War! Huh, yeah. What is it good for?
As it turns out, oddly compelling games about superheroes.
When it was first created for GODLIKE, Greg Stolze’s One Roll Engine captured me in a way that no other game engine had up until that point. It was the first time I had fallen in love with the mechanics of a game so completely and is still the system I truly credit for igniting my love of design. I liked the grit of the game and the setting. And I loved how simple, elegant, and easy it was to resolve action at the table while emulating the chaos and uncertainty so often found in warfare.
A few years ago, I found a copy of Progenitor, a setting for Wild Talents, the next evolution of the One Roll Engine on the floor at GenCon. I had heard Stolze talk about the game on a podcast and snatched it up immediately. The game again used war as it’s backdrop, but instead of World War II, this one used the Vietnam War. Amanda Sykes, a Kansas farmwife, is suddenly empowered with powerful abilities. She immediately begins to use them to make the world a better place. The catch is her powers are contagious, and several people who are affected by her abilities become superpowered in their own right, only slightly less powerful than her. These newly empowered people also begin to create their own, slightly less powerful empowered offspring. This process continues, the power dwindling as it gets less and less concentrated through the world.
The book includes a detailed alternate timeline of the events after Amanda gains her powers, including detailed write-ups of dozens and dozens of characters at various power levels that can be included in your campaign. But Progenitor is a game about big ideas. The PCs are not only able, but are readily encouraged to take the latter part of the 20th century by whatever they can grab and violently twist it to meet their own visions. The very fact that the PCs can really enter the game at any power level the GM chooses to have them puts them in a very unique position to radically change even the “established timeline” the book gives.
Now, coming up with a plot for this kind of game can be daunting as hell for even a seasoned GM. To help with that, Stolze included tools to help – the biggest being the “STEW Metrics.”
STEW stands for Suspicion, Technology, Economy, and Warfare, the four broad metrics used to track global “feelings” in Progenitor. When new consumer products hit the market that everyone scrambles to buy, Technology soars and dwindles when there are no new innovations. When tensions are high between the US and another super power, Suspicion begins to soar, but shrinks when borders begin to shrink. Here’s how they work – they’re measured on a numerical scale. The higher the number, the more prominent it currently is in the game. Each year of game time, the GM looks at the Metrics and chooses the two highest. This determines which of the six “tones” is prevalent for the year – Authoritarianism, Conflict, Espionage, Globalism, Imperialism, or Tribalism.
He then gathers a number of dice equal to the total of those two metrics and rolls them, looking for matches. Each of the six tones has a detailed chart that gives ideas for plots related to the general feel of the year’s tone to include in the game for the year for the PCs to pursue or ignore as they see fit. A simple match of two numbers gives a basic plot idea to introduce into the game – for example a very important politician dies. The more of the same number in that set, the more involved it becomes, also allowing for very natural escalation should a result come up again. In the above example, it might come out that the politician was not only assassinated, but it was by rival politicians, possibly causing a huge political firestorm and crippling a prominent political party for years to come. Some of these events may even have impacts on the metrics, should the PCs choose not to get involved in the action.
Additionally, any dice that don’t come up as matches can be used to generate events that can link directly to the PCs. Perhaps a cyber-stalker becomes enamored with them. Or a scientist wants to study a PC’s particular powers. Or maybe a PC gets his assets frozen as a part of an ongoing investigation. Each die rolled in this pool is important and can be used by a savvy GM to create no end of interesting situations for their PCs to encounter. Even if the GM has an overall plot, using the Metrics and these tables can provide for interesting one-off sessions away from the main plot or even be used to provide subtext to the overall plot.
All in all, it’s a very elegant solution to the problem of forging continuing plots in a globe hopping game where players are not only allowed, but encouraged to make the course of human events their own plaything. The fact that Greg Stolze hit the ball out of the park with not just the content, but also by using the system that powers the game to help run the game to me shows just how talented of a designer the man is, and makes me respect his work all the more. If you are an aspiring designer like me and can find a copy of this game, I would highly recommend you make a spot for it on your shelf. Even if you never run a single session of a game in it’s universe, there are so many lessons that can be learned from a design perspective to make the purchase worth every single penny.
Ben Erickson
