Lego FU is Awesome!

Why yes, I have seen the Lego Movie. I couldn't wait any more to see it and can't wait to take my kids to see it.

I got to enjoy it on lots of levels, including the Lego FU hack. As players of Lego FU might know, I based that FU hack heavily on the Clutch Powers movie and the TT Games range. I was keen to see if there would be anything new about the ideas of Lego, or how "the Lego Universe" might work. Lego isn't something with a canon so I was open to something new.

But here's the thing about Lego. It's about recreation and re-creation. It's about building on what someone else already did. Even though Emmett is in a different world to Clutch Powers, or Batman, or the Hobbitt, or the Power Miners, etc., the same principles apply.

And what does that mean for Lego FU? It means you can play the Lego Movie with the existing Lego FU hack with only a teeny, tiny, difference for flavour. Running out of creation spark takes your minifig out of the game but makes them a minifig who always follows the instructions, including the overpriced coffee.

Now go and build your story! Lego FU is awesome!

Supermen, an adventure idea

I had an idea for an adventure but I don't think I'll get around to running it any time soon so I'm putting it out there for you to use instead. Use whichever system you like but for the sake of this discussion I'm going to use FU.

Create Characters
These have to be ordinary people with no powers and no special occupations. No special forces or police, no security guards. Accountants, plumbers, shop assistants, and the like are all good candidates. The one thing that each of them must answer is their opinion of Superman. Is he a hero? An alien who can't be trusted? A god? A freak that should be registered? Any opinion is good, and it's even better if your group has a diversity of opinions about it.

For the FU version of this, create characters as normal but only allocate one Gear slot for something from that character's mundane life.

Share Powers
Something happened to Superman. Our player characters don't know what it was, let alone who did it. Maybe it was Brainiac, or maybe Lex Luthor. Whatever it was, Superman has lost his powers and can't be found. His powers aren't gone, though. They've just found new homes in the bodies of our player characters. Assign the powers randomly to the player characters but each character gets only one of them. I like to think of Superman as having the following.

• Super strength
• Super speed
• X-ray vision
• Heat vision
• Flight (also super speed)
• Invulnerability

You might end up with unallocated powers. Create NPCs for those.

The characters have a psychic link with Superman. From time to time they get flashes of what he's experiencing. This should be enough to give them clues as to his whereabouts.

For FU, each of the powers counts as two Gear slots.

Make the characters aware of time

Without Superman around, the super-villains are starting to rise up. They're more bold. The rest of the JLA is good, but Superman has always been the heavy hitter. GM, get the villains to start affecting the lives of the individual characters in some indirect way. That is, the villain won't come after the character, but their employer might have a factory which now has to be retooled to make war robots, or the villain declares an independent nation and this affects civil liberties, or a host of other things.

Secondly, give the players the feeling that the power transfer might be permanent if not negated soon. You decide what "soon" means. A day, a week, a month. Tailor it to the speed of play. The point is to help drive the characters to action.

What's this game about?

It's about a couple of things. The characters will have to figure out if they even want to help Superman, or if they would rather have one of his powers for themselves. If they want to help, they'll need to go find Superman and then figure out how to give him his powers back. If they don't want to help, they'll either keep their powers quiet (and boring) or they'll attract attention from somewhere. Will it be from the police, from criminals, from super-villains, or from the JLA who want Superman back?

Ultimately this story is an opportunity to explore what the ordinary person would do with just a glimmer of sudden power. The story ends when you want it to, but probably if Superman actually gets his powers back and (like most super heroic comic stories) everything is restored to the way it was.

If you play Supermen, leave a comment here and let me know how it went.

 

Lego FU Thank You

The game is complete! I have the PDF in my hot little (digital) hands, and you can too!

There are some people I want to thank right now for helping me make the game.

John Reid: layout guy with a brain full of clever ideas. He spoke at me in techno-babble and then patiently explained the steps behind the babble in order to make my text look good on the page. He owns his own graphic design business, LoveHate Design.

Leith Reid: editor with more grammar-fu than I¹. I've discovered that if you have her working on your text the correct strategy is "Accept all of Leith's changes and focus on her questions instead."

My playtesters: for putting up with my corruption of their otherwise fine Star Wars game. Peter, Michael, Pam and Oskar, thank you so much.

Nathan Russell: for making FU in the first place. It is teh awesome!!!!1!!


Notes:
1. ALL PUNS ARE INTENDED AND GLORIOUS. DO NOT QUESTION THE PUN.

Iconic and Dramatic

It took me too long to figure this one out.

I'm running a game of Star Wars using the FU RPG system. It's almost a no-brainer to run. The system is easily brought to bear on the universe and all I need to do as GM is continually develop an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Star Wars universe. No problem, right?

As it turns out, that's not what I had to do at all. I have two or three players, depending on personal schedules, and they've got their own styles of play. I tried several different categories to help me understand them and bring a good game to the table. At first I thought it was FU that was letting me down. I think what I wanted from FU was a Burning Wheel experience with character development and challenged beliefs. FU doesn't do that. It can approximate it, but it'll never be Burning Wheel.

No, the actual problem was not understanding my players. Robin Laws put it best (as is often the case) with his astute categories of iconic and dramatic characters[1]. In my words, the iconic character doesn't change but is perceived to change by virtue of their exposure to different environments and encounters, whereas the dramatic character changes regardless of whether they are in the same environment or a series of different ones.

What I have in my group is at least one player who wants the experience of the iconic character and one player who wants the experience of the dramatic character. I'm not sure what the third player wants, but I'll figure it out after another game session. When this penny dropped I immediately knew how to make the games more fun for all. I need to include elements of both in each game session, in order to let the players get enough of the experience that they want from the game.

And in the last game that's precisely what I did. And it worked.


Notes
1. I choose to believe that it was Robin who invented these categories, despite all evidence you may offer.