We have a new Transmission for up for download at TechnoirRPG.com. This one centers on the glitzy capital of Immatrix entertainment and gang violence that is Los Angeles.

Transmission: Los Angeles – 463KB

As much as I’d love to tell you it was inspired by L.A. Noire, I wrote this transmission a couple of months ago before I had heard about the video game. And I haven’t had a chance to play it yet—haven’t had the time to sit infront of my Playstation for that long. When do you guys all find the time?

I’ve had to make some changes to the Transmission’s earlier version to update it to the current format. Now it is available for your enjoyment. I will tell you that it does contain nods to Bladerunner, Chinatown, and Strange Days. So, download it and use it to start a new Technoir adventure or roll it in to an existing campaign.

I need your help! Technoir needs to be play tested by people who aren’t me. To make this process easy, I’m just posting the current draft of the rules publicly on the website for anyone to download—anyone to try.

If you can help out with this process, all you need to do is: play one or more sessions with your group, take notes of what was fun and what wasn’t, and email me with your feedback. My email is jeremy at cellar-games dot com.

There are some specific questions in the document you can fill out if you like.

When you email me, be sure to include the names of everyone in your group in the form they would like to be credited in the book. Because you’ll all get playtesting credit (which doesn’t transfer as college credit, sorry, I checked).

But to sweeten the deal, you will get a free PDF copy of the game when it is published. I will email this to the member of the group who emailed me and give you permission to share the file with the rest of your group members.

Anyway, here is the link:

Technoir Beta – 417KB

You can find this document as well as the protagonist sheet, the Player’s Guide and the Twin Cities Transmission at TechnoirRPG.com. Keep checking back because I’ll be updating these files every so often based on the feedback you give me. Thank you so much for your help. I couldn’t make a game I was proud of without it.

So, people are already starting to playtest Technoir, even without the playtest document out yet! That’s amazingly awesome. Between the video I posted, the rules summaries in the Player’s Guide, and questions I’ve been answering in the comments here and on RPGnet, people are able to get a pretty good sense of the game.

So here’s one more piece of the puzzle: the Twin Cities Metroplex Transmission. It has Connections you will need for making a protagonist and a bunch of other plot nodes and stat blocks to make sure you have some content for the game.

Here’s a brief rundown of how you, assuming you’re the GM, use a Transmission:

• Start by rolling three plot nodes from the master table on the back page. Write these down in a triangle pattern in the middle of a plank sheet of paper. This is your plot map.
• Draw lines connecting each of your three nodes. Each time you draw a line, invent a relationship between the two nodes you are connecting. This first cluster of nodes is your plot seed.
• The first time a protagonist goes to a Connection for a favor, add that Connection as a node on the map, don’t connect him to anything yet.
• Each additional time that Connection is hit up for a favor, draw a line from him to an existing plot node. Invent that relationship.
• Once a Connection is connected to another plot node, he cannot be hit up for another favor during protagonist creation. Once that’s done with, he can be hit up and connected as often as you like. Mind you, the more connected he is to the plot, the more likely he is to oppose the protagonist over something and betray her.
• When a protagonist goes to a Connection for information, have her roll a d6. Consult that Connection’s table in the Transmission. If the Connection is not yet connected to another node, use the first column. Otherwise, use the second column. Add the resulting plot node to your map and connect it to an existing node on the map—whichever makes the most sense. In the voice of that Connection, tell the protagonist about that node and its relationship to the existing node. Or even better, give her a mission involving that node.
• In this way, your plot map will grow and evolve as you play the game. It isn’t just prep material, it’s play material.
• Don’t fall into the trap of adding too many nodes to your map! It only takes a small handful of plot nodes to make an intricate story.

There are going to be a lot of examples and more robust text for how to use this in the actual book, this is just an overview after all. It starts getting pretty interesting when you start adding the Transmissions of other cities into play. The nodes from multiple cities can easily be used in the same plot map for a globetrotting adventure.

In my previous post about hack points, I mentioned a Player’s Guide for Technoir. The Player’s Guide is a 16-page booklet that contains barebones rules for protagonist generation, inflicting Adjectives on other characters, and recovering from those Adjectives. It also has a list of Training Programs, descriptions of the nine Verbs, many Adjective examples, an overview of the favors that Connections can perform, and an Object catalog with a glossary of all the Object tags.

You can likely glean most of how to play the game from this document alone. What it is lacking is information for how everything flows together: how the protagonists, through their Connections, link to the node map and the plot; how the plot nodes relate to each other and how the node map is generated; how inflicting Adjectives can be sequenced into the conflict resolution system; how the Push economy plays. These will all be dealt with in the core book (which is essentially the GM’s guide).

I have made the current draft of the Player’s Guide available to download, below. You can also find it, along with a protagonist sheet, at TechnoirRPG.com.

playersguide0.2.2.pdf – 114KB

As it is, it serves as a sneak peak to the rules to the game. Sometime in the next couple of weeks, when the playtest draft of the game is completed, it will be one of the documents used to beta test the game—though it may see some revision by then. Please take a look and let me know what you think.

A few months ago, I posted the first design element of my new game: it’s character sheet. The game didn’t have a title then, but with some help it has since been dubbed Technoir. Much of this game has been designed by the process of creating the character sheet. So, as it has been revised, its evolution is reflected in the changes of the character sheet over the playtesting process.

Here is the revision made soon after that previous post:

The main difference was that Bad Habits were changed to Clauses and Push was changed to Emphasis to try and better fit the sentence-structure theme I have going with Verbs, Adjectives, and Objects.

Then we go on to:

You can see I put in a place holder for a title, even though I still didn’t have one at this point. I also went from a half-letter sheet (8.5×5.5) to a full-letter sheet (11×8.5). This was primarily to create more room to write in the Object’s tags. Emphasis points turned back into Push points (represented by coins at this time). The mechanics behind Clauses were re-configured into the early version of Connections (which are in-game contacts with a little mechanical crunch to them).

Then:

Hey, we finally have a title! The proportions of elements on the sheet were pushed around so that we’d have a little gap along down the center of the page, allowing the sheet to be folded in half without folding anything important. Push points were changed to Push dice at this stage, so I made some biggish boxes where the available and used dice could sit to keep track of their state.

And now:

This is the latest version of the sheet. The main change is that the mechanics behind Connections have changed. They are now completely divorced from the Bad Habits/Clauses rules from prior versions and fit in-line better with the rest of the game.

There are two new pdf files available at the Chronica Feudalis downloads page.

The first is cf_pregens.pdf. It consists of a collection of pre-generated characters. These are the protagonists that I created for the “Warwick Castle” scenario I ran at Gen Con (it’s also featured at the end of the “Explore” chapter in the core rules of the game). These eight characters are proper starting protagonists, each supplied with personalized aspects and their own particular agenda.

Second is cf_reference.pdf, a fan-submitted reference document supplied by BiggerBoat. It does have the side-effect of taking what I describe as a relatively rules-light system and makes it look like a heavy-weight, but this flow chart is actually a very helpful look at how Chronica Feudalis works. It takes a step-by-step look at the system mechanics and conflict systems that you can use as a primer before the first time you play or keep on hand as a reference throughout your adventures. Take a look.

Not too long ago at Story Games I discovered this amazingly clever character sheet idea. So I stole it and made these new character sheets for Chronica Feudalis…

I think they are perfect for convention games when you don’t know everyone’s name. And having your three, key aspects right on the name sign helps keep them fresh in everyone’s mind for easy tags and compels.

I’ve added this and a few other character sheet options to the downloads page as well.

I have just uploaded a character sheet to the downloads section of the Chronica Feudalis website. Look for more freebie stuff and preview material to be available soon.