I’ve been very fortunate to have a lot of feedback on the Technoir Beta over the last month or so. Your comments and concerns have given me a lot to work with in shaping this little game into something stronger (and, by page count, bigger). I’ve just posted a new version of the beta with what is likely going to be close to the final text of the game. Please look it over and let me know what you think. I’m curious to hear if it addresses issues you may have had with the previous versions. If you get a chance to playtest it over the next week or so, I’d love to get your feedback.

Technoir Beta – 813KB

As to what’s changed: mostly the Contention chapter as a whole. It’s almost nearly completely rewritten with a much more detailed step by step guide through the process and much more text to explain when and why you roll dice. The system is much more clearly identified as a method used to manipulate characters rather than as a combat engine.

The examples throughout the book have also been rewritten to give a much clearer picture of how the rules support a noir story.

I also wanted to point out that I removed the Player’s Guide from the Technoir website. It’s so out of date right now that I didn’t want to cross any wires with it. Look for a new Player’s Guide to be posted in the next week or so.

My own focus now is going into the final illustrations and layout polishing phase of the book. Unless there are any major issues introduced by this new draft, the PDF of the game is on track to be finalized sometime in the next week.

Thank you so much.

I don’t have time for much of a blog post today, but it did want to point out a few places where Technoir is being discussed elsewhere on the internet. I might have mentioned a couple of these on twitter, but haven’t done so yet on the blog.

First off, Michael Wolf interviewed me last week on the Stargazer’s World blog. We talked about how I got into game design and some of the unique components of Technoir.

Second, the crew from Actual People, Actual Play discussed their playtest of Technoir on their latest episode of their podcast. This was a great source of feedback for me. I hope you enjoy it as well.

Finally, some playtesters have been providing their feedback publicly in a couple of threads at Story Games: [Technoir] A couple issues and [Technoir] 2nd session playtest. The resulting discussion has been amazing for me to reveal some issues in how the game is being communicated and help crystalize for me what I need to make explicit in my next revision of the rules. If you want to see into the guts of how the game is responding to playtest feedback, it’s all happening in that thread.

As always, if you’re talking about Technoir (or Chronica Feudalis for that matter) on your blog, podcast, or a forum somewhere, I’d be happy to hear about, weigh-in if it’s appropriate, and/or link to it from here.

I just uploaded a new beta document to TechnoirRPG.com. It’s still the same game, mostly, but with a lot of work to clarify it and communicate it better. Thank you to everyone who has been submitting playtest reports. They are helping me tremendously to see what’s working and focus what can be made better.

Technoir Beta – 533KB

The main bulk of changes are in the last two chapters, Contention and Restoration. Both now have running examples that continue the story of our sample characters Mouse, Roman, and Sortia. There’s lots of new sections in both chapters to nail down some points I had missed in the previous versions. And I went through and reworded a lot of rules that were already there in order to express them more effectively.

If you found an issue or point of confusion with an earlier draft, please give this a fresh read and see if I’ve addressed it. If it’s still vague or if I’m still missing some point, I would love to hear about it.

Here’s an outline of the changes. Mind you I’ve been working on this revision over the last couple of weeks, so I’m sure I’ll forget stuff.

Exposition

• The three exposition paragraphs are completely rewritten.

Initiation

• I worked on player buy-in and GM responsibilities section a lot. Trying to manage expectations well with this.

Generation

• There are actual names to pick from in the Generation chapter.

• I actually say that you start with three Push dice in the last step of Generation.

• I removed the flincy adjective. I have no idea what flincy means or how that got there in the first place.

• You can now declare the benefit of being high from the deal favor after you roll.

• I got rid of Interface duds. Instead I just added its gesture input tag to the specks. Specks are now a one-stop shop for using the Interface.

Contention

• I clarified some stuff about recharging Push at the beginning of an action. I clarified that the Push dice you spend to increase adjective severity are any Push dice in the roll that weren’t eliminated by Hurt. It’s okay if they were part of your result.

• I added a “set-up” move that lest you inflict positive adjectives on the environment you can use later.

• I talk about putting contentions on hold.

• I added a section on the outcomes of contentions and how the consequences should be determined by the adjectives you inflict and not by pre-determined stakes.

• I clarified some in the Push Dice Economy section. This is a pretty important section to read.

• I added running examples for the Contention chapter.

Restoration

• I added an option for individuals to reset their push dice buy playing out a scene that exemplifies one of their relationship adjectives.

• I wrote an overview of all the advancement options as they otherwise get burried inside of other subsystems.

• I added extended the running example through the Restoration chapter.

A couple of points unrelated to the document itself:

• You have helped me to raise $8,238 in the Kickstarter campaign for Technoir. And there are still 24 days to go. Thank you so much.

• If you haven’t yet, check out Judd’s NE Sprawl transmission-in-progress at his blog, The Githyanki Diaspora. It’s rad. It’s so cool to hear about people working on their own transmissions. Can’t wait to see them and, hopefully, play them!

I have had the privilege of playing Mythender twice. Once at my friend Josh‘s epic birthday party known as JoshCon. And once at GenCon. They were both crazy legendary experiences. The problem is that the game is all sitting inside Ryan Macklin‘s head. If I want to learn more, there’s no book to open up…one has to open Ryan himself. And there’s only so many times he’ll let you do that before he returns to his little cabin on The Internet.

Until now.

Last week, Ryan posted the character creation rules for Mythender. You can download them and at least take this portion of the game for a spin. Oh, and you can give Ryan your feedback. So let’s do just that.

I had this idea yesterday for a mythender. She’s a former prophet of the Norns. She had this life where she saw people’s destinies and helped them to recognize and accept them. Then she saw the fate of her own family: the tragic death of her husband and children. She refused to believe the prophecy. She tried to change fate, but it didn’t work. Her husband died in her arms. Her son and daughter were next. Now she fills with rage and fury from the loss of the husband she loved so much and the threat on her children’s lives. She forges her revenge into a sword. She realizes that in order to save her children, she will need to end the concept of destiny itself. And to do that, she will need to take down the Norns first.

I didn’t come up with this idea in a vacuum. This comes from my previous experience with Mythender and flipping through the character creation rules a couple of times. In a playtesting experience like this, I think it’s important to fit your ideas to the game, at least the first time around, instead of trying to bend the game to your ideas.

So lets make this former prophet swordswoman of revenge.

First, I want to point out how I love that the rules take a page to summarize the process before getting into them. This is kind of organization that Ryan’s really good at.

Heart and History

I need to pick a Heart. I was originally going to go with Warrior, but then I realized that her conviction is what drives her more than any practiced skill. So I’m going with Crusader. Let’s answer the Crusader’s questions:

What belief or ideal do you fight for?
I fight to end the concept of destiny. In order to give mortals free will.

What happened to make you so angry with the world?
The Norns fated my family to die. My husband died by that destiny.

What reward do you expect?
To save my son and daughter.

Great! And now for History. This is easy because the description for Apostate pretty much inspired this concept to begin with. So Apostate questions:

What Myth did you devote yourself to?
The Norns and the prophecies they gave to me.

What was done to make you flee your oaths and bonds?
The Norns fated my family to die.

What did you give that can never be replaced?
The life of my husband.

The Heart and History options are great. Lots of inspiring options. Good seeds. The questions really help to focus character concepts. I love how there’s room to write your answers down if you were to print out the chapter.

Okay, so a slight criticism of the process’s organization at this point. I would like to see Histories come before Heart. I think it would be more intuitive to conceptualize your character as what she was and then what she became—just as it’s more chronological. But maybe that’s just for this character who was inspired more by a History than a Heart. So consider this a data point.

Also, in flipping through the Hearts and Histories, it would be nice to have some sort of organizational break between the two. Several times I thought I was still looking at Heart options and didn’t realize I was now flipping into History territory.

So I have my Heart and History. What’s next? Ooh, Weapons, my favorite.

Weapons

I already have a strong idea for one of the weapons: the sword forged from her revenge. That’s obviously a Relic Weapon since it’s a thing.

Reckon, a sword forged of my revenge …is my weapon.
I use it to end Myths by… cutting my way through my enemies. And, one day, kill the Norns with it.

For my second weapon, I’m going to go back into my character’s History. She was a prophet. In fact she still sees the future. While it’s not a future she wants to accept anymore, she uses it to her advantage when she can. This is an Intrinsic Weapon since it is part of her.

A glimpse into tomorrow …is my weapon.
I use it to end Myths by… seeing where they will be so I can more easily cut them down.

One more. Since my character was a prophet—something of a priestess—she’s charismatic. Even after she forsook the Norns, she had a small gathering of loyal followers and has gained more through her travels. These collectively are a Companion Weapon.

The Forsaken Ones …are my weapon.
I use them to end Myths by… sending them into battle, attempting to find a new fate.

I think that coming up with weapons are easily the most fun part of character creation. I would like to see some examples of how to fill out the “I use them to end Myths by…” part to help direct me into how to fill that out.

Fate

Fate. Cool. This fits right in with my character concept. I am going to pick Myth of Death for this since it’s the death of her husband that haunts her and the destined death of her children she is trying to prevent.

The Norns know I am coming for them. To fend me off, they sow the fate of those around me. So whenever I travel I see people become sick and injured. So the Presence of Death is:

Disease and injury …happen around me.

Mortal Form: I appear as… a woman in a simple gown with a sword at her side. The blindfold of her prophet days hangs loose around her neck.

Godly Form: I appear as… a skeleton with blood dripping from her sword. A black mist hangs around her like a cloak.

Paragon Form: I appear as… a woman with a simple gown and sword. The sword starts dripping blood even when it has not been used.

Supernatural Form: I appear as… a woman who is extremely gaunt, almost skeletal. Her gown has turned black and constantly flutters about her.

This is cool. I really like that coming up with a description for your character is a solid part of the creation process. How many games do you play when some protagonist at the table was never described and so everyone has a completely different idea or no real idea of what the guy looks like. Knowing how this works in play, I’m excited to play this character.

Bonding

Okay, I can’t create any bonds because I’m making this character by myself. But if you make a mythender and want to bond with me, let me know. Okay, that sounds like a cheesy personal ad.

But I can come up with a name. I’ll check out this list and pick… Halla. I like that name, it was the of an NPC in a mythic tribal Saxon game I ran once.

EDIT: If you check out the comments bellow, Jeremy Morgan made a Mythender name Unnar who is bonded with Halla. So I’ll make a bond with Unnar.

I hesitate to slaughter Unnar because: he reminds me of why I rebelled.

Finishing

So the last thing. I need to pick my Heart’s Connection. I’m going to go with New because I’d really like this character to play her story out for a while. That lets me pick one Weapon to be rated at Earth-quaking (4) and the other two at God-slaying (3). My sword, Reckon, is going to be Earth-quaking and my glimpses of tomorrow and The Forsaken Ones will be merely God-slaying. Ha! Only in Mythender can the minimum level be called God-slaying.

The only thing that confuses me here is that it looks like my Storm rating, Might, Harm track, and Mortal and Mythic boxes are supposed to be determined at this stage but there isn’t any info on that. Maybe it is yet forthcoming.

All said, this is a fun and quick process. Lots of inspiring seeds in here. I am ready to hack at gods with Reckon and send The Forsaken Ones into battle against mythic foes (all the while becoming more mythic myself). There’s a couple little nitpicks I had but, hey, this is a beta version. I’m sure it will be all nice and pretty in its final form sitting inside a box set with a metric ton of dice. Right, Ryan?

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.

So we’re one week into the beta phase of Technoir and already I’m getting some great feedback. You can see some of it on Eldritch Fire Press and the Saint Louis Sprawl blogs. There’s also been a great buzz on twitter of people reading the beta and planning play sessions.

There’s also a review up already on Roleplaying News Russian. As the name implies, it’s a Russian-language blog. If you scroll down to the bottom of the post, you’ll see that the authors were gracious enough to provide an English translation of the review. The review is largely critical, but that’s exactly what I’m looking for right now: constructive criticism I can use to make Technoir better.

In the vein of making Technoir better, I’ve just updated the beta with some minor revisions.

Technoir Beta – 434KB

Here’s a rundown of the changes from the 11.05.07 version:

1. I’m playing with what happens when multiple dice from your roll match the highest result. Before it said that you add 0.1 for each match. But that implies that rolling a 5.3 has some meaningful effect over a 5.2. But it doesn’t. There was a suggestion on rpg.net to have matches result in a notation like 5+. I like that, but then I have to explain what a 5+ means: that it beats a defense rating of 5 but not a 6. And the GM has to explain that to her players. My solution now is to say if you have one or more matches, you append a ‘.1′ to the result. So having three 5s is a 5.1 and so is having four 5s. Hopefully it comes across less mathy, but it’s still something I’m experimenting with. See page 69.

2. I’ve added rules for overwriting current adjectives when you inflict new adjectives. See page 75.

3. I’ve added examples to the Instigation chapter. They start on page 55.

4. There’s some minor typo fixes, wording changes, and formatting adjustments throughout.

Thanks to everyone who is taking part in the beta and spreading the word about it.

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.

Audience participation time! I could use your help. While I’m hard at work finishing the first draft of Technoir, I’m wondering how well the overview in the Player’s Guide works for making protagonists. You’ll also need the Twin Cities Metroplex Transmission which has some Connections you’ll need to complete this process. So I’m hoping you can download both documents, make a protag or two, and give me some feedback on the following:

• Is everything covered by the Player’s Guide? Does it feel like an essential step is missing?
• Is everything explained clearly? Do certain parts of the process need to be elaborated on?
• Can you make the protag you want to make? Is something preventing you from creating a character concept that should exist in a cyberpunk setting

Please post your protagonists stats and your feedback in the comments here. And let me know anything else interesting that comes up in the process.

Thanks!

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.

I’ve been reading Dashiell Hammett off and on over the last few years. I’m a big fan of Hammett-inspired films like Miller’s Crossing and Brick. This is hardboiled fiction at its best as far as I’m concerned. One of the elements that defines a hardboiled protagonist—besides the cynical attitude—is a willingness to face danger. To get hurt, beat up, or even worse in order to do the job. Generally they get punched in the face a lot.

Hardboiled is an influence on cyberpunk, but it is something I am emphasizing even more so in Technoir. In cyberpunk RPGs there is a tendency to spend a couple hours planning in order to get in and out unseen, unscathed. Hardboiled protagonists walk in the front door. They make their presence known. They make people nervous. They shake the tree and see what falls out. The best way to infiltrate enemy headquarters is to walk up to one of their goons, get tasered unconscious, and taken prisoner.

The first part of emulating this idea is to make sure that the characters in Technoir can take a beating. First off, there isn’t much of a buffer against injury. If someone hits you, they can inflict an Adjective on you. Spending a Push die or two then is all that’s needed to make that Adjective sticky or locked. Sticky Adjectives are anything from wounds to injuries that can recovered from with first aid, some medicine, and some time. Locked Adjectives are permanent injuries—severed legs, gouged eyes—and can only be repaired by cybernetic replacement.

Having a bad Adjective at any level makes you add a Hurt die into your dice rolls. The more bad Adjectives you get, the more Hurt dice you roll. Hurt dice aren’t a definite penalty—they cancel out any matching results so if they don’t match your highest result then no harm done. But the more you have, the bigger chance they will trip you up or force you out (if all of your positive dice are cancelled out, you lose the conflict on the GMs terms). But you can take a lot of bad Adjectives before that happens.

Of course taking a bad Adjective is still bad for your health. And players tend to avoid behaviors that are mechanically bad for their characters. Ryan Macklin vocalized this issue in one of the early playtests of the game. It was even worse because it played into the whole Push economy. Players start with all the Push dice. That means that the GM can’t inflict any Adjectives on the wound or injury level until the protagonists start wounding or injuring the antagonists first. But the players were discouraged from spending their Push dice, giving them to the me—the GM, because they knew that in order to get them back they would have to get wounded or injured themselves. Why not keep all the Push dice for themselves and try to win the conflict using only the default level fleeting Adjectives?

Because this is hardboiled fiction, is what I tried to tell Ryan. That’s the genre. That’s what’s cool about these stories is that the heroes get beat up and bloodied.

But I knew that if I had a hard time selling that to a player standing right in front of me, I would have a harder time explaining that to a player I have never met, who is hearing this from her GM who read it in a book.

Ryan was right—and so were all the other game designers in the room who were nodding along in agreement. This kinda pissed me off^[1] because I really liked the Push economy. It was really elegant, I thought, if I could just get players to engage in it.

My solution came to me during the drive home from that game. At that point, I still hadn’t completely nailed down how the advancement system worked. All I had to do was tie the advancement system into the healing system. I made getting better at your Verbs happen when you are treating sticky or locked Adjectives. If you don’t get those injuries in the first place, you can’t make an advancement roll. The added bonus is that recovering from locked Adjectives is a good excuse to get new cybernetic implants. So the second part of emulating this genre concept was incentivizing getting hurt. The idea is that what doesn’t kill your protagonist makes her harder, better, faster, stronger. It’s one thing to say it in the text, but to sell the idea I had to say it with the rules.

1. ^[1] The issue pissed me off, I should say, not Ryan being right. I was grateful that Ryan really lasered in on the problem. ↩