If a GM runs systems where they call for specific skill checks (e.g., “give me a Computer Use check”), my experience — from both sides of the table — is that they’ll often develop biases in the skills they call for. Sometimes this will just be a natural consequence of skill design (Spot Hidden in Call of Cthulhu has a far more universal application than Geology), but often it’s just familiarity and comfort: They habitually reach for Field Medicine, even though Cybernetics or Pathology might be better fits. Or maybe they just never think to call for Mysticism checks.

These biases affect both rulings made at the table and adventure design. Either results in a flattening of the game world: If you’re not calling for Cybernetics checks, for example, then it likely means that you’re not including cybernetics meaningfully in your game. (Or, at least, keeping it out of the spotlight.)

If you’re running a system with skill overlap, of course, it’s fine for multiple skills to be applicable, but the bias will still have an effect: Skill checks are a way of asking questions about the game world, and if the only questions you’re asking about Cybernetics are the ones fully covered by Field Medicine, then you’re still missing the chunk of Cybernetics that makes it unique.

You can see this really clearly, I think, when it comes to designing mystery scenarios: If you’ve got an unconscious blindspot when it comes to Chemistry tests, then there are lots of different types of clues that you aren’t including. Your mystery scenarios, by necessity, will be less varied and interesting.

SOLUTIONS

Start by putting the skill list on your GM screen. Having that list at your fingertips from day one while running a new system is a great way of making sure you take advantage of all the tools the game is giving you. A skill bias often develops because you just keep coming back to the first dozen or so skills you learned, so if you can avoid falling into that rut in the first place you’ll never have a problem.

After five or six sessions, review the skill list. This shouldn’t take more than ten minutes or so, but really put in the effort to look at and think about each and every skill: Have you been using this skill? If not, are there times when you should’ve used it? What are some fun ways you could use the skill in designing your scenarios? Is there stuff you could add to the environment? Ways that your NPCs could use the skill or force the PCs to use their skill? If you’re struggling, re-read the description of the skill in the rulebook and/or check out the pertinent Wikipedia article.

Pay particular attention to skills the PCs are proficient in. Make a separate list or highlight them on your GM screen. Hitting these skills will spread the spotlight around and give the players opportunities to show off how awesome their characters are.

Then use these lists — both the game’s skill list and the PCs’ skill lists — to inspire your adventure creation. Need a clue? Pick a skill and ask yourself how the PCs could use the skill to get the lead they need. Designing a monster-of-the-week? Think about how the PCs could use skills to interact with them, either directly or indirectly. (Where does Cybernetics take you as compared to Pharmacology, Xenoesotericism, or Zero-G?) You can do the same thing when filling your environments with cool details — think not only about things to interact with (e.g., you can use Chemistry to analyze the strange liquid puddled on the sofa) but how skills can become an extension of the character’s senses (e.g., Chemistry lets them recognize a distinctive fragrance compound).

Originally Written July 2001

For nearly three years now, Kenneth Hite has been writing Suppressed Transmissions – a column which can be found, each and every week, in the digital pages of Pyramid Magazine.

For those of you unfamiliar with the column, I find it almost impossible to explain the experience: Hite takes a plethora of historical fact, teases it out with imaginative alternatives, spices it with every possible nuance of conspiracy, stirs in a bit of secret history, adds a touch of horror, and creates a potent brew. Each and every one of these columns – grouped about a particular idea (Jack the Ripper, Joan of Arc, the Knights Templer, Crystal Skuills, etc.) – contains half a dozen ideas. Each of these ideas could provide weeks of campaigning, and are possessed of a singular stamp of quality.

But that description alone does not do justice to the true brilliance which is churned out – week after week – by this remarkable man. Hite is not only preeminently creative, he is steeped in knowledge which boggles the mind – and the interstice between the two which is Suppressed Transmissions – defies any expectation I could hope to create in your minds.

In short: A better wellspring of ideas you will not find.

The book being reviewed here is the second collection of these superb columns – covering the period from April 1999 to March 2000, with columns grouped together by common theme (Alternate History; Enigmatic Explanations; Men, Myths, and Monsters; Peculiar Places; and Clashing Symbols). However, as many of you probably already know, all of these columns can already be accessed (along with the rest of Pyramid’s archive) by subscribing to the magazine for $15 a year. So why would you spend $20 buying this collection (or the first one)?

Because Ken Hite is even smarter than I thought. Suppressed Transmissions 2 uses the standard SJG format – main text supplemented by a sidebar on every page. And each and every sidebar – on each and every page – is crammed to the gills with copious footnotes. For this collection, Hite has copiously gone back into each and every column and supplemented it with additional research, interesting digressions, and interconnections.

This material is invaluable, and represents an incredible value.

So, by all means, subscribe to Pyramid and check the column out first. But if you are as captivated with it as everyone else who has ever read it, then you’re going to want to track down these collected volumes as soon as possible.

In short, again: Suppressed Transmissions is essential for any GM’s library.

Grade: A+

Like my review of Hera & Zeus, this was originally written for Games Unplugged magazine, but I can’t find any record of it actually being published despite, if I recall correctly, having a review copy supplied by the magazine. Based on its length, I believe this review would have been originally intended for Games Unplugged‘s webzine rather than the print magazine.

I had completely forgotten writing this review when I wrote a new review of both Suppressed Transmission volumes back in 2023. Unsurprisingly, neither my opinion of the book nor my superlatives were much altered, but it’s still interesting comparing both reviews, written with more than decades between them.

And they took the gifts that Nature left for them and turned those gifts to their own ends, shaping them through rites of chaos to become a teeming legion – least among their servants, but limitless in number.

This scroll describes “seething caverns of chaos, impossible in their vast expanse” and filled with “the seething terrors” that are the “least among the servitors of the Endless Sleepers”. These corrupted masses are called the Elder Brood and some are given names: Akop, tesk, marbassik spawn, tilaxic.

Attention is then paid to one of the Elder Brood in particular: “Unto the bulugon they gave the feast-lust, driving their bloated forms to obsession of corpulent excess.”

Bulugon were reptilian creatures who were gifted with an endless, insatiable appetite. This appetite fuels a limitless capacity for hate and a cruel drive for conquest. Their thick scales are stretched taut across an abdomen swelled with excess. Although bat-winged, their corpulent bodies make them clumsy fliers. (It’s actually quite remarkable that their wings can support their bulk at all.)

THE GLUTTONY

No matter how much a bulugon eats, the endless starvation in their belly continues. Their masters use their constant feeding to both grow their bloated bodies and to motivate their service, but there is no satisfaction which can be given to them.

There are many tales of lone bulugon tyrannizing isolated communities. They “enthrall those weakest of mind and will” and then seek out some isolated cave or (more blasphemously) a religious shrine. Word goes out through their newfound servitors that the devil must be fed or the community will feel its wrath. Tribute and service are demanded in the name of fear.

But its hunger cannot be satisfied. The bulugon will “feast until all the fields are bare; until all the stores are consumed; until it feeds upon starvation itself.” In just a few days, the bulugon can deplete the food reserves of the entire village. And then these malefic gluttons will turn on the locals and begin to feed on them. Horrific tales are collected here of villages reduced to grisly lotteries and bloody arenas in which desperate men and women are faced with the heinous choice of the next victim to be fed to an insatiable appetite.

THE GIFTS

Graphic depictions are given of the bulugon using their long horns to impale flying opponents, using the great bulk to send both themselves and their pinioned foe crashing to the ground.

Bulugon are also said to be able to “wreathe themselves in a mist of terror.” Although they are not very fast or agile, bulugon use this fog – and the fear which accompanies it – to disguise their approach. And then their considerable bulk – both of fat and muscle – is capable of delivering blows strong to crush plate armor.

Finally, the stomach of a bulugon possesses an acid of incredible strength. (Its enhancement is most likely the source of their appetite.) Once removed from the bulugon’s body, the acid quickly loses its strength, but the bulugon is able to spew this acid in a flesh-searing cone.

ALCHEMIC ARTS

Detailed instructions are given for extracting the acid from the belly of a recently deceased bulugon while sustaining some of its preternatural strength. With a successful DC 25 Intelligence (Alchemist’s supplies) check, an alchemist can remove 1d6+4 vials of bulugon acid. This acid deals three times the damage of normal acid (6d6 acid damage).

DESIGN NOTES

Like the akop, the bulugon were taken from Green Ronin’s The Book of Fiends to expand the ranks of the Elder Brood.

Another technique to note here is that each Book of the Elder Brood focuses on a different brood, but each volume also introduces the Elder Brood as a whole. (Since any one of these books might be the first one the PCs chance upon.) In several of them I list the names of other creatures within the Elder Brood, but notably each listing is incomplete and each listing is different-but-overlapping. This is a matryoshka techniques, with the players being able to slow correlate a list of the Elder Brood by comparing different sources of lore.

In my Mothership open table, a character named Manny Vasquez recently died. One of the other PCs, Dürmig Ableton, decided to use one of his downtime actions to arrange a memorial service for Manny — a chance for everyone who had worked with him to share their memories and commend him to the wisdom of the stars.

I loved this idea, but it was also problematic.

Sure, we could play through the memorial service with the four players who were currently at the table, but what about the other twenty players who are currently active in the campaign and their characters? In fact, even Manny’s player wasn’t at this session! (Dürmig had heard the news of Manny’s death from one of the other PCs in the session, who had been working with Manny when he died.)

What Dürmig was really proposing was a communal event that, ideally, everyone playing in the open table could choose to participate in.

The problem is that I’ve tried organizing community events like this before — where a bunch of open table players all get together — and they’re pretty antithetical to what makes an open table work: The whole point of the open table, after all, is flexible scheduling so that you’re NOT trying to coordinate everyone’s schedules. Therefore, not only have I found that events like this often never come together at all, I’ve seen the efforts to coordinate real-world and game-world schedules actually wreck the entire open table and end the campaign.

(This may be difficult to understand unless you’ve seen it in practice. Basically, characters and/or players got put on hold waiting for the communal event to happen. When the event inevitably got delayed because of the logistical issues, people went into a “holding pattern” where they were waiting for the event to happen. Attendance dropped at the other sessions, which killed the forward momentum of the table and even caused whole sessions to be canceled. This caused players’ commitment to the game to flag, which increased the attendance problems while also making it harder for everyone to come together for the now much-delayed communal event, and the whole thing slipped into a death spiral.)

So with these practical and existential problems in mind, how did we handle Manny’s memorial service?

RUNNING THE EVENT

For context, here’s a few key facts about how this open table is being run:

• We have a dedicated Discord server where events are scheduled. The players’ also have channels for chatting with each other between sessions.
• This is supplemented with an e-mail list, which I use to let people who aren’t habitually checking Discord know when new sessions have been scheduled.
• Time is synced between the real world and the game world, generally at a rate of 1 week in the real world being equal to 1 cycle in the Tempest Cluster.
• There’s a system of downtime actions which we resolve at the beginning of each session. Among other things, this allows PCs to “catch up” to the game clock.
• In my campaign status document, in addition to tracking open table headlines, I’ve also found it useful to track Major Events and the date they’re occurring. It then becomes relatively easy to see, during downtime resolution, which characters are “passing through” a major event and make sure to insert it into their narrative.

With these structures in place, I then did four things to run the memorial event.

First, as I mentioned, Dürmig spent a downtime action getting the event set up. This was during a session, so we played through this and established the broad details.

Second, I asked Dürmig’s player to make a post to the campaign Discord detailing the invent and inviting others to join and (in this case) share their memories of Manny. I also promoted the event to all of the players in the campaign via our e-mail list.

Third, I included the memorial service on my Major Events timeline. It’s very different from the other sorts of events I’ve tracked there (e.g., a major terrorist attack on the station where everyone lives), but the key thing is that it’s getting “triggered” for each PC as they pass through that moment in time. This gives us a chance to play through (and likely add to) the event, making it a living part of the campaign experience.

Fourth, I encouraged those players — if they hadn’t already — to go to the Discord and share what their character does at the memorial service. (This can be a little wobbly if you ask them to do it after the session, so you may find it most effective to take a “break” so that everyone can hop on their phones and roleplay the moment immediately.)

The result is an event that plays out multiple times over multiple weeks (or even months) of real time. It naturally results in the event being revealed/created/built in a nonlinear fashion, but with each pass through the event the group is collectively adding layers of detail and interaction to it. Meanwhile, no one is left waiting for the event to happen, nor is anyone forced to skip the event unless they want to.

FINAL THOUGHTS

To date, I’ve only used this technique to resolve what you might refer to as “low stakes” events: Attending Manny’s memorial service, for example, is a communal event, but its outcome is not going to fundamentally shift the forward trajectory of the campaign. Things might be different if there was, say, a bomb hidden in Manny’s coffin or if the big, shared event was something like the evacuation of the station.

If/when such events arise in the future, I’ll probably use similar techniques of mixing nonlinear Discord resolution, but will need to experiment with other techniques to make it work right. A few things I’ve considered include:

• Special Event Session! I’d use this if the PCs can/should be positioned to affect the outcome of the event. The goal here would not be the futile hope of getting everyone in the campaign to show up on the same day, but rather to run a specially flagged session where the PCs who show up are the ones at the tip of the spear. (Other PCs may still be able to participate in the session’s “pregame” via the event’s Discord thread.)
• Default anyone not participating in the event by such-and-such a date as having been away from the action. (In the Tempest Cluster campaign, for example, we would just assume that they took a low-paying job off-station when the event happens.)
• Alternatively, with the canonical timeline/outcome determined (by a special event session or otherwise), we can now transition the non-linear resolution techniques described above as everyone else figures out how their character was affected by what happened during the special event.
• Multiple special event sessions. This can work if the event is designed in such a way that its outcome is being affected by actions taking place in significantly different places at the same time. For example, maybe every session in March is resolving a different facet of a crisis, with the outcome from all tables being synthesized at the end of the event

As I say, these are currently just thought experiments. But they do open up some really fascinating opportunities I’m looking forward to exploring.

FURTHER READING

Open Table Manifesto
Open Table Headlines
Tempest Cluster

Originally Written June 2000

Hera & Zeus is a two-person card game designed by Richard Borg, who won the coveted Spiel des Jahres in 1993 for Bluff. The title of the game should be a highly suggestive give-away of the concept which is being put into play: Hera and Zeus are feuding, and this time things have gotten serious – hostages have been taken, and the Gods, Demigods, and Heroes have divided their loyalties between them.

Each player receives a specialized deck: One for Hera and one for Zeus. Both decks are functionally identical, although there is a degree of customization in terms of the fluff text which surrounds each card’s functionality. (For example, Hera’s player has Artemis and their Attack 6 cards, while Zeus’ player has Apollo for their Attack 6 cards.)

Play proceeds in turns, with a set of elegantly designed mechanics guiding each player as they commit their forces to a tightly defined playing field. These forces challenge each other, with each player attempting to accomplish one of two goals: Either wiping out of the other player’s forces (by clearing all of his cards off the playing field), or rescuing their designated hostage in a Stratego-esque fashion by challenging the concealed hostage card (Zeus holds Argus hostage, while Hera holds Io).

The simple-yet-dynamic basic mechanics of the game are given an added luster through the use of special Mythology Cards which possess special powers. For example, challenging a Medusa card with anything other than an Amazon or Hero causes you to defeat yourself. Borg has crafted a set of rules which allow for a number of successful strategies – which is always a sign that a game is not only enjoyable in the short term, but is possessed of an endurance which will make it enjoyable time and time again.

My only quibble with an otherwise excellent design is the decision to print the special rules for the mythology cards on two reference cards (one for each player), rather than directly on the cards themselves. On the other hand, by keeping the cards clear of all but the most basic reference text, the package is far more attractive and appealing – and the special rules are simple and few enough that you quickly assimilate them with ease.

Hera & Zeus comes highly recommended by this reviewer.

Components: Two decks of cards; two wooden counters; two reference cards; rulebook

 Grade: A-

This review was originally written for Games Unplugged, but I can’t find any record of it actually being published. So this may be the first time anyone has had the chance to read it.

Back around the time this was written, I used to play a lot of two-player board games. My ex-girlfriend and I would play them, and I had several other friends I would also get together and play with this. I remember this one being a lot of fun and it did, as I wrote in the review, have a lot of rewarding replayability. It’s been years and years now since I took it off the shelf, but that’s largely because I don’t play two-player board games any more: My wife and I spend our one-on-one time on other activities, largely because a lot of our other social time is spent playing other board games in larger groups.