AMPed Up!

Another project of mine has come to fruition. Third Eye Games has just published United Human Front: Affiliation Guide for AMP Year Two for its AMP: Year One game line. In the game, AMP stands for Accelerated Mutant Potential. When the game first came out I wasn't too interested because I'm not a huge superhero fan. I miss-understood things. AMP is not a superhero game, it's a super-powers game. Maybe it's not that big a difference, but it's an important one. AMP has plenty of “faster than a speeding bullet” without a lot of spandex costumes. When Eloy asked me to write for the game and I actually read the book I liked how dark it was. AMP is full of 1990s-era Marvel-style angst; “they hate us, yet we are dedicated to saving them from themselves.” It's also full of government distrust, secret machinations and downright nastiness which seem to have been pulled from the headlines of recent years. A good setting for a game.

I was asked to write a guidebook for members of the United Human Front. These are the people doing the hating of the AMPs. Explicitly. At first I was not excited. No one wants to be stuck writing about the one-dimensional “bad guys.” Well, I didn't anyway. I took it as a writing challenge, how can I make the anti-mutant faction in a mutation-based super-powers game into something which seems positive? How can I make the UHF a viable option for players picking their character's affiliation? How can I make this faction into something more than a stereotype?

I decided to focus on two things. Conspiracy theories and the kind of anti-government domestic terrorism America saw in the 1990s. McVeigh, Kaczynski, Koresh; they all came from within American culture. That part of the culture hasn't gone away, either. There are even more conspiracies afoot than ever these days. I tried to present the UHF members as thinking people (maybe thinking too much). They have looked at all the evidence and come to their own conclusions. Two members don't have to agree on what AMPs really are, or who created them in the first place to agree they are a potential threat to decent folk everywhere. AMPs are people who can turn into fire or smash rocks with their hands and who are drawn to fight with each other whenever they meet. That's dangerous! The United Human Front is circling the wagons and defending what they know. It's a noble position, in a way. I've also put out the idea not everyone who looks down their nose at an AMP is actually a member of the official UHF organization. This lets GMs use human antagonists claiming UHF affiliation who aren't actually acting by the more careful and deliberate means of the UHF hierarchy. Since the game establishes the UHF was founded by a geneticist, I played up that element too. The UHF top tier people know AMPs are different on a genetic level. It's not technically wrong to say they aren't human. Maybe the man on the street uses it as a cover for racism and fearmongering, but not all members of UHF take the same lessons from the founder's genetic tests.

I've tried to weave the idea of conflicting views of reality into the adventure which forms part of the Affiliation Guide. I have crafted stories as a GM for my weekly game group and I tried to write part of a choose-your-own adventure one time, so I didn't think an RPG adventure would be hard to write. I was wrong. I've not written an RPG adventure for publication before and I found it difficult to present a story where the players were forced to question their own definitions of human and mutant. My first attempt was roughly twice as long as it was supposed to be! I had trouble creating characters players were supposed to care about. I had trouble accounting for everything a group of players might do. I wanted to have multiple paths so different UHF groups with different visions of what it means to be “defenders of humanity” could enjoy the adventure. Ultimately a lot of the branching pathways had to come out to bring the thing down to size. The manuscript I delivered has been polished to a nice gleam by Eloy and the rest of his team. It can only improve when the creators of the game give it a once-over, right? I love seeing ideas I labored on over my keyboard turn into pages with proper layouts and illustrations. Well done, Third Eye Games!

If you want to check it out, the United Human Front Affiliation Guide is available now.
If you want to get started with the AMP game, check out AMP: Year One.
You can also back the Kickstarter for the latest book in the series; AMP: Year Three.