VERISIMILITUDE, MAGIC, AND THE FANTASY TECHNOTHRILLER

Verisimilitude is a word that gets tossed around a bit nowadays. It means nothing more than internal consistency; it's a form of realism but not realism in a traditional sense. You can have magic but you need to keep in mind the impact that magic would have on the world. Coming up with coherent settings and worlds that have different base laws can be challenging and fun, an elaborate thought experiment, metaphysics for gamers. But it's not just magic that defines a game or setting; other, less obvious features define the world as well. For instance, the rules of character development and combat can significantly impact the "reality" of a world as well. In this article I talk a bit about how one might look at taking the d20 system, applying it to a world, and seeing what falls out. Towards the end I discuss how (and why) you could take a world with pretty traditional fantasy physics and run technothriller style stories and adventures in it.

INTERNAL CONSISTENCY

There's absolutely nothing inconsistent with running a technothriller using the d20 system, hit points, armor classes, levels, fire-and-forget magic, and all. You just need to recognize that the rules of the game describe the physical laws of the world and you're off and running. It can even be fun to extrapolate the results of such a set of rules. If most armies consist of first level warriors then nations and armies will place a massive value on their experienced soldiers. A tenth level fighter with good equipment can level an entire platoon; put a couple of them together with arcane and divine support and they could quite feasibly wipe out an entire battalion (assuming the other side doesn't have similar people). When you recognize this you have two ways of responding. You can complain about the lack of realism in the game and switch to a set of rules where the average character has a lifespan of three adventures. Or you can embrace the genre assumption that elite men and women can face down armies and change the fate of a nation.

If you prefer the more gritty route you don't necessarily need to dump the d20 system; if what you desire is a low-powered campaign you can accomplish that by simply lowering the relative power of the players (i.e. raising the power levels of everyone else). One important choice you need to make when conceptualizing a campaign is what levels you'll assign to the non-player characters in the world. Is the average trained soldier first level? If so then you'll likely need to do some hard work to make your world gritty. However, perhaps first level characters and non-player characters represent raw recruits, conscripts, and militia. Using a standard military ranking system you can simply assign soldiers class levels equal to their military numerical rank. Thus a private first class, one who's been in the service for about a year or two, comes in as an E-3, or a third level fighter (or, perhaps, warrior if you use NPC classes). A sergeant is an E-5 in the United States Army so he'd count as a fifth level fighter. In this system most people with a few years under their belt fall between third and seventh level. Going this route means that players likely begin as rookies, move up through the respectable levels, then advance on to being much better than everyone else once they get to roughly ninth level. They'll still start out life better than most characters because they'll have better attributes; they'll also be more powerful than NPCs of a similar level because they'll likely have better magic items. However, even high level characters won't be able to laugh off a platoon of soldiers. This approach has a couple of downsides. First, you'll have to do more work when preparing NPCs because many of them will have a few levels. Second, a private will have trouble taking out another private with one attack. I don't take this second downside as problematic from a realism standpoint. In real wars it takes soldiers a lot of bullets before they actually kill someone; in fact, the d20 system is downright unrealistically lethal when you take a broader view of the stuff it attempts to model; of course, other more "realistic" games are actually even worse in this regard. If you're willing to accept the limits of the d20 system's level of abstraction then treating well-trained soldiers (a U.S. PFC certainly qualifies as that) as third level characters can actually be fairly accurate. A significant advantage of the gritty method is that it extends the game-life of your monsters. You can start players out against first level orcs (militia or conscripts) then advance them through veteran orcs and on to elite orcs as they advance in level. When doing this I suggest distinguishing orcs by regiment or organizational affiliation. Players should be able to look at an orc's unit insignia and have an idea of how tough he is in the same way that we can get an idea of how tough someone is by finding out if they're a member of the 82nd Airborne or Delta Force. This even adds flavor to your campaign.

If going the epic/heroic route try to keep in mind the impact that would have on the world. You can limit the impact by assuming that player characters and the kind of NPCs you see in modules are pretty rare, as rare as superheroes in a comic book world for instance. You'll need to come up with your own justification for that though since nothing intrinsically prevents other people from getting experience points too. Moreover, in doing this you effectively turn your players into superheroes and superheroes aren't really the kind of people who hang out broke in bars looking to scrape a few coins together from the odd job here and there. What's even a bit harder to swallow is that, while heroic level characters are pretty rare there seems to be an endless supply of bad guy versions of them. Also, no castle is safe in this kind of game. In fact, armies are largely superfluous since the king and his entourage could go and defeat everyone himself. One might use armies to police the peasantry, but they don't protect you from the real threats, and they can't help you take out the bad guy. This might be too far from our physics for your tastes but take it as a hypothesis for your world for a bit. Nations have armies to occupy land and keep the riff-raff in line; but the armies have little wartime value. During war what matters most is where the big guys go and which of them win their fights. This puts the players at the absolute center of the game and that can be a lot of fun. If your players defeat the 15th level enemy general then the battle has already been won. You can pass the enemy army's defeat off as loss of morale but everyone really knows what happened. The enemy army cannot actually fight the players and win; it can only run from them, and so it surrenders.

In the Second World Sourcebook and most of the supplements I produce (whether for the Second World or more generic) I follow the lower relative power assumption. Player characters are special because they have good attributes and find themselves fighting powerful creatures with potent magic items to loot. However, a third level character is roughly equivalent to well-trained soldier; they should still respect the sergeants because the sergeants can kick them around some. Given that there's about one sergeant per four common soldiers that puts a lot of fifth level characters in the U.S. Army. I'd adjust these numbers a bit; perhaps a veteran private soldier in the Second World weighs in at second level and sergeants float at third or fourth level. You can even gauge a rough life experience system off this. Well-trained soldiers have perhaps two years of experience and you make sergeant after about four to six years. By simply giving people 1,000 experience points per year after the age of eighteen you can model this quite nicely. After one year of solid training you make second level, matching up with a soldier out of modern basic training and a little field experience. A sergeant makes fourth level after six years, which is just about right. Tack on some bonus experience for surviving a few tough battles and you've got an elite soldier or veteran and apply occasional factors for intensity of training. You can multiply by a factor greater than one for intensive training and short lived races, or a factor of lower than one for longer lived races (assuming they train a bit more lackadaisically) and for people later in life who have fallen into a routine. This will get you a world filled with a fair number of NPCs in the fourth to sixth level range and some elite NPCs floating in the 7 to 10 range. For example, a human hits 10th level at the age of 73 using this method with no modifications.

Alternatively, you can go with a more direct method of distributing levels in your world. Simply assume that half the population is first level. For each level above 1 halve the population at or above that level again. This gives the following chart:

The above values actually seem pretty acceptable. Remember that they'd give you the number of characters of a given level in total; thus you'd still need to distribute the various classes amongst them. For example, in a city of one million people you'd have 61 fourteenth level characters. Perhaps 5 of them are wizards, 10 clerics, 15 fighters, 15 rogues, and then an assortment of others. There'd be a 95% chance that the city had a 20th level character in it. Using this all you'd need to do is assign a population to a region of your world then distribute the class levels throughout the region. You should probably play with the increase values for long-lived races a bit but otherwise it gives you a good general idea of what the population looks like.

Once you've got the population breakdown you can start to extrapolate what that means for your world. For a big nation or city there's actually a reasonable supply of high powered characters floating around. Once you start getting a fair number of characters over eighth level, you start to really change the way the world would look. Arcane spells at level four and higher would have a significant strategic effect if fairly readily available. As you can tell from the above chart a city the size of Second World New York (approximately 800,000 people) is going to have over 3,000 eighth level characters. If even 5% of those characters were arcane spellcasters that would come out to 150 of 'em. 150 people who could potentially cast Scrying. 150 people capable of crafting magic items and needing a steady supply of material components to do so. 150 people out of 800,000 is a tiny fraction, not enough to start mass-producing carpets of flying. But there are enough of them that any power group would be foolish not to use the resources they represent; and the foolish power groups would have gotten absorbed or destroyed by the un-foolish ones a long time ago; and what you'd have left are groups that know how to employ the powers at their disposal; and that's why natural selection is a potent force that doesn't just apply to biology.

Counterpoint: Powerful characters are mavericks and wouldn't work for anyone else; magic is a mysterious force and cannot and should not be turned into a commodity. Any time you have a resource and trade exists that resource acquires a value. If more than one person or group can supply the resource it will gravitate towards a value determined by the market. Perhaps some people will lock it up in their room but there are always others who will look at that really nice mansion or yacht and make the deal. It may or may not be true that everyone has a price; but what's definitely true is that some people have a price, quite often a pretty reasonable one, and that's all you need to create a market. Second reply: relativity, quantum mechanics, and horse racing are mysterious forces but we have pretty good accounts of the first two and certainly commodify the third. I don't even know what it would mean to say that magic is a mysterious force and that this somehow takes it off the market. Perhaps it means that magic is like art, you never know how to produce quality versions of it. Or perhaps magic is like the weather, almost completely unpredictable. Certainly art, the weather, and the stock market are mysterious processes but that's because they fail to behave in regular ways. Magic in the d20 system certainly doesn't fall into that category; in fact magic in practically every game system obeys rather straight forward dynamics; sometimes those dynamics are probabilistic but they're highly predictable probabilities. Quantum mechanics is a probabilistic theory and it's considered one of the most (if not the most) successful scientific theories in human history. You could come up with a truly mysterious magic system, one that operated like the weather or stock market, but you probably wouldn't see many people play a mage in that game (or those that did wouldn't have any friends). I take mysterious as meaning just that we don't understand the underlying dynamics; we don't have a complete or satisfactory explanation of how it works. And that's just fine; I don't have a complete understanding of how my phone works or how VCR's turn magnetic tape into television images but I can still use the stuff. As a matter of fact we probably have a pretty poor understanding of lots of things but as long we know how to get them to do what we want we're fine.

THE HIGH MAGIC TECHNOTHRILLER

I consider this one of the most interesting ideas to explore in the Second World books. The influence of modern ideas and strategies on a world limited in technology but strong in magic can make for fascinating story ideas and new ways of telling old tales. Technothrillers are the kinds of books Tom Clancy writes. Mission: Impossible is perhaps one of the earliest forms of technothriller. Technothrillers have a strong connection to spy and detective stories but they place a heavier emphasis on technical accuracy and internal consistency. In a technothriller we love to read about the details; we love to find out how an enemy agent is identified via a blurry satellite image. On the face of it one might think that a story (or game) needs to be horribly realistic to capture the technothriller feel. One might worry that you need a combat system that keeps track of current blood volume and pressure. Flat out it might seem that you couldn't ever get the feeling of gritty realism from a game with elves and wizards. However, realism isn't the key feature of a technothriller, at least not when realism is taken as being the accurate modeling of the physics of our world. What matters for a technothriller is internal consistency. Plot elements happen for a reason and if the players think about the plot elements they will understand why they happened. Actions have consequences and everything within the setting or story makes sense once you understand the axioms of the setting.

To run a technothriller style campaign make some basic assumptions. Powerful organizations recognize the value of their people. They recognize that a skilled rogue or fighter can do a lot of damage when placed strategically. They recognize that the non-combat applications of arcane and divine magic are terribly potent. And they also learn something from the First World, that combined arms teams act as force multipliers. By orchestrating and synchronizing the operations of their teams, by establishing standard operating procedures, they can increase the effectiveness of their operations drastically. While one might worry that this commodifies magic it does so in a good way. First, magic is no more common or mundane than spy satellites and cutting edge technology in the modern world. Second, magic is a commodity only to the extent it would be forced to become a commodity were it to exist in the real world. Magic still works differently and offers different advantages than technology. A crystal ball does what no spy satellite could ever do and, if you had the wealth of a nation at your command you'd realize that 70,000 gold pieces would be a steal for something with that power and flexibility. Ultimately though, equipment takes a back seat to personnel in a fantasy setting. The toys don't do anywhere near as much work as the people and powerful organizations will come to realize that it's their people that keep them safe and accomplish their goals. And they'll pay whatever it takes to keep those people loyal.

When running adventures in the technothriller mode you need to have a fair bit of information ready to hand to the players. This shouldn't be a problem; make two copies of the maps and provide one sans key and codes. The quality of the player map should depend on the quality of the organization's intel. The players should also have access to a substantial portion of the history of their target; again you can just read some stuff off from the background information you possess and perhaps a little bit extrapolated from the details of the scenario. By throwing around jargon like intel, intrusion, extraction, countermeasures, and exfiltration you can help get the players in the mood. This is a high-speed, low-drag operation and they're just the sorts to get it done. The structure of the adventure will shift a bit too. It might still be a site-based dungeon crawl but where most dungeon exploration focuses on the room to room, encounter to encounter movement, a technothriller will treat the site holistically. Players already have at least a sketch map so they should plan a route in advance, have a strategy for attacking the location and leave egress routes in case things go south. They may have external assets capable of providing direction from base (such as the Blue Room for the Blue Conglomerate); this can also provide valuable communication between separated units. Another feature of a technothriller style adventure is that it will have a more specific goal and the goal should take precedence over everything else. The players mission is to acquire or defeat a particular thing and once that's accomplished they may very well get out of Dodge. This makes these kinds of adventures better for city games; go into a building, get something, and get out. It also means that scenarios may turn out shorter since players don't need to explore every last inch of the site. When making your own adventures this allows you to simplify things a bit but don't over-simplify. You should put stuff on the map that you're pretty sure the players will avoid just so that they get a sense of value from their planning. By thinking ahead they avoid encounters they didn't need to fight and thereby achieve their mission more efficiently. Another feature of the technothriller is the time-sensitivity of a mission. You should mix this up a bit. For some scenarios give the players a week or more to prepare, scout, and gather intelligence. For other missions though have them come up and require resolution quickly so that the players need to figure things out as they go along. Remember though that if you require an entire mission to be completed in less than one day then spellcasters get only one batch of their magic. Try to set such missions for about 4 to 5 encounters, more if the players fail to look for efficient mission routes.