SLA Industries - History

This episode we take a look at SLA Industries; Nightfall's game of dystopian horror, set in the World of Progress.  Fame and fortune are yours to be had, as long as you do what the company wants of you, and you smile for the cameras.  Just don't ask too many questions or delve too deeply into secrets that are meant to stay buried.  Guns kill, but so does the Truth.
 
The SLA Quickstart can be found here: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/284671/SLA-Industries-2nd-Edition-Quick-Start?src=hottest_filtered

This is part one of our SLA episode - part two will feature a round table discussion where we put on our rose-tinted glasses and talk about our favourite memories of the game. 

Contact us at:

EMAIL: roll.to.save.pod@gmail.com
TWITTER: @savepodcast
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/rolltosavepod
WEBSITE: https://rolltosave.blog

HOST: Iain Wilson
VOICEOVER LADY: Keeley Wilson
BACKGROUND MUSIC: David Renada (Find him at: davidrendamusic@gmail.com or on his web page).
TITLE, BREAK & CLOSEOUT MUSIC: Xylo-Ziko (Find them on their web page).

Contact us at:

EMAIL: roll.to.save.pod@gmail.com
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/rolltosavepod
WEBSITE: https://rolltosave.blog

HOSTS: Iain Wilson, Steve McGarrity, Jason Downey
BACKGROUND MUSIC: David Renada (Find him at: davidrendamusic@gmail.com or on his web page).
TITLE, BREAK & CLOSEOUT MUSIC: Xylo-Ziko (Find them on their web page).

Transcript

Speaker 01: 0:00

Welcome to Roll to Save, the RPG history podcast, Slay Industries.

Speaker 00: 0:23

In 1993, I found my first proper job, as a waiter no less. Actually, I say found, but the job actually found me, in the form of my mother thrusting a copy of the Evening Times in my direction, jabbing at a classified ad, and suggesting it might be nice for me to earn some cash for myself. The hours were long, the shifts were gruelling, and this being in the days before minimum wage was even a concept, the pay was lousy. Thankfully, the tips that least in my teenage mind, more than made up for my paltry weekly earnings. I learned to be effortlessly charming and efficient very quickly. And it was a good job I did too, because in 1993 I had a lot to spend my money on. Some new game called Magic the Gathering had just hit the market, and it was a lot of fun. It combined the fantastic world of RPGs with the giddy rush that I'd only previously felt collecting football stickers as a kid. Ah, those memories of standing around in the freezing cold of a Scottish primary school playground, watching as your friend flicked through a massive pile of stickers while you and your friends chanted something along the lines of, got, got, got, got, need, like some demented cultists. If anyone did end up needing any of the stickers, that was usually the cue for the owner of the pile of cards to assume the stance and bearing of a mafia don and ask you what you had to offer for it. Magic had that same feel, but was considerably more expensive. Fun In fact, as part of my spending spree on Magic cards back in the early 1990s, I managed to bag a Black Lotus. Players of Wizards of the Coast's card game will no doubt be seething with envy right now. The Black Lotus is, without a doubt, the best card ever printed for Magic. It is also on a list of cards never to be reprinted. In fact, it's so sought after that one recently sold at auction for well over $150,000. I thought I was being smart in 1998 when I sold mine for £300. Que sera. Mind you, I doubt mine would have raised much more at auction. I played the hell out of that card on many a beer-stained university union table and that was in the days before debt protectors were a thing. It was during one of these forays to spend my ill-gotten and magic cards that I discovered one of my favourite RPGs of all time. I use ill-gotten in the truest sense because I learned very early on that if you said to a table of old ladies, I'll be with you in a minute girls, you were on to at least a £5 tip. On this particular excursion, the guy behind the Virgin Megastore counter told me that they were all out of magic cards and that they didn't know when they'd have more back in. Disappointed, I started browsing the RPG I and instead my eyes hit upon a game that I hadn't seen before. It was a softback book and the cover depicted a fellow wearing a trench coat and he looked for all the world like he'd been rejected by a tribute band for the cure. He was standing in the pouring rain and at the top left in bright red letters were the words SLA Industries. I would later learn that this was pronounced Slay Industries. Flipping it over I scanned the blurb. It suggested that This was a game where the players were agents for the titular company. It sounded pretty violent, but it also seemed that there was a televised element to it. Was this like The Running Man? Then there was the tagline, Guns kill, but so does the truth. I had to know more. Curiously, it also seemed like Slay was published in the town I was living in at the time, Paisley, in Scotland. That evening, I read all of the background to this game and I was absolutely hooked. At first glance, Slay seemed to be a sci-fi investigation game. Set in a dystopian universe, the players take on the roles of operatives working for Slay Industries. Ops fulfil all sorts of functions for the company. On one hand, they are investigators and detectives, but they can also be hit squads, spokespeople, EMTs, janitors, basically anything the company needs them to do. Set on the company's HQ world of Mott, a dying planet where continually reigns, the players operate out of Mort City, a gigantic hive where the super rich and glamorous live at the top levels and where the further down you go, literally to downtown, the worse the conditions become and the more awful your life is. Slay Industries owns everything. They refer to the known universe under their control as the World of Progress. However, despite their dominance, the World of Progress is not an amazing place to live in The crime rate on Mott is through the roof, so it's up to the ops to hold things together. They do this by carrying out the missions they are assigned to. Called Blueprint News Files or BPNs, these missions are colour coded and are what operatives carry out to get paid. BPNs vary from blue, which equates to street maintenance and which covers the filthiest, most simple, worst paying jobs, usually clearing out a sewer of some undesirables, to white, which are investigations to red, which are literally red alerts, all the way up to the top secret platinum BPNs that are only ever issued by head office. Sometimes squads even get a choice of which BPN they want to undertake. As well as a steady paycheck, BPNs also give squads a chance to advance their security clearance level, or SCL, and to get noticed by the media. You see, in a bid to keep the unwashed masses happy, Slay has pretty much wholeheartedly embraced the Roman poet juvenile's maxim of bread and circuses. Every citizen is paid a stipend of unis, the civilian currency, every week, and to keep them entertained, most of the work by Slay Ops is televised live. There are also contract killers who are on the contract circuit. This is a futuristic gladiatorial series of games where they compete against each other live on TV. Occasionally, channels such as GoZone will go into a neighbourhood, open up all the sewer covers and let all the nasties that live there pour out onto the streets while Ops, contract killers and anyone else who wants to get in on the action will take them down, all live on air. Occasionally, ops will get caught up in the middle of something like this whilst they are in the middle of a BPN. It's really not surprising then that one of the driving motivations for ops, and therefore the players, is to earn enough money to buy the latest weapons and armour. Of course, the televised aspect can make investigations tricky. If your squad is trying to track down a notorious serial killer, it's kind of hard to get the drop on him when you can sit at home in front of the getting a play-by-play from Third Eye News on how close he is to being caught. At this point, you're probably wondering why anyone would want to work for Slay. After all, wouldn't it be simpler being one of the idle civilians lounging about in your dole-check watching TV all day? The simple answer is not no, but rather hell no. Mort is a horrible place to live in, and downtown, where the bulk of the unemployed masses dwell, is literally the pits. Put aside for one moment the fact that you've barely got enough money to survive, there are gangs everywhere who want to cut off whatever you own for protection, and the police, a corporate force run by Slay called the Shivers, are amazingly corrupt and are more interested in penning you in and making sure you don't bother the great and the good in Uptown than they are of preventing crime. You'll also probably find that there is at least one serial killer active near you at any given time, Mott's dark hellish claustrophobic conditions aren't exactly conducive to good mental health and the fun part is that these guys aren't the worst thing that could come crawling into your apartment Mott's sewers are infested with all sorts of nasties from carnivorous pigs, yes really to the omnipresent carrion packs, a weird humanoid race of creatures with dog-like skulls for heads and an insatiable appetite for flesh Still, although living in downtown sucks, you could find yourself stranded outside of the city walls living in the cannibal sectors. This blasted wasteland clearly owes a lot to Judge Dredd's cursed earth. But it's like someone said, how could we take that concept and make it more horrific? Everything in the cannibal sectors wants to kill you and eat you. Yet, as an op, you sometimes have to go there for work. Further enriching the background of Slay are the cast of aliens that make up Mott's population. There are, of course, humans, but they are joined by frothers, humans born with a predilection for drugs and raised in a pseudo-Scottish culture. Hey, what are you saying here? Ebon's and brain wasters, creatures who are similar to humans except they can manipulate a force underpinning reality called the ebb. Shaktars, big red reptile guys who live by a code of honour and who have a lot of Klingon and Predator going on, Wraith Raiders, super fast cat people from a frozen homeworld with all the empathy you'd expect to find in a domestic moggy, and Stormers, Sleigh's genetically engineered super soldiers. Think eight foot tall walls of muscle with weird slightly equine faces and you're not going far wrong. All of that probably sounds pretty odd and that's because, well, it is. However, it all kind of works. The play has a very unique vibe and all these weird aliens, the strange city and this strange mega consumer driven society, it really comes to life through the book's black and white images and the fiction which crops up randomly from time to time. I say randomly because although this is a professional production, it still has a bit of a feel of a fanzine to it. There's a lack of organisation to some of the sections and sometimes the artwork can feel slightly out of place or not at all with what is being discussed in the text. At one point, for example, there's a two-page spread of what looks like CAD drawings. The contents reflect this too. There's some general scene-setting pieces followed by the standard what is a role-playing game. We then get almost 100 pages of background before we hit any rules. Now, the early 90s was infamous for this sort of thing. White Wolf, I'm looking at you. But 100 pages? Most of it will either not impact the players or will have little material outcome in the state of play. The history, which is such a big part of this material, is rigorously suppressed and sanitised by Slay in the game world, so most starting characters would not know any of this. Even within the history chapter, the structure is plagued by the same randomness. There's a history, then there's a section on what an operative does, then there's a load of information on Mott. Wouldn't it have made more sense to have had the op information Huh? I'm probably making more of a big deal out of this than there needs to be. As I mentioned before, the setting reeks of atmosphere. The fact that the way it's laid out does nothing to diminish this. Indeed, after my first reading, I was very much of the opinion that I need to run this now. Unfortunately, where Slay did fall down was the system. It's a bit cobbled together and the kindest way to describe it would be functional. When I ran games of Slay, it worked just fine and we all had fun, but it wasn't wasn't exactly sleek and streamlined. Take the organisation, again, for example. There are almost four pages given over to the rules on fear and reputation. These are rules that, in all my time running Slay, I have hardly ever used as written. Combat, always the longest section in most RPG rulebooks, takes up around a dozen pages and is pretty crunchy. However, there's not a lot of randomness in there, apart from the rules to hit, so it's pretty easy to game the and after a bit of time with it, it becomes pretty readily apparent that certain types of ammunition are just flat out better than others, so why would you use others? The section on wounds leads to situations that make little sense. Under the Slayer rules, every time the character is hit and takes at least one hit point of damage, they take a wound. It doesn't matter if they're hit by the biggest gun in the game or the worst gun in the game, if they take damage they take a wound regardless. The mechanical effect of having a wound means that you lose a hit point every 5 rounds. Multiple wounds shorten this duration and more than 5 wounds increase the hit point loss. You also get a minus one penalty to your actions for every wound you take. As mentioned before a blow has to do at least one point of damage to cause a wound but given that the worst civilian rifle is capable of penetrating starting operative armour this is kind of moot. Imagine a starting op, highly trained and armed to the teeth, being jumped by a gang, five of which manage to damage him. He should be able to tear through them but the rules as written means he's flailing around all over the place and bleeding out where he stands. Not a great look on Third Eye News. Then we come to character generation. Oh boy. I'm not going to spend too much time here, but suffice to say it's a points-based system, and every character has 300 points to spend on their characteristics and skills. Given that your average human has stats in the range of 5 to 10, and that each skill is governed by a stat, and that skill can't go above the stat value, you can see that this leads to a lot of bookkeeping. As was the fashion for the 1990s, there are a ton of merits and flaws to choose from. However, Each merit and flaw comes on a scale of 1 to 10, and you either receive or pay a certain amount of points per level you take. This gets unwieldy very quickly. Let us take the first merit flaw combo, handsome slash ugly, as an example. There are 10 levels. Each one gives you or costs you a point. One point of handsome is slightly better looking than normal, and 10 points means stunningly attractive. What effect does this have in the game? Don't know. Stuff like this really needs to be defined Otherwise, how does the GM work out what effect one point of handsome has on a role that lies on appearance? It gets even more ridiculous when you pair up certain advantages and disadvantages. Remember our definition of 10 points of handsome? Stunningly attractive. Well, there's a disadvantage called bad figure, also on a 1 to 10 scale. What happens if you take 10 points of handsome and 10 points of bad figure? Well, apparently you're stunningly attractive, but without overweight, misshapen and hideously ill proportioned body, literally just a pretty face. Oh, and there's no guidance on how this Igor-like body impairs your physical day-to-day. If it was said that the GM decides the effects of the different levels of advantages and disadvantages, things wouldn't be so bad. However, Captain Inconsistency shows up again. Guess what? Some advantages and disadvantages do have mechanical effects written into the rules, just not all of them. By far the most infamous example of this was the sterile disadvantage. It landed you 10 points to spend on skills. To put that into perspective, that's the same as being the most horrendously ugly person on the planet or being possessed of the Quasimodo-like figure we talked about a minute ago. Unless one of your driving goals was to have a family and who in their right mind would try and raise a kid on Mott, this disadvantage had zero impact on the game but you got 10 points to and spending your character for it. Following the character creation rules were write-ups on each of the races. This positioning is an odd choice. It's traditional for players to read about their character choices before they make up their characters. However, this is a minor gripe as these two-page spreads were a great read with great artwork and really helped conjure up the weird atmosphere of the setting. However, due to the way the rules worked, it became clear very quickly that there was little point other than flavour in playing a Shakhtar, because pound per pound, if you were going to play the squad's big fighty guy, you'd be better off playing a Stormer. In short, the rules were a bit of a mess. However, much as I've spent time highlighting this, that's only to contrast with the fact that they didn't stop myself and my group from having an absolute blast with this game. I've probably not conveyed it very well in my description, but the unique atmosphere of Slay helped to completely eclipse any of the crunchy shortcomings of the rules system. Yes, there were other sci-fi dystopian games out there but none of them felt like Slay with its weird aliens, its strange air forces and its drugs and what was with all those little callbacks to the real world, the world that the players were living in? As an example, Mott's most infamous serial killer is called Halloween Jack and he has a jack-o'-lantern shaped mask. Clearly there's nothing in Slay's cosmology that corresponds to Halloween so why is this? Likewise all the months of the year share the same names as those of the Gregorian calendar. An oversight? There's also the song titles from real-life bands scattered throughout the text. Slay's background captured the mind, and I've never met anyone who played it and didn't absolutely love it. Case in point, one of these fans was Max Bantleman, who produced a fanzine called The Big Picture, which was distributed and sold at game shops and conventions. This fanzine featured fan-made articles on races, creatures, opponents, equipment, all sorts of good stuff to slot into your Slay campaign Now, bear in mind that this was when the internet was in its complete infancy. Nowadays, this sort of stuff would be in a website or a Facebook group somewhere. However, back then a fanzine was the best way to distribute this information. Unfortunately, Max didn't exactly endear himself to the folks at Nightfall. He needed art for his fanzine and he decided that the best place to take it from would be the main rulebook. As he said himself, his intentions were good, but this didn't really help his cause and he was considered something of nuisance by nightfall. Like Max, most fans who bought into Slay wanted more content. So when I saw a review of Karma, Slay Industries first supplement in Valkyrie magazine, I naturally washed out and bought it. Karma was a very clever sourcebook. Presented as a Slay Industries lifestyle magazine for operatives, it was all flavour, with the rules crammed into the back. Lots of sourcebooks since then have followed this pattern, but back then this was really unique and rather refreshing. Karma doubled down on the atmosphere created in the main rulebook with more evocative art and prose and introduced some further typically Slay concepts. One area that received a lot of exploration was that of biogenetics. Unlike other games in the genre, Slay didn't have any kind of focus on cybernetics. Indeed, there's a slice of history that talks about that having been a passing fad in the world of Progress. Instead, for players who want to augment their characters, Slay has biogenetics. genetics as an equivalent. Want to be stronger, faster or tougher? Get some biogenetic implants. Want to see in the dark? Get some biogenetic eyes. Want your life extended? We can do that too with biogenetics. In fact, one of the big articles in karma is the concept of LED or life after death. For a small fee, operatives can be fitted with an implant which notifies karma when they die, so that we can dispatch a medical team to stabilise you and bring you in for resurrection. Like all things in Slay, there was no guarantee it would work. End up dead in Cannibal Sector 1 and chances are medics won't be able to get to you in time. It was around this time that Wizards of the Coast took note of Slay Industries and bought the game outright. Amongst their publications was the mod sourcebook that covered the HQ planet of the company. It received mixed reviews. Anyone who knows anything about Wizards of the Coast will know that they are not a company famed for their RPGs, other than that one time they swooped in and helped a little-known game called Dungeons & Dragons, that is. In December 1995, they announced that they were dropping their entire role-playing line, Slay included. The rights for Slay went back to Nightfall, who made an agreement with Hogshead Publishing. The main rulebook was reprinted, along with a couple of supplements. These were an adventure called The Key of Delaride, and a sourcebook called The Contract Directory, which sought to define exactly what the contract circuit was and what all these TV shows that the unwashed masses consumed were all about. Both were okay, but neither really set the slave world aflame. Hogshead folded in the early 2000s and, once again, the rights for slave went back to nightfall. Now, when discussing slave from this period, it is impossible not to talk about the writer's bible. Remember that quote from the back of the original rulebook, guns kill, but so does the truth. Well, in 1998, a document called the Slay Industries RPG Writer's Bible Slash Style Guide, catchy title, was leaked on one of the Slay Industries mailing lists. Kids, ask your parents what a mailing list was. This document was just over two dozen pages long, and it seemed to be an internal nightfall document for freelance authors, explaining how certain aspects of the world of progress worked thematically, and what the game's meta-plot was. Clearly, the idea was that new writers would be able to stick to the game's canon whilst also knowing what could and couldn't be discussed. The document itself was very rough and ready, but then again, it was an internal document intended for internal use, not a polished piece ready to be consumed by the public. The really interesting part of the document was the second section, entitled The Truth. In this, Nightfall explained the secrets behind the various forces at play within the World of Progress, and all those little weird call-outs to the real world. About three and a half pages into this section, we come to the meta-plot. I'm not going to go into it here, the document's easy enough to find if you want to go looking for it, but suffice to say, the general reaction from the Slay community upon reading this was WTF, as I believe the kids say these days. Personally, I found it all rather interesting. It was like no other RPG I'd read before. Yes, the document was rough as you like, but it was never intended for public consumption. I often wonder what would have happened if it wasn't leaked and Nightfall were able to explore the truth through publications. There were aspects of the truth that went a long way to explaining why the world of progress was the way it was and I really wish that some of this had come out in the form of supplements rather than being left in an internal writer's guide. Back in the world of publishing, Slay Industries was taken on by Cubicle 7 in the early 2000s. Despite an initial flurry of enthusiasm, Cubicle 7 only released two of the supplements they had lined up, Cannibal Sector 1 and Hunter Sheets Issue 1. Unfortunately, Dave Alsop, one of Nightfall's directors and the guy responsible for most of the iconic Slay artwork, left Cubicle 7, and this probably took a lot of energy out of the Slay project. 2007 was the last time Cubicle 7 released anything for the game, and then, once again, it reverted back to Nightfall. Nightfall spent the early 2010s releasing a variety of PDF-only data packets for Slay Industries. These small supplements were short in pages, but very rich in lore and artwork. For fans of Slay, they were an absolute delight to look and read through. Most of them came with a truth rating in the front, which corresponded to how deep into the game's meta-plot they would go. Interestingly, when Cubicle 7 took over Slay, it was announced that THE TRUTH in capital letters, as presented in the writer's guide, was no longer canon. However, reading through these data packets, it was very easy to see the influence of that document. albeit it was far better presented this time. Did this mean that the truth was back? The way that some of the data packets left things dangling, it was very clear to fans of Slay that something was brewing on the horizon. The form that the something took was not what a lot of Slay fans were expecting. In 2016, Darama Productions announced a Kickstarter for a Slay Industries miniature skirmish game called Cannibal Sector 1. According to the Kickstarter, Backers would get the rulebook and factions decks. Dave Alsop would be doing the artwork and he would be collaborating with Jared Errol, one of Slay's original creators, on the lore and background of the game. Apparently there would be other goodies included, but something that was made very clear in the first update was that we will not be including any faction starters or miniatures in this Kickstarter. If the stretch goals reach high enough levels, we do aim to create special characters for each faction. This didn't bother me As a rule, I'm extremely wary about backing Kickstarters that include miniatures, as they never run to time. So I happily backed it for the book. Some new official tangible material that I could hold in my grubby hands from the guys behind Slay? Yes, please. There's a phenomenon that I like to call Kickstarter bloat, where a creator puts in a ton of stretch goals in a bid to entice more and more backers, and ends up having to produce more than he realistically can hope to produce a ship. CS1 was absolutely riven by this, and Darama seemed completely oblivious to it. Although I wanted the main rulebook, that is the one with all the RPG bits in it, not just the skirmish rules, my pledge, after the stretch goals included, a signed hardback rulebook an A5 copy of the Skirmish Rules, a PDF of the rulebook, all six faction decks, a Cannibal Sector 1 t-shirt, a Cannibal Sector 1 pin, a Cannibal Sector 1 bag, a Shiver Sergeant mini, a Mansheen mini, four character minis, a Wraithman mini, a Shakhtar mini, an Ebon mini, a 313 Stormer mini, a Xeno Stormer mini, an Aetherman mini, a Vevephon mini, a Sector Ranger Mini, a Gritstormer Mini, a Chagrin Stormer Mini, an Advanced Carrying Mini, an Ex-War Criminal Mini, a Digger Mini, Glyph Cards, six sets of 4D10s done up in different factions' colours, a Campaign Medal, and a PDF Campaign Pack. That's a lot. Given that most miniatures games that are fulfilled in Kickstarter run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, the fact that this one was founded on just over 50,000 was concerning. People who backed the Call of Cthulhu 7th edition Kickstarter are probably smiling nodding their heads and feeling their PTSD for that campaign kick in right now. As was expected in 2017 backers received a message saying that things wouldn't be delivered as planned and then unfortunately but not entirely unsurprisingly in June 2018 backers received another message this time from Nightfall saying that they had partied ways with Darama who were going into liquidation. To help try and deliver the Kickstarter they were going to partner with WordForge Games but unfortunately all the funds from the Cannibal Sector 1 Kickstarter were gone and thus Nightfall and WordForge were going to have to work out how to fund the fulfilment. What followed was painful for a lot of people but the new Nightfall and WordForge partnership had to make some tough choices. They had a bloated, creaking Kickstarter and they had to cut some fat in order to make fulfilments of the code deliverables a reality. In the end, by the middle of 2019, I received my books, along with a handful of miniatures, some dice, the bag and a pin. Was it worth it? Well, the hardback, the only thing I really cared about from the whole campaign, was a thing of beauty, and it was massive. This mighty full-colour tome delved into the entire history of CS1, from its origins as central outskirts, all the way to the present day, and then into the future? Yeah, Slay's authors had chosen to move the meta-plot forward. There were also a couple of cheeky moments where I'd read something, stop and go back and read it again, as there were some rather tasty nuggets of the new So, a few months later, when the Kickstarter for Slay Industry's second edition went live, I was all in. Despite the shaky ending to the CS1 campaign, Nightfall had shown a lot of integrity in the way they had acted. They took a massive financial hit themselves to ensure that the backers would at least get something, the main thing, for the project. Plus, their communication was spot on. They were honest, transparent, and didn't mess around with timelines. Speaking as a professional project manager, this is all you can really ask for. The Slay 2.0 Kickstarter went largely to plan. There was a little something called coronavirus that got in the way of a summer 2020 delivery, but otherwise it went smoothly. A quick start was released early on to give us a taste of the game. As mentioned before, Nightfall's communication along the way was great, and whilst the shipment of physical product was delayed, backers did get their hands on PDFs of the book on schedule, and I have to admit that this was a pretty exciting moment for me. My co-hosts Jason was spammed by a series of messages from me, the tone of which probably came across as that of Excitable Teenager, as I read through the book. Jason was a massive spoil spot though, declaring that he would be waiting till he got his physical reward before reading anything, subtext of which was enough with the spoilers even. Interestingly, as the campaign was coming to a close, Nightfall announced that certain of the products were now no longer canon. These included the Mott Sourcebook, which was rendered redundant by the new chapter in the rulebook, the key of Delaride that never really felt particularly canon in the first place, the contract directory, the Cubicle 7 Cannibal Sector 1 sourcebook which didn't have any of the original Sleek crew involved in its production and which was rendered pretty pointless following the release of the new Cannibal Sector 1 book and the Usa Carrion data packet which didn't fit with the new origins of the Carrion as presented in second edition. He also commented directly on the writer's bible and pointed out that the truth as presented there was not the truth underpinning second edition. Now, for those of you familiar with it, there's clearly still a kernel of the old truth there, but I'm interested to see where they go with it at this point. Going back to the campaign, Nightfall will have my eternal thanks due to the way they handled my pledge personally. Because of circumstances that I won't go into here, myself and my family had to move house pretty quickly at the end of last year. This was around the time that Nightfall was shipping the Kickstarter rewards so I contacted them asking them if they could in any way redirect mine. They messaged me on Christmas day asking for my details. A few days later my goodies turned up. It goes without saying that that level of customer service is above and beyond what is expected. So how does Second Ed compare to that original edition I picked up in Glasgow all those years ago? The biggest change is the production values. One thing that long time fans of Slay joke about is the quality of the old books. both of my copies of Karma and my original rulebook fell apart in record time. It's almost as if they were held together by some flour and water paste rather than actual glue. The new rulebook is a sturdy hardback that will retain its pages for many, many years. The layout and organisation is also far more professionally done than that in 1993, but that's hardly surprising with both the advancement in technology since then and the fact that the Nightfall crew have had many, many moons to hone their craft. When it comes to artwork, on one hand it's leaps and bounds ahead of where it was in the early 90s. Dave Alsop was an excellent artist back in the day, but it's clear that he's become even better over time. The pieces are all full colour, and they still reek of that strange, odd, Slay Industries atmosphere. It's actually hard to compare them to the original pieces completed almost 30 years ago. The production values in this new book are much higher. Seriously, I've mentioned it before, but it deserves mentioning again. The layout and the simple construction of the book is up there with the best modern RPGs have to offer. However, there was something extremely compelling about First Edition Slay. Part of me really misses the black and white artwork from that first book. Yes, the newer book is much more polished, but there was a certain raw power to the imagery in the original. I don't know, I should probably take these rose-tinted glasses off. One of the new pieces of artwork that I loved, and which was long overdue, was the map of Mott. brings to life the bizarre structure of the city, and just why living in downtown, not to mention lower downtown, is so awful. It really helps convey the scale of the place, from the spires of head office to the wastes of the cannibal sectors. Previously, Mork was pretty much whatever an individual GM made it, which was fine, but it was often hard to reconcile what was written in one place from where it was described elsewhere. With this new artwork, it actually makes sense, albeit in a twisted, dark, dystopian kind of way. The background and history sections have been expanded upon since first ed, being updated to include some of the material from Cannibal Sector 1, in addition to a whole load of brand new stuff. For the keen-eyed, the truth, in some form, is clearly still there. Indeed, there are blatant name drops for some of the folks mentioned in that original document. However, this is clearly something that's going to be built upon in future supplements, so I'm actually really excited to see where they go with it. Actually, I don't know why I said keen-eyed. The open opening and closing pieces of fiction are both massive truth bombs that I loved. However, if I was entirely new to Slay, I'm not sure I would understand them or their significance. That being said though, I'm not sure I understood Slay's original opening fiction back in 1993, so maybe I'm overthinking this. There's a new type of BPM too, Orange, to represent investigations into the Xi'an cult that is making its presence known and mocked. For long-time Slay players, the sub-note of LED cannot respond to requests for assistance from operatives on an orange BPN should be suitably chilling. Alongside the cults, one of the new foes facing ops are the conflict aliens. I'm using air quotes around new because the conflict aliens aren't new. They're a part of Slay's murky past that they thought were long defeated. As antagonists go, these guys are seriously scary, very well equipped and out for bloody revenge. Given how much Slay have sanitised their own history, ops facing these guys are going to be totally ill prepared. Joining the cast of newish bad guys are the dream entities. Those who have read some of the data packets released by Nightfall or Cannibal Sector 1 will know what these guys are. They seem to be the manifestations of the fears of people living in and around Lower Downtown or the Cannibal Sectors. They're an interesting change to serial killers and carrion because often these things can't simply be blasted away and they really let a creative GM make the the lower reaches of Mott a thing of absolute terror. They also raised some unsettling questions about the nature of the whole of sleigh industry's reality. The system, especially, has really made improvements. Things have been simplified, streamlined and balanced. I'll caveat this with the fact that I've not played it yet, but a casual reading shows that it's a zillion times better than the bloated mess that first ed was. My co-host Steve is eager for me to run a game, so hopefully I'll have a more informed opinion soon. Combat looks to be fast moving and streamlined, minimising the amount of numbers that need to be crunched at any one given time, and gone are the silly rolls and wounds. Under the new rules, wounds are serious affairs that happen when you take a lot of damage. Character creation is much more balanced and simplified. Gone are the need to track several hundreds of character points, and each of the races seems to be fairly evenly balanced against each other. There are reasons to choose from all of them now. Sadly, for long-time players and fans of the Karma supplement, Vevaphons, the biogenetic polymorphs, are no longer a character choice, but I can see why they were removed by Nightfall. I only ever had one player choose to be a Vev in First Ed and while it was a fun character it was the most bookkeeping intensive character in the whole party. They're not entirely gone for the setting though and I can easily envisage the opportunities of using a rogue Vev as an NPC villain. Those of you who have read Hunter Sheets Part 2 will know what I'm talking about. The Chagrin variant of the Stormer is also gone too but I'm personally not bothered about this. The Chagrin was really just for those folks who wanted to play the ultimate comp Black Monster as if playing a normal Stormer wasn't enough. They also weren't that interesting to roleplay outside of their rather narrow HULK SMASH window. Two other character options are added in the place of the Vev and the Chagrin. First we have a race that was made playable in the contract directory, the Advanced Carrion. These are carrion with a human level of intelligence that have been captured and domesticated by the company. The insight into their ways of thinking and how to roleplay them are fascinating. I particularly love the picture and part of the rulebook of an advanced carrion trying to comfort a distraught civilian. I think that this will be the experience of many players choosing that race. In the brand shiny new corner we have the Neofron, an avian race of conflict aliens. These guys were never really at war with slain and after the conflict years they simply just faded into conflict space and did their own thing. However, with the advancing meta plot and cults and other conflict aliens popping up all over the place, the Neofron have decided to throw their lot in with the company. Now, technically they're not brand new. Neofron have been referenced before. Indeed, one of the big bads in Hunter Sheets 2 is a Neofron, but this is the first time players have been given them as an option. Like the Advanced Carrion, there are some great notes around the psychology of this species and how to roleplay them. These guys are much more Sherlock Holmes than Arnie, so they'll be a welcome addition to any squad looking to make bank on white VPNs. I'm also happy that although they're avian, Nightfall chose not to give them any kind of flight. It won't be an amazingly practical power and mod for starters, but I also find that unlimited flight powers can often disrupt the most well plotted scenarios. For those of you wanting to check it out, look at the quick start on DriveThruRPG, I'll chuck a link in the show notes. If you are a first time slave player and you decide to do this, please let us know how you get on. So there you have it, Slay Industries on and off history for the last few decades. What's really interesting is how Slay has survived all these years. On one hand, it's a really niche game. A small press title that was released in the mid 90s which churned out a few titles before being bought by someone bigger and then being dropped. Most games would vanish into obscurity by this point but Slay has somehow managed to keep going even though the going got pretty rough at points. What's even more interesting is that Back at the second ed being released, people were still playing Slay years after it had vanished, even though it had a terrible system that most groups ended up house-ruling within an inch of its life. Why would players even stick with this? I think the answer is obvious. The creators of Slay Industries managed to craft a setting that was so unique, so compelling and so interesting to play in that nobody really minded if there weren't any official supplements being released. We simply wanted to explore and game in a world of progress. At one point, the only two books I had were a tatty copy of the main rulebook and an equally tatty copy of Karma, but that didn't stop me from running a four-year-long campaign long after Wizards of the Coast had dropped all support for Slay. Like the Carrion, who lurked in Cannibal Sector 1, Slay Industries has proven to be tough, adaptable, and only slightly prone to mutation. If you've never given Slay a try, now's the perfect chance to jump in with both feet. The shiny new second edition is available at both in Nightfall's website and DriveThruRPG. For those of you who are veterans of the world of progress, grab your Fend 603, strap on your body blocker armour, and make sure you've packed enough kickstart in your medical kit for the whole team. There's a whole new world of BPNs out there to explore. And guess what? It's as dangerous as ever.

Speaker 01: 42:42

it's not SLA.

Speaker 00: 42:49

that was our history of Slay Industries. We hope you enjoyed it. Part 2 should be coming up soon that will include our roundtable where we discuss Slay Industries and our love for the game. Spoiler warning ahead of time, Jason and I will probably get pretty excited and our fanaticism will be on show for everyone to see. We're a monthly podcast about the history of RPGs. If you would like to get in touch with us, you can find us on Twitter at Save Podcast or you can mail us at role.savepodcast You can also find us on Facebook by searching for Roll2Save. Thanks very much for listening and tune in again next time.