Originally Published July 14th, 2000

When you think about the typical roleplaying game made available over the internet for free, the thing that springs to mind is that it is, above all else, free. Because there is no serious investment necessary to present the material to us, we see a cascade of secondary effects as the standard norm: Poor presentation. Poor artwork. Questionable system design. Lots of rehashed ideas. Little research. Less development. No support.

If we wanted to generalize a little more we’d note that most freebies are one-man shows, and, thus, even if something stands out for some reason, it will usually never stand out in more ways than one or two. You might get a good artist, but what are the odds of them also being a good writer? And if they happen to be both, how likely is it they’re going to be good at system design, too?

So the odds are against you when you start surfing around looking through these freebies. But there are a lot of diamonds out there – and not all of them are in the rough. What you need is a little guidance to point you in the right direction…

Which brings us to Children of Fire.

The first thing you’ll notice when you go to the webpage are the lavish illustrations which accompany the text. While lacking substantial content, the richness of visual design which supports the skillfully utilitarian lay-out of text and information not only supplements the writing (while not overpowering it or distracting from it), but also lets us begin checking things off of our mental checklist: Good presentation. Strong artwork.

Is there anything lying beneath this visual feast, though? Or are we looking at a shiny apple with a rotten core?

The central concept of Children of Fire is that the PCs are angels (the children of fire) sent to Earth to protect humanity (the children of clay) — both from itself, and from other supernatural forces (including the obvious fallen angels, but also the Grigori, the Anakim, the Nephilim, and human Sorcerers). This is territory which has been well-covered before, so the key question really becomes whether or not Children of Fire succeeds at bringing anything new to the arena: It does.

The problem a game of angels has is that, when you get right down to it, angels – as they are understood today in popular culture – are simply not interesting characters to play. An interesting character is a flawed character – a character who has to struggle against themselves as much as an exterior foe. Angels, on the other hand, are perceived as perfect beings who wander the universe doing nothing but good. Thus a typical game of this nature will have players taking on the roles of lost or even fallen angels, or it will “modernize” the angels by sullying them in one way or another.

Ironically, Children of Fire avoids the problems which typically lead to “modernization” by simply turning back the hands on the clock. Instead of adopting the cliches of today, CoF opts to base its setting on the rich mythology which was understood in ages past, but which has been lost in the gloss of the 20^th century. Backed up with an array of solid research, Erich Wambach (the author) succeeds at bringing a very different look to some familiar territory. The nine choirs are flawed creations, but even in their imperfection they are viewed with awe and fear by the bulk of humanity.

So, we have some fresh ideas which are backed up with strong research. We can knock a couple more slots off of our checklist. What about system design?

Children of Fire uses a simple, relatively loose, set of rules based around a fairly standard 2d10 mechanic (roll the dice, add a score from the character sheet, compare to a difficulty number set by the nature of the task and the GM). This is a good fit for the material, amply covering the broad nature of angelic abilities.

Character creation is a ten step program, but focuses primarily on the assignation of points to various Aspects (Knowledge, Understanding, Power, Vigor, and Glory – which are roughly equivalent to Attributes in most games) and Virtues (Justice, Prudence, Temperance, and Fortitude – which are a mapping of the angel’s moral make-up). This entire system, while bearing semblance to a typical set of character creation rules, actually emphasizes the utterly alien nature of angels. The fact that angels are quantified in ways which are completely different from the ways in which humans are quantified is a subtle, but powerful, game design tool.

Those are the strengths. Now, what are the weaknesses? The primary failing of Children of Fire is a lack of depth. There are only sixty pages of material in the basic book and certain elements of the background material read more as introductory pamphlets, rather than a solid tour guide. On the other hand, Children of Fire is receiving continuing support (a supplement, Children of Clay, is already available) – and I expect to see the setting appropriately fleshed out. This wouldn’t be acceptable if I had paid $20 or $30 for Children of Fire, but I didn’t – and the free nature of Children of Fire allows its creators to take an approach that wouldn’t work under different circumstances.

There are also some flaws in the general presentation of the material. Although the website itself is graphically rich, the PDF file available for download is not (I would have preferred the option of downloading a larger PDF which contained the graphics). Proofreading is sadly lacking and the text is replete with typos, homonyms, and other errors (for example, the book can’t quite figure out whether it wants 250,000,000 angels or 250,000 angels). The prose intermittently becomes stilted and awkward, a problem compounded by the occasionally condescending and annoyingly self-righteous implications of “this is the way you’re supposed to game”.

Those problems aside, Children of Fire is definitely worth taking the time to check out: A simple, effective system coupled to a setting replete with possibility.

Writers: Erich Wambach
Publisher: Methods in the Madness
Price: Free!
Page Count: 60

This review was written as part of a pitch to Pyramid Magazine to publish a review column focused on free RPGs available online. (Back in 2000, I was trying really hard to land a regular column gig for one of the RPG magazines because it would’ve given me a reliable income for paying rent.) At the time, these free RPGs were still something of a novelty: GMs who’d been running their homebrewed systems could suddenly use the World Wide Web to share them with the world, and they did! I thought this was incredibly cool and downloaded literally hundreds of them. I also thought it was a shame that so many of them were basically unknown and that it would be great to shine a spotlight on them.

Pyramid bought the review, but weren’t sold on the idea of a dedicated column. C’est la vie.

DriveThruRPG and RPGNow largely brought an end to the wild west of free RPGs, with creators these days mostly preferring to make PDF versions of their games available for sale instead.

Children of Fire remained available online until just a couple years ago, but can still be found on the Internet Archive. While poking around to see if the game had a modern home on the ‘net, discovered that Wambach published a board game with the same name back in 2005.

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