Retribution Falls
Chris Wooding
Speaker A
00:00:09.840 - 00:01:09.240
Welcome to the Game Masters Book Club, where great fiction becomes your next great tabletop roleplaying experience.
Fred is the captain of the Keddy J, the lead scoundrel among a group of other dysfunctional ne' er Do Wells trying to make a living on the wrong side of the law.
Following a hot tip, they take on a heist, only to be set up for the biggest political hit in history.
Now Frey and his crew have to get their ship together to former lovers and aristocratic villains.
Fist fights, gunfights, dogfights, the entire Coalition Navy and the fable pirate city of Retribution Falls.
Join George Krupsky, Marshall Smith, and Eric Tricks as we race around with this misfit crew that we compare to Guardians of the Galaxy, Star wars, and of course, Firefly.
Let's get into the conversation.
And here we are back at the Game Masters Book Club.
I'm Eric Jackson and I'm here with Eric Trix and George CR and oh my God, Marshall, why did I forget your last name?
I'm the worst person ever.
Speaker B
00:01:09.880 - 00:01:10.680
It's Smith.
Speaker A
00:01:10.920 - 00:02:10.370
Here we are again to talk about some more great fiction that you can turn into your next great tabletop experience.
Today we're going to be covering Retribution Falls by Chris Woodring.
There is really no other way to start off about this than to have our game masters talk about what this book is about.
And if there is one thing this book is about, it it's about scoundrels, right?
This is absolutely a book about bad people doing bad things that eventually turns out okay.
They end up being, as the will frequently be cited Firefly TV series says, big damn heroes.
So I'm very excited to talk about this book today.
I'm going to start off with George.
George, give us the super quick introduction about your gaming journey and, and then tell us about, you know, tell us about scoundrels in your game and how you play them, how you use them.
Speaker C
00:02:10.370 - 00:04:46.400
I'm the one who picked this book, and one of the reasons for that is because it's within my wheelhouse.
I love when I'm.
Whether I'm gaming or whether I'm reading or watching a movie or TV show.
I love when you take a group of characters and you cram group of characters with different agendas, cram them together and force them to make morally ambiguous decisions.
So that's something that I've been doing for decades as a game master and to sort of roll right into the scoundrel question.
You know, one of the ways that I like to deal with if a player wants to Be scoundrel.
You'll let him.
I mean, it's pretty straight.
My.
My approach is pretty straightforward.
If someone gives me a character that I think is not going to fit, I just tell.
I'm like, here's.
Here's the game we're playing.
You can play whatever character you want, but you need to have a reason to be here.
And if the players all trust one another and you trust them, you wind up with some fun stuff.
So I ran.
For more than a decade, I ran a Star wars game that was very heavily inspired by Firefly.
We had a Jedi knee, A guy who was a former slave who was trying to bring down every slaver and big businessman that he could.
We had a gunslinger who was out for revenge, and we had a guy who everyone kind of thought was comic relief, but he was actually secretly building a criminal empire.
Early on, what happened was he almost had the.
The Jed.
The Jedi and the.
The.
The.
The guy was trying to bring down slavers at opposite ends of the moral spectrum, and they just kept pulling the other two.
The other two are in the middle and would just get pulled in every direction.
And, I mean, it was.
It was a lot of fun to watch the relationships before between those four characters develop.
And we wound up with really interesting stuff.
Like the Jedi eventually found out that the guy was trying to form a criminal empire.
Sleazy boffin was.
He was smuggling spice on their ship.
No one knew about it.
She flushed the spice in the middle of the night.
He was furious the next morning because he owed someone a huge amount of money.
And she.
And her response was, I'll help you work it off.
So it was a great moral interplay, and everyone got to be true to themselves.
The Jedi got to be a Jedi, the scoundrel got to be a scoundrel, and they managed to stay together.
Speaker A
00:04:46.860 - 00:04:50.820
The.
That's.
That's.
That's a sign of real mature gamers.
That's fantastic.
Speaker C
00:04:50.820 - 00:04:56.460
Yeah.
Yes.
Well, I. Yeah, I mean, it's.
It's a.
It's a group that's been together for quite some time.
So.
Speaker A
00:04:56.620 - 00:05:01.580
Go ahead, Eric.
Pick it up, scoundrel.
Tell people who you are and tell them about scoundrels.
Speaker D
00:05:01.660 - 00:07:10.280
I.
My name's Eric, longtime gamer player in the Philadelphia region.
I tend not to play scoundrels.
I have, on a rare, rare occasion, done them.
But I try to play a scoundrel as someone who could have been a hero.
Maybe they're trained.
They have that same training.
They're great with rifles, soldiers, knights.
But they're damaged individuals, something is causing them not to.
Not to see the good side of people, but to just fear that bad side of people and to lean into that.
As a gm, it's something that I've always said, like, you can have that one Wolverine in the group of X Men if you're playing a heroic game, but you can't have all Wolverines unless the campaign is going to be written that way.
So you can have one disruptive player who plays that scoundrel whenever.
When I'm running something heroic, because, let's say sometimes you need that guy to do the dirty work.
But they're recognizing as a gm, there's that difference between a player who's playing a gray scoundrel type versus someone who's going to be disrupting to the party.
Beyond good role playing that, you know, George described there, it's great to have that good role playing back and forth.
But I always found I struggled with it a little bit when some players were like, I'm going to play a morally gray character.
And really what they were doing was playing an evil character and then having to sort of pull them aside and say, like, hey, listen, this is taking in the campaign really away from the other players and is causing a divide.
You know, you have a paladin on one side, an assassin on the other side.
That could work, depending how it's played.
But if the assassin's going around killing all the good guys, it becomes a problem with the paladin.
So you don't want the players at odds.
So it's really.
I think when I played my morally gray character, it was a version of Jugger Grimrod from the comics Alien Legion, if anyone's familiar with it.
Speaker A
00:07:10.280 - 00:07:11.680
Not me, but it sounds good.
Speaker D
00:07:12.240 - 00:07:34.970
Where.
Yeah, so Juggler Grimrod was this badass soldier who essentially recognized that he attached him so he understood he is not a good person.
A little bit of a Amos from Expanse would be an updated version of this.
Someone who attaches themselves to good people because they recognize they're not one and they want to do good in their own twisted way.
Speaker A
00:07:35.050 - 00:07:38.250
Marshall, you want to weigh in Scoundrels?
Speaker B
00:07:38.330 - 00:08:36.320
Absolutely.
So my name is Marshall Smith.
I've been playing since Redbox D and d. So over 40 years now.
I've done a little bit of writing for a couple of different properties.
7Th Sea Warlord, a couple others.
So on a player side, one of my white whales, a character I've always wanted to try, is the Marquis de Carabas from Neverwhere, who is a Wheeler and a Dealer and very amoral, but specifically amoral, not evil.
He's fine with doing the good thing, especially if there's a prophet in it.
He's not opposed to doing good.
He's just the moral questions are not the important questions.
And I got to play it once in a shadow run game that I had a huge amount of fun with.
And then we never played again after the first session.
That was very.
Speaker A
00:08:37.200 - 00:08:40.080
The greatest.
The greatest bbeg of all scheduling.
Speaker B
00:08:40.240 - 00:09:44.860
Yep.
From a GM side.
One thing that I always want to make sure with Scoundrels is on the one side.
Yes, let your players play Scoundrels from an above the table, allowing things kind of thing.
But in the game, in universe, make sure to push back on it.
You've got to have everybody not trust the scoundrel, because otherwise the scoundrel doesn't work.
If you just let the scoundrel get away with everything, it's this.
The character doesn't work.
Right.
But you need to have the police after them.
You need to have other criminals after them or refusing to work with them in the same way that in Retribution Falls, they have a growing list of places they can't go back to.
And that's the sort of thing you need to make sure the scoundrels have so that the character means something.
Speaker A
00:09:45.260 - 00:13:10.840
Agreed.
And I think where we're coming down on this and where I'm going to bring my story in is in the idea that I think Scoundrels.
Scoundrels can draw a lot of other players agency away because they can break rules that the other characters won't, which can occasionally be very useful.
That's the way it used to work in the old days, when you didn't want your paladin who could literally lose their character class if the rest of the party ran around being murder hobos all the time.
So that, you know, that literally got into, like, Mr. T, a team, knocking people out so that you could get stuff done.
But where I think this comes down to is this idea that.
That when you play with Scoundrels, you're playing with people with different sorts of moral codes.
And what's important is that they still have some sort of goal or code and they're still the hero of their own story.
Right.
They have a reason to do the things they want to do.
It's not just, I'm, I'm the bad guy.
Right.
If you have that, then they're just, you know, they're just opposed to things.
But if they have a thing that they're doing if they're building a criminal empire.
And I assume, George, that there was a reason one was building a criminal empire.
Even if it's just, I want to be sure that I'm safe for the rest of my life, whatever that is.
The character development, as long as the character development is there, you can then have characters like your Jedi help them get.
Get to whatever it is they want to get to without necessarily breaking quite as many laws or figuring out a way to hold off the.
Those.
Hold off the systems that are working against those.
Those scoundrels that Marshall just mentioned.
Like, you can't let them get away with it.
And the only way or the only way they can get away with it is through the, through the party.
Right?
The idea that the party itself is this group that can bind together in some way and help everyone else survive through this process.
And one thing that we didn't bring up that I noticed is I didn't hear anybody talk about a group of all scoundrels like our book is.
Our book is.
I know I can remember.
And this, I believe, is one of the great tropes of all of the process of playing role playing games.
The first character you always play is the heroic version of yourself.
And the second or third character that you play is almost always the evil version of yourself.
Someone always play.
You're always like, I'm going to play.
I'm going to play the hero.
And then the next one that you're going to play as well.
I found the hero thing.
What if I were the bad guy?
And so that happens.
And I think once you get.
Once you've played those things a couple of times and you've been through it, it becomes more about telling this story about this character and what they want from it.
And what they want might not be legal and might not even be terribly moral, but if it has a reason and that reason is good, I think the rest of the party can get behind it.
And I think that's what makes a great scoundrel.
You know, that they are.
They have a story.
And it's a story that isn't just, I'm bad and no one else can participate in it.
Because as Eric said, the whole point here is we don't want that character pulling from everybody else.
We want them to be part of this joint story.
Because that's what we do here in Tabletop Roleplay, we tell joint stories.
Speaker D
00:13:11.400 - 00:13:37.690
I just had a quick follow up question to everyone.
Has anyone had success with their players taking someone from scoundrel to hero.
Very much like some of the characters in the book.
Because we've, I've heard people playing scoundrels.
Even my character in the example states sort of on that sort of violent sort of scoundrelish person.
But have we actually transitioned those scoundrels to heroes?
Speaker A
00:13:37.850 - 00:15:12.430
I, I can say that currently I am playing in a campaign where I am playing a former mafia enforcer who is, who's slowly realizing that he's now an avatar of some God because that's the way this one is going.
But he, yeah, hey, it's cool.
But he is very much a.
And Elliot from Leverage, he is very much a guy who did many, many bad things and he's now working with this crew and he feels as though he has become their protector.
There's a lot of, A lot of them are academics.
They're very sort of sheltered.
And so he always feels like he's like walking around keeping the eggheads and safe from themselves when they do stupid stuff like you.
You guys don't even know what you're talking about.
Here, let me just get this for you.
Let me talk to my cousin and we'll see.
He's got cousins and he's got people and he's good.
He's.
Yeah, he's definitely a mobbed up guy, but he's trying really hard not to get pulled back into the life.
And there's been a couple of polls so far that have been very close where previous deaths have been called in.
And as we've stated, the reason why my character didn't end up going back to the life is because other people in the party chipped in, mate.
We, you know, we ran, we ran an op together.
We did a thing.
We found the guy before the, before I had to kill the guy or, you know, that kind of a thing.
There were opportunities for people to keep me from being, becoming or dropping back into that bad guy field.
So that's, that's how I, that's.
I've done that.
Eric,.
Speaker D
00:15:13.870 - 00:15:18.110
Very cool.
Of course you brought up Elliot, who's one of my favorite leverage characters.
Speaker A
00:15:18.350 - 00:15:19.310
Elliot's amazing.
Speaker C
00:15:20.880 - 00:15:41.600
In the, in the Star wars game, eventually everyone, well, the, the, the crime lord Bothan, that player bowed out of the game eventually.
But the, the gunslinger who was also sort of a scoundrel and the, the guy who wanted to bring down slavery, who had a good, he had a good goal, but his main way of accomplishing it was murder.
Speaker D
00:15:42.240 - 00:15:42.960
Darned.
Speaker C
00:15:43.200 - 00:16:01.140
They.
Those two characters basically accomplish their goals with the help of the Jedi and then became heroes alongside the Jedi.
So they over, over the long run, I mean it was a 10, 10 year game over the long run.
Everyone wound up fighting the good fight at the end.
Speaker D
00:16:01.220 - 00:16:02.020
Oh, that's awesome.
Speaker C
00:16:02.020 - 00:16:10.540
I will say one of, one of my favorite D D characters I've played was a wound up being a, an ultimately redeemed anti paladin.
Speaker A
00:16:10.540 - 00:16:13.060
Yeah, there you go.
That's a good one.
I like that.
Speaker C
00:16:13.140 - 00:16:42.860
And the, that one kind of similar to the character you're talking about, Eric.
The, the character was a tactician and powerhouse in battle.
So even though the other players did not want him there, they needed him.
And our goals were just similar enough that he was like, okay, well I'll, I'll go with them 3/4 of the way and then I'll betray them.
And then wound up in the end going, you know what?
I guess I'm not going to betray them today.
There's always tomorrow for that.
Speaker A
00:16:44.460 - 00:17:40.780
Most likely kill you in the morning, Wesley.
Fantastic.
All right, so let's talk about this book, Retribution Falls by Chris Woodring.
After being framed for a botched heist turned political assassination, Captain Darion Frey and his misfit crew of the steampunk sky ship, the Kenny J.
Must flee from the law, bounty hunters, the Coalition Navy, the elite Centurion Knights, and their fellow pirate scoundrels.
As they try to solve the mystery of their setup, they discover that one, they are actually stronger together and can therefore face their dark pasts.
And two, this conspiracy is wider and deeper than they thought and it will lead to the legendary haven of all sky pirates.
Retribution Falls, full of criminal characters, daring skyship battles, demonic magic, and fast paced wit and action.
Chris Woodring's steampunk cosplay of Firefly is great, good fun.
Speaker D
00:17:40.940 - 00:17:41.820
That's pretty good.
Speaker A
00:17:42.620 - 00:18:12.280
As George mentioned, I didn't include it here, but it is in my notes.
Yes, this book does strike me as.
I'm just going to throw this out here right now.
This is, this is very much Firefly with the serial numbers, you know, filed off and a, and brass paint and some gears and like a gold tooth and some demons.
That's it.
Like, it's like, it's just.
You just threw some stuff on top of it.
On top of that said, yeah, look, it's completely different.
You can't see it, but.
Speaker C
00:18:12.520 - 00:18:19.720
It's like, it's like you took every character for Firefly, gave most of them a different job, gave them a different weakness and said, go,.
Speaker A
00:18:19.720 - 00:18:50.290
Yeah, it's, it's.
But it's good.
I mean, that just talks about.
It talks about the structure, right?
Like the structure of the Firefly plot.
And we were talking about this pregame for those of you.
So if we sound a little flip about just throwing in Firefly, we have been talking about this for like 20 minutes beforehand.
Like 20 minutes yesterday too.
So I think we could easily say that the, the Misfit crew, as represented by Firefly is a strong theme in, in this story.
And any, any, any naysayers on that one.
Speaker D
00:18:50.530 - 00:19:05.830
The only naysay I'm going to throw in there is the Firefly crew.
Where they start, yes, they are scoundrels, but they are still on the more heroic side than where the.
Then Frey and Katie J.
Start.
Speaker C
00:19:06.310 - 00:19:23.830
That is, I would agree with you.
This is almost like season zero of Fire, like a Firefly.
Although Whedon did want to start much darker and the network wouldn't let him.
So I think that there is an alternate universe where Firefly starts out much closer to this.
Speaker A
00:19:24.310 - 00:19:37.290
I had a hard time starting this book, or rather I should say getting past like chapter three.
I started it twice and I was like, no, no, I can't read about these people.
They're pissing me off.
They're just.
I'm so grouchy with them.
Like,.
Speaker C
00:19:37.530 - 00:19:38.890
They are very unpleasant,.
Speaker A
00:19:38.970 - 00:19:39.770
Pleasant people.
Speaker D
00:19:39.930 - 00:19:42.010
Not.
You were not the only one.
Speaker A
00:19:42.010 - 00:20:03.180
Yeah, I was like.
But, you know, went on.
And I was like, okay, we got this.
This is going to be good.
George, this was your book.
What's your.
You.
You sort of stated at the beginning that your.
Your favorite theme of the book is taking a bunch of ne' er do wells and smashing them together and making them do stuff.
Do you have other themes that you really.
That you think are well explored in this book that you want to talk about before we hit mechanics?
Speaker C
00:20:03.180 - 00:20:46.030
Well, I mean, I think.
And I don't want to get into the comparables, but I'll throw one out.
Last year, Superman came out and there was the theme that the true punk rock is kindness, which is fine, but to me, the real punk rock was Thunderbolts, which was a bunch of lousy people who don't want.
Don't like each other, making each other better people when they're forced to be together.
And that's.
That's what this is.
These are all people.
They're all running from something that's like.
That's another thing that I think makes it an interesting gaming hook.
They all have something they're running from, and what they run toward is each other, whether they Realize it or not.
Speaker A
00:20:46.030 - 00:20:46.510
Nice.
Speaker C
00:20:47.320 - 00:20:49.880
Well, I'll add that.
I'll add that to your themes.
Speaker A
00:20:49.880 - 00:20:55.160
There you go.
Anybody else?
If it's not Firefly, what is it and what are the themes?
Marshall?
Speaker B
00:20:55.400 - 00:21:20.130
I think one of the big themes in this book was trust, but more than just on a surface level, because it's about not only being able to trust each other, how much trust can you extend?
What are the benefits and risks, but also each character has to learn to trust themselves by the end of the book in order for it to.
Speaker A
00:21:20.770 - 00:21:26.690
Work.
Even our.
Even our.
Even our crazy, cowardly pilot.
Like all of that had to happen.
Just fantastic.
Speaker D
00:21:27.010 - 00:21:50.600
I'm going to stick with the whole scoundrel, with being damaged individuals and figuring out what their damage is and what has driven them there is what I found really interesting on all the characters.
It's that they could have started at a more heroic level if they didn't carry this damage with them.
And what happens to them as they sort of come to terms with that.
Speaker C
00:21:51.160 - 00:22:01.800
I was gonna say it's interesting that you point that out because they do take, you know, like at least three of them.
They know, started off heroic and then got broken.
Speaker D
00:22:02.280 - 00:22:02.680
Right.
Speaker C
00:22:03.080 - 00:22:04.600
And this is what we have now.
Speaker D
00:22:05.400 - 00:22:05.960
Yep.
Speaker A
00:22:06.770 - 00:25:05.630
That's your.
And there's.
There's the redemption arc.
Right.
There's that idea that that's what this is.
This is a.
This isn't necessarily.
I.
Again, I'm not.
We're not talking spinning eye Disney villains.
We're not talking NPC villains where, you know, who maybe don't have the strongest motivations.
We have characters who are trying, who've been broken and don't know how to fix themselves except to just get along.
And it isn't until something, some huge impetus forces them together and to figure out how to stay alive.
And while they're doing that, they figure out maybe they can do some good along the way.
Pretty good stuff.
That's a great story.
All right, so if you wanted to have characters do this sort of thing, what kind of mechanics could we look to tabletop roleplaying to help us do this?
I'm gonna go first, which I don't normally do because I'm the guy who picked the obvious choice on this one.
When we were talking in pregame, I think Firefly, the role playing game, is the way to go.
I played a fate version of it, but I'm going to talk about Cortex, just because I think that's the one that most people are going to have the option to play.
I think the Cortex version is great.
I think that it has a sort of gambling infused narrative which take place.
There's a, there, there's complications that are presented by the game master and then there are plot points as people succeed at different things and, and between the complications which pull people into entanglements and different kinds of predicaments and shenanigans and the plot points which allow them to drag themselves out through daring rescues.
I think Firefly is just a solid build for this game.
There's no question about that.
I will also, just because I feel like, because I know what's coming and this will help lead into some of the other stuff, I will throw in Scum and Villainy as a, as another possible version of this.
Mostly because you can get more into your dice pool by pushing yourself, but through stresses you can take a devil's bargain, which obviously happens in like one of the, in the first scene with our big betrayal to get more dice in the dice pool, I. E. Get a bigger payout.
And they have actually in here a sort of group luck mechanic called the cruise gambit where the crew as a whole gets some karmic bonuses as they do.
Good.
So all of that I think makes, along with the fact that you've got like mystics Jedi, but also possibly demon summoners at that point.
Pilots and mechanics from air battles, scoundrels and speakers and the Stitch, which is the Doctor, another great character.
All of those are represented in Scum and Villainy.
So somewhere between Firefly, the Cortex system and Scum and Villainy is where I would fall.
It would depend on the group and what we wanted to accomplish and stuff and what we were all more comfortable with.
But that's where I'd go.
I'm going to go to George next and have him start with what, what his choice is.
Speaker C
00:25:06.270 - 00:25:12.510
Not the choice I settled on, but similar to your Scum and Villainy I did.
You know, Blades in the Dark I think is a,.
Speaker A
00:25:12.910 - 00:25:13.470
Okay,.
Speaker C
00:25:13.630 - 00:25:22.830
Decent.
You know, I, I, I've never actually played Scum of Villainy, but I've read it.
While it hits a lot of the notes, I don't know that it is grimy enough for me.
Speaker A
00:25:22.830 - 00:25:23.670
Ah, okay.
Speaker C
00:25:23.670 - 00:25:42.250
I feel like Blades in the Dark is grimier and this is definitely, this is series, you know, like these people are just let old leather and oil and gears thematically.
If I were going to run it, I would do Star Wars Edge of the Empire by ffg.
Speaker A
00:25:43.370 - 00:25:44.170
Okay, cool.
Speaker C
00:25:44.490 - 00:26:11.370
Mainly because they have an obligation system that I think is great where characters can have sort of weaknesses where the obligation can be an addiction.
It can be that they're being hunted.
It can be a tragic past.
I think you guys can see where that would apply to this group.
And what you do as, as GM is at the beginning of the session, you roll randomly to see if anyone's obligation gets triggered.
Speaker A
00:26:11.770 - 00:26:12.250
Nice.
Speaker C
00:26:12.330 - 00:27:03.940
And you decide.
You can either decide, I don't.
Okay, I triggered it.
I don't really want to.
I don't want to change what I was planning for the session.
But there's still mechanical impact.
The character who.
Whose obligation is triggered is stressed out for the session and has penalties, which I think is a fun, minor way to flavor things.
So you could have, you know, in that Star wars campaign that I'm talking about, which I did, I use different Star wars mechanics for the one.
You know, the same session could be spun one way because the gunslinger is stressed because he thinks the guy is trying to seek vengeance on might be getting too close.
Or the criminal is stressed because he realized that he, you know, oh, a big debt is coming due soon.
And that is going to impact ideally both the mechanics and the role playing of.
Speaker A
00:27:03.940 - 00:27:04.740
Fantastic.
Speaker C
00:27:04.900 - 00:27:07.460
It's just a mind.
It's a.
It's a subsystem.
Yeah.
Speaker A
00:27:07.460 - 00:27:20.730
But anytime you can.
Anytime that a system has a mechanic that plays into the narrative that you are looking for always makes it a great.
That's, that's.
That's.
That's when we know we're hitting.
We're hitting gold there.
Marshall.
Speaker B
00:27:20.970 - 00:27:57.850
So my choice is a game called Swashbucklers of the Seven Skies.
Kind of an obscure indie game by a buddy of mine, Chad Undercoffler.
It is very much airship pirates now.
It's more Age of Piracy Pirates of the Caribbean style than it is the steampunk.
So if you were going to use it for Retribution Falls, you would need to tweak it so that the ships are more metal, less wood.
But otherwise a lot of it's very much the same.
It has a lot of great world building that will allow you to build out the.
What's the religious group?
Speaker C
00:27:57.850 - 00:27:58.730
Awakeners.
Speaker B
00:27:59.210 - 00:28:52.890
The Awakeners.
The Awakeners.
It would be very easy to build out with what's already in the world.
There a lot of the social stuff that's going on, there's a lot of stuff already in the setting that you can build off for all of that.
It also has a system called Gifts.
The system is PDQ prose, Descriptive qualities.
It's a very narrative system that focuses a lot more on the words that you use to describe your character than the numbers.
So gifts are qualities that you give your character and could be used very easily to reproduce the demonism that's in Retribution Falls because it also has a mechanic to it that represents a draining of your vitality very much the way demonism does in the book.
Speaker A
00:28:52.970 - 00:28:59.690
Awesome.
That's.
That's a great find.
Eric, what do you think is the mechanic that best vibes with the Retribution Falls?
Speaker D
00:29:00.650 - 00:30:47.690
First one I'm going to lean to is just 5th edition or latest Dungeons and Dragons more calling out some of their campaign settings.
So you have freeport which is really covers like high seas pirates, ships and plenty of places for scoundrels to abound.
But then you have more steampunk magic settings.
The two particular you can run something like this with be Eberron.
I would probably lean Eberron, but then there's also one called Aether Skies that has floating islands and countries and aerial exploration.
But it's all in D and D so you got that magic going on.
Also.
The last one was sort of a funny thing because I had when you mentioned Elliot and Leverage was my first game of Leverage was actually using the D6Weg system and we were able to just lean into that sort of we're not playing nice people, we're doing that sort of leverage team type of thing.
Bad guys trying to do good.
So the D6Weg came to mind also that I would easily utilize for different things which does worth mentioning.
There's a leveraged tabletop role playing game.
But to duplicate Retribution Falls I think you need that natural magic system.
So whether it's DND or that WEG system, the other one is this is the 5th edition Star wars system that you can find online.
Which sort of funny because I think just Star wars in itself probably has campaign styles and world setting style suitable for playing that Han Solo, that Calrissian, that those type of scoundrels.
Speaker A
00:30:48.010 - 00:31:19.500
And I should mention that the character that I was talking about earlier that I'm currently playing in Eberron, that's where he is born and bred in.
Shan Marshall drifted in a bit more than the rest of us, but we all have started talking about some of the cool things that are in this book that can be put into other stories.
George, I'm gonna let you lead us off again and tell us if you were going to take something if you're gonna run a campaign, what elements would you want to lift from this and put into that campaign into a campaign?
Speaker C
00:31:20.210 - 00:32:12.350
Well, I'm actually gonna gonna riff off something that you know, you guys have.
We've.
We've all referenced Star wars, right?
And I think there is a.
To me, there is a direct chain from Star wars to Firefly to Retribution Falls, because winning's just ripping off Whedon.
Respectfully.
And when people ask me to describe Firefly in one sentence, it is.
Oh, my sentences.
Firefly is what Star wars grows up to be.
And what I like about this setting is the same thing.
It's the same level of complexity that I like about Firefly.
I love Star Wars.
Loved it as a kid.
Still love it.
And it's gotten far more complex.
But your.
Your original trilogy, it's black and white.
Yes, you've got the Hutts, you've got criminals, but it's Empire versus Rebels.
Speaker A
00:32:12.510 - 00:32:12.910
Right.
Speaker C
00:32:13.470 - 00:32:55.010
Here.
What I love is the triangulation of our crew and the Century Knights, who represent the government, and the Gamors, who are different law enforcement agency, and the Delirium Trigger, which is a pirate crew, and the Awakeners, who are religious.
Religious organization looking for government power.
It's a very gray area.
And it may not be obvious in the first book, but as you read, you know, if one were to read through the series, all those different factions are going to be aligning in different combinations throughout the series.
I mean, I don't want to.
I don't want to give too many spoilers, but we're.
We're allowed to give.
Speaker A
00:32:56.130 - 00:33:00.770
From this book.
Sure.
Yeah, absolutely.
And actually from the whole series, it's fine.
People, People are warned.
Speaker C
00:33:01.650 - 00:33:31.600
I'm reading the second book, right?
I'm rereading the second book right now where Frey teams up with another captain.
They are then robbed by the crew of the Delirium Trigger, who sells something to the Awakeners.
He, Frey, steals from the Awakeners, then the original other captain that he teams up with steals it from him.
And he is currently teamed up with the crew of the Delirium Trigger to try to get it.
Speaker A
00:33:31.600 - 00:33:32.320
Back.
Okay,.
Speaker C
00:33:33.280 - 00:33:41.400
Yeah, that's what I love.
And that's like that to me.
That's a fun game where.
Session to session, you don't know who your friends are.
Speaker A
00:33:41.400 - 00:33:45.840
Marshall, what would you want to make portable from this and bring into your games?
Speaker B
00:33:46.320 - 00:35:07.039
So, for me, it's Retribution Falls itself, which is the pirate town.
I happen to be running D and D campaign right now, which has a pirate setting to it, which has a town built by and populated by pirates.
And the description of Retribution Falls is so fantastic.
I just want to read the quote real quick.
Jez studied her surroundings critically.
The Sagging roofs, the cracked walls and mildewed corners, the broken bottles and bloodstains.
She sniffed, taking in the rank stench of the marsh.
You know what pirates are really good at, Pin?
She said, being pirates.
And that's all.
In fact, if you ask me what would happen if you took a thousand pirates and asked them to build a town.
I'd say it would look pretty much like this.
This place was better as a legend.
The real thing doesn't work and so I am absolutely stealing that entire concept of a town that they just poured some money into.
But nobody actually wants to.
Wanted to do the work to build it, right?
Certainly nobody wants to do the work to maintain it.
And so it's just not a good place to live because pirates are not, you know, sensible members of society.
That's my kind of by definition,.
Speaker A
00:35:08.158 - 00:35:20.840
Marshall.
How dare you, sir?
How dare you.
It's wonderful.
Eric, why don't you tell us what you think would be portable into your games from the Retribution Falls.
Speaker D
00:35:20.840 - 00:36:07.810
I love the organizations specifically.
I really like the Century Knights, the Ironclads, different types of sort of elite war, those two elite warrior groups.
But I really were reminded from my times running like Old west games where you have the Pinkertons.
The port over from Red Falls is the Shacklemoors.
These group of really somewhere between law enforcement and mercenaries for hire that will work for the wealthy and the elite.
I just love that idea and I don't know why I never thought of doing something like that in my games.
But I would totally steal the Shacklemores blatantly.
I'll even call them the Shacklemores.
Speaker A
00:36:08.530 - 00:36:09.170
Good name.
Speaker C
00:36:09.810 - 00:36:14.770
I have added the Shacklemores literally called the Shacklemores into my game already.
It's fun.
Speaker D
00:36:14.930 - 00:36:15.490
I mean.
Speaker C
00:36:16.050 - 00:36:46.650
I, I do agree with you.
I, I love this like the Century Nights are one of the things that I like to bet.
Again, going back to Star wars, the Clone wars cartoon.
Part of the promise is, you know about the heroes on both sides and that's what these guys are.
You know, they're the.
They're the.
They're the fed heroes.
They're the.
You know, I guess if you were to put in Star wars terms it would be champion Stormtroopers slippers.
Although they're not evil in my.
I don't think so.
Speaker D
00:36:47.450 - 00:36:47.850
Right.
Speaker A
00:36:48.410 - 00:38:09.580
I. I definitely think you guys have covered a lot of great stuff.
I'm a big fan of any sort of.
Any sort of cute little magic item that you can, that you can grab from any book.
And those are the ones that seem to make it in most of the time.
I. I love Craig's tooth.
Craig's gold tooth that charms people.
Just Chef's kiss.
Absolutely the best magic item.
And, and just wanting to see what my characters will do to try and get a tooth into their own mouth because it's a magic item, would just make me laugh for days and days.
Also, the Gollum vest is an amazing resource for characters to have, but the connection that he has to crake makes it so it's not just, hey, here's a big hit, point sink that you can drop and not care about.
I mean, it's relatively indestructive and it's a great useful thing, but you also can't apply.
Abandon it.
Right.
You can't just say, and it's gone.
Right.
It's it that that whole thing is there.
And finally, absolutely, finally one of my fa.
My.
My favorite parts of Star wars, my favorite parts of Firefly, and my favorite parts of this book are the side romances.
And I think Trinica is amazing and I, I hope, George, I hope we get to see more of Trinica in the next couple books because that's a great character and I'm looking, Looking forward to see what happens with her.
Speaker C
00:38:09.820 - 00:38:11.580
There is a lot more of Trinica.
Speaker A
00:38:12.380 - 00:38:32.940
Yes.
That I am definitely reading on because that is.
I. I love a good.
I love.
I love a strong.
I love a strong romance.
I love a strong romance with characters who have differing goals.
Who's Mrs. Mal?
Who?
I think.
What did you say?
No, I'm thinking of Christina Hendrick's character.
Oh,.
Speaker C
00:38:32.940 - 00:38:33.560
Saffron,.
Speaker A
00:38:33.870 - 00:38:35.110
Exactly.
There we go.
Yeah.
Speaker C
00:38:35.110 - 00:38:36.150
Mrs. Reynolds.
Yes,.
Speaker A
00:38:36.150 - 00:38:44.590
Mrs. Reynolds.
The Mrs. Reynolds character I love.
Oh, that is a.
There's a scoundrel.
There's a scoundrel right there.
Fantastic.
Speaker C
00:38:44.750 - 00:38:50.750
To the third book.
They do actually introduce a.
What I would call a saffron analog in the third book.
Speaker A
00:38:50.830 - 00:39:25.440
Oh, wow.
Okay.
Yeah.
This is getting better.
I'm super excited.
This is fantastic.
All right, that's gonna bring us to now since we're talking about books and.
But if you were going to.
If you wanted to read other stuff like Retribution Falls, clearly we have three more books that are out there, so we have those.
But if we wanted to find other media, other things that we wanted to talk about and let's.
I'm sorry, guys.
I'm just going to take Firefly off the table.
I think we've talked about it enough, so I'm sorry.
Yes.
Speaker C
00:39:26.640 - 00:39:31.830
I'm going to say if you're reading this book and you haven't watched Firefly already.
It's very surprising.
Speaker A
00:39:32.380 - 00:39:54.540
I agree.
Yes.
You should absolutely go watch all of Firefly.
It's unfortunately a short watch and you can get all of this and then all this will make so much more sense.
But go ahead, Eric, if you want to talk about Firefly Cam, but also tell us your other the other media that vibes with Retribution Falls,.
Speaker D
00:39:54.860 - 00:39:58.060
I think there's going to be a bunch of overlap on a number of them.
Speaker A
00:39:58.140 - 00:39:58.820
That's okay.
Speaker D
00:39:58.820 - 00:40:10.260
Clearly, as you mentioned, Firefly got a show out there.
But I'm also going to throw in Leigh Bardugo, 6 of Crows, where you have a nice sort of thieves group.
Speaker A
00:40:10.980 - 00:40:15.780
Just a quick note, Six of Crows will be episode 48 of this podcast.
Speaker D
00:40:17.780 - 00:40:18.260
Nice.
Speaker C
00:40:18.820 - 00:40:20.420
And what episode is this?
Speaker A
00:40:20.740 - 00:40:26.260
This is episode 47.
So the next episode will be Six of Crows, episode 48.
Speaker D
00:40:26.580 - 00:40:49.790
Awesome.
Given that my wife.
Yeah, so my wife's a huge Leigh Bardugo Six of Crows fan.
So yeah, look forward to that.
And then the other one is just there's some magic in there, but some of Sebastian de Castell's work, the great coats, really reminded me of some of that swashbuckler reaction that he had going on.
Speaker A
00:40:50.190 - 00:40:51.470
Marshall, you want to go?
Speaker B
00:40:51.630 - 00:41:40.720
So mine is another book that has recently come out called Cello's Gate by Maurice Afritsch.
It is sky pirates, gunslingers, mythic knights, as it says on the back of the book.
It is a little bit more Guardians of the Galaxy, which I would also throw out as a similar property, though I think pretty much everybody's familiar with it.
But in this case, in Cello's Gate, you've got a bunch of sky pirates.
They get hired by an immortal and in order to hunt down seven mythical stones of ultimate power.
So there's a lot of Guardians of the Galaxy in there, but it's got a lot that is very similar vibe of true first pirates.
All that good stuff.
Speaker A
00:41:40.720 - 00:43:58.969
Fantastic.
I'm gonna jump.
Let George wrap us up here.
So I'm gonna say Jim Butcher's the Aeronauts Windlass.
That's a two.
That's part of a two part series that he has written.
Very, very ship airship based, steampunky, flying cities.
Very cool stuff.
A little bit more of a master commander as opposed to a scoundrel.
So it's got all the setting pieces, but not really the same kind of crew.
But that was also episode 26 for us here on the Game Masters Book Club.
So I'm going to throw that in there.
And speaking of things that are also going to be on episode 50.
So coming right up, it's going to be A Matter of Execution by Nicholas and Olivia Atwater, which is magical flying skyships, fairy magic, fantasy.
Much a much heavier fantasy group.
And this one is more of a misfit crew, though I think they're a little further along on the hero's journey when we pick up with them, as opposed to our crew here.
A Matter of Execution by Nicholas Olivia Atwater is tops on.
I've mentioned it many times on the show.
I think it's really one of the best books to come out in the last 10 years.
I think it's just really good writing.
The best.
The original Skyship, Steampunk, Weird science, alt history has to be Girl Genius by Phil and Cagifoglio Foglio.
Sorry, Phil.
Controfoglio.
Just the best of the best.
If you're going to do steampunk, you can, you can.
You can't do better than that.
That is a little more bright and shiny.
But it also.
I think this will help.
George.
I think you, if you haven't already read it, it does have a lot of factions and people change sides all the time.
There's all kinds, including our main character, who does start out kind of rosy, but she ends up with like.
She ends up possessed pretty early.
So you don't know whether the possessing thing is controlling her or not.
And so is she the good guy or the bad?
So it does end up being very mature and complicated, even though it starts out a little more simplistically with that character.
Matter of execution.
Girl Genius, Aeronaut's Windless.
All great books.
So, George, why don't you wrap up the recommendations for us?
Speaker C
00:43:58.970 - 00:44:01.370
I'm going to wrap up with no book recommendations.
Speaker A
00:44:02.010 - 00:44:02.570
Excellent.
Speaker C
00:44:03.530 - 00:44:21.140
And I'm leaning into the small crew forced to work together.
I know you don't want me to say Firefly, but Dark Matter is maybe one of the best Firefly analogs out there.
It's got a great twist at the end of the first episode.
If you like sci fi and you like Firefly and you haven't seen it,.
Speaker D
00:44:21.300 - 00:44:22.020
Really good,.
Speaker C
00:44:22.180 - 00:45:10.470
Find it.
Killjoy's Cowboy Bebop.
Both versions live and animated.
For something a little bright and shinier.
One piece, at least the live action.
I. I don't know that I could recommend a thousand plus episodes of anything to anyone.
I know.
I already mentioned Thunderbolts, almost anything by James Gunn, the Suicide Squad, Peacemaker.
Especially the second season of Peacemaker.
Bunch of characters forced.
A bunch of terrible people forced into proximity who become better because of it.
And I feel like I'm missing one or two.
But I, I also think that might be enough.
Oh, and I will say Firefly, if you love it.
Track down the Dark Horse comics.
Don't track down the boom comics.
Speaker A
00:45:10.790 - 00:45:27.920
All right.
But George, we're actually gonna ask you to keep going because we at the beginning here, Marshall and Eric said that they were going to have any promotions and I just have the podcast.
So I know you have Firefly and Retribution falls oriented stuff to promote.
So.
Speaker C
00:45:29.200 - 00:45:32.720
Clearly I picked, I picked Retribution False.
I could talk about Firefly.
Speaker A
00:45:32.720 - 00:45:34.480
Of course.
That's the whole point.
Yeah,.
Speaker C
00:45:34.560 - 00:46:55.860
I will.
I know I, I've mentioned this one previously.
It's.
No, it's no longer out there as a.
But I worked on the 10th anniversary edition of the Firefly board game.
I think it's a fun game.
Check it out.
If you like Firefly and you like board games.
My understanding is that the company that was doing it no longer has the license.
But that is not stopped me or my associate Joe Kepler, who worked on the 10th anniversary with me from working on our own projects.
So if you like board gaming and Firefly, head over to boardgamegeek.com and look for Firefly the Game or Firefly the 10th Anniversary Edition Game.
And there'll be, there'll be lots of new content there.
And I will also out.
Since we're talking Firefly lo these many years ago, I think it's 20, 21 years ago now.
After the movie came out, I worked on a virtual Firefly series where we wrote 3029 episode length scripts.
If you're, if you're looking for some fan, I, I think it was pretty well done.
Fan related Firefly scripts.
Look for my name and still flying.net and see what you can find.
Okay.
Speaker A
00:46:55.860 - 00:47:00.500
And do you want to, do you want to send.
Is it.
Can you send us a link and we can put it in with the show?
Speaker C
00:47:00.580 - 00:47:07.860
Oh, and I, I.
The link's dead.
I just can.
You're probably going to need to put it in the Wayback Machine.
Speaker A
00:47:08.260 - 00:47:10.260
Oh, geez.
Okay.
Well, there we go.
Speaker C
00:47:10.340 - 00:47:10.780
Yeah.
Speaker D
00:47:10.780 - 00:47:11.180
Wow.
Speaker C
00:47:11.180 - 00:47:14.800
I discontinued it in 2012.
I think we discontinued it.
Speaker A
00:47:14.870 - 00:47:15.110
It.
Speaker C
00:47:15.430 - 00:47:21.590
But if you, if you do Wayback machine and still flying.net it's there.
Speaker A
00:47:21.990 - 00:47:22.510
All right.
Speaker C
00:47:22.510 - 00:47:31.470
And I know various people host at host the scripts and heck by, by October maybe I'll.
Maybe I'll put it up again.
I don't know.
Speaker A
00:47:31.470 - 00:47:32.710
There we go.
We'll see what happens.
Speaker C
00:47:32.710 - 00:47:37.350
Whenever, whenever this is going to come out.
So Eric may I may.
I may have a link to share with you.
We'll see.
Speaker A
00:47:37.350 - 00:47:54.610
We'll see how that goes.
Okay.
So folks, thanks again for coming on and talking about a great book that had clearly has great potential to help have great tabletop role playing experiences.
And thanks so much for being here and hopefully we talk again soon.
Yeah,.
Speaker D
00:47:55.810 - 00:47:56.530
Thanks Eric.
Speaker B
00:47:56.530 - 00:47:57.010
Yeah,.
Speaker D
00:47:57.010 - 00:47:57.530
Thanks all.
Speaker A
00:47:57.530 - 00:49:07.610
Thanks guys.
And that was Retribution Falls, the first book in the Tales of the Kenny J series by Chris Woodring.
Thank you to resident scoundrels Marshall, Eric and George for making this one a book to remember.
Join us next episode when we discuss a ship of a different kind in Ann Lecky's Ansellarian Justice.
You can find a complete transcript of today's discussion as well as links to all of our podcasts@k-square productions.com GMBC.
You can learn about upcoming episodes on our social media on bluesky at gmbookclub bluesky social on Facebook @GameMastersBook Club, on Mastodon @GameMastersBook Club, and on Instagram @Game MastersBook Club Club.
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Continued praise and thanks to John Corbett for the podcast artwork and Otis Galloway for our music.
Later, gamers and to paraphrase the great Terry Pratchett, always try to be the place where the falling angels meets the rising ape.