, this was in the wheel well, I don’t know what the fuck it is”
Popping this device open, the player discovered a mud-stained GPS tracker with a heavy magnet. No identifying marks. Attempts to trace the electronics in it lead to dead ends and empty lots that were never produced by American firms.
That player became paranoid/obsessed/terrified from that point on. I never followed up on it. I didn’t have to. They player did it for me.

Mythos Horror is Lack of Understanding
With the mythos, the answers only go so far. How did the book displace the agent’s consciousness? How does a gesture in the air cut a man in half? How can a thing that appears to be composed of bubbles of energy, speak and pass through objects?
The answers to all these questions are beyond human conception and always will be. While some elements at the edges may be picked apart, there will always be a fundamental lack of understanding of the mythos. That’s why it’s the mythos. 
This is where I see a lot of problems arise in groups. Keepers allow the players to “understand” a creature, and once that creature’s actions, stats and behaviors can be guessed, the creature/threat/mythos idea is no longer frightening. The key to generating fear is uncertainly.


Death is Omnipresent

Do not protect the characters. You are the mediator of the game, but you should not step in an reprieve a doomed character. It is your job to walk them to the gallows, the dice are the guillotine. Death is not only part of Delta Green, it is the basis of it. It is a game about human frailty and death, about the struggle against the unknown despite the fact that victory is never possible.
As such, it is important to let the game dictate the outcome. Note that the rules are stacked in favor of the creatures from beyond, and that humans, unless they are exceedingly careful and clever, have almost no chance of even a limited victory.
This is not a game about winning, it is a game about surviving to fight another day. Death is the central outcome of Delta Green operations. Few, if any, survive their tour without seeing, or experiencing death, first hand.

There are Worse Things Than Dying
Even more, there are worse fates than death in the world of Delta Green. Creatures exist that can infect and subsume a character, methods exist to artificially prolong or restore life, and there are places where all such rules — life and death — are removed completely.
Characters in the know should exist in mortal fear of such outcomes, and should be on the look out for situations which can compromise the very thing they are fighting for: normal, human existence. Many agencies and groups exist to further these concepts and infections. One might even say that the minions who serve the Great Old Ones themselves are a disease that infects and destroys human thought replacing it with alien ideas and concepts.
Death is the terror that keeps DG agents on their toes, but the things beyond death, that’s what Delta Green fights, and at their moment of greatest weakness and failure, sometimes become.