Deeper Readings Into The Cities Without Number rpg & Trey Causey's Strange Stars OSR Setting

  "The world is neon and dust.

There is nothing more than the flesh. There is nothing greater than the wires. There is nothing to dream that is not sold and nothing to worship that is not made. It is a mirrorshade world of human reflections, every red hunger and every black passion worshiped in cathedrals of glass and greed. The great love their sins like children and the least want only to be great. Who could hope for more?"

Cities Without Number is a cyberpunk role-playing game built for sandbox adventures in a dystopia of polished chrome and bitter misery. It's both a full-fledged Sine Nomine toolkit for building a cyberpunk world of your own and an Old School Renaissance-inspired game system for playing out the reckless adventures of the desperate men and women who live in it. Whether polished metal or flesh and blood, your operators will risk their lives and more to seize those precious things a merciless world would keep from them.

Alright it's been a New York City minute since I've cracked open the  Cities Without Number rpg. Readin deeper into Cities has been interesting tonight after getting together with my players over dinner & rereading the rules. Anyone whose been reading this blog knows we've been running Trey Causey's Strange Star campaign setting books. Cities is a perfect supplement to use with Strange Stars because of the transhumanistic elements of this OSR campaign. 

What Cities Without Numbers brings to the table is a long and storied rpg of Cyberpunk goodness. Coupling it with Stars Without Numbers over the last couple of months has been interesting because it brings some perspective to our own cybered version of campaign Earth. This version of our own campaign Earth is well aware of the fact of the aliens & intergalatic scene of Strange Stars. 
Earth however is struggling under the wait of knowing that it's no longer the center of the universe. Earthlings are in demand because of the intergalatic space trucking driver shortage. The holo vids are awash with colony adds and space piloting school adds. 
Our own own party wants to hire two new drivers and aquire two brand new 'used' space haulers. Already our own operators are looking through thousands and thousands of adds for new talent and trucks. 
There are tons of adventuring opportunities in the belt for our own adventurers and operators. Our own party operates on both sides of the law lately and there's been some push back from the more wiley of the alien races. 
Our own party has been pushing hard since a run in with several of the cults of B4 The Lost City. More coming up as our operators work to get the party saved from the vicious locals. 

Arduin,Barsoom,& Tegel Manor - Worlds Without Number & Cities Without Number Rpg

Over the years Worlds Without Number continues to come up on the pile of books that needs to be exploited. Now with the release of Cities Without Number it's time to put some of our campaigns ideas into focus from of the past. Campaigns I've run in the past especially with Tegel Manor. 

Martin Ralya from a 2014  Rpg Geek entry  captures what makes Tegel Manor so damn good in his comments; "This is such a cool module. One paragraph of backstory, and then straight to the funhouse -- and what a funhouse it is: dozens of rooms, a separate dungeon, portraits with magical effects, monsters jammed into every corner, magical statues, and weird encounter after weird encounter. Every room gets just a sentence or two of description, the sort of brevity I love in modules.

The huge map of the manor is fantastic, as is the player map showing only its outline; that's a nice touch. In 29 pages (discounting the covers and table of contents), plus a map, this module covers a tremendous amount of ground. It feels much, much longer than that.

Tegel Manor is nutty as a fruitcake, and I love it. It looks like a hoot to play, and would take a good many sessions to explore fully.

Added bonus: best typo in a module ever, "sunopsises" for "synopses.""

Our Tegel Manor was a time and planar jumping haunted fun house of horror that moved from one plane to another. The valley and all of the environs of the haunted house travelled with it. We had a brief run recently with it. 

Lately it's got me thinking about Worlds Without Number & the fact that the manor figured so high within our Mars/Barsoom games in the past. 

Now if the manor can appear anywhere. Could this massive haunted house appear within a massive cyberpunk urban cityscape & yes I'm thinking about a massive urban crawl using Cities Without Number with classic Tegel Manor. 
So if the manor wanders across time & space & we've had portals to Barsoom near the manor in the past. Then it makes perfect sense that these portals would also crossover with the Nexus gates of Arduin. 

Now in the past I've had the manor appear on a post apocalpytic Empire of the Petal Throne Mars via the  same gateway that  opens onto the Mars of Empire of the Petal Throne's Rpg via Brett Slocum's Warriors of The Lost Planet free Warriors of the Red Planet Add on campaign book.  And this goes back into my own take on the classic Barsoomian books. 

  

First Impressions & Review of Cities Without Number Rpg by Kevin Crawford

 "The world is neon and dust.

There is nothing more than the flesh. There is nothing greater than the wires. There is nothing to dream that is not sold and nothing to worship that is not made. It is a mirrorshade world of human reflections, every red hunger and every black passion worshiped in cathedrals of glass and greed. The great love their sins like children and the least want only to be great. Who could hope for more?"

Cities Without Number is a cyberpunk role-playing game built for sandbox adventures in a dystopia of polished chrome and bitter misery. It's both a full-fledged Sine Nomine toolkit for building a cyberpunk world of your own and an Old School Renaissance-inspired game system for playing out the reckless adventures of the desperate men and women who live in it. Whether polished metal or flesh and blood, your operators will risk their lives and more to seize those precious things a merciless world would keep from them.

Cities without Number rpg has finally been released to the public but the backers of the Kickstarter have been watching this rpg's evolution for sometime now. And it's a beast of a pdf clocking in at two hundred & fifty six pages of pure Cyberpunk rpg. Cities without Number  pretty much does it all, Cities has great layout, excellent fonts, and a solid B/X OSR  tool box approach to it's material. 
Cities is completely cross compatible with Worlds Without Number, Stars Without Number, and Godbound as well as other Sine Nomine publishing rpg product. And Cities has been in development for months now. As a Kickstarter backer for this project we've been at ground zero for development. Take note other OSR publishers this is how you run a kickstarter. You get your gamer's feed back, take on board opinions, and more then turnout a great product. 
There's already a Cities Without Number: Free Version rpg which has the following in it by Kevin Crawford: 

• An old-school inspired game system that's fully compatible with the sci-fi Stars Without Number game and its fantasy sister-game Worlds Without Number
• Cyberware and sophisticated high-tech gear suitable for chroming the most discriminating cyborg and equipping the most refined of street operators
• Playability-focused hacking rules designed to give hacking-focused PCs useful and important things to do without forcing an entire separate mini-game on the GM
• Gear rules for drones and vehicles, to better equip PCs who want to bring a little extra iron on their next mission
• System-neutral Sine Nomine worldbuilding tools for helping a GM create their own custom cyberpunk world or elaborate the details of existing worlds and settings
• Gang, corp, and city district creation tools for fleshing out your world with people and places that fit
• Fifty Mission Tags for adventure creation, plus guidelines and step-by-step procedures for handling facility infiltrations, managing local heat, selling loot, and other activities beloved of corp-hating street scum everywhere
• The default campaign setting of the City, a premade backdrop to help you get into the game as quickly as possible

And Cities does exactly what it says on the package able to deliver the goods in no time. And does it in style. And Cities can easily be combined with Worlds Without Number to bring you a Shadowrun style Cyberpunk fantasy with little issue. 
And the paid version is even better with more tools and cybernetic goodness;"

In the deluxe edition of Cities Without Number, you'll also be getting...

• Cyberware quirks and features for particular megacorp product lines
• Variant gengineered human types for PCs who don't fit the baseline mold
• Optional rules for the psychological strain of Cyber Alienation
• Optional rules for cheap street cyber, for those campaign settings where every goon with a knife has some wire beneath his skin" 
• Spellcasting, spirit summoning, and magical items for GMs who want to add a dash of magic into their cyberpunk world

This also means that Cities can be used to turn any of your favorite B/X 'World's Most Popular' Rpg adventures into cyberfantasy adventures. And this goes a long way towards getting incredible mile out of modules such as 'B4 The Lost City' where perhaps the other levels contain more then merely a lost race but city blocks of lost cybernetics and net running to thier favorite old school adventure modules! 
Anyone whose been reading this blog knows we've been running Trey Causey's Strange Star campaign setting books. Cities is a perfect supplement to use with Strange Stars because of the transhumanistic elements of this OSR campaign. 

So is Cities without Number rpg worth getting?! In a word, 'oh yes!' if your looking for a solid set of Cyberpunk rpg OSR tools that is capable of creating a campaign to call your own? In a word, yes. This book is worth every penny! 

 

The Sanity Erodes - Sine Nomine Publishing's Cities Without Number rpg & The Red Room's Orbital Decay -The Expert D&D Connection - The Caecilia

 Call it nostaglia or simply the fact that a friend of mine suggested that I go back to the Expert set of TSR Dungeons & Dragons for some monster inspiration. What I found however was something horrifying and I thought I'd share. 

We've been looking back through the B/X Dungeons & Dragons expert set today. Why?! Because there were a lot of monsters unique to this set. And we've been looking into these unique monsters for something a bit different and unexpected for our - Sine Nomine Publishing's Cities Without Number rpg & The Red Room's Orbital Decay campaign.  The idea here is that each time the Beyond touches our reality it leaves behind a bit of itself and corruption. And one monster that leaped out immediately is the Caecilia. Which according to the Expert set's stats go something like this; "Caecilia Armor Class: Hit Dice: Move: Attacks: Damage: 6 6* 60' (20') lbite 1-8 No. Appearing: Save As: Morale: Treasure Type: Alignment: 1-3 (1-3) Fighter: 3 9 B Neutral These giant gray wormlike creatures are about 30' long. They attack with their cavernous mouths and sharp teeth. An unadjusted "to hit" roll of 19 or 20 means that they have swallowed their prey whole. The victim will take 1-8 points of damage each round after that until either the victim or the caecilia is dead. Any attack from inside a caecilia may only be made with a dagger, and with a penalty of -4 on "to hit" rolls." 
And then I ran across Al's take from the Beyond The Black Gate blog from 2011 here; 
"Caecilia

AC 6[13]
HD 6
Atk Bite (1d8)
Special Swallow whole
Move 15(Crawl or Dig)
Save 10 (Fighter5)
No. Appearing 1d3
Morale 9
AL N
Treasure Type B
These 30' long, slimy, gray worms are voracious predators, often lurking just behind dungeon walls, floors, or ceilings (or spongy wilderness earth) and waiting for the vibrations of passing prey to bring them forth. Their toothy maws can swollow up anything horse-sized or smaller on a natural roll of 19-20. Swallowed victims are largely helply helpless and suffer 1d8 points of damage per round until dead, though they may attack with a small weapon such as a knife or dagger (at -4 to-hit). A faint scent, reminiscent of cinnamon and ozone, may linger in caecilia hunting grounds, warning savvy dungeoneers of their possible presence. The tooth of a Caecilia is rumored to enhance spells of an earthy nature." 

Now what's interesting about this is the fact that neither entry counterdicts the other. These could actually be merely different species or life stages of the same alien monsters from The Beyond. For our own Hudson River  City game the Caecilia are alien horrors that lurk around whenever a magus has been dallying to much with the Beyond. The Caecilia are corrupted lifelorms that have close ties to cults that use a form of unearthly Lovecraftian magic and they have ties to Bholes within our campaigns. The Caecilia are found wherever blood and magick have been spilt in the name of the Old Gods. 

The  Caecilia manifest whenever a gateway to the Beyond is found. They begin to grow and adapt to our reality very quickly. They hunger for the life and flesh of Earthly life. Any Earthly life that they can find is far game to these monsters. These horrors are fast multiplying branching off 1d6 worm spawn once they find a suitable food source. They are not only tolerated but actively summoned by wizards and occultists because of the fact that they actively sweat a gold like compound or  substance. They leave this behind along with a calcium like depoisit from thier feedings. This 'treasure' like substance is 99.9 % pure gold but is found in a matrice of human bone or animal calcuim as a waste product. 
The  Caecilia are also drawn to feed on psionic energies and so will seek out the flesh of psychics or shamans to feed upon.  This happens numerous times across the stars as the wizard or pychic opens the wrong doors. And instantly regrets it. 
In the Beyond there are often found  'Caecilia pits' places of thousands or millions of the monsters writhing together in obscene displays of inverted psycho sexual energies. The  'Caecilia pits' are the source of immense occult powers and are found in the wastelands of the side time Atomic War wastelands.  'Caecilia pits' beam occult power to the Lovecraftian gods & demons of inner reaches of the qlippoth.

Recently we had an encounter deep in the wastelands of  our Wretched Apocalypse game with a  'Caecilia pit' but it was merely a 10 mile across pit filled with tentacles. The players had no idea what it was after leaving the scene. Actually neither did I but now?! Yeah it was  a  'Caecilia pit' & there were rumors about Lovecraftian horrors after the players encountered an old mutant fortune teller in 

Apocalyptic Territories: Wasted Americana. 

The Sanity Erodes - - Sine Nomine Publishing's Cities Without Number rpg & The Red Room's Orbital Decay

 Over the weekend I got together with a fellow gamer Paul, who reminded me of the fact that we were due to play a Silent Legions Rpg  Phantasm campaign. Then our mutual friend Steve passed & that fell by the wayside. And over the weekend I found those campaign notes. What's interesting is that at the time I had taken the Phantasm gates of the Tall Man to lead into a whole cloth Stars Without Numbers sector. Different gates led to different time periods then the Tall Man sorta fades into the background.This blog post is going to links back up with this post here.  


 I agree with Martin Ralya's Silent Legions comments from the Rpg Geek site; "I like Silent Legions, but I wanted to like it more than I do. It has all of the hallmarks of a Sine Nomine book: clear writing, lots of tools for your sandbox, fun bits to play with.But there's less "faction move" stuff than I was hoping for, and considerably more adventure prep than I wanted -- I wanted zero session prep. Seeding the sandbox with adventures I have to write ahead of time is a dealbreaker.I wanted a Lovecraftian sandbox, and all the other Sine Nomine books I own delivered sandboxes, so it came as a surprise that this one is a sandbox full of plotted adventures. That's weak sauce."

"I guess the alternative is seeding it with Call of Cthulhu modules, but then I might as well just play Call of Cthulhu. Which would be shame, because I like the house system here, particularly for its deadly combat. I've played SWN, and it's a breeze in play; Silent Legions looks just as good."

Going over these campaign  notes I can see where Silent Legion hooks into Stars Without Numbers. Now with the Red Room's the Wretched New Flesh Postcards for Aviladad rpg on the scene I can really see this taking off. Especially if with a us of a combination of Wretched Darkness & the  Orbital Decay rpg setting book. as I stated last time, " Our own campaign is going to take place on the meanstreets of a cyberpunk backwater city. The megacorporations are starting to explore nearby alternative realities and dimensions. And the leap frogging in occult/high technologies are allowing humanity to gain contacts with outside forces that could  easily potentially wreck humanity. " 

Right so according to my notes the PC's encounter the undead of the Tall Man within our campaign city and then the time space gates. And accordingly they run into the back alleys of Avilidad via Fish Wives Games Cyber City Block 001 & finds Switchblade City 01: Randy's Pool Hall (Modern Generic).

The idea here was to start the pool hall & make the NPC  patrons a bit more cybernetic or what not with Stars Without Number. Now that  Cities Without Number rpg book is on the scene it's quite easy that we're going to bring things to a far more sinister direction. 
That being said I really love the monsters within the Wretched New Flesh Postcards for Aviladad rpg. 
So according to our notes there really are other forces at work within the city. The alien realms are starting to encroach upon this reality. 

Go down the wrong alley and you could end up not coming back at all. But this also leads into the fact of why I chose the pool hall as the central starting point for this campaign. 
One is the familarity of my own childhood having grown up around pool halls as a kid. And the sorts of scum that we find within a not typical Cyberpunk bio/cybernetic horror campaigns. 

Starting on a smaller scale allows the DM to scale the encounters to the PC's. This is after all an OSR game. Out of time and out of place means that the forces of outside are primed to exploit the PC's in many and possibly horrific ways. 

Cracks In The Plaster of Reality - Sine Nomine Publishing's Cities Without Number rpg & The Red Room's Orbital Decay

 So over the last couple of months I've been following the steady progress of writer/designer Kevin Crawford and Sine Nomine Publishing's progress on  the cyberpunk RPG Cities Without Number rpg book. He's been taking it through various incarnations & changes with little fanfare but a lot of fan or player input. But a recent post by Twitter buddy Redshift has me thinking that perhaps there's been a misstep on my part. Red Shift suggests using the Red Room's the Wretched New Flesh Postcards for Aviladad rpg combined with  the cyberpunk RPG Cities Without Number rpg book. As for myself I remain skeptical & instead with use a combination of Wretched Darkness & Orbital Decay rpg setting book.

'Why Orbital Decay?!' The whole reason is in the tag line on Orbital Decay;"Building upon the surreal and nightmarish world of Avalidad, Orbital Decay explores the depths of human ambition, desperation, and depravity as we venture beyond Earth’s atmosphere, establishing orbital stations and colonies on other planets within the solar system. This setting draws heavy inspiration from iconic films such as Alien, Aliens, Outland, Escape from New York, Stalker, Solaris, Event Horizon, and Pandorum, expertly weaving themes of isolation, claustrophobia, desperation, fear, and horror into the fabric of its narrative. As humanity reaches for the stars""
Now we've done a lot with the Invisible College rpg and the Red Room's the Wretched New Flesh Postcards for Aviladad rpg. And that's fine those world grinding occult conspiracies are going to come home to roost later on. Our own campaign is going to take place on the meanstreets of a cyberpunk backwater city. The megacorporations are starting to explore nearby alternative realities and dimensions. And the leap frogging in occult/high technologies are allowing humanity to gain contacts with outside forces that could  easily potentially wreck humanity. 

The vigilantes of Hawlett City are a part of this campaign acting as muscle against the forces of darkness and the supernatural. The real issue here comes from the occult realms that are invading Earth from the alien Hells from the outside. Ancient demons and Lovecraftian entities have been shut out of  humanities world eons ago. Now they've returned for better or worse and the warzones are heating up. 
Time is collapsing and even humanity's past or side time isn't safe. Adventurers from  Wretched Époque maybe be visiting the mean and alien streets of our campaigns. 

Weird aliens, strange gods and dark forces along with thier worshippers could be trading bullets in the dark alleys of our upcoming campaign. 
How is this a different campaign then say 2d6 Hostile rpg that we currently run. There are a number of ways and these include the fact that many of these rpg  concepts are going to come from folklore, the occult, and more. More Coming Up!