So, yesterday I posted psychic vampires. I posted a few templates a while ago, and last week I posted two more. I forgot, there was one other. Fortunately, someone reminded me. You see, when I initially posted the Hurt Locker outline, way back when, I mentioned wanting to see a sort of “super soldier” group. I had a thing ready, but I wanted to retool it to distance it from Deviant, since this was all planned before Deviant was a thing.
I’ve done the retooling. I have this final group to present to you. We call them The Lost Boys.
From a design standpoint, there’s a foundation here. There’s some story. They’re sympathetic. There’s background. But they’re not very specific. This is because I wanted a nice range of possibilities with these templates. Some are very tied to their stories and themes. Some are looser, and basically begging to be adapted to your chronicles as something more specific of your design. I already had one person tell me that he’s going to be using my psychic vampires from yesterday as the foundation for a Jedi group in his upcoming Star Wars game. That’s awesome to hear, and exactly the kind of thing I hoped would happen. These Lost Boys? They’re ready for your retooling. They work on their own, but they could be a foundation for an entire chronicle.
And since I couldn’t come up with more appropriate featured art, yesterday I featured Edvard Munch. It was kind of topical. Today, it’ll be Eduardo Arroyo, a favorite of mine. I don’t think this is at all topical. But if you can find a way to retroactively explain why I chose it, leave a comment.
I really like just about everything I see here, both in the fiction and the mechanics. My one issue is The Protocol as a Merit; I thought that 2E was trying to do away with “things you buy so you can buy more things.” I would either give players additional dots of The Protocol through story developments rather than xp, or give a free dot of Augmentation Merits for every dot the players purchase.
Either way could work.
That said, the Merit makes you more capable of handling the Serum you have to take. While it also means you have to take it more often, it means when you take it, you’ll have to deal with less damage. Also, if you’re burning bright and want to use overclocking as an advantage, it means you can hit your Deprived state quicker if you’ve bought more dots. At lower levels, there’s not a lot of opportunity to use Deprived tactically. So, there are advantages to the Merit; they’re just not so explicitly spelled out.
That’s definitely a good justification! And maybe I’m expecting too much power from a mortal template. If I ever use these I’ll have to give it some serious thought.
hey dave,sorry if i’m being impolite right now,but can you give us more changeling open dev this week?
Maybe next week. I’m not working on Changeling this week. Sorry.
Maybe this is just me, but I’m getting strong Deviant vibes off this based on what we’ve heard so far.
Like I said in the post, this was written before Deviant was a thing. I did do some things to pull it away from Deviant, focus-wise. It’s not really about rebelling or escaping or whatever. If you want to run it as a mystery, hunting down the shadow conspiracy above their heads, sure, that’ll work. But mostly, it’s about the support network.
There’s a bird, snow, and a bunch of white guys seemingly wrecking the place? Clearly a reference to what’s going on in Oregon.
Illuminati confirmed!
I think there are two ways to look at this template: in terms of rules mechanics and in terms of thematics/story material. On the rules side I think the template is pretty well written and certainly provides a good collection of rules, merits and concept ideas that could be utilised in a wide variety of roles. My main problem is on the thematic side, as to my mind, the Lost Boys seem largely identical to a Hunter conspiracy. Could this be re-purposed as a Hurt Locker themed Hunter conspiracy?
I was thinking the same thing regarding the theme. The lost boys feel like a compact or conspiracy from hunter the vigil, a very awesome one by the way. I plan on using them in our games.
I didn’t make them explicitly so, but they MIGHT be somehow tied to the Cheiron Group. So, it’s not coincidence.
Really th ey fealt more like the Dava Corporate to me with all the advance technologies involved. But creating a dependent tyson n people is their M.O.
I haven’t actually read them, or I may have made a reference.
They’re not really hunters, though. They don’t hunt anything. If they did hunt anything, they hunt their shadow conspiracy.
The rules for creating the Serum don’t seem entirely consistent with the new crafting rules in the CofD Core. It might be worth double checking those.
That said, I otherwise really like thes group. They seem fun and pretty adaptable too. Even more so if you add in a supernatural angle and maybe some of the more general Supernatural Merits.
The crafting rules are for very specific, stressful situations. It’s for improvisation and problem-solving, not crafting in the sense that most people think of. This is a rote process with expected outcomes.
I might adapt some of this material for the TFV antagonists in my Beast game..
Are you planning to have notes on adapting existing merits to add to these splats? Because I could see the Lost Boys working as a God Machine experiment, but I think I’d want to add some overt Supernatural Merits to the splat in that case. And I’d appreciate some advice for doing that.
Wuse, no adaptation is really necessary. Lost boys aren’t really a template, but mortals with themed supernatural merits.
You want a stigmatic lost boy, there’s absolutely no rule stopping you.
If you want a lost boy with another supernatural merit like telekinesis or telepathy, again, no rule stopping you.
The only reason to adapt anything is if you absolutely wanted the supernatural merit to follow the same rules as the other lost boy merits, and in the case of the G-M doesn’t necessarily make sense.
The G-M doesn’t need to experiment with giving out supernatural merits, it can already hand those out like candy without worrying about anti-rejection drugs.
This may be silly feedback, but the name “The Delta Protocol” overly reminds me of Delta Green. It’s actually fairly distracting for me to keep the two straight as I read.
This gives me a huge Deus Ex vibe, as if the Lost Boys are something like the nano-augs from the earlier games. Papa like.
This is by no means a coincidence.
It struck me as seeming like Cyberforce. Also not a coincidence?