Hell-A character lineup so far.

My players are sometimes brilliant people. One is my husband and he is pretty much an idea machine. My stepson is young and has been playing with us for about 3 years, so he often takes a more back seat sort of approach then sometimes stuns us with some brilliant insight from left field. The other two players I have confirmed are a married couple we've known for years and years and are good friends of ours. They're whip smart people so this should be a really crazy game because they seem to have taken the whole idea of player freedom behind the sandbox genre and run away with it.

Angie hasn't fleshed out her concept entirely but this is what she has so far. Her character is a 'genetecist'. By that she means someone with little to no scientific or medical training who found a copy of Darwin's Origin of Species and has taken it upon herself to save mankind through a selective breeding program. She wanders the wastes trying to get people to sign up for her 'study', mate with each other, swap people from different settlements to encourage 'strong' genetic traits... I can't wait to see how she tries to convince people to do it.

Jekob has two different ideas and I'm not sure which one he's going to go with. The first one is a born wastelander who after striking out on his own, found a high school kid's backpack with some textbooks and junk and is under the impression that 'High School' is the highest school in the land and he wants to gather the books and materials necessary to re-institute higher learning. The second idea is really wacky and he is supposed to be writing it up for me. I can't really do it justice to describe except to say that it has to do with Knights Hospitaller, mistaken history and Hospitals. When he gives me the write up I'll have to post it. He went into a lot of detail.

My husband decided on playing a Brotherhood of Steel advance scout. A sort of navy seal type guy who has been sent to the region for reasons we haven't determined just yet. He's supposed to be carrying on the non involvement policy of the west coast Brotherhood and looking for whizbang tech to 'secure' for the future of 'humanity', ie the Brotherhood. It's going to be really fun to watch his mission programming break down over time as he is out without the Brotherhood around to tell him what to do all the time. I already decided his ability to communicate with their headquarters will be pretty sporadic. They have access to a single working satellite but because of it's orbit it's not available for use 24 hours a day.

My stepson is making a fairly generic scavenger loner sort of character. He's still thinking about it some maybe he will come up with something a little more interesting.

I didn't give them any restrictions except to say that they needed to not be so loner-ish that it makes it really difficult for me as the game referee to get them together and keep them together. Nothing is worse than some lame loner player who refuses to be motivated or play with the group in order to remain true to their character.

Monster monday!

I decided now that I'm almost done with hell, err I mean the academy, I'm going to try and post a monster or mutant every monday to keep my drawing skills sharp. No description, no name, just slimy maws and tentacles. If you want to use the picture for something feel free! First up...

http://www.megapathdsl.net/~amichaels/SpaceMonsterSM.jpg

I'd post it as a clickable thumbnail but I have no idea how to do that.

Uh oh this game is getting away from me.

Oh noooo. My husband told some friends of ours about this game and now there's an actual group. 0_o No pressure!

Wasteland Vampires, of the mutant variety.

I decided the idea of cannibal vampire types in Fallout was pretty groovy but I think I want to go one step further than the game does and give them a mutation in which they are in fact actual vampires of a sort and not just creepy flesh eating weirdos. The Forced Evolutionary Virus opens all kinds of doors for odd, semi plausible mutations and with vampires this is what I'm thinking. Vampires, start out as regular people who have been exposed to the F.E.V but like ghouls, for whatever reason their DNA causes a specific mutation (vampirism or what have you) and they eventually become 'vampires'. Their bodies can't make a particular protein or type of cell or whatever on their own anymore so they have to get it from people. I think the idea of them kidnapping people or buying slaves then keeping them alive and doing creepy blood transfusions on themselves is way more interesting that just drinking blood. Maybe some of the ones that are off their rocker do drink blood or eat flesh, but I think that's sort of old hat zombie type stuff everyone is familiar with already. So in addition to that, they will be more resistant to radiation and disease and will heal quicker than a non mutated human. But they will be highly allergic to sunlight, but not because of the light. I had the idea that there is something produced by their cells when exposed to natural light (kind of like the vitamin D thing in normal people), which causes a serious allergic reaction (non beneficial mutation!). They still have to eat, sleep and breathe, etc. And they may be horrible disease carriers considering their direct exposure to blood born pathogens.

I did have this idea of a merc company of vampires wandering the wastes, swathed head to toe making them look creepy and mysterious, called the Midnight Runners. Yes, after the pop group. Maybe their leader found an old poster or cd...

Death by ninja.

Last night's game started off with a character death. Mine. I'm a little bummed about it but it was at least an epic confrontation with a demi god ninja. My Scion of Athena is a pretty tough opponent, so I didn't expect to be killed in 2 hits, split in half on the last one while only delivering a minor wound to my opponent. Doh. I had the opportunity after the first hit to declare my defeat. But the problem is that the ninja brutally tortured and murdered a good friend of the groups' (mine in particular) and threatened my character's family. I couldn't just let that go. It was a matter of avenging some wrongs that had been committed and the greeks are all about vengeance. I spent the rest of the game working up a new character, which will be fun but she's starting with significantly less power and xp than the group. Not odd for a lot of people but that's not what usually happens in our games. I'm pleased with the decision though. Everyone else are Demi Gods while my character will be trying to survive their sort of challenges and earn her place among them as a mere Hero.

Scrounging Tables and Geomorph PDFs up for grabs.

I revised the scrounging tables and put some important post apocalyptic survival stuff in there I had forgotten and then finished the Geomorph tables. I'm going to just call it done and then show the overall LA Map in a separate post and explain how I'm implementing them later. Anyway I hope they're useful!

http://www.megapathdsl.net/~amichaels/hellA/Modern-Streets-Geomorphs.pdf

http://www.megapathdsl.net/~amichaels/hellA/Scrounging%20Tables.pdf

Here's the LA map I'm starting out with. I'll expand it out with new sections as needed. It's the central part of LA. I'm going to number the sections as they get explored and use the geomorphs to define the neighborhoods.

Quick preview of the street geomorphs.

I finally finished scanning all the tiles in and getting them fixed up to go into a pdf. I rolled up a quick random 3 x 3 neighborhood as an example of what they look like. They don't line up perfectly but I'm pretty happy with them. There's 50 overall and I tried to make them individually interesting. Over the next week I should be able to release a pdf with all the charts and a Lankhmar style freeway map with gaps for randomly rolled neighborhoods.

Click for full size.

Finally finished.

I finished drawing the last geomorph today. I've got 50 unique tiles that can be re-arranged for quick neighborhood generation. I'm going to put together a pdf of all the tiles plus the generation chart, building type tables, habitation tables and structural stability charts. I don't think the charts will take a really long time to make since there will only be a few options on each, but the DM can take the information and record it pretty easily and create entire cities from scratch within a pretty short amount of time. I'm going to include the large LA freeway map I draw out too in case anyone wants to see what I did with all of it. It's going to take a while to scan because I think I can only scan maybe 6 tiles at the most at once. I can't say the streets will match up perfectly every time but I drew them all by hand.

Further ideas for the geomorph.

Interestingly enough, my husband and I were talking the day before yesterday, while I was working on the modern geomorphs, about how the Lankhmar setting map worked really well for something like this because of the big white spots the GM could fill in on their own. Then this morning I saw that Zak over at pondering the use of the setting. So I was thinking this morning that I am going to make something similar for Hell-A. I have a bunch of zoomed out saves of google maps of the greater LA area. I think I'm going to take them and trace out the general area on a large piece of bristol board or something, using the major highways and little sub sections of LA like West Hollywood and all that with the large spaces in between open to be defined by random geomorph generation or other means. That way I can more easily keep track of where the players are at and where they're headed, and I can keep a journal for myself of which geomorphs got used in what order and a brief run down of what was there. Then like a west marches type sandbox, all those areas are still there and can change depending on how the players affect the landscape. And I can use random tables to define them on the fly along with what's in them.

Ruined Streets Geomorphs

I drew 20 4"x4" modern street geomorphs for the post apocalyptic game today. I'm going to do 50 of them total so I can create blocks of neighborhoods on the fly. Along with I am going to put together some tables based on building size for determining what buildings are along with their condition and structural stability. When I'm done I'll make it available as a pdf.