Rule of the Dice

To clarify, this post has nothing to do about playing a visually-impaired character, or playing a game whilst being visually-impaired yourself. In retrospect, it was probably a terrible idea for a title. Sometimes it's nice to have no idea what you're doing. On Friday I went into a game with a nearly complete blank slate. As I've said in the past, it's very unusual for me to play in a game (instead of game mastering), so when a number of my regulars couldn't make it to our Star Wars campaign , I quite happily agreed to let one of the players run a game of his own. It meant a change of pace for everyone and a bit of a break for me. The game was a homebrew D6-hack based on JS Morin's " Black Ocean " series of novel s. I didn't know the system (it was the GM's own invention and his first time running it) and I've never read the books, so I had absolutely no knowledge of the setting. I had made my own character with the scant informati...

Don't get me wrong, I quite enjoyed The Force Awakens. It was familiar and just felt like an updated version of something I loved as a kid, paying homage to it lovingly while adding enough new touches to open up a new world for future stories. But therein lies the problem, at least from a gaming perspective. A day or two after I saw the film, I sat down to stat out the characters and ships for use in a game. (Everyone does this right? You see the world around you in terms of RPG statistics? For instance, I know my boss has a really high bureaucracy skill, but a middling command/charisma. My Hyundai Elantra has a pitiful maneuverability and movement score, but it has decent cargo capacity for a vehicle its size. My kids have amazing saving throws - all kids do, otherwise they would never survive all the dumb stuff they do.) Anyway, I started statting out the material from the movie in a system I know ( Star Wars D6 ), comparing it to existing material in the system as a ba...

Excalibur. Narsil. Stormbringer. Shieldbreaker. The Vorpal Sword. Lauralee . These are mighty swords of power and legend, of myth and song, blades that shall be remembered until the end of time. The following blades, however, are probably best forgotten. Not every sword can be an artifact of immense power. Not every sword is even a boring "long sword +1." And not every sword can be cursed. Some swords, despite their enchantment and pomp and circumstance, are merely, "meh." These are those swords. Sword of Itching The grey, rough blade of this sword chips and splinters easily. A fine powder - like iron filings - flakes off it almost constantly. When it's first found in its scabbard, if it hasn't been used in awhile it's probably even covered with a layer of rust and corrosion. This irritating, flaky oxidized iron powder is transferred to anyone wounded by the blade, and will remain in the victim's body if they survive being struck by the...

Splatter Elf's back, man! Well, as a literary genre, it's never gone anywhere and is actually alive and well in the a new series of stories by Philip T.D. Overby (they're available on Amazon !). But now, for the first time in quite a while, Splatter Elf the game makes a triumphant return. The main character in Philip's stories is a half-elf mercenary obsessed with collecting swords, so I decided to stat out a few of her favourite weapons for use in Splatter Elf: The RPG . Now, these weapons are specifically designed for the SE version 0.3 rules, which have not been widely shared, but you get the idea. Also of note, these are completely unofficial versions of the weapons and how I envisioned them to be used in the game. Philip would have his own take on them, which obviously supersedes anything I say here. Hey Phil, does this mean you've now generated your first fan fiction? Lauralee "The warped, cracked blade looked like hammered shit, but i...

In the past few weeks I've written a bunch about zombie apocalypse games (I blame it on The Walking Dead ). I've also been running my regular group through bi-weekly " zombie grinder " sessions, which is basically DCC Funnel adventures but set in a modern zombie apocalypse. It's a hilarious good time  but not a basis for a long-term campaign, so I've been trying to come up with some ways to stretch it out and get some more mileage out of a pretty simple premise. I realized that zombie apocalypse scenarios , as depicted in movies, books and games, can be broken down into three distinct stages (there may be more, but three works well for my purposes). Each stage comes with its own story possibilities and game mechanics, which will hopefully revitalize the players help the game go longer. Tell me what you think: PART 1: THE FALL Civilization is crumbling. Humankind has been struck by a terrible plague that is killing people by the millions and caus...

I am somehow at a time in my life where I'm running, or playing,  all the games. So, now I get to bore everyone with all the weird ideas I have for campaigns. Here goes... Mythical/Heroic Ireland System: D&D There is a lot of fodder for a good campaign in the myth cycles of Ireland. Giants, wizards, kings with silver arms, gods from weird magic islands, who fly around in spaceships, and of course, a huge bucket full of fey folk, curses, geas, and all the other wacky Celtic shit you can think up. Renaissance Call of Cthulhu System:  Call of Cthulhu, or Harnmaster with insanity rules. Kind of a wacky Leonardo Da Vinci investigates fucked up horror stuff in the Italian city states vibe.  Most likely a bunch of  church corruption and conspiracies, secret cultists, and all the usual good ol' Cthulhu stuff, mingled with a bit of X Files monster of the week. Apocalyptic Nazi's in space System: d6, or BRP Nazi's destroyed the world and moved to sp...

As I posted about here , I had been toying with GMing a new game.  Well it has come to fruition.  My group has started a PBEM (play by e-mail) game, set in the world of Robin Hobb's Farseer books . We've only been going for about 2 weeks now, which isn't very long in PBEM time, but I'm already having doubts.  The problem is, I can't tell if my players are having any fun. The start of an adventure is always tedious.  Players aren't sure who the other PC's are, or where they are supposed to fit in.  As GM, I never know how much infomation to give.  So far my adventure is pretty open.  The King has given the party a task, but how they go about it, and what they discover along the way is up to them.  I do have a general story in mind, but if they take a left turn, I'm happy to adjust and improvise.  And as a PBEM, that's much easier for me as I have time to think about any changes. Where I think I might be going wrong is that I haven...

Can you smell Halloween on the air? Smells like non-toxic face paint and burnt pumpkins. In case you weren't aware, I've been playing around with a zombie/horror game based on the Dungeon Crawl Classics Funnel system - basically you send in a gang of 0-level schlubs, hoping that at least one survies to become a level 1 character in an on-going post-apocalyptic survival game. It uses basic d20 rules that everyone is pretty familiar with. To keep the game as chaotic as possible, in our first playthrough I just rolled the scenario out randomly as we went along - determining encounters, locales, etc purely by a toss of the dice - and I plan to continue doing the same thing. Partly this is to keep my prep work down, partly it's to keep the tension and suspense high as the party never knows what to expect. Sometimes the group meets 1d4 stray dogs, sometimes they meet 1d4+1x100 roaming zombies. I've been using the many tables in Palladium's DEAD REIGN ™®© books (a...

We tried the Walking Dead -style Funnel last Friday and I think it went really well. It was a welcome change after my recent GM-related negativity  - I personally had a ton of fun running it, and I hope the players did to. The best part of it, that I didn't even think about when I came up with the idea, is the freedom it gave the players to try weird things and to play out horror-movie style tropes to full effect. See, I had assumed that the game would just be the characters lining up to be ground into paste, played for laughs as we described the gruesome ways they were torn to pieces as their dice betrayed them. While that certainly did happen, the coolest side effect of playing 4 "disposable" characters was that players developed scenes and situations that they don't normally get into during regular games. I don't know about you, but most people I play with tend to be cautious, careful and calculating in their games. They have a strong connection ...

Most of my posts here are about board games, but in the last couple of weeks I've had two new RPG's start, one as a PBEM and one as a live on-line experience.  This has me in an RPG frame of mind, so today I'm all about that bass our last live gaming session. We played in google hangout, and the system and world are home-brew D&D knock-offs created by +John Williams .  A couple of weeks ago he sent us a slimmed down rule book, some world background info, and let us make our characters.  The rules have a lot of random generation tables, and all 3 of us PC's used those to a fairly large degree.  This, in my mind is point #1 where things started to go really right. Whenever I've made a character in the past, it has involved things like "What does the party need?" and "What's something really cool I can do?"  This isn't a terrible way to make a character, but it does lead to me often making similar characters with similar traits tha...

I've been considering running a couple of new RPG games, one as a PBEM , and one with a live group.  I've mentioned in the past that I know I'm better at running PBEM's than live games, but I'm hoping they both work well.  But that's putting the cart ahead of the horse.  What I need to do first  is find a system, a world setting, and a campaign. While I have a bunch of 2e and 3.5e adventure modules, I know I prefer unique worlds in the games I play.  My usual GM has an extensive world he has created and sets most of his games in it, which I really enjoy.  I hope to be able to give my players a similarly satisfying experience.  I know I don't want to go the extreme route of creating my own system the way C.D. has with Splatter-Elf .  However I am considering adapting one of the systems I know well to a unique world. Likely the system will be 2e or Advanced Labyrinth Lord  (hooray for free!), or with a bit more work, I can make my ide...

Why? Short answer: Because I can. Long answer: Because I'm still learning FATE and the best way to learn a new system is to tear it apart and make something new with it. Of course, the cool thing about FATE is that's the whole point - you're expected to tinker with it and make it your own. I chose Thomas specifically for a number of reasons. First, a cursory glance shows no other Thomas homebrews out there. ( This is a pretty awesome list of other FATE hacks, though ) (Fun aside - someone tried to make a Thomas video game RPG on Kickstarter a few weeks ago, which was quickly shut down for copyright reasons. +John Williams - I apologize in advance Gullane Entertainment shuts down Rule of the Dice for this) Secondly, I've been watching a lot of Thomas with my son lately so it's at the front of my mind. The trains of Sodor live in an incredibly detailed and expansive world (a world with an insane amount of railroad on an island only 60 miles across). Plus,...

Splatterday Night was an illustrious moment in the history of Splatter-Elf the RPG . For the first time ever, the Godfather of Splat himself, Philip Overby , joined us live via satellite from Yokohama, Japan to sit in on a play-test session of the game. We hoped to learn great things from the man who coined the term "Splatter-Elf" and basically invented the genre , but sadly the biggest thing we learned is that Google Hangouts hates people that live in Japan. (Your hear that, Google? I hope one of your bots scans that and you fix your stupid software.) Anyway, after an hour of fiddling with Google+... and Roll20... and Skype, we eventually got a usable work-around and we were off and running! This time around we had a dwarf Sanguine Sorcerer (note: he was a "midget" human, not a dwarf-dwarf - an important distinction that he loved to remind everyone about), a Hunter-Killer (a new build, basically a ranger/brigand) and Mr Overby played a Bloodlust Berserker wi...