Something very cool

So, last Friday, I attended my friend's game session, expecting to experience Savage Worlds again (as it was his week, which he alternates with the person running D&D 5). My friend did not run Savage Worlds. Instead, he ran something which he was literally coming up with off the top of his head, taking an occasional two-minute break to create a simple table.

I won't detail what it was exactly, but it was awesome, and one of the other players has tentatively enlisted me as an editor if the two of them decide to organize and possibly publish this brand-new game. All I'm going to say at this point is that it is not a medieval fantasy game, and it's similar in concept (if much cooler in execution) than a highly-anticipated video game from eight to ten years ago. If it does get into the planning stage, I might write a quick preview of it here.

Sorry if this post seems like a bait and switch. I'll be sure to write a better post later this week.

Review/shameless plug: Ternketh Keep, and the Airship of Horajefa

So, in case my one follower hasn't heard, Alexis Smolensk of The Tao of D&D has been providing some cool stuff - ranging from an adventure module to an early preview of his upcoming novel - in exchange for donations to help him out with rent and bills. For $15 CAN, the prospective donor gets a copy of the adventure he talked about at length on his blog, Ternketh Keep (a preview of which can be found here), as well as the deck plans and description of the airship that can be used to get there. I took the plunge and donated, and let me tell you, it's worth every penny.

Not only is the module itself pretty cool, and designed to be easily adaptable to any suitable fantasy RPG (although it's designed for AD&D, and Alexis includes a few notes on using it with other systems), but both it and the airship can be provided in PDF or Microsoft Publisher format, or both upon request; the descriptions are in Microsoft Word format, but considering that most people will be using Gmail (in fact, Alexis mentioned that some donors had issues with the download in other email clients), it can be easily opened and saved in a more convenient format if you don't have the newer versions of Word that use .docx files.

I highly recommend donating at least $15.00, as this module is pretty cool and the airship is very well designed - even suggesting a Spelljammer-esque means of celestial travel. Plus, the donations are going directly to help out a guy who I'd certainly like to be able to continue blogging. The page explaining the various rewards is here.

(Full disclosure: I was not asked nor paid by Alexis to do this. I bought some of what he's selling, and I enjoy it, and I feel like he deserves to be paid for this quality of work.)

Clumsy and Random

So, a little over a week ago, I was a participant in a Star Wars Roleplaying Game session (the d20 one, not the current game with the extra-weird dice). It had been forever since I played or ran a d20 System game, so it took a little while for me to get up to speed. Nonetheless, I was able to make my character, a Jedi Knight named Titus Crom, and fun was had by all.

Titus came into the story in the middle of a prison break occurring in a massive Imperial skyscraper; the details that the GM told me about this time period in the Old Republic implied that I had been arrested for being (rather obviously) a Jedi Knight. I was freed, and joined a newly-freed smuggler and another Jedi who was making his way through the complex. They stayed in touch with their allies (four other player characters working on getting into the building from the top down) via com-link, and I was brought up to speed on the Jedi's mission: Defeat the Sith Apprentice on the very top floor of the building.

We made our way through, and right before our fight with the Sith Apprentice, the GM rolled a d20 for some reason that slips my mind now. It was a natural 1. He racked his brain for a bit, and then announced to us:

"The Sith Apprentice loses his connection to the Force."

Wow. Not what we were expecting, but considering that it was now a battle between two Jedi Knights in top form, and a single crippled Sith Apprentice, we figured that this should be an easy fight.

It was not. D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder may be obsessed with balancing everything so that the players won't have too tough a time with their enemies, but SWRPG is very, very tough. For this reason, the GM had instituted a rule that, after all racial and other modifiers were applied, any 9s that were rolled for ability scores became 10s. So Titus has exactly average Strength and Dexterity - not high enough to take any of the lightsaber combat feats - with only slightly above-average Constitution and Intelligence, but a 14 Wisdom and a 17 Charisma.

Two Jedi against one disabled Sith, and I still came within one blow of dying.

Of course, once a bunch of guards showed up, I was able to effortlessly sweep them down using Force Slam, and pin a straggler to the wall and interrogate him from halfway across the room. My total bonus to Use the Force is +14, on a twenty-sided die.

I have hung out with this group once more since then, and hopefully the fruits of that more relaxed session will make good blog material. For now, I'll leave off with a few observations:

• The GM was excellent; aside from a few notes on his cell phone, he was able to give us descriptions of everything from memory and/or improvisation.
• Star Wars and the d20 System are a nearly perfect match.
• That said, I still really want to try White Star.

"You owe us money."

"You owe us money."

In many ways, it was through those four simple words that our shakedown mission got a lot more complicated...

So, as you might recall from my previous post, I was part of a Savage Worlds game a while ago. My character, a mutant with transparent skin and hair who can pull out bones to use as weapons (think Ransik from Power Rangers Time Force), is named Remini. The other party members were, as Remini came to learn, a detective/professor (the only "normal" human in the group); a bone golem armed with a cannon; a crab person; a subtly racist ghost, who repeatedly called Remini "Skinny"; and a person who was constantly uttering oaths to Thor. We were employed as low-level enforcers for a mafia family run by Top Hat Thomas, in the futuristic year of 192X.

Our first mission (which would end up being the only one we accomplished for that session) was to collect some debts from a man living in a run-down residential area. I had the highest driving skill in the party (d6, on a scale of d4 to d12... and my character was the best driver out of six people). As such, I drove them to the house, using some cream makeup and sunglasses to hide my rather frightening appearance, and tagging along in the back when the party walked up to the door. The bone golem knocked, and the door opened; just the man we were looking for.

"You owe us money," said the bone golem.

The man immediately closed the door and locked it. This made the bone golem very unhappy... to the point that he (it?) pulled out the aforementioned cannon, and blasted the door down. The cannonball tore through the house, splintering several pieces of furniture and finally embedding itself in the entryway floor. Some of the party entered the house, and found the man hurriedly loading a rifle; he attempted to shoot the golem, but didn't even cause a scratch.

While this was going on, the detective/professor was busy sneaking upstairs, checking for any sign that our debtor had some of his funds stashed in the house. She succeeded only in finding a piggy bank with about $30 in cash.

Meanwhile, the man fled through the rear door into the back yard. As he raced through his neighbor's yard, the ghost summoned a spectral steed and gave chase; I hopped on the horse's back behind him. The jockey, however, had failed to make either himself or his horse visible, so to all outside observers I looked like I was floating through the air, bow-legged. We caught up to the man, and I hit him in the back with a sword pulled from my leg; the blow would have killed him violently (at 5d6 damage, with exploding dice!) if I hadn't spent a Bennie to change it into a non-lethal blow. Our quarry was knocked out, and the ghost took the opportunity to possess him and dig through his mind.

There, he found the man's bank account information, and learned that said account contained at least twice the amount that he owed Top Hat Thomas. Unfortunately, the police were on their way, as we inferred from the distant sound of sirens. The devotee of Thor started praying, and a storm started brewing that delayed the cops; he was nowhere to be found when we were hurriedly trying to eliminate the evidence of our assault on the house. I hopped into the driver's seat of the car, and everyone except for the ghost (who was still possessing the man) piled in as we quickly drove away, narrowly avoiding the arrival of the police.

The ghost stayed behind, and repeatedly failed to convince the police that the loud gunfire was the result of an accident while cleaning his rifle. They took him away in the squad car, where the man succeeded in ejecting his ethereal guest from his body, and began freaking out when he realized that he was in the back of a police interceptor. Worried that he might talk, the ghost made a last desperate shot with a spectral pistol... and succeeded. The man's head exploded, along with the rear windshield, and the neighbors were too frightened to say anything about what they saw. (It also helped that said debtor was not well liked by his neighbors in the first place.)

Needless to say, a grand time was had by all. And all of the players and the GM involved did a great job of including me, and my first time playing in about two years went very smoothly.

(Note: I'll be going back and adding some tags to all of my past blog posts, and I'll be using them going forward.)

Level Up!

I finally got one of my AD&D 2nd Edition players to 2nd level (a rogue, unsurprisingly). This has been a longstanding goal of mine; now I just need to get the priest and the two warriors up there...

My AD&D2 campaign wiki

My self-created wiki for my AD&D 2nd Edition campaign is now up and running. Most of the class information is up (except for the priest classes and some of the specialist wizards), and I'll be updating and adding things until the wiki basically has all of the rules from the Player's Handbook. (You may notice that a lot of text is taken verbatim from the PHB, albeit altered to reflect rule changes and to be gender-neutral; obviously, I am not making any money off of this. Fair use, and all that.)

Eventually, I'll be adding some more setting information, and finishing the player characters' descriptions. I'll also be doing some updating of that nature on the Weebsite for the campaign.

Here's a brief, incomplete list of some of the changes I've made from the core rules:

• Method I (3d6 in order) is used to generate ability scores for NPCs and for deliberately "ordinary" characters. Method V (4d6 drop low, arrange as desired) is used for PCs. This means that it's difficult to qualify for classes like the paladin or bard, but not impossible.
• Gnomes are out as a core race. The only significant mechanical difference that distinguishes gnomes from dwarves and halflings is their ability to be illusionists. I simply make the Tallfellow subrace of halflings able to be illusionists (even multi-classed); no need for gnomes. The rules are still in the PHB, so if someone desperately wants to play a gnome, I won't stop them, but I won't bend over backwards to include gnome-centric character options.
• Humans cannot be mages; only elves and half-elves can, and even there it's on a case-by-case basis. The setting rationale is that humans lack the innate connection to magic that those of elven descent share; the mechanical reason is that I want magic to be slightly less commonplace, and I want to encourage people to play as specialists.
• Assassins and monks, as they are implemented in Greyhawk: The Scarlet Brotherhood, are here, but only on a case-by-case basis; assassins are all evil, while monks may not mesh well with the setting in all cases. I'm considering putting the necromancer class into this category as well.
  (Side note: I don't recommend buying the PDF in that link until they clean up the PDF a little bit; it's a pretty rough scan. Some people have also said that it's missing the maps, too.)
• Alignment is there as a guideline for character behavior, not as some kind of cosmic force.
• Weapon proficiencies and NWPs are out; weapon specialization (for fighters) and secondary skills are used.

More details are on the wiki, and more will be added as I have time.

Savage Worlds is pretty damned cool

So, this past Friday I had the chance to play in a Savage Worlds game. This was a lot of firsts for me; not only was it the first time I have gotten to play (rather than referee) in years, it was my first time playing a tabletop RPG that uses a point-buy system for character generation; my first go-round with a multi-genre system; and my first time playing in a group that was already well-established.

Fortunately, all of these went well; the point-buy system wasn't too hard to figure out with help from the GM (even if I do tend to be paralyzed by unlimited choice - and I do mean unlimited, since the GM had the superhero and Western books), the characters worked well together, and the group was fairly welcoming and willing to forgive my lack of SW experience. I played a mutant with transparent skin and hair, who has only one (extremely near-sighted) eye, and can pull out bones from the body which transform into bladed weapons.

I might write more about how this session went, in a later post, but right now I'm very excited by two other role-playing opportunities I have. The first is a possible spot as a player in an upcoming D&D 5th Edition game, which I also intend to write about if it does in fact happen. I'll leave the second for a slightly later post.