For A Fistful Of Coppers

Friends and neighbors! Find me on Google Plus!

2012-02-02T18:48:00.002-05:00

Seemingly 4 months after everyone else got on the G+ bandwagon, I now have an account! I'm looking forward to trying out the platform for gaming with friends and just general social networking, so add me if you follow Fistful of Coppers. I'm a great conversationalist.

LBSREAM (Library Book Sales Rule Everything Around Me)

2012-02-02T14:00:00.000-05:00

Used book sales are one of my favorite things in the world. I love picking up quality mystery and fantasy novels for small amounts of money, especially when it benefits an organization like a library. Plus, every once in a while, you find something truly remarkable. A library book sale was where I found unopened copies of the Mentzer Basic and Expert box sets, as well as my early works of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and a laserdisc copy of My Name Is Trinity (for curiosity's sake).

I was visiting a library where I am interviewing for a position in the following week, checking out the selection and space, when I noticed that they have a section in the back shelves for a Friends of the Library Book Sale. I felt it was my duty to check out their selection and see if I could find any gems. Outside of my standard searches for cheap Elmore Leonard and Terry Pratchett, I found some old sci-fi paperbacks that demanded attention.

I read my father's copy of Creatures of Light and Darkness when I was a teenager, but Jack of Shadows was a Zelazny work I'd always heard about, but never seen. I was glad that I picked up both of them.

Even at used book stores, I could only find the later Myth collections by Robert Aspirin, so finding the first three books in one volume was really cool and really cheap.

Oh yeah. And this pretty cool thing.

It's bright 'cause it's so awesome.

Five dollars! Five dollars for every single BECMI boxset rule and expansion packed into 304 dense-as-hell pages!

Honestly, I kind of feel bad that I picked this up for the price that I did, given that Rules Cyclopediae end up on eBay and Amazon for over $40, minimum. But there's a lot of stuff to unpack in this thing and I hope you'll stay tuned while I do.

The Fondue Plot, Part I

2012-01-31T14:25:00.000-05:00

One of the most fun and simultaneously most terrifying parts of being a GM is when players throw you a curveball. This might be following a lead that you didn't really anticipate as part of the mission you had planned or taking a crazy action that has far-reaching consequences. As the person running the story, often your only option is to improvise like crazy and hope that what you come up with makes for a fun session.

Yesterday, I got together on Skype with a group of six close friends and ran a modern crime/cyberpunk game of Savage Worlds. The characters included:

- Mouse, a nebbishy disguise and security specialist
- Murray, an old-school corporate spy with a penchant for scotch and blackmail
- Ramirez, Green Beret and former private military contractor
- Ray, an internet libertarian techie who lives in a telecom van
- Slick, a spray-tanned con man and quick draw artist
- Theresa, ex-Fish and Wildlife agent turned ecoterrorist hired gun

In true cyberpunk style, the group was hired by a wealthy divorcee, Angela Horwitz, whose developer husband, Travis Blackwell, claimed she was unfaithful and that he wasn't responsible to support their son. She wanted the PCs to acquire a DNA sample from Blackwell, by whatever means they deemed fit. However, the tycoon's new residence was the Arcadia condominium development, a Burj-like monolith with in-house kitchens, self-sustaining power and its own private SWAT team. If the team can deliver the package to Angela and her lawyers, there are $10,000 in bearer bonds waiting for each of them.

After the meeting, Ray took to his van and hacked into Blackwell's personal email account (the business one was too heavily guarded), including his schedule for the rest of the week. At this point, the team divided into two groups. One assessed the security of the Arcadia complex, the other kept their efforts focused on Blackwell. Murray, using his Connections edge, was able to get Ramirez an interview with the Arcadia's security force; given his ex-military background, he was an easy choice. Theresa spent the afternoon sizing up the building's security personnel and Mouse, disguised in prosthetic nose and hunchback as a cleaning lady, took stock of the building's surveillance set-up.

Meanwhile, Murray, Ray and Slick made their way to a Brutalist gentlemen's fitness club, where Blackwell's calendar had scheduled a jai alai match that afternoon. With a little defensive driving on Ray's part, the team got a look at Blackwell's personal security: one ex-Marine bodyguard , Mr. Hart, with him at all times in an armored SUV and another pair of them either trailing or leading in a black sedan. Once they reached the club, the bodyguards entered with him.

It was then that the Blackwell group began to formulate a plan. Ethan, who was playing the role of Slick, had chosen a small high-tech holographic projector as one of his pieces of essential equipment during character creation. His idea was to use the hologram to simulate a jai-alai ball in sight and sound, with Ray's electronic assistence, to pass himself off as an athletics instructor and worm his way into Blackwell's confidence.

Now, this plan has two distinct ways that it could blow up in the group's faces. The first was that Slick barely knew what jai alai was, let alone how a champion jai alai player performed. Second, and much more crucial, was that the minute Blackwell attempted to scoop the jai alai ball, it would instantly be revealed as a ruse. I was completely prepared for this plan to be a complete disaster and to potentially blow their cover completely.

But somehow, it worked. Slick's mannerisms and confidence as Hans, the European jai alai champion (with a fantastically awful Austrian accent by Ethan) didn't convince Blackwell fully, but it was more than enough for his dimmer athletic partner Jackson and his poor Smarts rolls. Jackson may have been gullible enough to challenge 'Hans' to a match, but surely he would have noticed that the ball wasn't real, right?

Except Slick killed it on his Agility rolls. In Savage Worlds, direct athletic competition like this is governed by opposed rolls. While Jackson's roll of 4 against his Agility was nothing to sneeze at, Slick's d8 in Agility exploded, giving him an eventual roll of 10, enough for a Raise (a special situational reaction in Savage Worlds terms).

Jackson never even got his hands on the ball. Slick, through the holographic gadget and Ray's assistance, faked his way through the whole process, like something out of an episode of Leverage. True, I didn't really have a great grasp of the rules of jai alai and played it more like the schoolyard game of fireball/wall ball, but the truth was that I felt that this crazy plan, coupled with some solid rolls on Slick and Ray's part, deserved to succeed.

However, all of my gaming prep had to do with the Arcadia. Literally all of it. Security systems, level layouts, the elevator spindle down the middle of the building. In the heat of the moment, I had Jackson invite Slick to an early dinner at a fancy tapas restaurant in downtown Los Angeles with him and Blackwell to dine on little plates and maybe get lucky with some ladies.

Slick accepted. Why wouldn't he?

Next time: The Fondue Plot, Part II! In which the name actually makes sense!

Dungeon Bastard Tells It Like It Is

2012-01-17T23:15:00.001-05:00

Thanks to Jeff Rients for introducing me to the Dungeon Bastard. We're a small hobby as it is and division only makes us smaller.

Silver Age Service

2012-01-16T13:42:00.000-05:00

This morning, my girlfriend and I went into Camden to volunteer at a community center providing some Martin Luther King Jr. Day programming for K-12 students with the day off. Among the highlights of the day was a 'Make Your Own Comic Book' activity for kids under 10. I helped the budding young artistes focus their story ideas and occasionally drew some hands and in return, I got some pretty solid Silver Age-style hijinks out of it.

Top of the list would probably be the Hairy Men, a crime-fighting family with progressively ridiculous beards and names (Bob, Billy Bob, Bob Jr., Billy Bob Jr., Billy Billy Fo Filly), who attempted to fend off the hair-snatching plans of the envious Bald Man. There were also a solid collection of alliterative superhero names, including Greatness Girl, Mute Man, Burly Boy and Wonderwind.

I guess you give a little and get a little, huh?

Cheap Minis Project: Stats and Standouts

2012-01-14T16:07:00.001-05:00

It's been a while since I've actually looked at the spreadsheet that I put together for the Cheap Minis project, so I decided to go through the list and see, in broad terms, what I have to work with, as well as any standout awesome minis that I have come across.

There are 303 Dungeons and Dragons miniatures that cost $1.50 or less at CoolStuffInc (the prices at Troll & Toad are fairly similar, but there are exceptions) across each of the 21 expansion series. The vast majority of these minis are Medium-sized, occupying a 1" square and around the size of a standard human. Only 15 of these minis are labeled as Large, or taking up 2x2" on a Chessex-style map.

As I somewhat expected, humanoids and monstrous humanoids take up the bulk of the monster selection: races like humans, elves, dwarves and the like account for 43% of the list and monstrous races like goblins and orcs account for another 23%. The remaining third of the minis include a fair amount of both constructs or animates and undead, outsiders and both mundane and magical beasts.

I'll tackle each of these sections in the future, but for now, I'll post a few standout minis that I think would be an inspiration for any DM looking for cool monsters or PCs.

Blood of Vol Fanatic

A great cultist model for any murderous sect.

Bugbear Gang Leader

I've always had a soft spot for bugbears and this dude totally reinforces that. Angry, well-armed and ready to wreck you.

War Ape

Just like it says on the tin. An ape that is ready for war. I really dig the spiked gauntlets/restraints on him. Maybe his race were forced into battle.

Hammerer

One of a number of great constructs and golems in the cheap minis collection. This one's a little more gear-driven than others, but that hammer hand really sells me on it.

Skeletal Equiceph

Some sort of awesome man-horse that's also a skeleton and has a big ol' spear.

There's plenty of cool stuff to work with, even when your price range is limited.

All miniatures are creations of Wizards of the Coast. Images from CoolStuffInc.

The Cheap Minis Project

2012-01-10T20:17:00.000-05:00

Miniatures are expensive, no matter what form they take or what company manufactures them. From the detailed pewter of a Warhammer or Malifaux model to the most recent prepainted D&D or Heroclix boosters, it seems like the only way to acquire affordable miniatures in on the secondary market. When I used to play Warhammer 40K, eBay was a godsend for cheap(er) Space Marines built from other people's bits boxes and Rhinos on the sprue without packaging or instructions. For prepainted minis, the places to go are websites like CoolStuffInc and Troll & Toad, where you can find just about any monster released for any collectible game.

However, these websites also illustrate another upsetting part of the miniatures market: their once-collectible status. The randomized booster format of D&D miniatures means that there are 'common' and 'rare' miniatures that cost ridiculous amounts of money for the materials used to create them. Among these 'rare' minis are many of D&D's most iconic monsters: dragons and giants of all shapes and sizes, the beholder, owlbear and displacer beast cost anywhere between $5 to $20 to purchase. In order to play the typical game of D&D with minis, you would most likely end up spending more money on plastic than you did on rulebooks, which is really saying something.

That's not to say that there aren't affordable D&D miniatures, far from it. I think there's a wealth of awesome, weird and quality collectible miniatures out there that won't break your bank account.

Over 300 of them, in fact.

Before the Christmas holiday, I compiled a spreadsheet of every single available D&D miniature under $1.50 on CoolStuffInc, not only as a piece of bargain hunting, but as the basis for a worldbuilding project. Over the next few weeks, I plan to assess the miniatures that I've found on the secondary market and begin to create the structure for a campaign world around them. Instead of lamenting the lack of a cheap Black Dragon or Ogre miniature, I want to build a fantasy setting that is tailor-made to accomodate something like the Maug or the amazing Half-Illithid Lizardfolk that I have come across in the under $2 range. I think that working within this framework will at the very least inspire me to create some cool fluff and adventure ideas and might possibly lead to a campaign in the future.

Later this week, I plan to take stock of the list, its strengths and weaknesses when it comes to creature diversity. There's a lot of great stuff in there, from sword and sorcery looking cultists and warriors to a bunch of off-beat monstrous humaniods like bullywugs and a copious amount of troglodytes. Stay tuned for more!

Where'd You Go II: The Quickening

2012-01-10T18:52:00.002-05:00

So, serves me right for announcing big things in Blogland before the winter holidays and a chunk of important job-related deadlines, right?

Never fear, cool things are just around the corner. That is, if there are still any readers out there.

Putting my money where my mind is

2011-12-21T20:42:00.001-05:00

I feel like a lot of my creative career, including For A Fistful of Coppers, has been chock full of good ideas and unfortunately lacking in final products.

This ends now.

On my computer, there is a folder called Campaign Planning where I keep all of my prep work and general RPG noodling alongside my rules PDFs and token art. Most of my work on settings like Assholes in Space, Heist D&D, my Savage Worlds Feng Shui conversion and other campaigns that I've outlined on this blog are there, but the vast majority of that campaign info is in my head, bouncing around and getting lost behind other works and worries. As a result, I never really feel like I've created a complete RPG product, in the sense that a lot of other game bloggers release games, supplements and settings either for free or cheap. Stuff like Christian's Loviator zine, Stuart Robertson's Weird West RPG, the myriad contributors to Fight On! and Knockspell and the tons and tons of cool little PDFs of house rules and adventure scenarios are unbelievably inspiring to me.

I want to try and put together quasi-professional product, both to inspire other gamers and readers of this blog and to prove to myself that I can follow through and expand my ideas into compelling gaming. Furthermore, I'd like to spend a little time with Publisher and learn how to lay out some supplement pages of my own (what do other people use to put their PDFs together? Inquiring minds want to know!)

In the future, expect information and potential products, including:

A 60s Spy Setting Book and Plot Point campaign for Savage Worlds!
My expanded Savage Worlds Feng Shui conversion!
Technoir transmissions, including a Gibsonian Bridge location and the lawless highways of a cyberpunk future! I'll get into Technoir and why I think it's so groovy in a future post.
My Dungeons and Dragons campaign building project, useful for any edition of the game! I've just finished the prep work for this thing, which will make it pretty darn useful, even for folks who have no interest in the campaign that I'm working on.
More Assholes in Space!

Where'd You Go?

2011-12-16T11:06:00.000-05:00

So, what have I been doing in the past two months? Well...

- Still playing in Drance's awesome Castles and Crusades game, for one! It has been waaaaay too long since I've actually gotten a chance to play a role-playing game of any stripe, so spending every Wednesday rolling as Milo the mace-wielding thief has been great fun.

- Running some games! In October and November, I ran some D&D Gamma World (the most recent 4E-style box set) for my friends and my girlfriend. Though Thanksgiving and real life definitely killed most of the game's momentum, it was a total blast while we played it.

- Working a crappy seasonal job to pay rent! Thankfully, I've got some job interviews lined up in the future for more library-focused work, but 5:30 mornings have been a bit of a creative buzzkill.

Fortunately, there's going to be plenty more to come from Fistful of Coppers into the new year, so stayed tuned today for some more posting and the announcement of a super special new Old School/Dungeons and Dragons-related project!

That's right! Goblins and treasure and magic swords and everything!

Strange Western Tales #7 - Liquid Gold

2011-09-27T20:58:00.001-04:00

Liquid Gold, a Strange Western Tale for the Savage Worlds and Weird West systems in the Bullets and Tequila setting

Get Ready: A family of mountain moonshiners might have discovered the most wonderful cocktail of booze in the world. Now they'll have to defend it from the proprietors of an outlaw saloon.

Get Set: The Atkinson family has been living in the Ozarks for a generation and moonshining much longer than that. Their batches have never been as consistent as they'd like, but they've always made a consistent living from their home-brewed booze. But something about their new residence, whether it's the flowering trees or the burbling spring where they collect their water, has made the newest batch of 'shine something close to divine ambrosia. Clancy Atkinson, the family patriarch, originally started selling it to local cowpokes, who grew so enamored of it that they refused to go to local saloons. As a result, every place that sells booze in Pine Gulch is buying the 'Sunshine,' as it has come to be known. Billy and Lucky Atkinson, the younger sons of the clan, are the primary couriers of the shine, bringing a load of the stuff into Pine Gulch twice per week.

Go!: Unfortunately, not everyone thinks that the Atkinsons should be profiting from their good fortune. Betty Barton, the proprietor of the Cowpuncher Saloon, has gotten a group of her customers together, mostly outlaws and other unsavory types, to stage a coup of the Atkinson family estate. They plan to take the Atkinson family hostage and force them to produce the Sunshine for their own lucrative gain, exporting it outside of the Ozarks to points West and East.

Strange Western Tales #6 - The Red Spectre

2011-09-26T23:40:00.000-04:00

The Red Spectre, a Strange Western Tale for the Savage Worlds and Weird West systems in the Bullets and Tequila setting

Get Ready: A masked vigilante has been responsible for the deaths of many ex-Confederate 'traitors to the cause.' Now, he's after one of your party.

Get Set: Spotted in towns all across the Kansas and Oklahoma territory, the Red Spectre still wears the gray long coat of a Confederate officer and a Jack Flag-style mask of the Stars and Bars. He kills his victims with point-blank shotgun blasts and marks where their bodies falls with the word 'Traitor' written in red. So far, 9 men and women have fallen to his trail of vengeance. The Pinkerton Detective Agency has an operative following the case (an excellent source for clues and a convenient dude to die before your PC)

Go!: The Red Spectre has a crew of Klan-style raiders devoted to his cause that he can call to action if his first assassination attempt fails. They don't try and be subtle: expect fire and brimstone on horseback

Notable NPCs

The Red Spectre
Agility d10, Smarts d8, Spirit d8, Strength d6, Vigor d8
Fighting d8, Intimidation d10, Investigation d8, Knowledge (Battle) d6, Notice d8, Riding d8, Shooting d10, Stealth d10, Streetwise d6, Taunt, d6, Tracking d8
Charisma: +0 (-4) Pace: 6 Parry: 7 Toughness: 6 (8)
Hindrances: Arrogant, Bloodthirsty, Vengeful, Wanted
Edges: Block, Command, Inspire, Marksman, Quick Draw, Steady Hands, Strong Willed, Trademark Weapon (Trusty Pigknuckle)
Gear: Trusty Pigknuckle (12/24/48, RoF 1-2, 1-3d6, +2 to Shooting), LeMat Pistol (12/24/48, RoF 1, 2d6, AP 1, underslung shotgun barrel), Chainmail Vest (+2 to Armor), quality horse

Home stretch

2011-09-26T23:23:00.000-04:00

It's been a pretty hectic personal week for me, so getting to my September Short Adventures has unfortunately not been a priority. I'm going to see how many I can churn out this week (it'll have to be about 2-3 adventures per day at this point) but I want to finish what I started. School stopped me from finishing the April A to Z challenge and I'll be gol danged if it's gonna happen again.

Heist Plan #5 - The Curtain Call

2011-09-26T23:16:00.000-04:00

The Job: The Curtain Call

The Set-Up: The City of Masks takes its opera very seriously. The only thing more elaborate than the sets and costumes are the riches on display in the audience. Every year, the largest opera production is the Black Ship of Vesperia at the Coronet opera house, a dramatic aria about the romance between a pirate captain and a princess imprisoned by a wizard. The box office alone takes in over 20,000 gold pieces, without factoring in donations or the sales of wine, not to mention how much money you could make kidnapping a lead player before their big number.

Why It's Impossible: The Coronet runs a very tight security shift. Unauthorized personnel are forcibly escorted from the wings of the theater by large men and women, but they're not the only ones. Cloaked guardians, floating inches above the ground patrol the halls of the theater, including the backstage, the cat walks and the dome ceiling that opens up onto the sky. No one knows where they came from, but every employee of the Coronet knows to stay clear of them. There's also the chance that you'll come across a doting aristocratic fan or scheming talent agent that might not take too kindly to outside observers.

The Cracks

There are tons of stagehands, costumers and chorus members all around the theater, ample opportunities to disguise one's self.
The catacombs under the opera house can be accessed through many different secret passages in the City, from the houses of Parliament to the brothels of the Red Quarter. Just watch out for cloaks
Bianca Corrovaddo, the alto playing the role of Lucretio, the milkmaid disguised as a male pirate, is getting sick of playing second fiddle in Coronet productions. If you come across her, she's willing to parlay: if you kidnap her and hold her for ransom, she'll cooperate completely in exchange for half the ransom. She's also willing to help your group kidnap another member of the cast for a finder's fee. If she's kidnapped against her will, she will be an awful prisoner.

The Twist: The cast of the Black Ship of Vesperia isn't completely human. Some of the more unearthly choruses are provided by a pair of harpies, who have exchanged their predatory lives for more comfortable existences.

Notable NPCs

Cloaked Creatures HD 3; AC 3 [16]; Atk 1 claw (1d6); Move 12; Save 14; CL/XP 5/240; Special: Paralyzing cry, cannot be hit by nonmagical weapons.

Glulinda and Parsimony, Harpy Chorus HD 4; AC 7 [12]; Atk 2 talons (1d3); Move 6 (Fly 18); Save 13; CL/XP 4/120; Special: Flight, Siren-song

Strange Western Tales #5 - High Noon Run

2011-09-21T16:07:00.001-04:00

High Noon Run, a Strange Western Tale for the Savage Worlds and Weird West systems in the Bullets and Tequila setting

Get Ready: A double agent informer for the Pinkertons needs your help to make it to the local Agency safehouse alive.

Get Set: Slim Garfunkle was a really crappy outlaw. But what skills he lacked at bushwhacking and safe blowing, he more than made up for with open ears and a welcoming disposition. After being caught during a robbery in Tulsa, Garfunkle was approached by the Pinkertons and recruited as an informer. The Agency engineered his escape and paid him $200 a month; in return, Garfunkle would send weekly letters to a safehouse, containing coded information on bandit movements, hideouts and planned robberies. Things were going great until two days ago, when one of the members of the Punch and Judy gang caught Garfunkle sending his letter and received a whack on the head for their trouble. Now Garfunkle's on the run and looking for someone to help him out.

Go!: The Pinkerton safehouse is in the small city of Red Fork, hidden in the back of a general store. The quickest route to get there is by train, but if it's known that Garfunkle's on the train, there will definitely be an awesome train gunfight. Ike and Wilma Teller, the husband and wife outlaws who head the Punch and Judy gang, have lost three men to the Pinkertons and they really want the responsible party dead.

Notable NPCs

Slim Garfunkle, confidential informant
Agility d8, Smarts d8, Spirit d6, Strength d4, Vigor d6
Climbing d4, Fighting d6, Gambling d4, Investigation d8, Knowledge (Bank Robbing) d4, Notice d6, Persuasion d4, Riding d6, Shooting d4, Stealth d4, Streetwise d8
Charisma: 0 Pace: 8 Parry: 5 Toughness: 5
Hindrances: Thin Skinned (suffers an additional -1 for wound penalties), Enemy (Punch and Judy gang)
Edges: Alertness, Investigator, Fleet Footed
Gear: Colt Lightning (12/24/48, RoF 1, 2d6, AP 1)

Ike Teller, cranky old outlaw
Agility d4, Smarts d8, Spirit d6, Strength d6, Vigor d8
Fighting d4, Knowledge (Explosives) d10, Lockpicking d4, Notice d6, Riding d6, Shooting d4, Streetwise d8, Survival d6, Taunt d6
Charisma: -1 Pace: 5 Parry: 4 Toughness: 6
Hindrances: Elderly, Habit (Tobacco, minor)
Edges: Command, Inspire, Level-Headed, Marksman
Gear: Shotgun (12/24/48, RoF 1-2, 1-3d6), Dynamite-firing crossbow (15/30/60, 2d6, MBT), 10 sticks of dynamite

Wilma Teller
Coming soon!

Strange Western Tales #4 - Brotherly Love

2011-09-20T10:30:00.001-04:00

Brotherly Love, a Strange Western Tale for the Savage Worlds and Weird West systems in the Bullets and Tequila setting

Get Ready: A pair of mad scientist siblings and their respective goons battle for supremacy over a town with a nearby aluminum mine.

Get Set: Horace and Prescott Van Dyne both vied for their father's affection so fiercely that their rivalry only grew after an untimely lightning accident ended the half-crazed scientist's life. Now both have their eyes set on the town of Zenith, who have been waiting on the Alcoa company to assess their newly discovered veins of aluminum oxide. For each brother, the metal could prove to be the tipping point in their war against each other: Horace's boiler suits (big fireproof diving helmet suits with flamethrowers) could be made lighter and more protective, while Prescott's fleet of war balloons would be armored and could carry more powerful weaponry. The citizens of Zenith are terrified of the lunatic factions that have overtaken their town and refuse to leave the laundry and dry goods store; just about every other building is occupied by one gang or another.

Go!: Each faction has its camp set up around Zenith: Horace's men have taken over the town hall and Prescott has made an Ikea-like construction around the water tower. Each vie for the mines located outside of Zenith, but the air rifles of the ballooners or the coal-boiling behemoth motor cart of the boilers have created a stalemate. The PCs could turn the tides toward one brother or the other, or take the whole operation down, Yojimbo-style.

Notable NPCs

Boiler Suit Goons
Agility d6, Smarts d4, Spirit d4, Strength d8, Vigor d8
Fighting d6, Intimidation d4, Notice d4, Riding d6, Shooting d6, Survival d4
Charisma: 0 Pace: 5 Parry: 5 Toughness: 6 (7/10)
Edges: None
Gear: Flamethrower (Cone template, 2d10, ignores Armor, 5 shots), Boiler Suit (+1/+4 vs Fire, reduced Speed to 5)
Note: You can target the fuel tank (-2), which causes a blowback explosion (2d10 damage to goon)

Air Crew
Agility d8, Smarts d6, Spirit d6, Strength d4, Vigor d6
Climbing d6, Fighting d6, Notice d8, Piloting d6, Shooting d6, Taunt d4
Charisma: 0 Pace: 6 Parry: 5 Toughness: 5
Edges: Steady Hands
Gear: Air Rifle (20/40/80, RoF 1, 2d6+2, AP 2), boating knife (2d4), Navy coat, nice moustache

Heist Plan #3 - Hot Potato

2011-09-17T18:18:00.002-04:00

The Job: Hot Potato

The Set-Up: In a previous score, one of the PCs has come into possession of a beautiful cats-eye gem. The stone is bad luck, through and through. If the PC has tried to sell it, it continues to return to their possession in increasingly bizarre ways and just makes their luck worse. Usual fences refuse to buy the stone again and are starting to shy away from the group entirely. Now you've got to figure out a way to get rid of this cursed piece of rock before it destroys all of your lives.

Why It's Impossible: Whoever enchanted this rock was not messing around. Any local artificers or lay clerics you know can't seem to break the curse on your party member. You'll either need to get the help of a very divine cleric (who might not be sympathetic to your plight) or talk to the gem's previous owner about it (who's beefed up his or her home security after the PCs took off with their possessions.) Neither way seems like a good idea.

The Cracks

It would be much easier to talk to the former owner of the gem outside of their fortress-like abode. Going to meet a client, shopping for new jewelry or furniture, the possibilities are endless.
Indol the Left-Handed is the high priest of the God of Thieves (or your game's trickster god equivalent). He's got the divine know-how to remove the curse from your party member, but owing him a favor is probably worse than their current predicament.

The Twist: Your previous mark couldn't be happier that you've taken the gem. They've been trying to get rid of it for years to no avail. The defenses that are being constructed are not to prevent any further thefts; they're meant to keep the PCs from ever trying to return the gem.

Notable NPCs

Indol the Left-Handed, 8th level Cleric St 9 In 13 Wi 16 Cn 14 De 10 Ch 16, 40hp, Ring of Protection +1, Leather Armor +1, Wayfinder (short sword +1, locate objects), Scarab of Protection

Card Hunter: A Different Sort of Virtual Tabletop

2011-09-17T16:22:00.001-04:00

Somehow, while looking through my Steam library, I came across a link from my XCOM: UFO Defense entry to an interview with Jon Chey, one of the co-founders of Irrational Games and the developer of a new online game called Card Hunter.

I think this game might be the closest thing I have ever seen to tabletop gaming on a computer.

In their own words:

Card Hunter is an online collectible card game with some twists:

It’s free to play and you win cards by playing the game, not by buying expensive booster packs.
Search dungeons to find treasure and then equip your loot to build out your decks.
Use your cards to move your characters and battle monsters’ decks.

We’re taking two great flavours and combining them into something new. Classic fantasy adventuring meets collectible card gaming!

Tired of pressing buttons while grinding away at quests? Card Hunter is all about skill – your skill at deck building and playing your cards. Tired of paying for endless new card sets? Card Hunter lets you win by playing, not by paying.

The game is being designed by many former members of the Irrational Games team, as well as Kevin Kulp, a game designer who "once won Best DM for three years running with Gen Con’s RPGA." Oh, and Richard Garfield and Skaff Elias of Magic: the Gathering fame. Honestly, the person I'm most excited about is Ben Lee, who was the artistic director behind all of the Silver Age goodness of Freedom Force and seems to be putting that same kind of thematic dedication into all of the preview art for Card Hunter.

Seriously, check out that old-school flavor! If that doesn't make you excited, I don't know what will.

(All images linked from Card Hunter's gallery page: http://www.cardhunter.com/gallery/)

So, City State of the Invincible Overlord...

2011-09-16T15:06:00.002-04:00

WHY HADN'T I CHECKED THIS OUT EARLIER?

For the past two weeks, I've started playing in a Castles and Crusades game at seemingly the only FLGS in the South Jersey area. Though the most recent campaign is usually run by our blogging buddy Drance from Once More Unto the Breach!, this week's game was run by the group's previous DM in the City State of the Invincible Overlord.

What a location!

The previous campaign had started in March and as a result, there were plenty of stories to be told about the Church of the All-Seeing Eye, conflicts between rival merchant houses manufactured by the PCs and a giant underground combat in a buried temple to some sort of Giant Spider God. This session was mostly focused on continuing havoc caused in the city state by working to fulfill the prophecies developed by the abolitionist group cum religion known at the table as the All-Seeing Eye. Our efforts to purchase gunpowder in order to collapse the eastern wall of the massive obsidian Cryptic Citadel proved fruitful, but once we entered the palace (thanks to the barbarian's possession of the Eagle's Talon, a magic sword once owned by the 4th Invincible Overlord), we discovered that it was completely hollow and occupied by a giant tentacled eyeball that looked at us, caused a brief dose of vertigo, then closed back up.

When we left the temple to retrieve more explosives, we found the city in ruins, burnt and demolished with a giant web-encrusted hand smashed down on top of our warehouse. After a bit of confusion, we discovered that we were now shrunk down and inhabiting a full-scale model of the City State that the PCs had encountered while fighting the Spider God's forces earlier in the campaign. We went to return to the pyramid to fix things, triggered the eyeball again, then returned to a pristine model of the City State with no one around.

Now, most people would stop and think about this situation at this time. But not us! We went and triggered the eyeball at least 3 more times before realizing that we were now five levels deep inside the original burned model and about the size of specks of dust. And that was when the adventure ended.

So, next week?

(Image from the Judges' Guild website: http://www.judgesguild.com/images/misc/csio_ca.jpg)

Something I feel like I should share...

2011-09-14T01:54:00.000-04:00

I listen to audio books while I cook, clean and do my walks around my new hometown. Today, I started a Western story called The Adventures of Johnny Vermillion, written by Loren D. Estleman, a funny and decidedly cinematic Western novel with a phenomenal introduction that I think captures what I want to do with a Western RPG. What follows is a selection of that first chapter, trimmed a bit as to try and avoid copyright infringement:

Most of what follows took place in the West.

Not just any West.

It was the West of legend and suckling-memory, where drifters caked head to heel with dust swilled red-eye whiskey at long mahogany bars, punching holes in the tin ceilings with their big Colts to impress their half-naked, quartz-eyed hostesses; where buffalo thunder across gaunt desert, grass ocean, and the great mountain ranges where the earth showed its tusks, stopping only to splash in the wallows and scratch their burlap hides against the cowcatchers of the Central and Western Pacific and the mighty Atchison; where red-lacquer Concords barreled down the western face of the Divide, pulled by teams of six with eyes rolling white, whips cracking like Winchesters above their heads; where glistening black locomotives charged across trestles of latticework oak, burning scrubwood in greasy black steamers and blasting their arrogant whistles; where highwaymen in slouch hats and long dusters pulled bandannas up over their faces and stepped suddenly from behind boulders, firing at the sky and bellowing at shotgun messengers to throw up their hands and throw down the box; where all the towns were named Lockjaw and Busted Straight, Diablo and Purgatory and Spunk.

A West where all the gamblers wore linen and pomade and dealt aces from both sides of the deck and derringers from inside their sleeves; where cowboys ate beans and drank coffee around campfires to harmonica music, and everything was heavily seasoned with tin. At sunup, drowsy and stiff, the cowboys drove undulating herds of grumbling, lowing, high-strung longhorns past ridges where feathered warriors balanced their horses square on the edge, bows and lances raised against the sky while the brass section blared and kettle drums pounded. Gun battles cleared busy streets in a twinkling and bullets rang off piles of rock in the alkali flats with p-tweeeeeee!, kicking dust into the eyes of lawman and outlaw alike. The U.S. Cavalry was invincible, and bandits and gunfighters were celebrities, trailing battalions of paparazzi in brown derbies: Custer had yet to stand on his hill, Jesse to turn his back on Bob, and Wild Bill to draw his fabled hand. All the wagon trains came with concertinas, and all the undertakers and hangmen looked like John Carradine.

... It was the West of Daniel Boone, Kit Carson and Billy the Kid; but it was also the West of William S. Hart, Roy Rogers and John Wayne. It was big enough to encompass the bombastery of Buffalo Bill and Cecil B. DeMille and the skullduggery of the bloody brothers Harte.

This was Johnny Vermillion's West; a West that should have been, but never quite was.

Yep, I think that covers a lot of it.

Strange Western Tales #3 - Pedal to the Metal

2011-09-13T18:21:00.002-04:00

Pedal to the Metal, a Strange Western Tale for the Savage Worlds and Weird West systems in the Bullets and Tequila setting

Get Ready: Defiance, Utah is hosting the unveiling of the world's first prototype motor carriage! How long will it take until someone tries to steal it?

Get Set: Chosen as an automotive testing grounds for the nearby salt flats, Defiance is a pious town taking in a glut of Eastern journalists and engineers out of territorial pride. Cyrus Lipscombe, the inventor of the motor carriage, is a good Mormon boy who intends to manufacture his creation in Utah. This insistence on keeping the potential wealth out of the hands of industrialists and robber barons is the primary reason that two teams of spies and thieves have embedded themselves in the crowds of press and supporters descending on Defiance. Neither group is aware of the other and clashes will most likely occur.

Go!: The thieves will try and make off with the motor carriage at night, killing the guards or knocking them unconscious. If the carriage is well-protected or one group brings itself out in the open, the other will attempt to steal it during the trials on the salt flats. However, there is only so much of the experimental oil solution that powers the vehicle, so it will eventually have to be drawn by horses or pulled by a wagon.

Notable Stats

Motor Carriage: Acc/Top Speed 5/15; Toughness: 10 (2); Crew: 1+3

Mortimer Buckles, JP Morgan's man in Utah
Agility d6, Smarts d8, Spirit d4, Strength d6, Vigor d8
Driving d6, Fighting d6, Investigation d8, Knowledge (Business) d6, Notice d6, Persuasion d6, Shooting d6, Streetwise d8
Charisma: +0 Pace: 5 Parry: 5 Toughness: 7
Hindrances: Obese, Vow (Work for JP Morgan)
Edges: Combat Reflexes, Command, Inspire, Investigator, Level Headed
Weapons: Volcanic repeater (12/24/48, RoF 1, 2d6, AP 1)

Strange Western Tales #2 - The Best Around

2011-09-12T13:32:00.002-04:00

The Best Around, a Strange Western Tale for the Savage Worlds system in the Bullets and Tequila setting

Get Ready: "A martial arts tournament held during the American Civil War by Emperor Norton with several shadowy tongs and cartels backing it. Draws in all sorts of fighters from around the world." (shamelessly stolen from Conrad Grey on RPGNet)

Get Set: Emperor Norton, the eccentric quasi-monarch of San Francisco, has become enamored of hand-to-hand combat after being introduced to Kung-Fu by the inhabitants of the city's Chinatown district. He has become consumed with a desire to observe and test the prowess of every type of martial art that he can observe. As word of his obsession begins to spread across San Francisco, a consortium of Chinese tongs decide to assist the Emperor in sponsoring a tournament. The Suey Sing, Bing Kong and Hop Sing tongs agree to a tenuous truce for profit's sake and work with Emperor Norton to set up the tournament, while controlling all of the gambling profits on the side.

Each tong has a champion included in the contest and impeccably monogrammed invitations from the Emperor have been sent all over the globe, to French Savate stars, English catch wrestlers, Japanese jiujutsu masters and many more (maybe even to a PC of yours!)

Go!: The Norton Invitational will definitely have underhanded dealings, personal sabotage, conspiracies and metric tons of people being kicked in the face. However, the biggest threat to the competition and the profits made is probably the Kwang Duck tong. Excluded from the tournament planning, the Kwang Duck will most likely attempt to destroy the tournament as the finals are reached. A newly acquired Gatling gun will be the star attraction.

Notable NPCs

Guo Liaushu, tong champion
Agility d10, Smarts d6, Spirit d8, Strength d6, Vigor d8
Climbing d6, Fighting d10, Knowledge (Cooking) d6, Notice d8, Riding d4, Stealth d6, Streetwise d6, Taunt d8
Charisma: +2 Pace: 6 Parry: 8 Toughness: 6
Hindrances: Arrogant
Edges: Attractive, Block, Combat Reflexes, Dodge, Martial Artist, Quick, Superior Kung-Fu (Shaolin Temple)

Arthur Armstrong, English wrestling star
Agility d6, Smarts d6, Spirit d6, Strength d10, Vigor d10
Fighting d10, Intimidation d8, Notice d6, Repair d6, Shooting d4, Streetwise d4, Survival d6
Charisma: -2 Pace: 5 Parry: 7 Toughness: 8
Hindrances: Ugly, Slowpoke
Edges: Brawny, Improved Nerves of Steel, Martial Artist, Superior Kung-Fu (Shuai Chao [Catch Wrestling]), Sweep

Strange Western Tales #1 - The House Always Wins

2011-09-09T14:32:00.002-04:00

The House Always Wins, a Strange Western Tale for the Savage Worlds and Weird West systems in the Bullets and Tequila setting

Get Ready: There are anachronistic old-timey billboards advertising a 'Gambler's Paradise' called Hutter's Fortune in the Nevada Territory. When the PCs arrive, they find a small town built around a massive casino called the Silverlode. Are the odds really fair?

Get Set: Hutter's Fortune mostly consists of rows of hotels and boarding houses, a general store or two, some cafes and a church, all radiating off from the Silverlode casino. The Silverlode is basically a modern casino if built in the Wild West. There are tables for every game you can think of, showgirls and saloon music, a gigantic bar offering Eastern and European delicacies like absinthe alongside the bar whiskey and tequila and much more. Table monitors dressed in the style of Pinkerton agents keep the peace and remove gamblers who accuse the house of cheating. The casino's owner, Jacob Hutter, comes out onto the casino floor every once in a while and interacts with patrons and staff before retreating once more into the lower levels of the casino.

Go!: The basement of the Silverlode is one gigantic Bond-villain-lair level con operation. Dozens of operators, statisticians and guards work at rigging the outcome of each table through the use of magnets, trick decks and any other nefarious dealings that you can think of. At the center of it all is a constantly clicking Babbage Engine-style machine, spitting out a line of tickertape calculating profits and losses.

Weird Western Twist: The central Babbage machine is actually sentient and will attempt to protect itself with claw grabbers and other industrial machinery should it be attacked.

Notable NPCs

Jacob Hutter, Casino owner
Casino guards
(*) Sentient Babbage engine

Heist Plan #2 - Brothel in the Sky

2011-09-07T14:04:00.000-04:00

So, the Labor Day weekend is finally finished and I am back in the South Jersey saddle. Time to catch up on these adventures.

The Job: Brothel in the Sky

The Score: There are plenty of tall towers in Quohal, but only one of them has no visible way of entering. Locals call it the Sparkling Spire and rumor has it that this ornate structure is the home of the Emperor's secret harem, full of lovely women of all races and creeds collected by the monarch over his exceptionally long life. If the finery of its parapets are any indication of the wealth within, it would be a hell of a score. Maybe in more ways than one.

Why It's Impossible: Seriously, there's no way into the tower from the ground. Everyone that you know in Quohal has tried, but there's nothing: no illusory walls, no concealed door, nothing. From what you can see of the structure, it goes up 15 stories before the tower even starts having windows. Even once you've reached these upper levels, there's no telling what lies beyond them.

The Cracks

Though there's no possible entrance at street level, intrepid adventurers may take to the sewers below Quohal, where a secret tunnel guarded by monstrous humanoids leads to a secret way in: one really, really long ladder. Feel free to put Elmer Bernstein's The Stairs on in the background while the players figure out how not to fall off while they ascend hundreds of feet of ladder.
The PCs could also try reaching the tower by the air. The sheer stone surface of its lower half is studded with balconies, buttresses and other potential handholds. They just require you to have some sort of very high vantage point or perhaps a flying getaway driver.

The Twist: What the rest of the city thinks is just an elaborate house of pleasure is actually the real seat of Quahol's government. The real Emperor died decades ago within the Spire's gilded walls and ever since, the denizens of the Sparkling Spire have collectively taken his place. This council includes a multitude of races, including human, elves, dwarves, bound dryads (their trees are located within the tower) and even a doppelganger, who impersonates the Emperor in public. Any adventurer who makes his or her way up to the highest reaches of the Spire will definitely become involved in these machinations as a knowledgeable party.

Stats

Sewer Creatures: HD 2; AC 4 [15]; Atk 2 claws (1d3) or by weapon (1d8); Move 12; Save 16; CL/XP 3/60; Special: Blindsense 60 ft., Camoflague (75% chance of not being noticed while waiting in ambush.)
Elder Dryads: HD 5; AC 3 [16]; Atk 1 life drain (1d8 + 1d8 healing); Move 12; Save 12; CL/XP 8/800; Special: Charm Person (-2), Entangle (as Web), Plant Growth.

Heist Plan #1 - Mutiny on the Dowry

2011-09-02T17:24:00.001-04:00

The Job: Mutiny on the Dowry

The Score: The heir apparent of your city's nobility, Prince Heinrich, has just celebrated his wedding nuptials with the Lady Mernau, the fair and somewhat older daughter of the Duke of Okkuz. Their honeymoon journey will consist of a carriage caravan transporting the happy couple and their respective entourages between Okkuz and your fair city. Though most of the gentry assume that this is just an overly public and traffic-causing ceremony, you've learned that the real purpose of this cross-kingdom convoy is to transport all of the new princess's worldly possessions to her new home.

Why It's Impossible: There is never a point where the caravan is unguarded. Soldiers from both Okkuz and your home city have been assigned to protect the newlyweds, not to mention the constant swarm of servants, drivers and other support personnel. If even one carriage goes missing, the entire procession will lock down and the militaries of both cities will be tasked to bring you in at any cost.

The Cracks

The aforementioned swarm means that disguised folks can easily 'join up' with the caravan, provided that they have a good enough story.
At night, the caravan runs on a skeleton crew of paid professionals. If they can be distracted or misdirected, the rest of the caravan will be relatively unprotected.
Lady Mernau's entourage only contains a single wizard, Flidwick Pontos, who tends to enjoy a good drink. From what you can gather with your magical senses, only the prince and princess's carriages are protected by spells.

The Twist: The gems, gold and other finery in the caravan are protected by another guard entirely. Flidwick Pontos's real talent is not in sorcery, but magical tinkering. Concealed within the majority of wealth-bearing carriages are mechanical sentries disguised as brooches, lamps, candlesticks and other potentially stealable items.

Stats

Brooch Bug HD 1d4; AC 4 [15]; Atk 1 bite (1d2 + paralysis); Move 9; Save 18; CL/XP 1/15; Special: Immune to Sleep, Charm, Hold Person; Paralytic Bite (Save or Paralyzed for 2d4 turns)
Lantern Sentry HD 1; AC 6 [13]; Atk 1 flame spout (1d6 fire damage); Move 9; Save 17; CL/XP 1/15; Special: Immune to Sleep, Charm, Hold Person

A September of Short Adventures

2011-09-01T14:19:00.003-04:00

Every once in a while, the Old School blogosphere has these collaborative events, both official and unofficial: the April A to Z project, Zak's Secret Arneson Gift Exchange and Gigacrawler and the most recent Building a Better GM, inspired by ckutalik's over at the Hill Cantons. Of the different events that I have taken part in, I've always felt that they have at least encouraged me to post more regularly, if not more competently.

This month, Matt at Asshat Paladins convened a little challenge called the September of Short Adventures, where each of the participants will create 25 compact adventure scenarios over the course of the month. If anything, something like this is just what I've been looking for to keep me hunched over my notebook on a part-time basis while I look for work.

I intend to create a series of different adventures, capers and conflicts for at least two different settings and systems during this September: Bullets and Tequila, my cinematic Wild West adventures with a slight twist towards the strange, and Heist D&D, presenting thefts, swindles and break-ins for use with Old School fantasy-type RPGs. Where stats are concerned, B&T will be dual statted in Savage Worlds and Stuart Robertson's Weird West RPG and Heist D&D will be put together in Swords and Wizardry-style Ascending and Descending AC.

Making the Western Weird Again

2011-08-30T19:57:00.000-04:00

As much as I love the Deadlands setting and its alternate-history stylings, I have definitely come to terms with the fact that it's really codified a lot of what constitutes Wild or 'Weird' Western gaming nowadays. In the same way that fantasy RPGs are expected to have elves, bags of holding and giant abandoned tunnel complexes under most mountains, the 'Weird West' tends to contain a fistful of steampunk technology, some real-world figures that are actually demons or Draculas and a few Native American ancestor spirits, all topped off with zombies, zombies and more zombies. A lot of genre works or roleplaying games replicating genre works can get bogged down in this inspirational marsh: potential players want to have a certain amount of familiarity in their settings, a sort of 'buy-in' that allows them to imagine the world more clearly than a written description.

If I ever run a Western game of any stripe in the future, I want the buy-in to be the Western genre itself. There is so much unexplored gaming territory in the straight or slightly twisted Western just waiting to be mined that it's almost criminal. Action and suspense fans can have gunfights on top of moving trains or high-noon showdowns, planners have bank robberies and jailbreaks and social gamers have poker games and contests of intimidation. If I ever wanted to add Weird elements to the game, it would be more as an accent to the ongoing action rather than the be-all and end-all of the campaign. It would still be a recognizably Western game, just with a couple of interesting tweaks to vary the formula, not transforming the game into a fantasy or horror campaign with Western trappings. Of course, this is under the assumption that the only way to add Weird elements to a Western game is by including the supernatural or other types of mythical monsters. There are plenty of ways to make your Western weird without delving into the codified lists of fantasy creatures in spurs and Stetsons.

I think I'm going to take a couple of entries to talk about the different ways that a campaign can still remain a Western game at heart, even while adding strange or extraordinary elements to the mix.

Mappening is what's happening...

2011-08-24T22:11:00.000-04:00

And once again, my nemesis is revealed...

As the son of an architect, I grew up with a lot of graph paper around the house: big reams of it, small pads, just about any measure of the stuff that you can imagine. Yet I never really felt compelled to use any of it for mapping purposes until I started checking out older versions of Dungeons and Dragons. I always get kind of jealous when I look at the fairly amazing geomorphs that folks like Dyson and Risus Monkey put together because I've always been awful at putting my ideas about a building or a city down onto paper. Everything always ends up too symmetrical or too empty. This might not mean much when designing a loosely-structured western town or an asteroid haven for space smugglers, but it matters a hell of a lot when you're marking jugs for a Dungeons and Dragons heist.

The map that I'm holding in the picture above is the Temple of Manymon, a potential heist site that supposedly holds the bottled soul of one of the land's greatest poets in its sacred wine cellar. This is the product of three hours of draw, erase, conceptualize the space, draw again and erase again. I was intentionally trying to avoid making the temple too symmetrical and blocky, but ended up running into my second problem. As much as I do like the exterior structure of the building, I have no idea how to stock the damned thing. The only thing that I really have so far is the giant eyeball altar in the middle of the temple and the Greek-style open colonnade entrance. Maybe I should get back to space, where my head's clearer...

Starting From the Planet Up

2011-08-22T17:00:00.000-04:00

Some of the best advice that I have gotten from this whole extant blogging community has been to start your campaign planning small. When it comes to setting up a world for characters to explore, I had always assumed that one needed to draw a map of the entire campaign world and populate it with cities and kingdoms before starting. After all, what would happen if one of your players wanted to see the map to expand their travels? (Actual answer: nothing, because this never happened.) Now that I'm back in the campaign planning saddle, I figured that I would put this advice towards my criminal sci-fi sandbox, Assholes in Space. After a week spent watching episodes of Cowboy Bebop and playing the free Steam weekend of Brink, I've been jonesing for a little space western outlaw action.

Back in the April A to Z challenge, I came up with the idea of convict planets as a way of integrating "outer planets" post-apocalyptic action to a presumably cosmopolitan space opera setting. I figure that a single planet where the PCs are forced to explore until they can formulate a way to escape is a perfect starting point for a universe that's built upward. The convict planet has a great framework for faction conflict, environmental hazards and plenty of non-linear thinking on both the player and GM's parts.

My first step is going to be sketching out a general environment overview of the planet. If anyone out there has a good name for a planetary prison colony, let me know.

...Aaaaaaaand we're back

2011-08-17T15:18:00.000-04:00

So, it seems like a whole lot of stuff has happened in the past two months that I've been MIA from the blogging world: the Google+ explosion, International Gygax Day, lots of new projects and quality gaming material and the requisite amount of bellyaching. However, I can now safely say that Fistful of Coppers will return to a regular posting program!

As of now, I have received my Master's of Library and Information Science and relocated to my new apartment in Southern New Jersey. Apart from the standard settings-up and necessary organization, I've definitely been thinking about gaming again. It's been way too long since I was able to contemplate a regular campaign and, now that I have some spare time on my hands, I can foresee this space getting a whole lot of use across a variety of different settings and styles. Expect brainstorming on Heist D&D, modern crime gaming, Assholes in Space, the Dresden Files RPG and probably anything else that filters through my brain. On top of all that, I'm thinking of starting to run an online Savage Worlds Wild West game for ConstantCon, if there are folks interested in something like that.

Expect more in the near future...

A quick update

2011-06-06T14:51:00.000-04:00

So, there sure hasn't been a lot of updating over here.

Last week, I headed up to Oberlin College, my alma mater, to attend the commencement of the Class of 2011. Not only was my girlfriend walking, but also many of my close friends and compatriots in the Dead Hear Footsteps, the radio detective show that I used to direct. Great fun was had by all, credit card bills were run up at restaurants and my old band, the Bucketkickers, reunited for probably our last show ever (after having 8 previous Last Shows Ever in other years).

Unfortunately, I was laid low on the way home by a particularly vicious virus that rose my temperature to 101 and basically prevented me from talking, using the computer or doing homework. Potential sources for this mini-plague are still inconclusive: heat-related, drinking out of an old water bottle, playing the show in a mildewy garage full of appliances (punk rock!) Regardless of the source, it knocked me on my ass up until now.

So with a satchel full of schoolwork that needs to be made up, of course that's when gaming has been on my mind almost continuously. Since Mike's back in town, I've wanted to get the gang back together and play some Bullets and Tequila, Gamma World, Assholes in Space or just about anything that I can think of at the moment. But unfortunately, all of that prep time is really taking away from the necessary schoolwork that needs to be done. I'll most likely be going dark at Fistful of Coppers for the foreseeable future while I get back on track at school and my internship.

But after that... games with low prep-time and maximum fun!

A Different Lens - 4E Alternate History Fantasy World War I

2011-05-24T11:25:00.001-04:00

So apparently Edition Wars are still happening, which makes me very glad that all the blogs that I follow are full of creative and positive people who don't really truck with the whole "My Edition is better than yours and you should feel bad for liking the things you like" bull honkey. I just can't understand that kind of mentality.

What I can understand is "this edition of the game doesn't really fit my playstyle or what I imagine D&D to be like." One of the common sentiments around the blogosphere is that people's personal backlash against current editions of D&D would be lessened if the game was called something else or had a different focus other than dungeon bashing and exploration. So why not shift the focus, genre or style of games to offer a potentially more enjoyable alternative?

A Different Lens - 4E Alternate History Fantasy World War I

I've been reading a pretty fantastic young adult novel called Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld, the author of the Uglies and Midnighters series. It's a rollicking adventure story set on the outbreak of World War I, where the war is not only fought between the Central and Allied powers, but between diesel-powered war machines and genetically modified beasts of war. The titular Leviathan refers to a British airship created from the genes of over 100 animals, built in the 'chassis' of a sperm whale. Keep in mind that all of these fantastic creations are illustrated by Keith Thompson, whose art you've probably seen if you like awesome gaming inspired work.

Badass.

The interesting thing about World War I as a potential adventure setting is its comparative ambiguity when compared with gaming in its sister conflict, where you can't really have a whole lot of PC sympathy for the Nazi war machine. Saying that Germany and Austria-Hungary are the "bad guys" of the piece isn't really a nuanced view of the war as a whole either? So who can serve as the antagonists for a ragtag player group of potentially mixed nationalities?

There's another World War I based fantasy RPG that I'm fairly fond of, but a console rather than pen-and-paper game. The Shadow Hearts series are Playstation 2 RPGs set in the early part of the 20th century that play fast, loose and goofy with actual history: Al Capone can be allied with a gangster cat who knows drunken boxing and your adventuring party in Revolutionary Russia can consist of a puppeteer who fights with a marionette of his dead daughter, a flamboyant vampire pro wrestler and a magical camera-wielding Anastasia Romanov. The combat system of Shadow Hearts - Covenant actually reminded me of 4E's area effects and strategic maneuvering, which put the game in my mind when I was reading Leviathan.

Regardless, the villains of the Shadow Hearts games are generally ruthless or driven individuals who want to take advantage of the misery and malice that the Great War generated and use it towards their own dark purposes, generally world-destroying chaos. As Chaosium has noticed before me, World War I is a great setting for investigating and battling mind-destroying horrors, both human and extraplanar, and the Shadow Hearts games feature plenty of Cthonic monstrosities and creatures brought into being from physical and spiritual trauma.

Cthonic monstrosities and creatures brought into being from physical and spiritual trauma that you are supposed to PUNCH IN THE GODDAMNED FACE. Though there may be doubts and introspective dread, none of that should prevent you from giving them a sound ass-kicking.

So yeah, that's my framework for a reimagining of 4E to take it out of the dungeon and into left field. Next time, I'll be working on character creation and how to make classes your own with the magic of reskinning.

I have invented a maneuver...

2011-05-21T22:45:00.001-04:00

When I haven't been doing schoolwork or playing in Scott's Tunnels and Trolls game, I've been playing some old favorite Legend of Zelda games. Not only do games like Link's Awakening, A Link to the Past and the other Zelda games have a great adventure framework, they've also gotten me thinking about how elements of these games could be integrated into Basic D&D.

Link can generally do a few things with his sword, mostly slashing and stabbing, but also the charged Spin Slash maneuver which attacks all enemies around him. In later editions of D&D, something like this would be covered by an Encounter or Daily power that you could use in a combat encounter. But as much as I like the Power framework, I don't just want to graft it wholesale onto the Basic rules. If I wanted to use them, I would honestly be better served by playing 4th Edition. So how do you make things like special maneuvers work for Basic fighters without 4th Edition style powers?

My idea has been to base it on weapons used. In the Basic and Expert books that I own, there's not much mechanical difference between using a staff or a sword other than the damage dealt. If wielding a warhammer gave you the ability to knock enemies prone or a spear giving you a bonus to AC when used two-handed, it could add a little bit of mechanical variation to things. Hell, it might encourage the use of weird weapons like bolas or whips if they had cool little bonus effects alongside the standard damage.

Is this how Weapon Mastery works in the Companion or Master set? I don't have either of those, but I've heard that they add a bit of proficiency boost to the Fighter.

A non-gaming related endorsement

2011-05-17T20:15:00.000-04:00

Some friends of mine are attempting to break our college radio station's record for longest continuous broadcast. They've been at it for about 9 hours at this point and will continue on in the studios of WOBC until tomorrow afternoon at 5pm EST. Mike and I worked together on the same detective radio play in college and he's been in just about every RPG session I've run over the past three years. They've been doing a great job of finding good nerdy topics to discuss so that they don't get bored over the next 20 hours or so, so if you'd like to hear some sweet music and discussions about the Star Wars Extended Universe or summer blockbusters, tune in at WOBC's webcast and click Listen.

Now I'm off to play some Tunnels & Trolls.

Some magical weapons that I cooked up at the library yesterday

2011-05-15T15:25:00.003-04:00

Solar Knife - A dazzling wide bladed golden dagger (+1, +3 when exposed to sunlight). At night, the blade of the Solar Knife emits light as a Light spell. Double damage against the undead.

Aegis Hand - A massive giant-sized gauntlet traced in gold and embedded with a glowing emerald. Functions as a Gauntlet of Ogre Power that does 1d10 damage when used in combat and cannot wield any other weapon. Blows from the Aegis Hand can knock down normal doors with a single blow. Larger reinforced doors may take longer to sunder.

Black Bastion - A stout jet black shield (+2) with the unsettling outline of a face and a pair of fangs at its base. Once per day, the Black Bastion can be struck against the ground to create a Wall of whatever material covers the ground (default is a Wall of Stone)

Mosquito Blade - A thin rapier with a scintillating insect wing hilt. Counts as a +1 magic weapon for the purpose of immunities. Always hits, regardless of armor class, but deals 1 damage plus or minus Strength modifiers for each blow (Thanks to Telecanter for the idea on this one.)

Wingthief Boomerang - A boomerang (+1, +2 vs. flying creatures) made of an unknown bright green wood and inlaid with bronze. Flying creatures hit by the Wingthief Boomerang lose the ability to fly for 1d6 turns.

Man, I hope that post comes back

2011-05-13T14:36:00.000-04:00

And we're back to the world of the blogging. Unfortunately, my most recent post on the Mentzer box sets and my younger influences was also swallowed up by the catastrophe. I am a bit miffed, as I'd gotten some great comments on it, but I can hope that the post will return once the repairs to Blogger have been finished.

On the other hand, I've really been inspired by this whole campaign idea, coupled with a few other cool posts I've been reading (Telecanter's unbelievably cool Five Swords post and Zak's Sandbox ideas, which are now unfortunately missing). Thinking about this confluence of old influences and current ideas has been really fun for me. When I was reading old sword and sorcery pulps in an attempt to understand older D&D editions, it was a good experience but not exactly nostalgic for me. My roleplaying origins definitely lie with Lone Wolf and Legend of Zelda as opposed to Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, and that's neither a good nor a bad thing. It has more to do with what my generation really identifies as fantasy than levels of literary quality or inspirational source material. The fantasy of the 1990s was very heroic and probably more inspired by the Mentzer and AD&D 2nd Editions than the older, pulpier games. Is it any wonder that saving the kingdom or defeating the dragon is ingrained in many of us? Even when playing a roguish character, I'm all about doing what's right.

Expect more material in the near future. I'm on a roll here.

WW12YOMD?

2011-05-11T23:11:00.000-04:00

This week, I finally bit the bullet and cracked open my Mentzer Red Box to check out the goodies inside. Though I did notice some of the rules differences between it and my older Moldvay box set (Thieves knocked down again! Why?), I really liked the organization and especially the introduction. It reminded me of the old Lone Wolf books that I used to borrow from my best friend Conor when I was in middle school. I'd always loved Choose Your Own Adventure books ever since I was small and the addition of combat and roleplaying elements to the standard "if you want to go east, turn to page 26" formula gave them a lot of re-read value.

In my online searches for Lone Wolf books, I came across a website called Project Aon, where you can read and play all of the Lone Wolf books for free, legally and with the expressed permission of Joe Dever, the original author. Naturally, I started into the first one, which got me thinking: what would it have been like if I'd gotten this box set when I was 12? My influences at the time were the Lone Wolf books, Magic: the Gathering cards, games like the Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past and emulated copies of Chrono Trigger and Shining Force. Reading the Mentzer Red Box made me want to revisit all of those old sources and see if I could put together a whimsical kind of D&D campaign with them in mind.

I'm still a heroic kind of guy at heart. Saving an imaginary village from rampaging ogres is definitely more satisfying for me than acquiring imaginary loot. So whatever this campaign would be like, it would have plenty of danger, monsters and potential good to be done on top of the normal loads of treasure and magic items. I think 12 year old me would be satisfied.

(Note: Looking through my old Magic cards, I had no idea that Liz Danforth and Tony DiTerlizzi did so many illustrations for them. It's cool thinking back on how the worlds of RPG and CCG art intersected before Magic really took off.)

Has this happened to anyone else?

2011-05-09T21:18:00.000-04:00

Have you ever dreamed a phenomenal dungeon?

It's been a day of registering for classes and the like, but I'm still remembering parts of the dream that I had last night and how they would make a great D&D dungeon. The start of the adventure was fairly mundane: I can recall giving the signal to my sister and a couple of my friends on the edge of a baseball field, where we all got into black burglar clothes and started making our way towards something.

Here's where it got pretty crazy. Apparently, the heist that we were meant to pull off was in this crazy dungeonesque castle which was really just a massive manned tank around a gigantic octopus. Like the size of a skyscraper. A series of rope bridges connected different parts of the castle aquarium, including some that went directly over the octopus. I was trying to get into the structure through one of these bridges, but the weight of me and my gear made it sway in the high air, so I had to crawl the rest of the bridge's length on my belly until I reached a small portal where I could enter. Inside, the stone walls were damp and had algae growing on them like the inside of a fish tank.

I really want to expand on this whole idea for a dungeon and hopefully I've gotten enough written down to remember the inspirational aspects of the dream. The thing that really stayed with me was "what happens if that octopus gets mad? Utter chaos, that's what."

But look on the bright side...

2011-05-08T17:50:00.000-04:00

Last week, I went to my local library's Friends group book sale in search of some cheap mystery novels or YA books that I wanted to read. Imagine my surprise when I came across a pair of Mentzer-era D&D box sets, still sealed in shrink-wrap and basically perfect, apart from a triangular-shaped box dent on the back of the Basic set. Total cost: $2 each.

Thank you, old ladies from the Friends of the Library group. You didn't quite know what you had. Now should I open them or leave them in their pristine sealed condition for a rainy day?

A Crisis of Confidence

2011-05-08T13:34:00.000-04:00

I think I've lost my game mastering touch. Or rather, I've been trying to run things in a way that I really can't run them.

On Thursday, my friends, girlfriend and I got together to play some pistol-packing, wild West Savage Worlds. We had a group of great characters, including a half-Mexican drifter with a buffalo rifle, a two-gun wanted outlaw and a delusional rancher out to see the world with his unlucky cowhand. Using the phenomenal Adventure Generator from The Day After Ragnarok, I whipped up a cool adventure idea involving a group of bank robbers recruiting ex-Confederate soldiers to "retake the South" while fattening their wallets. It was a good adventure seed and I was using a system that I'm intimately familiar with, one that I've said I know like the back of my hand. So what went wrong?

I have this misplaced notion that I can run a game purely on improvisation. Given that I'm a repetitious mess making unplanned speeches and a fairly crappy jam session bassist, I have no idea how I made this assumption. To be fair, some of my best gaming moments have been spur of the moment ideas, but generally there is some sort of exterior structure to them. The only preparation that I had done was writing up some stats for the New Confederacy army and brief descriptions of the town of Hogan's Bluff, Arkansas. As my friends continued to ask questions that I didn't have the answers for, I found myself feeling more nervous than excited about the continuing adventures of my friends.

Also, my 'cinematic' Savage Worlds distances rule? Totally didn't work for me. While thinking about keeping the action fluid and improvisational, I'd forgotten how much I really do enjoy my vinyl gaming mat and miniatures for RPG combat. It's something concrete that can be focused on, something visual that helps shift that burden of constant improvisation on my part. Sorry, Robin Laws, but right now, I could care less if it takes away from the immersion as long as it helps me feel like I'm not having a panic attack.

My new game plan is as follows:

Plan out goddamned everything before running a game: My game notes are going to have to be detailed enough that I can give people the answers to their questions about game stuff without having to clearly make something up. Let the improvisation flow over a rock solid, well planned backbone, like all good printed modules or fellow blogger's entries. I need maps, I need names and I really need events and their logical consequences.
Don't be afraid to be comfortable with the way you run games: I like how SW works with minis, so I'm not really sure why I decided to throw all of that stuff out. From now on, I'm going with my gut on these things.
Separate things out: For the Bullets and Tequila game, I was simultaneously trying to help people make their characters while planning the adventure. Never again. Separate session for character creation, separate gaming sessions for everything. Not only will that give me more time for prep, it will help me tailor the game more towards the players.

So that's my current state of mind right now. I think I really need to take a little time and think about how to proceed with this whole thing.

Aaaaand I'm done

2011-05-02T12:24:00.004-04:00

As I noted before I embarked on the whole April A to Z challenge, it wasn't an extremely well thought out decision. I just wanted to see if I could update For A Fistful of Coppers 26 times that month. I enjoyed reading my fellow bloggers posts and hacking some cool ideas together (especially that Convict Planets idea!), but I am super glad that its over and that I can return to a regular blogging schedule of posting cool stuff that I've been thinking about instead of trying to find a topic that began with the letter Q (seriously, hard work).

Expect a bunch more stuff on my potential Bullets and Tequila game, as well as my first experiences with Tunnels and Trolls. I've got a few more days off, so I'd like to spend a little time getting reacquainted with all of you.

T is for Tunnels and Trolls

2011-05-02T12:20:00.000-04:00

The other interesting thing that's happened over the course of this finals week was joining up with Scott from Huge Ruined Pile's online Tunnels and Trolls game. I was following the increasingly awesome Idrizoob posts and when the call for players came out, I couldn't resist.

Cue my first experiences with Tunnels and Trolls. I had heard about its more simple and lighthearted approach to dungeon crawling fantasy from bloggers like Scott and Tenkar, but I'd never encountered the game at all. By the time I started searching for RPGs in game stores in 1998 or 1999, Tunnels and Trolls was a fairly obscure and presumably out-of-print game. However, I think I probably would have liked it a whole lot at that age.

First of all, it's definitely a simple system, but not as bare bones as I thought it was going to be. I spent a whole lot of time outfitting my three characters (Rogue, Warrior and Wizard, respectively) with effective equipment, which was fairly hard to do with limited attributes and funds. I was engrossed in the equipment list, with its pages of oddly named knives and polearms (even more than 1st ed AD&D!) and separate pieces of armor and equipment. I also seriously appreciated the inclusion of Delver's Packs, a grab bag of useful dungeon items all bundled together with a single weight and cost like D&D Gamma World's Explorer's Kits. I haven't seen anything of what the game is like in play, but I really enjoyed making my characters.

Bonus! Here they are for all you T&Ters. Let me know if I did anything wrong.

Dax Coitus
Level 1 Rogue

ST 9 IQ 17 LK 11 CON 13 DEX: 7 CHA: 16
Adds -2 Encumbrance 304 /900
Armor: Leather Armor (6 Hits taken, 200u)
Weapon: Misericorde (2d6+1, 14u),
Gear: Clothing and Pack (10u), Delver’s Package (20u), Provisions for 1 day (20u), 10 ft. of hempen rope (50u)
Wealth: 0gp

For every gem stolen, secret uncovered or princess bedded, there must always be a responsible party. Dax Coitus may not be that party in all cases, but chances are he’ll tell you that he was. An inveterate liar, boaster and con-man, Coitus is generally regarded as a decent thief and a great talker. Surprisingly enough, he also conceals sizable magical potential, though he still hasn’t gotten the hang of the gestures.

Umanzor
Level 1 Warrior

ST 14 IQ 14 LK 8 CON 10 DEX 10 CHA 16
Adds +1 Encumbrance 510/1400
Armor: Full Helm (3 Hits taken, 50u), Gauntlets (2 Hits taken, 25u), Greaves (2 Hits taken, 40u), Target Shield (4 Hits taken, 300u)
Weapon: Trident (4d6+3, 75u)
Gear: Provisions for 1 day (20u)
Wealth: 0gp

Dax paid for Umanzor’s freedom after witnessing his talents in the arena. When the gladiator school refused to release him even after accepting Dax’s ill-gotten gains, the con-man had to find another solution. After the judicious application of two blowgun darts, a vial of acid and the best lockpick in the city, Umanzor was free to go as he pleased. He’s been by Dax’s side ever since. In the taverns of Idrizoob, he is well-known as a kind and soft-spoken individual. But his sweet talk dries up when he dons his full-face gladiatorial helmet, replaced with steely resolve.

Elisara Valiasto
Level 1 Wizard

ST 10 IQ 15 LK 8 CON 8 DEX 11 CHA 7
Adds -1 Encumbrance 125/1000
Armor: Arming Doublet (3 Hits taken, 75u)
Weapon: Baton (2d6, 20u)
Gear: Clothing and Pack (10u), Provisions for 1 day (20u)
Wealth: 5gp

Accused of perverse witchcraft in her puritanical home city, Elisara escaped a horrific death in the Umber Pits and began traveling with a caravan as a fortune teller. Of course, her predictions were all made up on the spot, but when you can create your own glowing crystal ball, people tend to believe you. Once she reached Idrizoob, her fortune telling opportunities dried up, as its residents were both more cynical and magically adept than her previous clientele. Her current position is as magical tutor to Dax, which pays the bills and that’s all she would like to say on the subject.

S is for Saloon

2011-05-01T18:46:00.000-04:00

"You know, a good, smelly saloon... is my favorite place in the world."
Paden, Silverado

One would think that the saloon in a western RPG could easily work in the same way as a tavern in a fantasy RPG. After all, their genre trappings are pretty similar: food, drink and pleasurable company, perhaps a game of dice or a hastily started fistfight. But apart from that, the two don't really serve the same thematic purpose. The standard fantasy tavern is a location to acquire information that leads to an external adventure: a guy in a cloak gives you a map to mysterious treasure or the local guard captain tells you about a series of toad attacks. As a gamemaster, you think more about the interactions that the PCs can have in a tavern, rather than the space itself. Other than the ubiquitous tavern brawl, there aren't really that many important gaming moments happening in the tavern.

Saloons are a different story. There are tons of climactic western moments that take place in the center of a saloon: the two opening gunfights in Desperado, the introduction of Clint Eastwood's Manco in For A Few Dollars More and the first sparks of righteous anger out of Robert Mitchum's JP Harrah in El Dorado all come to mind. But what sticks in my mind the most is probably this scene from Silverado of Paden retrieving his hat from one of the outlaws who left him for dead in the desert. It's been one of my favorite films since I watched it with my mom at about age 5, an unabashedly archetypal western with the man who wrote Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Empire Strikes Back behind the director's chair. It distills everything that I like about the heroic Hollywood Wild West into an incredibly quotable package.

The saloon question has gotten me thinking about Robin Laws' section of Feng Shui entitled "The Map Is Not Your Friend." As Feng Shui is a high-kicking Hong Kong-style action movie, setting everything up in a 2-dimensional map space causes the players to "stop focusing on the action scene in their heads and instead directing them to a dead, lifeless piece of paper." Something tells me that I should definitely be considering something similar for my Bullets and Tequila game, even though Savage Worlds runs really well with miniatures. My previous cinematic combat rules, inspired by the combat rules for Gregor Hutton's 3:16, cut all of the different ranges down into five categories (Melee, Close, Short, Medium and Long) that can easily be qualified on the fly to players. If someone's got a sawed-off shotgun and is told that there are three enemies in Close range, it works well both for the game master (you don't need to make up absolute ranges on the fly) and the player (you always know who's in range). Still, I've never tried them out in practice yet, so we'll see how it goes.

R is for Random Tables

2011-04-29T17:16:00.000-04:00

I was always one of those finicky game masters who always had to plan everything out in advance. In my youth, I felt that randomly generated results from a table didn't "produce good story" or some other ridiculous high minded bull honkey. But I'm also not someone who would completely rely on tables to stock a dungeon ("This room has... *clatter* 60 gibberlings and... *clatter* a pie crust filled with silver pieces.") or run social encounters. For me, random tables are imagination boosters. If I'm ever feeling lost or out of ideas when I'm constructing an adventure, I can always find someone's table full of dice-generated good ideas. For players, they can provide character hooks, equipment ideas or ideas

Probably my favorite random table out there comes from Ken Hite's phenomenal Savage Worlds campaign setting, The Day After Ragnarok, which details a pulpy post-apocalyptic world where Hitler's occult machinations actually summoned the monsters of Norse myth, forcing the Allies to slam a nuclear bomb into the Midgard Serpent. When the Serpent dies, it crushes Western Europe underneath its body and sends a venom-infected tidal wave towards the East Coast of North America. If you're a Savage Worlds fan, an alternate history weirdness fan or just a Ken Hite fan, you should really check it out.

I mean, look at that fucking cover.

Anyway, the back of the Day After Ragnarok book has a random Adventure Generator in it that really hits the right buttons for me. Each aspect of an adventure is detailed here, from the initial Hook that gets the PCs involved (anything from the Dying Message to an Innocent Beginning that belies something more sinister) to the antagonists involved or a potential Twist to add. But the best part of the Adventure generator is that it's fairly system-neutral: those they have references to setting items like Chimeras (monsters that were once human like ghouls and Stalinist man-ape hybrids) and the like, it's very easily adaptable to just about any setting. If I run out of ideas for Bullets and Tequila adventures, I'm gonna pull this thing out.

Q is for Quickly Now!

2011-04-28T15:14:00.000-04:00

Now that my semester is over and the pile of finals coursework is finally done, I'm going to blaze through these last ten or so entries in the next few days. My gaming brain has been pretty solidly focused on my Savage Worlds anachronistic action western game over the past week or so (my rewards for finishing coursework have included watching weird spaghetti westerns and Maverick and playing Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood), but I've also been taking a real look at Tunnels & Trolls because of Scott of Huge Ruined Pile's super-cool Idrizoob stuff.

So if you see a few entries on your blogoroll in the next couple of days that seem behind the curve, it's just me catching up. :)

P is for Pregens

2011-04-21T19:52:00.000-04:00

The more that I prep and plan for potential games, the more that I like the idea of pregen characters. High School Me would be furious if he ever found this out.

Though one of my favorite parts of playing RPGs in character creation, it's something that I have a lot of practice doing. When you buy as many games as I have over the past ten years or so and only get a few chances to actually run them, you tend to spend a lot of time making characters in assorted systems. For a system that I'm fairly familiar with, like Savage Worlds or any of the Cinematic Unisystem games, I can whip up a PC in about 5-10 minutes and I'm sure that most experienced RPers can do the same thing. However, point-buy games like these two can often be daunting for the complete novice or occasional gamer. When I did character creation for my failed Deadlands game with my friends, there was a lot of that uncertainty on what they were going to play, until they took a look at the character ideas section of the Deadlands book.

In this way, I think class-based systems really have the edge in terms of novice player buy-in. Roles like Fighter, Magic-User and Thief are iconic: you immediately have a picture in your head of what kind of character you would be as one of those classes. For a western, there are plenty of these iconic roles, but I never really thought that they fit into a traditional class-based structure. So instead, I'm making pregens. For those of my friends who already have an idea of what kind of character they want to play, we can hammer out character creation on our own and hopefully, it'll be a painless experience. But for anyone who just wants to pick an archetype and play, I'ma have them covered.

My list of pregens came from a wide variety of sources, including the Deadlands Reloaded and Wild West Cinema corebooks, as well as countless movies and TV series.

Lawman
Gunslinger
Mysterious Stranger
Bounty Hunter
Gambler
Kung-Fu Wanderer
Prospector
Soiled Dove
Outlaw
Mountain Man
Indian Brave
Deserter
Courier

Any other suggestions?

O is for Old Ideas Made New Again

2011-04-19T22:53:00.001-04:00

Sorry it took so long to get back to this, Superhero Necromancer. :)

While I was working on the branch library, it seems that a veritable revolution in lockpicking and thieving skill has been going on around the old-school community. Sparked off by Arkheim at Rather Gamey, the thread was taken up by Telecanter, Zak S, Roger the GS and many more from the overarching blogging community. Reading about all of these cool thieving ideas (NEVER bump a Dwarven lock!) got me thinking about the D&D Heist ideas that I had come up with a month ago. Unfortunately, none of my current gaming crowd are super interested in playing Dungeons and Dragons any time soon, so these efforts are purely speculative on my part.

There was a great post that I read on the Dungeon Mastering blog while planning for a potential D&D heist on how to prep a heist adventure without having to plan the whole thing out like a Hollywood screenwriter. I'm not sure about the "Planting Information" stage, but the first two are rock solid. Every heist movie or novel has its section explaining why any attempted caper is either tough or impossible, so why not lay that out explicitly when constructing a heist?

The Place: The Temple of Manymon
The Score: A bottle from the temple's heavily guarded wine cellar said to contain the spirit of a famed poet, plus as many relics or ornaments as you can get your hands on.
Why It's Impossible: The temple is almost always occupied by the clerics of Manymon and their animate guardians. In order to get access to the wine cellar, an ordained cleric must speak the ancient oath and drain a drop of their blood into the intricate reliquary vault. No one knows what would happen to someone who screwed the pooch at the vault.
The Cracks:

The feast day of Hallowlaeg is approaching and the clerics of Manymon are preparing for the ceremonies and festival contests. Plenty of performers, cooks and brewers come in and out of the temple in the days leading up to the festival.
No one said that the blood had to be in the cleric's body.
The animate guardians sense the world around them seismically, in the vibrations of footfalls and impacts. Chances are they wouldn't notice someone just floating past them.

With these four steps, you can illustrate all of the important aspects of a potential heist and have a pretty sweet little adventure sketch, all in one. I could imagine these being great on 3x5 cards, maybe separated by what city the PCs are in or the kinds of efforts that would be needed.

N is for NPCs

2011-04-18T23:47:00.001-04:00

I love making NPCs for games almost as much as making pregens. Something about whipping up cool characters that you'll get the chance to play or just pit against your players is a real blast for me. As of lately, I've been working on making potential antagonists for my Savage Worlds Bullets and Tequila game. Some are completely new, others, like the Handsome Brothers Circus of Crime, have been cooking around in my head for years now.

Potbelly Pete

Pete wasn't a very good outlaw. Sure, he and his gang would make away with some good scores every once in a while and hightail it down to Mexico or some other bandit hideaway, but somehow Pete would always end up taking a bullet. He never got hit bad, but boy, did he sure get hit often. Whether it was a ricochet catching him in the hindquarters while running out of a bank or the rifle bullet that left him with a noticeable limp, all of those wounds began to build up on his nerves. So one day, Pete hired a blacksmith to make him a 'bulletproof suit' that covered his vulnerables and most of his body in solid cast-iron. Since the addition of this set of armor, Pete's become a lot more successful, if not any less ornery or smart.

Attributes: Agility d6, Smarts d6, Spirit d6, Strength d8, Vigor d8
Skills: Driving d6, Fighting d8, Gambling d6, Healing d4, Intimidation d4, Notice d6, Shooting d8, Streetwise d6, Taunt d8
Charisma:-2 Pace: 5" Parry: 6 Toughness: 10 (6)
Hindrances: Mean, Obese
Edges: Command, No Mercy, Nerves of Steel
Gear: Revolving shotgun (12/24/48, RoF 1, 1-3d6, +2 to Shooting), Bulletproof suit (+4 armor, covers torso, head, arms, legs. Called Shots at -4 bypass armor)

Jake Thornton and Iron Crow

The bounty hunters known as Jake and Crow first met while trying to catch the same buffalo. After nearly killing each other over the lost quarry, the two figured that they could bring in much more game as a team than solo. But as time passed, the hunt became less and less lucrative. Unwilling to dissolve their partnership, the two decided to turn their skills towards hunting bounties instead of animals. Jake is the more talkative of the pair, with a fairly sunny disposition for someone in his line of work.

Iron Crow
Attributes: Agility d10, Smarts d6, Spirit d4, Strength d8, Vigor d6
Skills: Climbing d6, Fighting d6, Intimidation d6, Notice d8, Riding d6, Shooting d10, Stealth d8, Survival d6, Tracking d8
Charisma: -2 Pace: 8" Parry: 5 Toughness: 5
Hindrances:
Edges: Combat Reflexes, Dodge, Fleet-Footed, Marksman, Quick
Gear: Composite Bow (15/30/60, 2d6) with 3 dynamite arrows (2d6+2, MBT), 3 "tear gas" arrows (Vigor rolls or Shaken, MBT) Pair of Knuckle Dusters (d8+d4)

Jake Thornton
Attributes: Agility d8, Smarts d8, Spirit d6, Strength d6, Vigor d6
Skills: Climbing d6, Fighting d8, Healing d6, Knowledge (Traps and Snares) d8, Notice d8, Riding d6, Shooting d6, Stealth d6, Survival d8, Tracking d8
Charisma: 0 Pace: 6" Parry: 6 Toughness: 5
Hindrances:
Edges: Ambidextrous, First Strike, Woodsman
Gear: Colt Lightning rifle (20/40/80, 2d6+1, AP 1, DT), Lariat (Reach 2, Agility tricks Knock Prone on a Raise), Tomahawk (2d6)
Notes: Jake's traps and snares act as the Entangle power from SWEX pg. 90. He has 10 'Power Points' worth of uses. Ensnared victims have a -2 penalty to Pace and skill rolls linked to Agility and Strength (Raise restrains target fully).

The Handsome Brothers Circus of Crime

There are all sorts of traveling sideshows and circuses in the Wild West, so it's hard to tell when carnival folk are trying to bilk you out of your hard earned money. In that sense, the Handsome Brothers Circus is a refreshing alternative: they're more likely to steal your money with a knife to the throat than an ill-sized ring. Run by the conjoined criminal masterminds Jake and Todd Handsome, the Circus usually comes into town as a standard traveling attraction: jugglers, acrobats, freaks of nature and games of luck and skill (mostly luck). But while the town is entranced by the spectacle, a small group of skilled performers and outlaws take the bank in town.

Jake and Todd Handsome, Management
Attributes: Agility d8, Smarts d10, Spirit d6, Strength d6, Vigor d8
Skills: Driving d4, Fighting d8, Gambling d6, Knowledge (Criminal Planning) d10, Notice d8, Persuasion d10, Shooting d8, Streetwise d10
Charisma: +2 (+4) Pace: 5" Parry: 6 Toughness: 7
Hindrances: Conjoined Twins (Obese), Outsiders, Wanted
Edges: Ambidextrous, Attractive, Charismatic, Command, Improved Frenzy, Level-Headed, Martial Artists, Natural Leaders, Snakeoil Salesmen, Two Fisted
Gear: A very nice suit, two derringers (5/10/20, RoF 1, 2d6, AP 1), Bowie knife (d6+d4+1, AP 1)

Big Mel, Right Hand Clown
Attributes: Agility d6, Smarts d6, Spirit d6, Strength d8, Vigor d10
Skills: Driving d6, Fighting d10, Gambling d6, Intimidation d10, Lockpicking d6, Notice d6, Repair d4, Shooting d8, Stealth d4, Streetwise d6, Tracking d6
Charisma: -4 Pace: 6" Parry: 8 (7) Toughness: 8
Hindrances: Ugly, Mean, Wanted
Edges: Berserk, Block, Brawny, Dirty Fighter, Nerves of Steel, Sweep
Gear: Sledgehammer (2d8, AP2 vs. rigid armor, Parry -1), meat cleaver (d8+d6), Double-barreled Shotgun (6/12/24, RoF 1-2, 1-3d6, Shooting +2)

Jay Lafayette, Card Sharp with Sharp Cards
Attributes: Agility d10, Smarts d6, Spirit d8, Strength d6, Vigor d6
Skills: Fighting d8, Gambling d8, Lockpicking d6, Notice d6, Persuasion d6, Riding d4, Shooting d4, Stealth d8, Streetwise d8, Taunt d8, Throwing d10
Charisma: 0 (+2) Pace: 8" Parry: 6 Toughness: 5
Hindrances: Arrogant, Wanted
Edges: Attractive, Combat Reflexes, Dodge, Fleet Footed, Flurry (Throwing Frenzy, short range only), Quick Draw, Trademark Weapon (Razor-edged Playing Cards)
Gear: Razor-edged Playing Cards (5/10/20, 2d6)

Madame Serpente, La Dompteuse des Hommes
Attributes: Agility d6, Smarts d8, Spirit d10, Strength d6, Vigor d6
Skills: Fighting d8, Healing d8, Knowledge (Poisons) d10, Knowledge (Dangerous Animals) d8, Notice d6, Persuasion d8, Riding d6, Shooting d6, Stealth d6, Streetwise d8, Taunt d6
Charisma: 0 (+4) Pace: 8" Parry: 6 Toughness: 5
Hindrances: Vengeful, Wanted
Edges: Beast Bond, Beast Master, Common Bond, Snakeoil Salesman, Very Attractive
Gear: Derringer (5/10/20, 2d6, AP 1), Nail Syringes (d6 + Poison)
Notes: Madame Serpente's animal companion is a 20ft boa constrictor named Gregoire (use stats on SWEX pg. 153)

L is for Library

2011-04-16T12:27:00.000-04:00

And once again, blogging has fallen a little bit by the wayside because I was helping to open a completely new library satellite branch in the Pittsburgh Public Market!

This doesn't have anything to do with D&D, Savage Worlds or anything else roleplaying related, but libraries are basically my life outside of gaming. In my Marketing and Public Relations class at Pitt's library school, we had the opportunity to work with the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh to open a very small library branch at the Pittsburgh Public Market in Pittsburgh's Strip District. It's part of an initiative to try and find new service models that provide important library features with a relatively low budget. For the non Pittsburgh natives, the Strip District is a stretch of about 10-15 blocks loaded with wholesale markets, assorted ethnic groceries and fantastic restaurants. Patton Oswalt did a hilarious stand-up bit about the Strip's Pennsylvania Macaroni Company, mistakenly identified as an Italian restaurant, but still hilarious.

See? It says so on the cover!

The Strip District hasn't ever had a dedicated library, so setting up a small satellite location where patrons can pick up holds, bring kids to storytelling on Saturdays or check out cookbooks after they pick up their meat and dairy is a pretty phenomenal event. Even particularly unfortunate circumstances while we were doing promotional chalk art (long story short: my girlfriend's purse was stolen, but we got it back 5 hours later from a good Samaritan who found it on the ground with everything except cash still inside) couldn't stop the day from being a triumph.

K is for Karnival of Killers

2011-04-13T15:27:00.000-04:00

This message is brought to you by TV Tropes, for now we have names for every instance of anything that ever happened in pop culture.

Ever since I watched the anime series Trigun as a young teen, I've always loved the idea of what TV Tropes calls the Carnival of Killers. The basic idea is that a wealthy bad guy hires a massive group of colorful, thematic and potentially unrelated killers to take on the main characters either one by one or all at once. Each member of this hired gang would have different skills or powers that made them a formidable opponent. I had seen the concept before in the "Rogue's Galleries" of different superheroes or super teams, but something about Trigun's Gung Ho Guns really stuck with me. The latter half of the entire series was based around Vash, Wolfwood and the other main characters avoiding the attacks of the various different assassins and coming to terms with their lots in life. Some were wild and over-the-top in their villainousness, while others were more low-key and resigned to their lot in life, but no less deadly.

I've always thought about integrating some variety of assassin's society in a tabletop game. I think that the anachronistic action western setting of Bullets and Tequila or the cyberpunk space opera grabbag of Assholes in Space could easily accept either a group of colorful hired killers or specialized bounty hunters out to get characters on either side of the law.

In the Bullets and Tequila setting, I've been thinking about all of the myriad ways that characters can bring the fight to their enemies. On top of your standard gunslingers, there are high-kicking martial artists, trap laying hunters, buffalo rifle-toting snipers, giant guys that can carry a Gatling gun and just about anything else that you can imagine, just as long as it makes thematic sense (which is different than logical sense). I figure I can put together a list of killer/bounty hunter characters that could be used separately or as part of a larger group.

So, let's think of some weapons or fighting styles that a Wild West assassin could specialize in:

Lariats
Dynamite
Traps and Snares
Knife Throwing
Martial Arts
Long-distance Sniping
Heavy Weapons (Gatlings and such)
Heavy Armor
Swashbuckling
Horse Riding

Any other thoughts? I'm going to try and turn each one of these into a Savage Worlds NPC suitable for cinematic Wild West action.

J is for Jamie Time

2011-04-13T13:09:00.000-04:00

Kind of a double meaning on this one. Not only am I taking a little time to myself, but it's also time for a visit from my girlfriend, Jamie.

I know, right?

She's coming out to visit for the rest of the week, so I'm going to be hard at work trying to get things ready and finish my homework. More posts later on.

I is for Inspiration

2011-04-13T01:49:00.001-04:00

Within the past few days, I've been grooving on a whole truckload full of great western influences that have really put me in the Bullets and Tequila mood. Here are some of them.

(The amazing bar shootout from Robert Rodriguez's Desperado. The archetypical Bullets and Tequila gunfight)

(One of my favorite Spaghetti Western trailers. Note: I have never seen this movie and have no idea where I would get a hold of a copy.)

(Rockstar Games' amazing Red Dead Revolver, half gritty Western revenge, half Capcom shoot-em-up. The soundtrack is all lesser known Spaghetti Western music and is really responsible for my depth of knowledge in the genre.)

(The Professionals, a movie whose structure is basically an RPG scenario and a damned good one at that. A great cast of Wild West shadowrunners (Lee Marvin, Burt Lancaster AND Jack Palance!) getting screwed over by Mr. Johnson and switching sides. Plus that badass Lewis gun scene on the train.)

(And here's a clip of a Jim Garner/Clint Eastwood fist fight from an old episode of Maverick. Bret Maverick takes no guff from no one)

H is for Hardboiled Hollywood

2011-04-11T18:12:00.000-04:00

This is kind of a repost from my previous roleplaying experience, but I don't really know how many people check out old threads about Inspectres on RPGnet these days.

In college, I was in charge of a detective radio drama called the Dead Hear Footsteps. We would write half-hour long scripts detailing the exploits of our hero, Hardin Lovelace, private eye (say it quickly), then perform them live on the college radio station. It's probably the most rewarding activity that I was ever involved in and I've been trying to do something similar with distant friends ever since I graduated last year.

As a huge fan of detective novels, radio plays and television shows, I've always been incredibly frustrated by their seeming lack of transferability to the gaming table. They can either be an exercise in pixelbitching for the right clue or GM overload in adapting a mystery to fit the players' actions. I was reading about the Gumshoe system used in Esoterrorists and Trail of Cthulhu one afternoon when I realized that I already owned a game that could be used to run a dynamite goddamned mystery: Inspectres.

You'd have to run it with a group of people well-versed in Chandler, Hammett, Nero Wolfe and Johnny Dollar, but I think that's a feature, not a bug. The mission ratings, players describing the clues or information that they uncover, the simple character creation, everything just... fits for a hardboiled detective game. Even the 'Confessional' works as radio-style inner monologue. So as follows are my Hardboiled rules modifications for Inspectres.

---------------------------

Character Creation

Characters in this modified Inspectres have four basic skills, each covering an area of expertise.

Wits
Wits is the skill you'll use to piece together theories, outsmart armed guards, remember facts and figures and research information through records and libraries. Characters with high Wits are like Nero Wolfe, able to hypothesize and make connections even when the circumstances are dire.

Brawn
Brawn is the skill you'll use to sucker punch a torpedo, make your roscoe cough 'Ka-chow!', resist physical torture and do all sorts of physical activity. Characters with high Brawn are like Mike Hammer. His gun is quick.

Legwork
Legwork is the skill you'll use to tail a mark and remain unseen, get in touch with your contacts, question witnesses or break into someone's house to find evidence. Your Legwork skill is also used whenever you want to buy (or have access to) equipment. Characters with high Legwork are like Boston Blackie, with contacts in the underworld and a criminal disposition.

Cool
Cool is the skill you'll use to con someone into believing you're someone you're not, seducing the gangster's moll and convincing people to tell you secrets. Characters with high Cool are like Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade, able to talk their clients and enemies into revealing everything.

You have 9 dice to distribute amongst your character's Skills. No one skill can be rated higher than 4 or lower than 1.

Each character also has a Talent, either something they're naturally good at or a skill they picked up before working at their detective agency. Choose an area where your character will gain a bonus die. Whenever this area comes into play, you'll roll an extra die. Sample Talents include:

Car Mechanic
Ex-Stuntman
Incredibly Beautiful
Academic
Cast Iron Stomach
High Society

from the rulebook (don't sue me, Jared)

When using a Talent, strive to be creative! And remember that your character is allowed to use their Talent in any of the four skill areas. So if your ex-mechanic gets into a scrap, boost your Athletics roll by using a monkey wrench as a weapon. If your agent is sexy as all-get-out, maybe you can get the team a good deal on a used car (a bonus to the Legwork roll).

Agency Creation

Since you're just a fledgling detective agency, you get 6 dice to divide among your Agency's accounts.

Gym Membership - Gym membership dice can be spent to add to Brawn rolls.
Library Card - Library Card dice can be spent to add to Wits rolls.
Expense Account - Expense Account dice can be spent to add to Legwork rolls.

All unallocated die go into the Bank, which can be spent on any roll and used to alleviate the effects of Stress on your investigators (nights in the speakeasies, movies, pleasurable companions, etc...) However, there is a much bigger risk in spending Bank dice. Whenever a Bank die is rolled, there is the potential to regain it, lose it, or lose your entire Bank.

Example Stress

Get shot at by two guys bursting through the door with guns (as per Chandler's Law): Two dice
Find your dead client: Two dice
Tortured by syndicate henchmen: Three dice
Double crossed by...
- Sneaky Peter Lorre type: Zero to one die
- Femme Fatale: Two dice
- Best Friend: Three dice
- True Love: Four dice

G is for Gunslinger

2011-04-10T15:07:00.002-04:00

It always seems to come back to westerns for me. From the Leone-inspired name to the Sabata poster banner to the boomtown of Motherlode, most of my blog has been western-inspired, a fantasy or apocalyptic veneer over a frontier core.

I was talking with my friend CJ about the sort of games that he would like to play over a couple of whiskey and cokes and he started reminiscing about a Deadlands game in his past, probably the most successful game that he's ever played in. I tried to get a Deadlands game going with my crew before, but there's just something about the setting and PC parties within it that's really hit or miss for me. It seems like a lot of people gravitate towards the Arcane Backgrounds and cool powers of the setting; I've seen a lot of potential parties that are loaded down with Hucksters, Mad Scientists and Blessed without once cracking the multitude of movie western roles. I guess it's hard to think of 'Old coot prospector' or 'Army deserter' as D&D-style gaming classes, even if they are western archetypes.

I think my ideal campaign milieu is an anachronistic action western, equals parts Robert Rodriguez's Desperado, Lawrence Kasdan's Silverado and Howard Hawks's El Dorado, plus a lot more films on top of that (I just liked the rhyme scheme): a West that Never Was combining kung-fu, sleeve guns, electric guitars and motorcycles with a cinematic frontier filled with oil towns under siege, outlaw gangs and railways connecting it all. The closest that I've seen any piece of media come to the idea is Rockstar Games' Red Dead Revolver. Even with a soundtrack of phenomenal Spaghetti western music and a gritty film aesthetic, it was still a Capcom game at heart, which means that nothing has to make sense. You can be fighting fat guys and midget clowns in an abandoned mill until everyone's dead, then have to deal with a dynamite-strapped boss character who chases after you with a pair of metal shields and explodes when he runs into you and that's okay, because they're carnies.

I haven't seen this kind of cinematic western flavor in many RPG products, save Dave Bezio's Wild West Cinema, which seems to be on the exact same wavelength as I am. However, I'm hesitant to spend another $10 on a PDF download that I might never use when I'm reasonably sure that I could hack this game together with Savage Worlds, the game I'm most comfortable with and the original rules set in which Bezio ran his successful wild west games.

I know this one is a bit short and a bit late, so here's a little bit of video to make up for it. Over-the-top Korean westerns are a-okay in my book.

F is for Fun

2011-04-08T14:53:00.000-04:00

Seriously, if you're not having any fun, why play RPGs?

The most consistently fun RPG I've ever run is Jared Sorensen's Inspectres, the first and arguably still best 'Narrativist' or indie RPG I've encountered. I first downloaded the PDF back in 2005 and since then, I have run dozens of incredibly successful sessions of supernatural hunting fun with gamers and non-gamers alike. Though many games tout their ability to be run relatively prep-free, Inspectres is really the only game that I have been able to run successfully with absolutely NO prep. The player buy-in for Inspectres is honestly stronger than most fantasy or sci-fi RPGs, because EVERYONE has either seen Ghostbusters or watched a Monster of the Week supernatural TV show (Buffy, Angel, X-Files, Supernatural, et al.) Failing that, they can always basically play themselves.

The system is super simple: characters are created with 9 points put into four Attributes (Athletics, Academics, Technology and Contact) and a Talent that adds a bonus to these rolls when in use (ie. Mechanic gets a die bonus when fixing a truck, swinging a monkey wrench, haggling over a van, etc...) Each assignment is measured in Job dice, which are acquired as characters come closer to solving the mystery, defeating the monster or finding the missing MacGuffin. But what makes it so easy to run without any prep is the fact that narrative control is shared (if not dominated) by player input.

When players succeed at their Attribute rolls, they describe the results of their success. When a character is researching the apartment complex inhabited by ghosts and rolls a 6 on one of their Academics dice, they get to decide what is causing the building to be haunted. It could have been built as a natural conductor for ectoplasmic energy like Dana Barrett's apartment building in Ghostbusters or built on top of a textile shop that caught fire, killing everyone within. It's all up to the players, which means that you, as the GM, can just concentrate on setting up the initial scenario and rolling with your player's ideas, keeping the Stress on the whole time.

I've adapted the rules of Inspectres to hardboiled detectives, Leverage-style heists and just about any other episodic genre out there. It's a game that's perfectly designed to emulate that structure and it's up and downs. You can find a copy of the Start-Up rules on the Memento Mori Theatricks website. If you like the idea of the game after reading it, gather up a group of friends and just wing it. It's the best option.

Cover image from the Memento Mori Theatricks website.

E is for Equipment

2011-04-06T23:45:00.001-04:00

For me, equipment has always been the slowest part of the pre-game character creation ritual. I always seem to have players that agonize over the differences between an Ares Predator and a Browning Ultra-Power, the relative usefulness of a length of rope vs. a bedroll and the eventual kicking of one's self when they realize that they've forgotten something.

Creating the equipment list for Assholes in Space has been an exercise in keeping things simple and modular. I wanted to minimize the equipment bookkeeping and the countless ammunition tracking from which Savage Worlds often suffers. Every piece of equipment that I have created or cherry picked from one Savage Worlds book or another is there because I think that they fit the style of the game in one way or another. Each weapon listing is genericized and ammunition has been completely broken down into action-movie style 'magazines.'

Everything may be generic, but there are incentives for making your weapons your own. If a player comes up with a name for it (say, Black Falcon), they get a +1 to hit with it. If they draw a picture of it, they get a +1 to damage with the same weapon. Since there isn't any more ammunition tracking, these bonuses easily take the place of Double Taps or Burst Fire that appear in the Savage Worlds rulebook and let the players make up some cool stuff about the world. If players aren't really artistically inclined, there's always Pimp My Gun, a Flash website that RPGnet clued me into in the past. Using the old version (since I don't really care about all the finicky bits of guns), it's a blast to do the Hollywood Sci-Fi Retrofit by taking an existing gun...

...mess around with the construction and glue some extra bits on to make a Space Gun!

Now you try it!

D is for Duos

2011-04-06T09:30:00.001-04:00

Sorry this one's coming out a little late. I was laid up sick for most of last night with a couple of assignments for school due, so I've been trying to make some time for blogging.

As chronicled in my B is for Buddies post, my potential gaming group has whittled down to two players at the moment: my friends Marcos and CJ. Generally when people think of a gaming group, it's five people or more including the GM: the iconic Fighter, Wizard, Cleric, Thief party and a game master to set everything up. It seems to be a lot harder to run games for a duo, so I thought I'd take a look at some classic duos and see how their interactions and adventures can inspire a two-person party.

Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser

The iconic sword and sorcery duo, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser feel like the first real team or 'party' in early fantasy literature. Their strengths compliment each other and even though they do have their arguments and falling-outs, they always return to the Silver Eel, often a little worse for wear or out a couple thousand gold pieces. They constantly try and one-up the other, a continuing friendly rivalry that often gets them into much more trouble than they would if they were solely cold professional acquaintances.

Spike Spiegel and Jet Black

Though the crew of the Bebop is eventually rounded out by two more members, they seem much more auxiliary than the show's two initial main characters, Spike and Jet. One's hotheaded, the other is stoic, but their personalities really seem to compliment each other. There's a lot of tension between the two that occasionally explodes into arguments but at their core, they both respect each other's abilities and personalities, even if it doesn't always show in their banter. This unspoken bond really shines in the longer episodes like Jupiter Jazz and the series finale The Real Folk Blues.

Duos live and die on their interaction between each other. If a pair of PCs have great chemistry and bounce ideas and plans off of each other, it makes your job as GM that much easier. While a larger party that is more reluctant to converse with each other can technically function, a silent duo makes things awkward at the table and especially taxing on the GM's NPC stable. You can only do so many different accents. :)

C is for Convict Planets

2011-04-03T21:01:00.001-04:00

I came up with the idea of convict planets so that I could scratch the Trigun-style space western itch in Assholes in Space without having to seriously redefine the game world. One of the things that I really appreciate about science fiction settings in general is that a completely new environment or set of social rules can be just a planet away, like how Firefly and Cowboy Bebop can switch from gleaming future cities to frontier satellites in between episodes. Plus, the idea of desert planets conquered with jury-rigged technology just tends to appeal to me.

Convict planets are the interstellar equivalent of Australia, where the less scrupulous or financially solvent members of the Federation of Allied Worlds can send their repeat offenders to fend for themselves. These makeshift colonies are generally located on planets where terraforming has failed to meet the specifications of a multi-stellar corporation or whose natural environments are... less than hospitable. Anything from barren wastelands to swamp worlds filled with vicious carnivorous plants could be home to a convict planet, depending upon the severity of the crimes committed. Hopefully.

Criminals being sent to a convict planet are generally launched from Federal prison transports in dropships known as Oneways. Each Oneway is only equipped with stabilizing thrusters and enough fuel to move the ship into an atmospheric entry, where an ample amount of heat shielding and impact-resistant foam should protect every passenger in the crash landing. During the drop, a recorded message will inform the prisoners about the basics of their new home, its environmental hazards and the existing power structures (if any). Once they crash and extricate themselves from the foam-filled mess that was their transport, they're on their own.

Some convict planets have developed far better than their overseers anticipated, creating towns and cities from both the planet's natural resources and the salvaged wrecks of their Oneways. Generally, these more developed planets are either controlled by feudal warlords or else divided into civilized outposts and roving gangs of raiders and thieves. Towns are simultaneously wary and welcoming of new arrivals, like a constant Yojimbo-style struggle for power. Of course, there are plenty of other convict planets that have turned out more like the Most Dangerous Game.

Picture from Greg Martin's super cool guide on how to make planets in Photoshop, which I will totally start doing once I have some free time.

B is for Buddies

2011-04-02T22:33:00.001-04:00

But before I do that...

Buddies are great, aren't they? You hang out with them, make music, watch movies, eat food. Sometimes you even play roleplaying games with them, like I did this week. For all of my blogging bluster, it has been a really long time since I actually, you know, gamed with anyone. So after I finished an intensive week of projects for library school, I decided to call a couple of my friends up and let the good times roll.

We gathered over at Marcos and CJ's house with a carefully purchased assortment of Cheetos and Mountain Dew (to complete the experience) and my copy of the D&D Gamma World boxset. While Marcos, CJ and my friend Mike from college rolled up character origins, I was frantically winging the skeleton of the potential adventure and the basics of Radon, the town that it took place in. I wanted to do the classic 'post-apocalyptic gang wants to take over a small town for its natural resources' bit, but give it a bit of a twist. So the resource that the porker motorgang was chasing after was not gas or weapons, but food. Specifically, a mineshaft filled with tasty, genetically modified beetles that reproduced at an alarming rate and ate anything they were given. We never got that far, but it's nice to think about your prep work.

Our characters were:

Chimp Eastwood (CJ), a Giant Simian, who's 20 Strength and naturally rolled 17 Constitution made him the de-facto piledriver of the group. Skilled in Mechanics, he carried a big ol' hammer and an electric nailgun, which he could use to pretty deadly effect with his Ape Rage (no joke, actual power from Famine in Far-Go)
Bogo Free (Mike), a Magnetic Arachnoid, described as a kind of regular looking guy with a giant web-spinning thorax. Accompanied by a HAL-esque talking laser helmet, Bogo also used what we referred to as a 'cargo-cult railgun' that used his natural magnetism to fire projectiles.
Problem Glueth (Marcos), a Gelatinous Nightmare apparently from a parallel universe where life never evolved above single celled organisms (albeit very big ones). A private detective by trade, Problem used his gelatinous body to form blades, shields and his patented Goomerangs.

As you can see, a finer group of adventures doesn't exist. The trio started out on the Road heading towards Radon to deliver goods and mail to the local post station, rolling in a pick-up truck towing Problem's wagon and canoe (Gamma World's random crap tables are fantastic.) But on that hallowed highway, they come across a smashed up trailer with a large cloud of glowing red birds hovering over it. The trio attempted to move past the blood birds, but ended up attracting their vicious ire and combat began.

It was vicious. Chimp and Bogo initially tried to close into melee with the avian bastards, but the blood birds radiated a damaging aura and each of their attacks inflicted ongoing damage against our heroes. After splitting up and retreating to a safe distance, Chimp was unexpectedly tagged by a bullet from a distant rifle, wielded by a sneaky dabber who hid in wait to scavenge the gear from the victims of the blood birds! With Chimp distracted, the blood bird flock focused their attention on Bogo, whose attempts to use his laser helmet were met with robotic disdain and the sound of batteries draining. Chimp used his powerful Alpha mutation to throw up an invisible wall of force between the dabber and his allies so that he and Problem could focus fire on the dreaded bird swarm. Down to a minuscule amount of hit points, Bogo freed himself from the blood birds and spat an entangling web of venom that managed to keep the swarm tied down and immobilized for the next five or six turns thanks to my crappy saving throws.

As the force field faded, the dabber was greeted by the sight of Problem vibrating his gloopy body like the Hypnotoad, channeling terrifying psychic flashbacks into the poor creature's head. He remembered how his father left him in the wilderness to fend for himself and never truly cared. As the dabber continued firing at ghostly images of his awful past (and missing), Chimp took a rage-fueled run at his assailant, who instinctively flung open his vest and triggered a claymore mine attached to his belt buckle that sent the ape-man flying. Problem continued to lock down the poor, misunderstood bastard while his allies went to finish off the rest of the swarm. Trapped inside the radiation aura once again, Bogo managed to deliver the killing blow to the dreaded birds.

With their enemies defeated, the trio united to finally deliver the mail to the town of Radon. The post office was a ragged tent-city affair and the mutant on duty told them that they could get a free meal at the local greasy spoon Bud's before turning in. The food was delicious, if disconcertingly all called... clams. As night fell, Bogo and Chimp found their lodgings at the Huck, an arcade-game filled tavern with a creepy animatronic animal band and Problem found his at El Rancho, the stable where he unsuccessfully tried to barter for the owner's riding mantis.

At night, the party was awoken by the sounds of revving engines and rumbling dirt. Making their way outside, they were confronted with a late night biker gang invasion of dear old Radon! The fight wasn't as punishing as the confrontation on the way to town, but the motorcycle-riding porkers were vicious in their attacks. The day was finally won when Chimp rolled a 1, which caused him to switch out his Alpha Mutation for the Teleportation power. He made his Overcharge roll, then sent every remaining biker 50 ft. into the air. As folks who have played a 4E game know, falling damage is a bitch. Each porker took about 5d10 damage and pretty much disintegrated on contact with the ground.

That's where the night ended and it was a pretty wild ride. The pared-down 4th Edition system behind Gamma World is damned solid and my friends had a great time pulling, throwing and zapping people with mutant powers. The only caveat is that Gamma World is super deadly with less than 5 people in the party. It's really hard to make appropriate challenges for three people without making them overly deadly. The first encounter of the evening was designed for 4th level characters and our heroes barely escaped with their lives.

All in all, we had a great time and played until I had literally run out of prep material. Unfortunately, Mike has since gone back to school and I am left solely with Marcos and CJ as adventuring companions. Though I really do love the new Gamma World, I'm afraid that it would be way too lethal for their early leveled characters, so the eventual Assholes in Space game will definitely involve the two of them and hopefully some more folks.

A is for Assholes in Space

2011-04-01T14:54:00.000-04:00

As I hope most of my followers remember, I started the month of March off with an idea for a Savage Worlds sci-fi setting called Assholes in Space, my kitchen-sink melange of space western anime, Bioware space opera, cyberpunk attitude and good old fashioned old-school adventuring spirit (which is to say, profit-motivated jackasses who will nevertheless do the right thing when the chips are down. Probably.) Needless to say, I was unfortunately overwhelmed by graduate school work and had relatively little time to put pen to paper and write up world concepts and a cast of characters. Not to mention that my flash drive, which up until recently was my depository for my school work and all things Assholes in Space-related, had a tragic mishap involving an elbow and outstretched arms late at night last week. As a result, my previous files will be inaccessible without the aid of a flash drive recovery company and probably $150.

But honestly, the equipment lists and racial descriptions only go so far in describing what Assholes in Space is really like for me. I'm often afflicted with what's commonly known as 'Gamer ADD,' which means that I am incredibly susceptible to outside influences on my gaming ideas. Assholes in Space is enough of a sci-fi sandbox that it can accommodate just about anything that I want to add. Trigun-esque space western adventures can be found on convict planets or frontier asteroids where the strongest rule with a literal iron fist. Ocean's 11-style heists and capers are commonplace on urban core worlds with mile-high skyscrapers and walkways. There can be giant robots alongside psychics, alien martial arts that take full advantage of having four arms and good old fashioned revolver-slinging exploits.

So this month, I'd like to get a lot more of the crunch and ideas for the setting out there, either in blog post or gazetteer format. I want people to see the cinematic combat rules that I've cooked up for Savage Worlds, the different sci-fi races that I'm having trouble naming and the adventure ideas and locations that potential PCs can tear up.

This is something extremely well-planned and thought out

2011-03-31T22:59:00.010-04:00

So, I'm going to be doing the April A to Z blogging challenge. Now that my hell week of hunkering down and churning out 6 heavy school projects is over and done with, I'm going to try and make more time to crank out blog posts like I promised. Having just gamed for seemingly the first time in years (more on that in a future post), the fires of creativity have definitely been rekindled. Hopefully having a schedule of what kind of stuff I'm going to post about will help out in the long term. I've got the first chunk of my entries worked out, so hopefully once I pick up steam, I'll get a better idea of what kinds of stuff I'm interested in writing about. In the meantime, here's a list of the posts I'm planning:

I'm really looking forward to the other posts that people are working on. Hopefully, some stuff from this blog will get people charged up.

The Dungeon String: The Thief

2011-03-20T08:32:00.000-04:00

As anyone who's seen heist films knows, the gathering together of a crew (or "string" as Donald E Westlake's Dortmunder novels call it) really sets the tone for the rest of the caper itself. Each member of a string has a specialty that makes them essential to the task at hand, from safecracking to infiltration to crowd control. The television show (and subsequent roleplaying game) Leverage divided these specialties into the broad categories of Hitter, Hacker, Grifter and Thief. For my Heist D&D game, these roles are going to be covered by the four standard classes from Basic D&D.

These Dungeon String posts are my ideas on how each D&D class can fit into the heist milieu. Though the Thief class seems like it would cover the traditional pickpocketing, lockpicking and stealthy elements of a caper, this is a fantasy heist. There are going to be vault doors closed by magic, exploding rune traps, gelatinous cubes making security sweeps in the sewers below, plenty of room for a wide variety of unscrupulous characters. But since they are the backbone of any good heist, let's start with the Thief.

In a game where disarming traps and dodging security are commonplace occurrences, the Thief is the obvious utility player, acting as dedicated burglars, ranged combat specialists or expert lookouts. On top of their obvious Thief skills and alertness bonuses, Thieves also have the Backstab ability, which not only covers striking from the shadows with a knife to the back, but also ranged attacks from long distances. A Thief armed with a repeating crossbow in a high vantage point could hold off advancing enemies until the job is done or the plan has to be abandoned.

As many people have already noted, the standard B/X Thief is kind of a chump, with low hit points, okay saves and an alright attack progression. But on top of that, the Thief isn't any good at his job. I know that the Player Skill vs. Character Skill debate has been hemmed and hawed over by the OSR blogging community as a whole, specifically having to do with Thief skills, but it still stands that a standard Thief is much, MUCH worse at being a Thief at 1st level than a Fighter is at being a Fighter and so on. A starting Fighter with decent stats has about a 25-40% chance of being able to hit most monsters. A Cleric has a 33-50% chance of turning undead of around his level. But a starting Thief is more likely to succeed at his saving throw against a poison trap than his actual Trap Removal roll.

No more. In the Heist D&D campaign, I'm planning on using a modification of Beyond the Black Gate's Swords and Wizardry Thief class with the unified Thievery skill starting out at a 35% success rate. I figure that a modification like this puts the Thief on more even ground with the rest of the Basic classes and as a result, it will hopefully encourage more stealthy maneuvering and thiefly behavior.

Picture from Claudio Pozas' art gallery on ENWorld

Some great reading

2011-03-17T15:57:00.001-04:00

If you haven't been reading austrodavicus's phenomenal Old School Renaissance is Dead posts, check them out post-haste. I'd like to thank Tim Shorts of Gothridge Manor for bringing them to my attention with his Newbie Blogger Award, as they are probably the best codification of why I'm involved in the whole old school blogging community. The idea that a group of people can be united by a common interest rather than a common distaste, enthusiasm rather than nostalgia. After all, I wasn't even BORN when all of these games were in their prime and I'm still writing about all of this stuff, right? So thank you, austrodavicus, for putting a lot of thought and effort into pinpointing what keeps a lot of us going.

In more clerical news, Fistful of Coppers is going to be a little more sporadically updated in the next few weeks. I've got about a half dozen big projects due at graduate school and as much as I enjoy writing stuff up for this blog, time is unfortunately not a luxury that I have at the moment. Hopefully I can start putting some of these ideas that I've had bouncing around in my head onto paper in the future, but right now I need to focus on putting poster projects and book talks onto paper. I love writing this thing, but unfortunately I'm not getting graded on it.

Return from sabbatical

2011-03-14T23:02:00.001-04:00

Unfortunately, looks like I'm not exactly going to meet my goal of posting once every day this month, seeing as I spent the last week looking for apartments with my girlfriend in the sunny state of New Jersey. However, I did spend that trip listening to three different caper/heist novels, which have really stoked my creative fires on this D&D Heist thing. So within the next few days, I'll hopefully be bringing you some of my new ideas, including the beginnings of my Whimsy deck, an analysis of how each D&D class fits into a 'string,' as Donald E Westlake calls it and some floorplans of potential heists in the inimitable graph paper dungeon style.

But to get us started, here's a completely legit YouTube link to the entirety of the Castle of Cagliostro, one of the greatest anime films of all time and a fantastic heist film in its own right.

See you soon.

I've crossed the rubicon!

2011-03-07T23:04:00.001-05:00

Thank you to everyone who has been following For A Fistful of Coppers recently. As of now, I have over 50 people following my intermittently updated ramblings and I'd like to thank each and every one of you. I appreciate every comment that I get on my posts and ideas. It's one of the reasons that I love the game blog world so much and I think I'm more confident in my posting than ever before.

As of recently, I've been binging on Dortmunder and Discworld novels and watching classic heist movies, including the Sting and the Castle of Cagliostro. I think that something really clicked for me with the Bugbears and Bankvaults post and hopefully, I can synthesize it into something fun for everyone. All I know is that I'd better start working on that Whimsy/Plot Complications deck, because what's a heist if it doesn't have unforeseen consequences?

Until next time...

Ogrim's Eleven: Or Bugbears and Bankvaults

2011-03-06T10:20:00.001-05:00

I've been thinking about this post since Society of Torch, Pole and Rope talked about something similar with the Tomb of Horrors, so here goes...

In recent weeks, I've been trying to understand why the idea of the old-school dungeon crawl or megadungeon hasn't really inspired me that much. I seem to be able to comprehend the idea of the picaresque hero and the simple interpretable rules that seem so important to old-school games, but I really want to understand more of what's appealing about these places. I'm not really a big fantasy literature buff and the novels I do read tend to have very modern genre attitudes, like the Dresden Files and the Discworld series. The Tomb of Horrors post over at Society of Torch, Pole and Rope got me thinking hard on the subject. I love movies like The Sting, Ocean's Eleven and Snatch and television like Leverage and White Collar, which share a whole lot of elements with the dungeon crawl: assembling a crew, loading up on the requisite equipment, edging down corridors and disabling traps. So why couldn't I apply this love of a plan coming together to dungeons?

I think it's because they're not active enough for me.

Now before the entire D&D blogosphere jumps down my throat about their dungeons and experiences and whatever, note that I'm not saying that the megadungeon mode is a bad thing: it just may not be for me. Something about looting long abandoned temples just doesn't excite me that much. Sure, you may have just found the Eye of Hrumesh and taken it from its rightful temple, but where's the fallout from that? Who have you pissed off? Where are you going to lay low?

I think that I need to run old-school D&D like a Dortmunder novel: putting together a crew of quirky characters to do a job, whether it's trying to steal a magical artifact from a prominent guild leader or being hired by a scholar looking to retrieve significant findings in the field. A Magic-user casting Charm Person on the janitor to smuggle a pair of Thieves into the building while the Fighter looks on with a crossbow, ready to intervene if things get nasty (which they most likely will). Magical university buildings set up with Explosive Runes traps for nosy lockpicks or wizards trying to Knock their way into a fortune.

Stuff like that gets me fired up.

New layout

2011-03-04T22:48:00.003-05:00

Trying something a little new with my layout here, as I was kind of getting sick of the limited space of my old white-on-white formatting.

Yeah, I know it's not a long post, but it's a post for today and I'm sticking to my schedule! There'll be a longer one tomorrow that I've already started working on, I promise.

In closing, have an average weekend!

A New Direction

2011-03-03T22:30:00.002-05:00

I realized today that I was spending more time on writing up space opera races and weaponry than I did on assignments and group work for library school. Unfortunately, that's one thing that I can't afford to do right now, so Assholes in Space will probably be riding the backburner for the time being.

However, that's not to say that I'm going to put this month of blog updating on hiatus. I'm just going to take a different approach. A little bit slower with development and brainstorming, since I'm probably not going to get the chance to run this thing until the end of the month anyhow.

Assholes in Space: The Mixtape

2011-03-02T19:50:00.000-05:00

Along with my initial concept of the Assholes in Space campaign, I made a mixtape of setting-appropriate soundtrack music that helped me visualize the setting. I tried to find as many of them as I could on YouTube, but there are definitely some important ones missing. It's a pretty potent blend of trad ska and reggae, hip hop, electronics and hardcore/noise.

Minutemen - This Ain't No Picnic (embedding disabled by request)

Assholes in Space: A Brief Introduction

2011-03-01T21:36:00.000-05:00

Along with continuing my ideas for the Motherlode D&D campaign and adaptations of S John Ross's Uresia for use with Basic-style D&D, I want to use the month of March to talk about an old campaign idea that has been sitting on my mental backburner for a while now, known colloquially as Assholes in Space. The original idea for the game came from a very interesting combination of influences that created a very specific image of a campaign setting in my mind.

Most science fiction fans have read Neuromancer. It's the book that launched a thousand dark futures and is directly responsible for Cyberpunk 2020, Shadowrun, GURPS Cyberpunk and dozens of other less well known roleplaying games. In my senior year of college, I was listening to a BBC Radio 'play of the week' adaptation of Neuromancer before going to sleep and what really stuck out to me about the story in audio form was the Rastafarian Space Navy. I'd always liked Maelcum in the novel, but hearing the reggae thumping in the background of a slow motion deep space cruise just made me think, "There must be characters like this in every science-fiction setting." Somewhere in the Star Wars universe, there must be a guy who thinks that living in space is just the coolest and spends his days floating around smoking space-weed and listening to space-reggae (there are probably names for these in the Star Wars universe, but my EU knowledge is a bit rusty.) The combination of music with the silent background of space reminded me of Cowboy Bebop's fantastic eclectic soundtrack and the western twang of zero gravity in the Firefly universe.

The other major influence was actually a Wushu play-by-post game on RPGnet that I was involved in called A Million Billion Bastards (right here if you've got an account.) The setting was described as "Take Cowboy Bebop, Outlaw Star, Getbackers, Xenosaga, Ghost in the Shell, and a dozen other influences, toss 'em in a blender, and hit puree." It was a real melange of influences, all decidedly cinematic, and while it lasted, it was really fun. But what I really took away from it was the 'anything goes' idea of worldbuilding. Don't worry about whether or not something in an over-the-top cinematic galaxy is realistic or even plausible. Don't be afraid to just wing it. Cybernetics, psionics, rifles as long as some people are tall, four-armed aliens and genetically altered killing machines are all welcome in this universe. Fun is fun and if the campaign can accommodate everyone's idea of fun, so much the better.

T-Minus One Month

2011-03-01T11:54:00.003-05:00

From now on, I'll be taking an hour or so every day just to write stuff for this blog and post it. It may not be perfect, but at least it will be consistent.

Hope to see you there. :)

A plan for March

2011-02-27T20:53:00.001-05:00

So, I'm relatively certain that most of my readership has kind of dwindled off since I've stopped posting regularly. Though a fair chunk of my time has been held up by classes, assignments and work, I know that I've definitely been wasting a lot of my time on internet forums and video games that could be better spent updating this blog and working on my gaming stuff. For March, I propose a little experiment.

I am going to take an hour of every day in March to work on blog stuff and get a post up. Some stuff may be detailed, some stuff may be sketchy. Maybe it'll just be a random description of a magic item or an orbital satellite, but at least it'll be consistent.

So here's to more Motherlode, here's to Uresia B/X and here's to my new Savage Worlds asskicking sci-fi project tentatively titled Assholes in Space (which I'll probably have to retitle at some point since my real name is on this blog). HERE'S TO ACTUALLY UPDATING THIS THING.

Dungeons and Discworld

2011-02-22T09:00:00.003-05:00

Posting is probably going to be a bit slow for the next two weeks, as midterms are rearing their ugly heads. So I thought I'd do a post about my recent listening material (going through Disc 7 of Thief of Time right now.)

Some of the chiefest influences in my Motherlode game have been Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels. Though I have explored Appendix N as far as I could find through our public library system and swaths of used book stores (not to mention a pretty sweet trade with Scott of Huge Ruined Pile), I keep finding myself coming back to Great A'Tuin and the fantasy world balanced on his back.

First of all, the books are hilarious, not only for fans of fantasy but Anglophiles, cinema buffs and academics alike. I've spent many an hour just laughing at the assorted mottos of the Guilds of Ankh-Morpork and still think that if the BBC were smart, they should start adapting the Night Watch series into seasons of excellent television. But something about them also hits that part of my mind that is inspired by games like Moldvay Basic and Swords and Wizardry, and I think Pratchett explains it best in the introduction to the Art of Discworld:

The twist is that it is taken seriously; not taken seriously as a fantasy, but taken seriously as a world... So Discworld works, more or less. People plow fields, file things, make candles, deliver letters and babies, produce newspapers, perform daily the thousand minor miracles that keep a city fed. Magic has pretty much the same status as nuclear power: under control it is useful, perhaps even essential, but too much reliance on it comes with a disproportionately high price tag, and only a loony would use it to catch fish...

That sort of darkly humorous fantasy ethos just seems to fit with my preconceptions about Basic D&D. Being clever and willing to improvise can be just as important as any martial prowess or arcane power; at Ankh-Morpork's Unseen University, learning how to manipulate magical forces is much less important than learning how not to use them.

Discworld also wears its modern influences on its sleeve, which I very much appreciate. I've never really understood the draw towards a purely medieval fantasy world, probably because I grew up on westerns, Hong Kong action movies and comic books. There should be black powder, even if there aren't guns; clockwork creations even if there's no steam power; a telegraph-esque service even without copper wires and electricity. Familiar elements like that seem to make it easier for players to understand how a fantasy world works, instead of having to approximate a brief history of hamlets in the Middle Ages every time the party wants to go to a tavern.

Hopefully, this influence will be reflected in the game and make Motherlode something a little to the left of a typical fantasy town.

Art by Paul Kidby. Some of the best page-to-picture translations I've ever seen.

Motherlode: A Quick Sketch

2011-02-16T13:18:00.000-05:00

In working on the town of Motherlode, I decided to just make a quick sketch of important places that could be expanded upon or added to as I continued developing the idea. Unfortunately, I never got to really flesh out a lot of these ideas, as my friends never really visited most of the locations in town. I'm going to spend some time on the blog expanding these ideas and trying to populate Motherlode a little more.

Taverns and Other Places of Ill Repute
- The Empty Casket
- The Dragon's Hoard
- Fat Tom's
- The Rusty Pickaxe
- Mulligan's
- The Irish Deer
- The Wanton Wench
- The Ravished Ruby

Other Places of Interest
- Looter's Row, where tomb robbers and snake oil salesmen sell uncovered artifacts and forgeries alike. Some people don't know what they really have.
- Pleasant and Co. Explorer's General Store, sells rope, lanterns, iron rations, et al. Everything you need to get lost in a tomb complex.
- The Church of Antra, goddess of underdogs. Fortune favors the bold, and Sister Bradabax takes it to heart. Bit of a drinking/arm wrestling problem.
- Marshal's Office, the only iron-framed building in town, meant to hold even ogres and other giant troublemakers. The Marshal has orders all the way from the City of the Cathedral to keep the peace and does.
- Cathedral Claims Office, where master appraisers let adventurers know just how much that statue is worth before they sell it for booze money.

Hopefully, I'll be able to expand on these ideas in the next few weeks while I'm not working on schoolwork.

Motherlode: Back to Basics

2011-02-13T15:30:00.000-05:00

Before I embarked on the initial Motherlode campaign, I'd spent a large chunk of time defining the background of the setting, the different capital cities and their populations, the special things about each race. As time went on, I found myself becoming less and less inspired by the fluff that I had written. So forget Shrapnel and the City of the Cathedral for the time being. In this new imagining, I'm just going to start at Square One: the boomtown of Motherlode.

The initial idea of Motherlode was inspired by the gold rush boomtowns of the Wild West, small towns containing everything that a prospector needed (bunking, a general store for tools and equipment) and wanted (mostly drink and women). Only instead of veins of gold, the inhabitants of Motherlode would be searching for ancient artifacts and treasures. Motherlode is built on the outskirts of a Valley of the Kings-esque buried civilization that has just recently been discovered by university scholars, many of whom will want to hire a group of adventurers for protection in these delves. Or you could always buy a hastily drawn ruin map from a guy at a tavern. It's all up to you

Motherlode can also work as one of the Mummy Towns in the Troll Lands of Uresia: Grave of Heaven (of which I will be posting some more about in the future. Needless to say, it will have to do with some cool conversion-type stuff)

Old School D&D My Way 2: Old School Harder

2011-02-10T10:05:00.000-05:00

Posting has unfortunately been a bit sporadic recently, as my girlfriend is visiting for the first time in what seems like months and I try and spend as much time as I reasonably can with her when she's here. Still working over ideas for games with my friends, as I've had impassioned pleas of "When are we going to play some D&D?" to "When are we going to kick off that Feng Shui game that I was excited about?" All this plus ongoing schoolwork and reading 5 books a week for Resources for Young Adults. I'm conflicted. :)

A few of you folks may remember a post that I did before I disappeared off of the face of the earth called Old School D&D My Way, which I think captured a lot of what I've been trying to accomplish with my D&D musings. I was born in the tail end of the 80s and came into gaming well after the majority of people who are revisiting old-school games from their youth. I've become much more exposed to the influences surrounding early edition D&D in recent months, but at the time I thought that immersing myself in thematically appropriate material would help me get old school D&D better than I did.

In retrospect, it was a bad decision.

Though I did add some personal elements to my Swords and Wizardry game, mostly the quasi-Western setting, I really didn't feel like I put enough of myself into it. I just got so inspired by other people's stuff that I thought a patchwork assemblage of their work would somehow result in a great game for me. Now I know that's not the case and I'm going to try my damnedest to put together a D&D game that I feel is mine.

In the coming weeks, I'll probably be using Fistful of Coppers as a public forum to work all of this stuff out. I hope that some of you will find it interesting.

So, I know I'm late to the party and all, but...

2011-02-09T13:36:00.003-05:00

Anyone else catch the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons episode of Community? All in all, I thought it was a really solid portrayal of the good and the bad, not to mention a great new reservoir of character names if I ever need them. But prepare to have your mind blown.

Dan Harmon wrote the Dead Alewives Dungeons and Dragons sketch.

Yeah. That one.

RIP Brian Jacques

2011-02-08T00:30:00.001-05:00

While I was in the middle of writing another post, I heard the news that Brian Jacques has passed away at the age of 71. The Redwall books were some of the most formative fiction of my childhood. My first informal roleplaying games among friends involved the Redwall universe and as soon as I got my hands on GURPS 3rd Edition in my 6th grade year, I tried to use it to make Redwall characters. They were heroic tales, stories about community and perseverance. A lone abbey in the wilderness surviving against any onslaught thrown at it.

But mostly, they were about food. I think I can honestly say that Redwall made me into a foodie. Jacques was a master of tantalizingly describing tarts, stews, breads and cordials in a way that made my 4th grade brain hum with delight. I only really started to cook myself when I was in high school, but ever since reading the Redwall books, I wanted to try new and exciting foods wherever I went.

So thank you, Brian Jacques. You will be missed.

Man, I really want to run some D&D

2011-01-28T22:07:00.001-05:00

Like my blogging buddy Barking Alien, I have an awful case of Gamer ADD. When I think I'm set on running a super-cool Feng Shui campaign for my friends, my mind naturally starts to wander. I've been thinking about Uresia, about the aborted 4E campaign that I was going to run at the library, the fantasy novels that I've been reading for my Young Adult class, not to mention all the cool things that I've been reading on people's blogs. The sum total being that they've all got me wanting to run Dungeons and Dragons again.

Fortunately, I've put out the word to my Facebook friends and at least one person has bit. Marcos wants to play D&D SO BAD that I think Harrison may just have to deal. :)

This one's for Dr. Rotwang!

2011-01-23T22:42:00.002-05:00

More definitive proof that the 80s took a really long time to die...

This is a promo video for the 1st edition release of Shadowrun at Gencon 1990, combining shirtless musclemen, intense Duran Duran video makeup, feathered hair and jean skirts with Doctor Who-level special effects and highly advanced Mind's Eye style CGI. Enjoy!

Feng Shui: Savaged Archetypes

2011-01-22T18:36:00.004-05:00

For all folks who've been interested in my Savage Worlds Feng Shui conversion, I finished the grunt work on most of the archetypes today. Unfortunately still in development are the Abomination and Supernatural Creature (to be put together with the Slipstream alien creation rules), the Cyborg (still finishing the Edges and Skills), the Monster Hunter (still have no idea how to do cybernetics) and the Transformed Animal (worked out all the races in the book with the alien creation rules, going to put something together if someone wants to play one)

Here you go. Enjoy the Google doc and if you have any questions about it, feel free to ask!

Feng Shui: The End of an Era

2011-01-17T01:10:00.001-05:00

My best friend Mike has always said that the 80s in Hollywood really didn't end until Pulp Fiction came out in 1994. Since Feng Shui's 'Contemporary Era' is smack dab in 1996, I wanted to see if the hypothesis fit. After spending a lazy afternoon watching bad 80s and 90s action movie trailers with a back injury, I heartily concur.

Case in point:

1990

1991

1992

1993

To be fair, direct to video movies tend to be about 5-10 years behind the pop-cultural curve, so I can't exactly blame the Cannon films for being too 80s.

Note: these are all coming from the gigantic ActionPackedCinema YouTube channel, where you can find probably 500 more of these trailers.

Lost Empires: A step in the right direction

2011-01-16T15:34:00.001-05:00

Thanks to James from the Underdark Gazette for pointing this game out to me!

This month's OSR kerfuffle de jour basically had to do with innovation in old school products, whether or not retro-clones were doomed to restat the same orc and the same six attributes forever and anon. Well, the new Beta rules of Rogue Comet Games's Lost Empires is an interesting step in the right direction for retro-clones, even if its rules are a bit of a mess at times.

Lost Empires definitely appears to be inspired by games like True20 and Microlite20, point-based refinements of d20 games down to a core essence. Characters are created by spending points towards your Combat Bonuses, Skills, Hit and Mana Points. The three quasi-classes in Lost Empires are definitely inspired by the Warrior/Adept/Expert divide in those games and I wish that these distinctions were more apparent in the rules text. They tout the ability to customize thieves that can cast spells or warriors that can pick locks, but the actual class roles are located at the bottom of page 13.

The game uses a very interesting magic user mechanic which gives starting mages a fighting chance of doing something other than casting Sleep and falling back on their daggers. Each spell has a dice 'level' of their own that determines how many Mana Points that you spend on it. If that number exceeds your existing MP, the difference is taken as Feedback damage against your Hit Points.

Overall, I really like the idea behind this clone, which is honestly more of a game inspired by S&W rather than a clone of an existing rules set or a house-ruled document. The author has said that it's a game designed to appeal to young people who've never gamed before, which is a super admirable mission and one that, alongside a lot of other stuff that's been circling around me, is definitely inspiring my creativity. Expect further announcements.

Feng Shui: How to Savage an Archetype

2011-01-13T22:03:00.003-05:00

Alongside writing up ideas for the super cool Gigacrawler project over at Playing D&D With Porn Stars, I've been working on translating Feng Shui's Archetypes to my weird hybrid system. Though the two systems are surprisingly similar (broad skills, Edges compared with Schticks, modular powers), I've been having one main issue with the process: how faithful should the Archetypes be to the originals? In the original Feng Shui, game balance was not a real issue between Archetypes. Somewhere on RPGnet, I remember someone who worked on Feng Shui saying that they basically assigned values that sounded good to each character type. As a result, some Archetypes were just better than others.

At first, I created each Archetype as a Novice level Savage Worlds character, complete with buying their items. This was all well and good, but the more I looked at them, the more they didn't seem right. I had always liked the abstract Wealth Levels and weapon choices that Feng Shui employed. It left all of the bookkeeping and gear crunching at the door and told you, "You're a Working Stiff. You've probably got a car and an apartment. You get three guns. Let's kick some ass." That was the first thing to be grafted on.

I also felt that the same Novice layout was making each Archetype look a little samey: not many Edges and too few Skill points to really make the character your own. So I decided to boost the level of each Archetype to Seasoned, which enabled for a lot more room for customization. Different Archetypes could put their Advances into Edges, Attributes or Skills as I saw fit. It gave me much more leeway in building these Savage Worlds characters like their Feng Shui counterparts. Take a look:

Everyman Hero

Agility d6
Smarts d6
Spirit d6
Strength d6
Vigor d6
+1 more

Charisma: 0
Speed: 30ft.
Parry: 5
Toughness: 5

Driving d6
Fighting d6
Knowledge (Classic Cars) d6
Knowledge (Sports) d6
Notice d6
Repair d4
Shooting d4
Streetwise d4
+3 more

Hindrances

Heroic (Major): Character always helps those in need

Edges

Combat Reflexes: +2 to recover from being Shaken
Improvisational Fighter: +1 to hit and damage with improvisational weapons
Lucky: +1 extra Bennie
Quick: Discard draw of 5 or less for new card

Weapons: None. You're just going to have to find one somewhere.
Wealth Level: Working Stiff

Mixtapes: Go home and be a family man!

2011-01-11T23:52:00.001-05:00

So, I'm pretty sure that most people born in the 1980s have played a few rounds of Street Fighter II before. It's one of the universal arcade games of our era, like the X-Men side-scrolling beat-em-up or one of those Neo Geo cabinets with Metal Slug and Bust A Move on it that every skating rink or mini golf course had at one point or another. Apart from being the first fighting game in video game history, it's also perfect Feng Shui fodder.

Seriously, a bunch of super-powered martial artists, kung fu cops and what seems to be a Supernatural Creature from the Brazilian rain forest pitted against each other in a worldwide fighting tournament by a psychic dictator who runs the world's most powerful crime syndicate? That's your campaign right there! If you want to make it a little more down to earth (and a little stupider) there's the much worse in hindsight Street Fighter II V anime series, available on Netflix Instant.

Mainly, this whole post is an excuse to post Guile's stage theme from Super Street Fighter II, which I have had stuck in my head for three days. Enjoy!

Library D&D Campaign: Survey Says...

2011-01-10T16:57:00.002-05:00

But seriously, folks...

As I mentioned before, I'm attempting to kick start the library Dungeons & Dragons program again for the Spring semester, with a more focused effort towards online and school outreach. So far, I have 3 potential teens interested in the program and hopefully more to come. Unfortunately, I haven't heard back from any of them in the month following Christmas Break, which was when I sent out my email reminder.

I've decided to devise a preliminary survey to send out to interested kids to not only gauge their interest in the Dungeons & Dragons program, but also to get a sense of their experiences with the fantasy genre and roleplaying. Here are my questions so far:

(1) Name, Age, School, etc...

(2) What are 5 of your favorite fantasy sources? Remember, this can be anything from books and comics to television and video games. Anything goes!

(3) Have you had any experience with roleplaying games before? Have you played console or computer RPGs? Online message board games?

(4) What kind of character are you interested in playing? Are they courageous? Cunning? Steadfast and loyal? How will they interact with the rest of the group?

Remember: I'm not interested in running a campaign with evil characters. Everyone should be more or less willing to do the right thing when it's necessary. That said, not everyone has to be a paragon of virtue. Mercenaries, scoundrels and ne'er-do-wells of all types are encouraged.

(5) Is there anything that you absolutely want to do in this Dungeons & Dragons campaign? Recover lost artifacts from dangerous subterranean temples? Repel a goblin invasion? Become king (or queen!) of an emerging nation? Let me know!
__________________________________________

That's what I have so far. Anyone else have any good ideas for questions that I should ask?

Feng Shui and Savage Worlds: Two great tastes, together at last!

2011-01-08T13:18:00.001-05:00

Outside of my potential library game and old school brainstorming, I've been recently sitting down with my non-gaming friends and trying to determine a game that they would like to play. They all have assorted background with roleplaying, both in tabletop and video game format and are mostly looking to have some fun and kick some ass. My friend Harrison isn't a fan of fantasy fiction and D&D by extension, so I've been thinking about games in more modern, but still somewhat fantastical settings. We first tried making characters for a Deadlands game, which is one of my favorite settings and the home of my most successful campaign ever (4 sessions! Whoo boy!) But once characters were made, I had a hard time coming up with any adventure hooks. I guess it was one of those cases of being more excited about the idea of running Deadlands than the actual prep involved.

So, after a week or so of refocusing, I picked up a new line of inspiration. I had gone over to hang out with a big pile of DVDs after my finals were over and ended up putting on Big Trouble in Little China, which no one else had seen. Now, alongside Raiders of the Lost Ark, Silverado, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Desperado, Big Trouble in Little China is one of my favorite movies of all time, one that I could watch over and over again. Everyone else seemed to have a blast watching it, which got me thinking. Feng Shui is basically the Big Trouble in Little China RPG, right?

Compare and contrast

Like many people, I'm not a big fan of the auctioneer-style initiative system and the 2056 Juncture in the established core book, just because I don't really like the idea of magic bug carapace technology as a normal everyday thing, even in the future. But I wasn't comfortable enough with the system to modify the existing Arcanowave system or start making my own Archetypes and Schticks.

And so, I started working on a weird hybrid system, combining Feng Shui with my most comfortable system, Savage Worlds. The two actually share a fair amount of common ground, from the broad skills to the differentiation between major characters and mooks to the effects-based sorcery powers, so conversion wasn't a difficult step. But there were also a lot of elements from Feng Shui that I wanted to keep, as well as a fair amount of other changes to both of the systems (does it really make sense for a high-flying Hong Kong action game to keep meticulous track of ammunition?).

Hopefully, we'll be making characters tonight after watching The Rundown. So far, everyone seems super enthusiastic about it and it's given me a chance to revisit a bunch of my favorite Hong Kong and Hollywood action movies. Once I've gotten more of a handle on the individual parts, I'll start posting my conversion stuff.

Hey Kids!

2011-01-07T01:56:00.000-05:00

Do you like the idea of a fun and expandable Adventure Deck in your 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons game, but think that $8 for 4 cards is still pretty ridiculous?

Then check out these cool-ass Drama Cards, brought to us by this classy guy over at 1d4chan! Not only are they useful for a 4E game, but many of them could be used in whatever version of Dungeons and Dragons you care to run! Download them here from Megaupload!

Yeah, I know, I know. Magic: the Gathering is ruining the sanctity of the gaming table and trading cards are a blight on society, but I picked up a Magic deck long before I ever rolled any polyhedrons and I think stuff like this is pretty cool. I would love to integrate something like this into my game, to match my wonderful Deck of Stuff.

So here's a toast to not overreacting as well as finding creative solutions to problems!

New Years Revolution

2011-01-03T00:30:00.000-05:00

My list of New Years gaming resolutions includes:

-Finish work on my library Dungeons and Dragons game (which will start being worked out on the blog shortly).
- Begin my Savage Worlds Feng Shui hybrid campaign with my non-gaming friends.
- Meet up and talk with more of my fellow game bloggers. I had a chance to talk face-to-face with Tavis Allison from The Mule Abides this Christmas break and it was a really great experience.
- Be on the playing side for once, damn it! I've been GMing for what seems like a decade without any real chance to take the other side of the screen. I'd like to have some adventures.
- Read more.
- Write more.
- Get fit.
- Succeed wonderfully at whatever I do.

Well, a man can dream, can't he?

Kids These Days

2010-12-19T22:02:00.000-05:00

This one's been coming for a while, folks. I'm pretty sure the same ground has already been tread by many other bloggers, but as both a gamer and someone who's going to be working with kids professionally some day, I just really needed to get this off of my chest. Bear with me.

One of the most common complaints that I've seen throughout the Old School blogging and forums community is about the monolithic 'Kids These Days.' They're too soft to accept that they automatically die if they touch the big demon face. None of them have the attention span to dedicate to 4 hours sitting down at a table without going crazy from digital withdrawal. Video games have spoiled them and now no one can use their imagination to play real games. Tabletop role-playing just isn't bright and shiny enough to drag them out of their technologically induced haze.

I'm sorry, but fuck that.

Back when I was in elementary and middle school, me and my friends were big old nerds. We played Magic, read Tolkien and Expanded Universe Star Wars novels and made our own comics set in both these worlds and our own. And before any of us got our hands on a codified rules system, we were doing our own story telling role-playing games. But we were also on the fringe of our age group. We were a minority of kids interested in fantasy and imaginary play and it stayed that way for a long time.

Right now, the most popular books for kids in America are a series of 7 fantasy novels starring a trio of young wizards fighting against an overwhelming evil while still trying to maintain grades at a magical academy. In the 13 years that the Harry Potter books have been in print, they have sold over 400 million copies, better than every edition of the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit published over a combined 70 year period. There are hundreds of fantasy series available for kids and teens at every library and book store across America.

On top of that, kids actually have an existing framework for what role-playing games are, thanks to console and computer RPGs. Even across cultural lines, the Final Fantasy and Legend of Zelda are pretty universal. Kids as young as 6 already have an idea of how hit points, initiative and experience work thanks to Pokemon, the most popular portable game ever made. Even the most recent book in the popular children's series about cats beating each other up, Warriors, has a miniature Lone Wolf style 'Adventure Game' written into the back.

So why do people think that Kids These Days aren't primed and ready to enjoy tabletop RPGs? Probably because Kids These Days wouldn't want to play their kind of RPGs.

So let's not dismiss kids off hand because they wouldn't want to inch their way down a dungeon corridor. Role-playing games are really born out of the creative influences of their time and as a result, games made today are more likely to attract kids born today. Instead of bemoaning the fact that their D&D isn't like my D&D, complaining instead of participating, we could be showing kids how cool tabletop role-playing is in a milieu that they're interested in. I can't fathom a middle schooler picking up a Jack Vance or Fritz Lieber paperback today, but if your campaign world was influenced by Avatar: the Last Airbender and One Piece, you'd have a line of kids out the door who are ready for adventure.

Let's cast a wide net, folks.

This is what I want every game of Call of Cthulhu to be like

2010-12-10T13:10:00.006-05:00

These pictures are so awesome that I have lost the capacity for description. Courtesy of Something Awful's Strange Fanart thread.

Mixtapes: I'll be your garbageman

2010-12-09T23:55:00.005-05:00

Got three pages of my 5th grade pathfinder to go then I gotta start working on my thought paper on media literacy, so here's a bunch of music from Scott Pilgrim.

Metric (w/Brie Larson) - Black Sheep cause they won't let me embed it.

Gamma World: A Delicious Melange

2010-12-04T16:38:00.000-05:00

Nothing is more fun for me than anachronism. I've been trying for ages to put together my campaign ideas for a western campaign inspired by Desperado, Hard Boiled and the Spaghetti westerns I've talked about before: a game where it doesn't matter that the bad guys are coming into town on a combination of horses and old sidecar motorcycles because you've got to Fonzie slap the jukebox in the saloon into playing Misirlou before you flip-cock your Winchester and get ready to shoot someone through a plate-glass window.

(God damn I want to run this so bad)

Regardless, that's the way I feel about Gamma World. It's fantastic because of this wildly fluctuating technology level. Some communities might have a still functioning slushie machine in their local cantina and as a result, that's what the town's known for! Firefly-esque prospectors with laser rifles! Tribes of robots with rebar spears! A group of Programmers worshiping a crazed mechanical digger!

I love this machine and the post-apocalypse makes it even better

And that's why I really like the new Gamma World rules. Albeit, I've never played any of the previous editions and I'd like to get my hands on a copy of 2nd if only for the map of post-apocalyptic Allegheny County, but I like the feel. The rules support that anachronistic melange in a way that I didn't feel that Mutant Future does.

One of my favorite additions to the new set are the generic weapons (Light One-Handed Melee, Heavy Two-Handed Ranged, Light One-Handed Gun, etc...) because it levels that playing field. Under the rules, a crossbow can be as effective as a hunting rifle or a harpoon gun made out of car parts, depending on what you decide its stats are. It feels a lot more natural than either limiting characters to medieval weapons at the start or ending up dropping your trusty spear completely when you pick up a plasma rifle.

By its nature, the post-apocalypse should be off-beat. Chuck all your favorite influences into it, let 'em simmer and season with gonzo or serious to taste. But for Pete's sake, don't make it prosaic.

Picture from Six-String Samurai. If you like Gamma World and haven't seen this movie, what the hell are you waiting for?!

Gamma World: The Road

2010-12-03T16:08:00.000-05:00

There's only one Road. Only one good one, anyway. Chances are there was a whole network of Roads once, criss-crossing and connecting the entire West. But a lot of things have happened since then: wars, disasters, dimensional incursions, robot wars...

The Road we've got is probably pieced together from the good bits of a bunch of different ones, judging on how some stretches tend to go on beyond the turns. Most of them are either bombed out, booby trapped or overgrown enough that you couldn't get anywhere on 'em without rides built special for navigating the terrain. No way in hell that the Tankers could make their way over those cobbles. And that's why we have the Road, and the reason that it can't be broken.

Sure, you can drive your pick-up or dune buggy or hover-boat around wherever you please, but none of those things can haul worth a damn. If you really wanna get things from Point A to Point B, you gotta use something big, like one of the old tankers or a gravity barge, and if there's one thing that all those Big Rigs need, it's space and stability. But once you've got that, you need to keep it that way.

That's where the towns come in. Most of them sprung up Roadside as soon as the lines from the Coast to Vegas were being reconnoitered, but each of them soon learned the drill. If you keep your chunk of the Road free from raiding parties, burrowing sharks and giant robots, you get trading rights for the cargo coming down the Road. Depending on what Rigs are rolling, you could get anything from clothing to food to construction supplies to Dr. Goggles' Tank-Aged Frontier Whiskey. The promise of first dibs on these treasures is enough to keep the crossbows loaded and lasers charged most Roadside settlements.

December's really the cruelest month

2010-11-30T09:48:00.002-05:00

So I'm most likely not going to be blogging for at least the next week, probably more. I'm literally at the point where I've either got to write 1,000 words or read an entire book every day and I'm not really sure where leisure activity fits in there, let along leisure writing.

Godspeed, y'all. Send me your best vibes.

I am weak and have poor impulse control

2010-11-28T23:45:00.000-05:00

So here's my new Gamma World box set, purchased with a Black Friday Borders coupon and cracked open outside of the plastic. Clearly, Hermes is very excited.

Just for fun, I rolled up a series of Origins and tried to see what I could make of them.

Mind Coercer/Plant: A dryad-like plant woman with hypnotic pollen. Most likely named something like Rose, Tulip or Violet.
Gravity Controller/Speedster: A density-altering mutant
Mind Breaker/Telekinetic: A psychic Russian agent from a parallel earth where the USSR won the Cold War.
Giant/Electrokinetic: A Frankenstein's Monster-like conglomeration animated by a car battery embedded in its back.

And my personal favorite, Android/Doppleganger, which I decided represented an sentient vending machine wearing a cowboy hat a la The Tick's Eastern Bloc Robot Cowboy, who can vend smaller utility robots from a core base block.

I think this game is gonna be all right.

Happy Thanksgiving to All

2010-11-25T13:19:00.000-05:00

Nothing's worse than being sick on a holiday. I guess the supposition that you only get sick when you can afford to, which I guess is the case. Fortunately, the ibuprofen and Mucinex seem to be working and I'm staying hydrated.

Still, I'm thankful to be home with family, helping them make the Thanksgiving feast. I love my parents and my sister, the cats and the dog. I'm hoping that my girlfriend makes it through her 10am-10pm EMS shift stress-free. On top of all that, I'm hoping I'll be able to make a full recovery by tomorrow and get working.

There's a lot in this world to be thankful for. It's for the best to focus on that, rather than the stuff that gets you down. Do as much as you can to make the world around you a better place to live and don't stress the things you can't change.

And remember, the Bond marathon is on Sci-Fi this year. :)

Uresia, One Piece and the importance of whimsical fantasy

2010-11-23T21:20:00.003-05:00

I'm not the only blogger to have sung the praises of S John Ross's amazing Uresia: Grave of Heaven. Jeff Rients (do I say this guy's name enough or what?) has often doted on the setting in his early Gameblog posts and SirLarkins of The RPG Corner made an attempt at a mechanical conversion for Rules Cyclopedia D&D. It's a dynamite little book, lean on population-density data but chock full of plot hooks, adventure seeds and character ideas. Each continent and civilization has the important cultural details and maybe a few cities sketched out in the descriptions but the book gives GMs more or less free reign to make Uresia a setting of their own based on the building blocks set out by the author. It's a fantastic approach to a published setting that really inspires and if I ever get a group together with the right mindset, I'd love to give my Culinary Adventures campaign a try. Because really, there's gotta be groups of adventurers that have to go out and track down the secret ingredients for the Dreed fighting chefs, be it hunting for giant beasts on Trolllander islands or climbing the Laochrian mountain ranges for a chance to harvest the rare Winter Thyme.

But I think the thing that really sticks with me about Uresia is the whimsical, light-hearted nature of the setting. So much of the role-playing community, old-school or not, is obsessed with increasing doses of grittiness and dystopia in their gaming experiences. Now, I'm not saying that no one should play gritty games: after all, my favorite system of all time is still Unknown Armies and I've had great times playing Cyberpunk and Call of Cthulhu. But the games I really remember are the ones where everyone is having fun and the setting supports that fun.

I'm a huge fan of the shonen manga series One Piece for a multitude of different reasons. I've been reading for six years and over 600 chapters now and I can honestly say that I'm as interested in reading more now as I was when I first started, which I NEVER say about most lost-lasting shonen series (Naruto, Bleach et al.) Honestly, I think it's because the series has maintained a consistent tone of whimsical adventure since it started. Times have gotten dark, situations have felt hopeless and struggles have been overwhelming but at the end of the day, it's still a series about a young boy wanting to become the greatest pirate ever with the help of his friends. No matter how serious matters get, there's always hope and camaraderie to rely upon.

I know that I haven't done a great job of explaining how I feel about this 'style(?)' of gaming, but in the campaign idea that I'm working on for my potential library D&D game, I'm trying to capture this whimsical and hopeful feeling for a group of completely new roleplayers. There are a couple of established settings outside of Uresia that really hit that mark for me, chief among them Shane Lacy Hensley's 50 Fathoms for Savage Worlds and the core-books-only approach to Eberron, which is fortunately made much easier in its new 4th Edition format. But in all honesty, I think that I want to create something using the core assumptions of 4E and frame it in these whimsical ideals.

I want their characters to believe that they can change the world. And goddammit, they should be able to.

Acquisitions Incorporated and Old School Podcasting

2010-11-18T14:40:00.005-05:00

Whenever I've felt uninspired or unsure of the direction that my campaign ideas have been taking, I've found myself coming back more and more to the series of Acquisitions Incorporated podcasts that Wizards of the Coast produced with Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulic of Penny Arcade and Scott Kurtz of PVP and joined in later podcasts by your friend Wil Wheaton. The first podcast hit the Internet just as 4th Edition was being released and not only introduced the gaming public to the new rules set, but introduced Krahulic to tabletop roleplaying. Needless to say, it was an utterly successful conversion.

Each podcast 'series' is an actual play session involving the adventuring group Acquisitions Incorporated, chronicling their exploits in the Nentir Vale, the implied corebook setting of 4th Edition. The group dynamic between the three (or four) players is absolutely wonderful; listening to the players argue, strategize and cooperate makes for great radio and a lot of the table talk and banter reminds me of games that I've played. On top of that, it can be gutbustingly funny sometimes, especially when things go wrong. The group's reaction to a series of back to back 1s has to be heard in its entirety.

There are a couple of podcasts out there for older editions of Dungeons and Dragons but frankly, I really don't like them. The Roll For Initiative and Save Or Die podcasts are both steeped in the kinds of frustrating Dragonsfoot-style antagonism and edition warrior machismo that gets me absolutely goddamned steamed. In one of the episodes of Save or Die (the podcast focusing on Basic/Classic D&D), a discussion of campaign lethality had the three hosts tripping over each other to brag about killing stupid players, and "not letting the characters walk all over my world."

No kidding. Actual words that came out of a DM's mouth.

But the real pity of these podcasts is that they're preaching to the choir. The best thing about the Acquisitions Incorporated podcasts is that, on top of the humor and camraderie, it was teaching both the players and the listener how 4th Edition works. I learned the back and forth of the game, alongside how new mechanics like healing surges and skill challenges worked. When Roll For Initiative or Save Or Die goes through their different spotlights and segments or talking about how their old DM did things, it really feels like their audience are the folks who've been playing AD&D or Red Box for decades. As someone who just started looking into older editions of D&D, I was frankly lost.

I think that an old school actual play podcast in the vein of Acquisitions Incorporated could be a wonderful introduction into the strengths and quirks of games like Swords and Wizardry or Labyrinth Lord. I Hit It With My Axe is probably the closest thing to a flagship series out there but even that's been contentious. All I know is that I'd love to hear what James Maliszewski's Dwimmermount or JB's Baranof games are like around the table and maybe it would help new players understand what draws folks to these old editions.

Acquisitions Incorporated picture by Mike Krahulic of Penny Arcade

Further thoughts on Mutant Future

2010-11-16T00:40:00.003-05:00

So, after last week's Mutant Future post, I printed out a copy of the rules at the school's computer lab and have been checking them out when I have the chance. So far, an extended look at the rules has mostly verified my suspicions from last week: still a whole lot of Labyrinth Lord in those rules. I'm mostly afraid that in trying to run the kind of game that I want to run in Mutant Future, I would have to hack out and house rule an inordinate amount of stuff, write up my own equipment lists and probably my own monsters, mutants and robots, too. I don't want to feel like I have to rewrite the entire thing to get it to work for me.

So what would work? Frankly, the more I've been hearing about the new D&D Gamma World, the more inclined I am to pick it up. It seems to be able to do what I want it to do right out of the box, but I've been trying not to spend money on gaming stuff.

Totally awesome mutant pigs vs. PCs picture by Chance II of the Something Awful forums from his Roadhogs and Rednecks Gamma World Let's Play.