Entering Hyperspace in Star Wars D6

Not sure if I already posted about this, but I made a flowchart explaining the steps needed to calculate the difficulty number for a hyperspace jump in Star Wars D6 (1st edition). I'll upload a picture once I have access to my own computer again (and post the last part of that minis series), but for now I'll just type it out, as though this was Thy Dungeonman. Ye adventure ſtarteth below ye cutte!

Star Wars Miniatures By Species, Episode V

Follow-up to this post, and it only took me two months! Must be something I ate.

Anyway, same deal as last time, except I'll be covering the playable alien species included in The Star Wars Sourcebook. The overall list is rather similar to that in the later d20 rules, though obviously it doesn't have any species that were invented for the prequels; a few omissions are a bit strange, though. But nowhere near as strange as what the W.O.T.C. decided to do with some of their miniatures...

Quick and dirty diagram I made for one of my friends. As cool
as that Darth Talon mini is, no way am I paying $90 for it.

Star Wars Miniatures, By Species

So, a little project I've been working on today. I'm a huge, huge fan of the old WOTC Star Wars Miniatures, not only as a collector and an RPG nerd, but as someone who's grown to like the Miniatures Game with which all of these are compatible.

Everyone knows that one of the coolest things about Star Wars is the almost infinite variety of alien species. The minis do a pretty good job of this, with even a few of the old Expanded Universe types getting a figure here and there - although some of them really got the short end of the stick, as we'll see later. But finding them is not always easy when they use a character's name instead of the species name, hence my little project.

This is gonna be a list of all the WOTC minis of each species, as I'm able to find them. For now, I'll just be listing the three alien species from the core rules of the old D6 RPG: Ewoks, Mon Calamari, and Wookiees. Future posts should (should) contain more.

(shamelessly stolen from here, don't blast me Syd)

But how will I know the good side from the bad?

Over several months of contemplating Star Wars and the two older RPGs thereof (don't have anything like the money to even touch the FFG trilogy of tomes), I've continued to find my mind split right down the middle. I own the core books for both the West End Games D6 version (the original one), and the Wizards of the Coast d20 version (revised). My miniatures habit has continued to swell like Val Kilmer's ego once did, and I'll briefly put some notes in bullet points.

• The Star Wars Miniatures game based on the d20 rules is pretty good. Relatively fast to play, and the abundance of characters in the Fringe faction means that I might be able to adapt the rules for three sides instead of just two (living with two other nerds, one wants to include them when possible). The very small number of New Republic minis that aren't Luke or Han's kids is a bit disappointing, but there are still some gems out there.
• Thirdly, as much as I like the core of the d20 System for combat skirmishes, the roleplaying games based on it are just too much. Not running Star Wars d20 unless at least one of my potential players makes a massive commitment to mastering the rules - in exchange for which, I might be persuaded to make a similar effort for her Starfinder campaign. Quid Go Pro, and all that.
• Next, the D6 version has some peculiarities. Part of this is my own unfamiliarity with things that aren't D&D or D&D-based, but some of the rules are a bit confusingly worded and structured. Perhaps the 2nd edition resolves some of these issues, but I'm reluctant to drop more cash on that core book without trying this one in more detail.
• Sixth and lastly, this White Star game that everyone's been talking about (or was a few years ago, back before the Renaissance turned into the Old School Ragnarok). It's pretty cool! Rules-lite enough for me, but maybe a bit too rules-lite in places - especially where starships are concerned. Still might pick it up at some point, though.
• And in conclusion, I nabbed the Star Munchkin RPG at my game store. Might actually be persuaded to give this a shot if I find the right group - who I might have to sew together from HackMaster 4e and Halberd players.

House Rule: Asogians

(The following is a homebrew species write-up for Asogians in the D6 version of Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game. Enjoy!)

Asogians are a humanoid species who have long been a part of the Galactic Republic. They typically have hairless brown or yellow skin, with long arms, very short legs, and necks that can be extended almost half a meter. Many Asogians are adept in the ways of the Force, and the philosophy of the Jedi is largely in accord with their peaceful, botanically-oriented culture.

Home Planet: Brodo Asogi
Attribute Dice: 11D
DEXTERITY 2D/5D
KNOWLEDGE 1D/4D
MECHANICAL 1D/3D+2
PERCEPTION 2D/5D
STRENGTH 2D/4D
TECHNICAL 1D/3D+1
 
Special Abilities:

• Inner Glow: Asogians can naturally produce light within their bodies, especially within their hearts and fingertips; these tend to glow whenever they feel strong positive emotions. This light is fairly dim, approximately the brightness of a small candle.
• Telepathic Bond: Asogians have a natural affinity for telepathy, even apart from any skill they may have in the Force; when an Asogian uses Force powers that involve interacting with another person, treat all difficulty modifiers for relationship as one less. (Examples: acquaintances would have a +5 difficulty, friends would have +2, and close friends would have no added difficulty.)

Story Factors:

• Love of Life: Most Asogians have a natural respect and affinity for living things, especially plants, and have been known to nurture and heal weak and dying ones. This attitude is similar to the Ithorians, but less extreme - an Asogian has no qualms about exploring and studying an environment as long as they feel safe doing so.

Move: 8/10
Size: 0.8-1.2 meters tall

Silver Lake, Star Wars, & Where I've Been

This post will probably take a lot of time to write... My gaming this year has been fairly limited. The one consistent thing I've been doing, however, is running The Silver Lake Chronicle, a Vampire: The Masquerade campaign (running on the Introductory Kit rules) that just had its "season finale" a little over a week ago. I've been writing the session summaries and posting them on the blog whenever I have the time and energy; go ahead and take a look if you're interested.

Running this "game" (really almost entirely RP-focused, as one might find in a MUD) has been interesting in a few ways. First, every session after the second has been entirely online, using Discord's text chat and a very nice dice-rolling bot called Dice Maiden. The disadvantages to this are the greater difficulty in conveying tone, and the amount of time that is eaten up just with writing responses (even with my reasonably fast typing speed); the advantages are the greater ease of "assembling" everyone (no transportation or parking issues), and the ability to fiddle with my descriptions and dialogue until they're just right.

Since the season finale, I've been planning two separate games: an online D&D game using For Gold & Glory (the AD&D 2nd Edition retroclone), and a face-to-face Star Wars game using the original West End Games rules... along with some nice vintage Wizards of the Coast prepainted miniatures that can range to absurdly low prices here. Apologies for the low quality of my cell phone camera, but here are the minis I've gotten so far (the only one I already had was the Wookiee soldier).

So darn cute! :3

Finally, I've applied for graduate school (library science!), I'm planning to move in with my girlfriends sometime in the next year, and I've tried to become more active in spiritual and political spaces; the latter two are somewhat outside the scope of this blog, so I won't go into detail about them here. What I will mention is that I've grown increasingly uncomfortable with how much control G**gle has over my data, so don't be surprised if I make a post sometime before moving explaining my plans for future blogging and journaling. In the meantime, feel free to leave a comment if you need to get in touch with me. That's all for now!

Checking In

Just wanted to check in here to prove that I'm not dead yet. 

As of writing this, it's been almost three months since I last ran my AD&D campaign - all two sessions of it. I was glad to see a group of primarily "new school" players using the "old school" system without difficulty (or at least, with no more difficulty than the Pathfinder on which some of them cut their teeth). However, I've since realized that keeping all of that machinery in my brain was draining for me, so while I will look back at the system with fond memories, I don't see myself running it again in the near future.

In this interval, I have gotten to run a storytelling mini-session: two more Preludes for my Vampire chronicle. The actual second session has proven elusive thus far, but I'm hopeful that it will come - as are most of the players. The setting and the ultra-light rules have proved a good fit with each other.

I've also been putting plans together for a new campaign of Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game - the first edition of the D6 version, by West End Games. It's kind of at a midpoint between pure storytelling and pure role-playing, and a recent viewing of the original Star Wars film (the Despecialized Edition, of course) was met with enthusiasm among my millennial peers. Synchronously, just after I acquired The Star Wars Sourcebook and finished some more campaign notes, I spotted the 30th anniversary reprinting of both books at a big chain bookstore - and at a price that would have snagged me instantly if I didn't already own vintage copies. Maybe once I'm able to run more, I'll have more material for blogging.

Magic Items, By Way of 10Rogue

Brief bit of background beforehand: I have been playing a small, little-discussed game called 10Rogue off and on since middle school. A classmate was playing it, and I asked for the name, interested as to what such a primitive-looking game might be like; when I downloaded it and started playing, I was hooked. Even though it took the better part of 5 years to understand most of the mechanics (mainly due to the fact that Googling "10rogue" mostly brought results about MMOG players discussing how best to optimize their rogue character builds... and now those people have taken up D&D 5e), I still found it fascinating. I took it for inspiration when I tried to make a pen-and-paper version of it, until I discovered Dungeons & Dragons and learned that I had been essentially reinventing the wheel.

For those who aren't familiar with it, 10Rogue is a freeware clone of the original Rogue, the game that spawned an entire subgenre of "roguelikes". I'd be tempted to call 10Rogue a retroclone, except that it came out in 1984 - less than 5 years after the introduction of the original. It simulates a randomly-generated dungeon crawl, with the primary divergence from old-school D&D being the lack of a distinct class or race system; the player's character can use any weapon, armor, magical implement, or scroll, and can search for secret doors. The main reason that I prefer 10Rogue over the original Rogue is that the interface is very stripped down and streamlined (you can use the arrow keys or the numpad to move). The ASCII graphics are also a huge plus, as any version of Windows prior to 8 can run it in a command prompt window, although I still prefer to use DOSBox so that the save/load and scoreboard features work properly.

Here's one example of Rogue; graphically, it's almost
identical to the version that I play regularly, 10Rogue.

Getting back on topic, it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that 10Rogue cemented in my mind the way that RPGs should work. It definitely comes from the old-school way of thinking about dungeons: monsters are there to kill or be killed; the only way to learn what an item does (aside from using a scroll of identify) is to use it, with potentially deleterious effects; and if your character dies, they're dead. The only flaw with 10Rogue is that having a party of multiple characters - essential for any old-school D&D session - is impossible, which means that the odds are stacked against you from the start. But this is part of the reason I pull no punches as a DM of B/X. Your character died? Do you want to pay/go on a quest to have them raised? You can't? Oh well, better make another one.

(I also haven't pulled any punches when I've run the original West End Games Star Wars, but that's for an entirely different reason; it's damned difficult to kill characters in that system!)

The main thing that I like about 10Rogue mechanically, though, is the way magic items are handled. When you find an implement, potion, or scroll, you don't know anything about it other than what your eyes tell you. This staff is made of mahogany; this potion is blue; this scroll has the words "jujmon lij dodlom" written on it. Unless you have a scroll of identify, the only way to figure out what an item does is by using it - wave the staff or wand, quaff the potion, read the scroll aloud. After this is done - and if the effect is immediately obvious, which it isn't always - then other items of the same appearance are automatically "remembered" as being of that particular type. The appearances are consistent from item to item, within the same game - but when you start a new game, everything changes.

This process of risky discovery is what I want to capture in my B/X sessions. I personally don't like the rule that every single potion, even one with identical effects to another one, is a different color (and presumably scent, opacity, etc.), so I decided to make them uniform. This doesn't mean that a potion couldn't be deliberately adulterated to resemble a different one - indeed, poisons almost always are designed to resemble beneficial potions - but in general, two blue potions of identical size, scent, and viscosity will have the same effect. This allows the party to gradually discover more about the world by experimenting.

I didn't want to just haphazardly assign color values and materials to magic items, though, nor did I want to give too many cute clues (a red potion heals, a transparent potion confers invisibility, etc.) to the players. Since I quite enjoy the system of the eight "schools" of magic in AD&D 2e, I decided to use them as the basis for a unifying scheme of colors, metals, woods, and gems. This was partly inspired by my research into Alchemy and the Hermetic Qabala, but I was careful to not apply them too similarly out of respect for the traditions. (Not like I could, anyway; most Western esoteric systems are based on 3-, 7, and 12-part schemes, whereas magic in AD&D 2e has eight divisions.)

Yep, an eight-part color wheel. At least it allows
for opposition, unlike its seven-part counterpart.

I won't go into too much detail about the specific attributions I used, in case some of my players stumble across this post. But the advantage of using the schools of magic in this way is that it allows me to assign specific color values, as well as corresponding materials, for both main types of magical effects - thaumaturgic (arcane/wizard spells) and theurgic (divine/priest spells) - because the designers of AD&D 2e were helpful enough to include the appropriate school of magic even in the priest spell descriptions. This does mean that not every potion or implement is unique; there are obviously multiple potions in B/X whose effects fall under the school of Necromancy or Alteration, for example. But I still like this system a lot.

As for scrolls... I'll have to deal with those in a separate post. Stay tuned!