#RPGaDay 2017 Instrument of Surrender


I thought I'd be able to catch up on this year's RPGaDay upon my return from Manhattan but I've come down with a cold that I'm fairly certain is Captain Trips from The Stand. I've been alternating between sleeping and painful coughing. This has also caused me to miss out on some grad school work. Once I'm feeling a bit better that will need to be my priority. 

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 b...
Keep reading

Locating a Fictional Superhero City

Image
Gotham City. Metropolis. Central City. Star City. Coast City. Opal City. DC Comics has a number of fictional cities in the United States. As a counterpoint, Marvel Comics tends to use real cities, though it does have its share of fictional nations such as Latveria and Wakanda. As I work out a superhero setting I have to confess to preferring the DC Comics method. I'm the type of person who likes "getting things right" and setting a game in a city can put me into a research loop. To be sure, it's a mental block on my part. It's one of the things I like about setting Call of Cthulhu games in Arkham. However, creating a fictional city gives its own type of problem. A city needs to go somewhere. And good places for cities tend to be occupied by... well, cities. Being a Brooklyn originally boy my bias tends to be a city along the eastern seaboard and no further north than the mid-Atlantic. Gotham City is probably my main inspiration, with influences from S...
Keep reading

Fiction Review: "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy

Image
“She was gone and the coldness of it was her final gift.” It is possible that I've experienced a more depressing novel than The Road  but I tend to doubt it. The key word here is experienced . The Road  is not really a book you read, it is one which you experience. Just describing the setting itself is depressing. Some ten years ago something really bad happened. We don't quite know what it is. We know there was a lot of fire and a lot of heat. We know that all the power is gone. And the Earth's biosphere has pretty much failed. All the trees and grass are dead. They are still there but they're dead. Doesn't appear that any animals have survived. The beach is littered with the bones of dead fish. The book mentions some migratory birds last seen a few years ago. There seems to be an awful lot of earthquakes in the course of the book. Everything is covered by ash and dust. It's getting colder. We don't know if the initial disaster killed a lot ...
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 contr...
Keep reading

Some Thoughts on the Rules Changes of Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition

Image
I've had the opportunity to clock in a decent amount of time playing the  Call of Cthulhu  7th edition RPG since its initial release in 2014. Like the previous editions, characters from one edition are very much compatible with previous editions, though the rules themselves have undergone a lot of tweaking and fine-tuning. So what changed? Looking at the character sheet the first thing you notice is characteristic scores no longer are in the 3 to 18 range but rather in a percentile range. You generate characteristics in the same way - 3d6 or 2d6+6, depending on the stat, but you multiply by 5. This makes it perhaps a bit easier to make percentile rolls against abilities but it doesn't affect gameplay very much. Looking at the quickstart rules for Chaosium's upcoming RuneQuest revision it doesn't seem like this change will carry over there. Perhaps the biggest change is the addition of a full difficulty system. In previous versions of Call of Cthulhu , there w...
Keep reading