Some Kickstarter Loot - Tunnels & Trolls and The Dracula Dossier

Hey look more stuff to distract me! I came home today  to a pair of packages, one with the new Tunnels & Trolls Deluxe Edition and one with The Dracula Dossier, a campaign for Night's Black Agents.

My experience with Tunnels & Trolls is fairly limited - I've played a few one-off games way back in middle and high school. It's a game that looks a lot like D&D, with a series of stats that are generated by 3d6. It has a small number of classes - warriors, wizards, and rogues are the big three. Warriors and wizards are pretty self-explanatory. Rogues are anyone else - they can learn to use magic, they can fight decently well. There's also the warrior-wizard, a class really difficult to qualify for (but one I saw a lot of now that I think of it...). The Deluxe Edition is expanded from this baseline with more difficult-to-qualify for classes. Unlike classic D&D stats go up over time - they go up a lot. Since wizards used to expend strength to cast spells, you might find a high-level wizard with a strength of 50. This is something that always bugged me a bit about the game - and later versions of the game including the Deluxe Edition added a wizardry stat. Combat is a bit different from most games - you roll a ton of d6 based on all of the characters on a side and divide damage to the other side.

The book is a thick hardcover (there is also a softcover version). It is mainly black and white with some color sections. I would stop short of calling it a beautiful book but it is absolutely a nicely done professional book. I'm not certain what Tunnels & Trolls fans think of the book. I've heard some displeasure on how experience is handled in the game -- in this version characters bump up their stats and their highest stat counts as experience, such that a stat of 20 or higher makes you second level. There's also a bunch of additional classes and an optional skill system.


The Dracula Dossier is a supplement that there's a decent chance I'll try out at some time. Me being a part-time grad student for the next three years or so a well developed campaign all set for me using a light rules system has a lot of appeal. Plus I love the espionage genre detailed in Night's Black Agents, especially the "stale beer" subgenre as seen in works like The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. Add to it being based on one of my favorite novels, Dracula, and this is really calling to me.

I've not devoured the PDFs I've received for The Dracula Dossier yet so my familiarity with it is pretty basic at this point. The idea is that Dracula is actually a redacted after-action report. The book Dracula Unredacted is a modified version of the novel Dracula with annotations throughout it, new and changed core text etc. Flipping through it I can see how it could be used as an inspiration for a number of games.


Another game I'm looking forward to is Pelgrane Press' Timewatch. Like Night's Black Agents, Timewatch uses the Gumshoe engine. This time the characters are time travelers and assumed to be part of the Timewatch, dedicated to protecting the timeline from threats like intelligent time-traveling dinosaurs. It also has campaign frames to modify the game, making it pulpier, making it more like Doctor Who, focus more on alternate Earths, etc. The newest version of the book has recently been distributed to backers, so while pretty badly delayed it is moving along.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Jules Verne Translations That Don't Stink

Image
Shortly after I graduated from college R. Talsorian published their fantasy steampunk RPG,  Castle Falkenstein. Having missed out on Space: 1889  when it first came out this was my first steampunk RPG, though I had been exposed to the genre by Gibson and Sterling's novel The Difference Engine (a novel which, though I though I found the setting compelling, I did not particularly care for - must reread some day). Jules Verne was one of the authors in the inspirational reading section of Castle Falkenstein.  Heck, the game also made him into France's scientific advisor, having him responsible for their massive Verne Cannons  which formed a sort of nuclear deterrent.  With that in mind, one Sunday afternoon I was at a Barnes & Noble bookstore my new girlfriend (now my wife of nearly 16 years!).  On a whim I decided to pick up a Jules Verne novel. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea . That night I started reading it, never having read any of his works before but having vagu
Keep reading

Stepping Away and a New Beginning

Image
After maintaining this blog for nearly seven years (an eternity in internet time), I've decided to step away from it. When I first began I wasn't 100% certain what it would be about. For a while I thought it would be a blog related to OSR type RPGs but I found my own tastes not firmly rooted there. Looking at the history of the blog, I see a lot of Call of Cthulhu which is hardly surprising. However, some lack of consistency definitely made it tough for me find a defined niche and over the past few months I've been giving some thought to starting a new, more narrowly focused blog. The imminent end of Google+ played a part in these thoughts, with much of my traffic coming from that site. I write because I enjoy writing, but I do enjoy growing an audience. My plan to start a narrowly-focused blog took a turn when I had the opportunity to join the  Rolling Boxcars  blog. Talking with the contributors (one of whom I game with on Discord already) and going through thei
Keep reading

Developing Boston for 1920s Call of Cthulhu

Image
While Chaosium has produced sourcebooks for many locations in Lovecraft Country (Kingsport, Arkham, and Innsmouth) as well as non-fictional cities of the 1920s (such as New York City and New Orleans), the nearby city of Boston, while being featured in many adventures, has never received its own full sourcebook. The most common era for my Call of Cthulhu  games has been in the 1920s - some campaigns have been in New York City while others have been in Lovecraft country. For those in Lovecraft Country, many adventures have been in nearby Boston. Over the years I've slowly been building up some expertise in the area and I thought it might be of interest to others gaming in the same setting - whether with Mythos horrors or a purely mundane game. First, let us investigate those official sources. While Boston has found its way into many adventures, I can think of two sources where it has been given a fair amount of detail. First, The Unspeakable Oath  double issue 16/17 has a ref
Keep reading

Using the Force in D6 Star Wars

Image
Defending yourself with just 1D in Sense is not easy, as Luke discovers when training with a remote. My previous post discussed the proto-D6 System as found in the Ghostbusters RPG. For those unfamiliar with the D6 System and the way it does the Force (or for a brief review) the essentials are: You roll a bunch of six sided dice against a target number, typically ranging from 5-ish (easy) to 20 or even higher. Your rating is listed as something like 2D+2 which means roll 2d6+2. By default, most normal/non-heroic people have 2D in most stats.  Starting heroes will might have their best skill be at 5D or a touch higher. You can take as many actions as you want in a round. However, taking two actions in a round reduces all dice codes by 1D, taking three reduces all by 2D, etc. Starting with Force skills will lower a characters starting attributes. Unlike most skills they start off at 1D. There are three Force skills - control, sense, and alter. Control lets you control t
Keep reading

Balancing Classes in Swords and Wizardry

Image
DM: "The box is the size of a small trunk; it is latched but not locked."  Dougal: "I'm looking for traps on the box."  DM (rolling for Dougal's "find traps" ability. The roll indicates that Dougal has failed to find the poisoned needle in the latch.) "You don't find a trap."  Morgan (the group's leader): "Black Dougal will open the box."  DM: "Black Dougal, you find out that you missed a tiny discolored needle in the latch. Roll a saving throw vs. Poison, please!"  Dougal (rolling): "Missed it!"  DM: "Black Dougal gasps 'Poison!' and falls to the floor. He looks dead."  Fredrik: "I'm grabbing his pack to carry treasure in." Game balance. It's a tricky concept in RPGs. D&D 3rd and 4th editions made a very strong effort to balance the character classes with one another as well as to balance encounters. For my purposes, they went too far. A
Keep reading