Mission: The Enemy Within

Another untested and probably insanely unbalanced Stargrave scenario with which you can ruin friendships!

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THE ENEMY WITHIN

Alien shapeshifters operate in this sector. Keep your eyes peeled, Mac, they could be disguised as anything.

Why are you looking at me like that, Mac?

Mac?

Mac?

SET-UP

Set up the table as normal. Place terrain, select board edges, and place loot tokens just as in a standard game. Select a Target Point as normal.

Everything is normal.

Except...

SPECIAL RULES

You've got to be flarkin' kidding! On an initiative roll of 8 or 2, the opponent picks one of your crew, who immediately changes into their true form of some nasty gribbly alien thing. Replace the crew figure with a suitable alien model, which will act as normal in the Creature Phase. Any model other than the Captain can be replaced. Any effects or injuries received prior to the change are discarded.

Treat the shapechanger as a Bounty Hunter (p143). In the Creature Phase the alien will act as normal, with one exception; if they were carrying a loot token before they changed, they will attempt to get off the table with it by the fastest and shortest route.

The actual crew member will be found after the game, tied up, gagged, and stuffed in a supply locker back on the ship, but otherwise alive and well. Any special gear they were carrying will be found with them; assume that the shapechanger's strange physiology mimicked any special abilities or gear.

Option 1 - Trust no one! There is more than one shapeshifter in each crew! One will reveal itself each time a 8 or 2 is rolled for initiative. You should probably limit it to only about three per crew, but I can imagine a wild game in which there are a lot more!

Option 2 - I knew this would happen... Each player selects the opponent's hidden alien before the game begins, and in secret. Writing it down on a piece of folded paper for a suitably dramatic reveal seems appropriate.

LOOT AND EXPERIENCE

Loot and experience are scored as normal, with the following additions:
+10xp to the controlling crew when one of its members changes.
+5xp for eliminating the shapechanger if it is was part of the opposing crew.
+25xp for eliminating the shapechanger if it is was part of your crew.

I Had the Power (Up)!

On Sunday, I went up to That London to go to the Power Up! exhibit at the Science Museum, prompted by reading about Orlygg's visit... except I didn't go until Monday for unimportant reasons I won't go into.

(I went and ate spicy paneer chapati wraps in the park instead.)

On a scorching day pushing past 35° Celsius, I did what I always used to do on hot summer days, and went into a dark room to play computer games!

This is only half of it!

It's debatable whether Power Up! is truly an exhibit at all, but I don't suppose it matters. For an old fart like me it was an exercise in nostalgia, playing games from my youth on the original hardware, and for youngsters -- of which there were not many, as it was a school day -- it's an opportunity to see where computer games came from, and that there is fun to be had with the older systems.

This was a pleasant surprise. A version of this -- I think the Mark 6 -- was my first console.

It was £12 for a day pass, which isn't terrible for a London museum and by my rough count I played around 27 games, so that's money well spent I reckon. Yes, I could emulate all of them, but it was good to play on the original hardware and I got the chance to handle some consoles I have never seen in the flesh before, like the 3DO, NeoGeo, or WiiU; there is something of a thrill to experience them for the first time, but perhaps I'm just a big saddo.

Aside from the N64 controllers almost all having that distinctive loose thumbstick, all the hardware was in excellent condition, and I wonder where it all came from. It's a brave collector who would donate their vintage console to be handled by thousands of grubby mitts, and I can't imagine the Science Museum itself has a stack of old SNESes in a back room. That said, the Amiga CD32 had its launch at the Museum, so it's possible that the machine there was indeed owned by them!

I have only a couple of minor criticisms. There were a few notable omissions, such as the PC Engine and any handhelds that weren't produced by Nintendo, and not all of the games were the best showcase of their machines; are we really saying Frogger is the Commodore 64's killer app?

(I would also have loved to see a Wondermega or "tower of power" in the flesh, but those are the nittiest of picks.)

Otherwise, Power Up! is an interesting if superficial look at the history of computer gaming, but also a great day out if you're a fan of computer games.

Arbitrary score: Blast Processing out of MOS6510.

Your humble correspondent, having completed Sonic 2, entirely legitimately, honest.
(And no, no idea what happened to my hair.)

Flute(owar)

Go on then. One more.

The inspiration should be obvious, but in case it's not. That said, I first saw the image in a different context.

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Hold On to Your Potatoes

This is your semi-regular reminder that Temple of Doom is the best one.

#TempleOfDoomIsTheBestOne

Drums (Little Bit of)

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Bagpipes (of DOOM)

Self-explanatory.

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Triangle

An attempt to do a picture in the style of Amos Orion Sterns, who did all the class pictures in the LotFP rulebook. Partially successful. Ish.

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I Like Second-Stage-Randomness

There's probably a proper name for this family of mechanics but what I mean by second-stage-randomness is taking a base mechanic that is stable and knowable, and then spicing it up with a layer of random generation. Some examples:

Characters: Everyone knows what a Fighter is, how they work, and what sort of things they can do. But then we modify the Fighter by allowing some randomness in, so then two Fighters may look and act in different ways. Dragon Age and Shadowdark both do this with dice rolls to determine what abilities characters get, from class-specific tables, and I've tinkered with a similar idea myself.

Monsters: The room contains 1d12 orcish Morris dancers! But what if we can roll 1d8 to determine exactly what sort of orcish Morris dancers they are? 13th Age does something like this with its dragons, and there's a similar sort of idea here at I Cast Light! You don't want anything too complicated gumming up play at the table, just a simple modification to the standard monster to stop them becoming too predictable.

(If you're playing a Warhammer-style setting with true Chaos at work you could really lean into this with expanded tables for Chaotic creatures. Maybe even a d1000 table...)

Locations: I've been watching -- but not playing, I don't have the reflexes or time for that -- quite a bit of Nightreign the new Elden Ring spinoff. The game randomly generates some of its content, such as monster placement and type, so that while experienced players will get to know the general shape of the game, there is still some potential for surprises; you may know that it's one of six bosses over in that grove of trees, but which of the six you won't know until you get there. One other thing the game does is reshape the map with a special location that's randomly drawn from a pool; it could be a mysterious city, a snowy mountain, or a volcanic chasm. Players don't know which it will be -- if any; I think there's also a chance of none appearing and the map being "normal" -- until they arrive on the island.

It feels like there should be a way to do something similar in a tabletop role-playing game, although I haven't worked out how yet. You don't necessarily want randomly changing locations on your world map, unless you're using some sort of "chaos zone".

What I like about this sort of mechanic is that while randomly rolling everything can make a game feel arbitrary and meaningless, this gives a stable base but also accommodates an exciting layer of unpredictability. For me it's the best of both worlds, and you can even further adjust it by using bell curve probabilities to make things a bit more predictable.

But not too predictable, eh?

Recorder

Is the recorder the basic instrument taught in schools around the world, or is that just the UK?

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Cymbals

KTANG!

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