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The following system is a rough guide for converting the Fera as given in the Player’s Guide to the Changing Breeds. Naturally, these rules are guidelines. The results need to meet with the approval of the group before seeing play. If you want further inspiration for introducing Fera-like shapeshifters into Forsaken, shapeshifters get a whole section in War Against the Pure that provides a good starting point.

These rules should leave the shapeshifters with an approximate power level the same as the Uratha. If you want to enhance that, see the options presented in the Werewolf Translation Guide.

Step One: Convert Traits

Converting the Trait modifiers of a given Fera’s forms involves a few changes:

• Subtract 1 from form bonuses to Strength and Stamina.
• Don’t modify the Dexterity bonus.
• Apply the more severe of any Appearance and Manipulation penalty to Manipulation.
• Any Perception bonus remains the same, and applies to Wits
• “Near” forms that are significantly larger than humans get Size +1.
• Animal forms have Size appropriate for the animal in question, p. XX of the World of Darkness Rulebook can provide guidelines.
• Crinos-equivalent forms have Size +2 (+1 if the Breed is noted for their small Crinos-equivalents) and 1/1 natural armor.

Changes to Attributes and Size affect Initiative, Speed, Health, Defense, and other derived traits as normal.

Step Two: Natural Weapons

The options available to the Fera will vary a lot by form. The most common set includes:

Some Fera have claw attacks in Near-Human, which deal +0L, or claws in Beast form that deal +0L (often alongside a bite that only does +1L). As a rough guide: if an attack is likely to fuck up a human being, it deals +2 lethal damage. If it’s going to ruin his day but may need a couple of hits to really bring the pain, it deals +1 lethal damage. If it’s sharp and pointy but fundamentally no worse than a kitchen knife, it deals +0 lethal damage. All forms from War-Form to Beast can bite without grappling first.

Step Three: Lunacy

War-Form and both Near-forms (where present) incite Lunacy much the same as werewolves. If a form specifically gives a bonus to witnesses resisting Delirium, apply each “step” of reduced Delirium as an effective +1 to the victim’s Willpower when it comes to resisting Lunacy. This bonus is cumulative with form-specific modifiers—a Breed that reduces normal Delirium by 1 step in their War-Form would give a +1 Willpower bonus in War-Form and a +5 bonus when in Near-Human.

Step Four: Gifts and Rites

Gifts and Rites convert using the systems starting on pp. 22 of the Werewolf Translation Guide.

Step Five: Renown

Fera use a range of categories of Renown, detailed in the Player’s Guide to the Changing Breeds. Use those writeups, along with the example of Apocalypse-centric Purity Renown on p. 33 of the Werewolf Translation Guide to convert Renown as needed.

Step Six: Details

This section covers specifics for each breed. Bits that aren’t covered either have no system (Corax eye-drinking) or the system in Player’s Guide to the Changing Breeds doesn’t need changing (Kitsune not regenerating).

Ananasi: Pithus form counts as Near-Beast for everything already stated. Crawlerling form creates a swarm of radius equal to the Ananasi’s Size in yards (Swarms are covered on p. 198 of World of Darkness Innocents). When a swarm takes enough damage to reduce it to half its original radius, the character will look and act rather differently. Ananasi webs have Durability 3, Size 1, Structure 8, Damage 2 (only for grappling). Were-spiders only regain Essence when doing damage with a bite attack, each point of damage inflicted causes them to regain a point of Essence. Swap the modifiers for Stepping Sideways in built-up and rural areas. Ananasi don’t regenerate but can spend Essence to heal bashing or lethal damage at a rate of one point per point of damage.

Corax: In Crinos form, Corax have a Flight speed equal to their land speed + 5; in Corvid form, increase Speed by 5, but they don’t really have a walking Speed—most birds have a species factor of 10 when calculating flight speed, rather than the 5 common among land creatures. Hollow bones gives +2 dice to Athletics rolls in Crinos, but attackers wielding weapons that do bashing damage gain +1 die. When distracted by shiny objects, Corax must make a reflexive Resolve + Composure roll to act normally.

Gurahl: Were-bears raise Strength or Stamina by spending Essence, at a rate of one point per dot per turn. Alternatively, they can increase Health by 1 for the scene by spending 2 points of Essence (but see Temporary Health Dots, p. 173 of the World of Darkness Rulebook). Add 3 dice to Composure rolls that involve the were-bear’s need to protect, but a Gurahl’s player must spend a point of Willpower if her character ever changes his mind.

Kitsune: Were-foxes receive an extra dot of Dexterity for free at character creation. This comes before spending Attribute dots, and their human-form maximum is still 5. Kitsune always use the higher of Dexterity or Wits to determine Defense, and don’t take aggravated damage from silver. Were-foxes do inflict Lunacy, but observers have an additional +3 die bonus to their Willpower roll to resist (+5 in total for Juko, and +7 for Sambuhenge)

Mokole: Aspect benefits translate directly into Forsaken terms. Sum the character’s Harmony and Primal Urge, then divide by two (rounding up). Select that many Archid characteristics. Armor provides 2/2 armor every time it’s taken. Color Change adds three dice to contested Stealth rolls when the Mokole is hiding. Bladed Tail/Horn give an additional means of attack that does +2L damage. Huge Size increases Stamina and Size by +1 (and thus Health by +2) for each pick. Long Teeth/Terrible Claws add 2 dice to bite and claw attacks. Poison Sacs deliver a Toxicity 4 poison. Other Archid characteristics don’t need changing.

Nagah: Regain Essence when underwater. Primal Urge is not harder to raise; it’s plenty expensive enough. Nagah venom is a Toxicity 6 poison.

Nuwisha: Do not take aggravated damage from silver and cannot frenzy. Their Primal Urge trait measures their closeness to Coyote, as such they don’t suffer social modifiers for having a high Primal Urge.

Ratkin: Blood Memory requires a Harmony roll, with a penalty depending on the specific nature of what the rat-shifter is after (difficulty conversions are provided on p. 29 of the Werewolf Translation Guide). Ratkin blood is a Toxicity 3 poison, anyone consuming it also suffers the effects of a dose of hallucinogenic drugs. Pretty much all Aspect traits convert directly.

Rokea: Shark-born Rokea suffer a -3 penalty to Presence and Manipulation rolls when dealing with humans. Worse, any dice that show a ‘1’ also subtract a success from the character’s total. Double the Rokea’s Primal Urge when checking to see if the character falls into Death Rage. Chasmus and Gladius both have 1/1 armor, and an attacker who makes a successful unarmed attack against a Rokea in those forms suffers a point of bashing damage.

© 2012 CCP hf. White Wolf, The World of Darkness, Werewolf: The Apocalypse, and Werewolf: The Forsaken are registered trademarks of CCP hf.

GO!

Ed Healy mentioned on Twitter this morning that 80% of Americans will have smartphones by the end of 2013². In his own inimitable style, he also asked of those of us who create games: “Will you create content for them?”³

Game pubs, @TheTimHayden mentioned at #IMS12 that 80% of Americans will have smart phones by EOY 2013. Will you create content for them?

— Ed Healy (@ephealy) April 10, 2012

This sparked off some discussion between myself, Ed, and David A. Hill Jr. on the best way to cater RPG books to smartphones. Naturally, it happened on Twitter, which is a horrible place to have a discussion involving long, thought-out points, so I’m dragging my side of it to my blog.

The smartass answer⁴ to Ed’s question is that people with smartphones can read books just the same as people without them. That’s avoiding the issue. If you’ve got a smart device, you want to use it for things. Why wouldn’t you want to use it when gaming?

As I see it, we-as-game-publishers have a few avenues we can explore:

1. Publish in PDF
2. Publish in ePub
3. Publish as an app
4. Publish as a web app

I should point out that these are just the first four things that sprang to mind, other options exist that I’d quite like to hear about.

Publish in PDF

PDF has become the default standard of the electronic-format roleplaying game. In effect, it’s a way of creating a fixed-layout page so that the electronic artefact can match up precisely with a printed artefact. Even though the printed RPG book is quickly becoming a luxury item,⁵ we’re still tied to a strict electronic representation of those books as our default file format.

Only problem is, PDFs are a horrible format for representing actual electronic documents. Making a usable Table of Contents, list of bookmarks, and hyperlinks is beyond the capabilities of the basic software. Most RPG books still go for the 11″x8.5″ format that people recognise as a gaming book. Thing is, people use font sizes that look good on paper, which end up far too small to read on many screens.⁶

Yes, we can zoom in. Thing is, if the reader has to zoom in then one has to overload scrolling to not just move within the document but to move the viewport around the page. Which is a really hard problem. This is doubly a pain in the genitals if the PDF has columns—a good idea in print, but a real headache on screen as it encourages yet more fucking scrolling.

An 8.5″x11″ PDF also doesn’t work for pretty much any mobile device. It’s readable on the iPad with its 4:3 screen if one has perfect eyesight or decent glasses or doesn’t mind scrolling like a bastard, but nothing else does.

One fairly recent trend is to put out books in 6″x9″ format, often single-column and sometimes landscape format. All these things help with screen-reading: landscape is nicer to read than portrait, single-column avoids the scrolling issue on small displays or when zoomed, and the smaller page size fits better on many displays. A 6″x9″ book displays just fine on many of the 7″ tablets on the market⁷

Thing is, these PDFs do fuck-all for smartphone users because smartphone screens are small compared to just about any page of text

As an experiment, I put together a couple of PDFs of BLACK SEVEN earlier. One was sized to the screen of an iPhone 4, another for the HTC Wildfire. Body text was dropped to 5pt, pages sized precisely for the screen with tiny margins, everything tuned for a phone display

On a high-resolution device like more modern iPhones and the Galaxy Nexus, these mini-PDFs looked fine. On most phones⁸, the display doesn’t have enough pixels for the pages to be comfortable to read. Once the font’s increased to a comfortable size, tables and graphic elements become unreadable.

This is a natural consequence to using a format that tries to replicate “pages” of fixed text. After banging my head against the layout problem for a while, I realised⁹ that the problem was fundamental in static layout.

I have in the past argued against the use of PDF for gaming books. In trying to make them usable, I was hitting a whole bunch of problems that I’ve already called out as being pretty intractable.

Based on experimentation, PDFs just don’t work at the small screen-size available on most smartphones. High-end phones have the ppi to drive PDFs, but the majority of people don’t have high-ppi devices.

Smartphone-sized PDFs are thus a no-go.

Publish in ePub

Here, I can legitimately claim to be ahead of the game. Both BLACK SEVEN and Touched by Darkness come in ePub as well as PDF, which is still a rare thing for RPG publishers to do.

ePub has massive advantages over PDF: the text flow is dynamic, so the reader can control what size and orientation looks right. Reader software can allow the reader to change the font-face, colors, and size to find the perfect reading style for their device. Readers are freely available on anything with more computing power than a digital watch. ePub is a form of HTML and CSS, which means that formatting tricks are possible, in theory.

In practice, each reader has its own host of bugs. Many RPGs, especially small-press games, use layout and typography to make up for a relative lack of art, and that’s lost in ePub. In theory, the format allows for embedded fonts and CSS layout tricks. In practice, creating ePub files is a bit like writing a standards-compatbile website that looks identical in both Firefox, Internet Explorer 6¹⁰, and Lynx.

Writing ePubs is possible, but the current suite of authoring software is shit. Calibre and Sigil both assume that one is intimately familiar with ePubs and create files that look great if one only uses Calibre or Sigil to read them. Pages will export ePub, but don’t expect embedded fonts, tables, or any bits of layout trickery to work. iBooks is a whole other pile of worms that doesn’t work in any other reader. Half the readers out there won’t even render a bastard table correctly. Forget typography or layout elements. If you want anything beyond basic Markdown, you’re buggered.

For smartphones, ePub is a fantastic format. For layout people—especially, like me, part-time layout people who are also writers, editors, developers, and have a day job—ePub is a total fucker to work with.¹¹ But if you’re willing to fight it a bit to get the necessary information legible, then a publisher really should be including ePub. It’s just good manners to allow people to read your work on as many devices as possible.

ePub is a brilliant format for the reader—but the limtations of the format (no embedded fonts, no character sheets, very limited set of reliable layout elements) mean that publishers don’t want to release in ePub alone.

But if a publisher’s not at least releasing the text of their game as an ePub with a full-featured PDF or similar then they’re missing out on the gamers-with-smartphones sector.

Publish as an app

Publishing a game that’s a smartphone app is the sort of thing that seems like a really great idea. I’ve thought about it several times, from appified versions of rulebooks right the way to proper high-crunch games with player and GM modes that communicate and adjudicate a lot of the rules without the GM needing to intervene, thus opening rules-heavy games up to people who can’t normally be bothered with tracking lots of variables but want the verisimilitude that said tracking would provide.

Sorry, tangent. I’ve thought about this a lot.

Naturally, for a smartphone-using gamer, this is the sweet-spot. The game can go on sale through the various app stores, it’s optimized for the screen size and capabilities of the game, it can include things like a database of characters and a dice roller. The presentation of the rules and the like take what’s good about ePub and turn it up to eleven.

But.

App development isn’t the sort of skill that people just pick up. Expecting someone who already does everything as an indie publisher¹² to take the time necessary to learn to write apps—not just once but twice—is unreasonable.

For most publishers, programming is a whole skillset that they’ve no idea about. Even for people like me, who can write code already, it still takes a couple of months to pick up something new at least. Then it’s up to writing, developing, and testing.

Once you get to the point of pressuring publishers to release a smartphone app, you’re raising the bar of entry to the publishing space to people who can a) write apps and b) write RPGs. And while I could inhabit that space if I had a couple of months off work, for people not coming from an IT-heavy background it’s not a sensible requirement.

Naturally, people who write apps will say “just hire an app developer”, which misses the main point of small publishers: we’re really fucking small. I was able to trade off my own time as a resource when publishing BLACK SEVEN. App developers are expensive, and most of us do not have the money.

The ideal way forwards would be for an enterprising person to publish an app-creator-kit, an equivalent to DTP software that instead created an app for both iOS and Android. While it’s a nice idea, I honestly don’t see it happening any time soon.

While game-as-app is the perfect artefact for smartphone users, it’s not a space that’s available to most small publishers. It’d be nice for that to change, but the change would have to be publisher driven or it’d cost people out of producing RPGs.

At present, it’s a luxury that most publishers cannot afford to produce.

Publish as a web app

A web app, leveraging HTML, CSS, and Javascript, is a handy way of creating something that’s significantly more feature-rich than an ePub file, because it’s able to use Javascript. It can also use things like bits of HTML5 to add yet more features.

While HTML, CSS, and Javascript require more skills than hitting “export to ePub”, they’re a mature skillset. Better, web apps can be made with intro-level software, creating apps that work in browsers, with tablets, and with smartphones without much knowledge of the underlying code. As with smartphone apps, web apps require a set of programming skills that most small publishers don’t have. Unlike smartphone apps, these skills aren’t as onerous to pick up.

The main problem for creating RPGs that work as web apps is of delivery. If you aim to get them out via the various platforms’ app stores, then you’ve got to code up a wrapper—though that wrapper’s going to be easier to write once and use for a range of games than if each were made as an app. Otherwise, you’re left with the problem of getting the files to a smartphone user.

Delivering the various messy bits of files that incorporate a web app directly to a phone or similar isn’t necessarily easy, especially with the way that some devices lock down browser access to the filesystem. A publisher may instead host the web app, but that opens a whole new can of worms around guarantees of access, and ensuring that unauthorised users can’t access the web app.

As you can probably tell, this is the space I’ve thought about least. It’s easier to do than to create an app, but harder than making PDFs or ePubs. The problem shifts from “can people who buy my game use this” to “how do I get this to people who have bought my game”.

Conclusions

To get people who came with tablets and smartphones at the table, the best thing to do at the moment is to make a 6″x9″ PDF and an ePub version of your books. While other options are there, they’re currently too high a hurdle to require from publishers.

I’ve played around with smartphone-sized PDFs and they’ve proved to be distinctly not worth it. I’m going to work on getting BLACK SEVEN available as a web app, and will report back.

Despite Mass Effect 3 being released today in the UK¹, I’ve not included anything from the Mass Effect games in the file. Partly, that’s because it’s all new stuff that will take time and energy to assimilate and translate into a rules framework. Mostly, it’s because my copy didn’t show up today despite being dispatched three days ago. I’m currently frothing and ready to kill someone. That’s surely the perfect mood in which to learn page layout in a whole new program, including the happy fun discovery that it can’t do something that you actually need for another project. I’m drifting.

Mass Effecting the Thousand Suns