What are y'all up to these days?

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Was going to run Microlite74 Basic, but I have decided to convert it to a modified 3.5, retro-fitted for old-school play and only using the Player's Handbook, which is the way I did it when I first started playing D&D (and indeed, RPG's in general).
 
Was going to run Microlite74 Basic, but I have decided to convert it to a modified 3.5, retro-fitted for old-school play and only using the Player's Handbook, which is the way I did it when I first started playing D&D (and indeed, RPG's in general).
May I suggest Microlite 20? Oldschool ish goodness, lite system, and 3.5 recognizability. Personally my favorite 3.5ish game.
 
I decicded today to get the Robotech miniatures I purchased in the KS out and I have a lot. Want to play the mini game and use them in the rpg
 
I picked up Cakebread & Walton's Renaissance a couple of months ago and a supplement called Further Afield from the Beyond the Wall game. they both really impressed me, but I wasn't sure how I wanted to use them until recently. After re-reading Jack Vance's Lyonesse novels, John Bellairs Face in the Frost, and Hope Mirrlees Lud in the Mist over the summer, I think I've finally got a setting to pair with the Renaissance rules and a way to adapt some of the collaborative world building stuff in Further Afield.

I've got this weird idea about blending the settings of all three stories together (or at least elements from all three), probably using maps of the Elder Isles from the Lyonesse books and advance it all a few hundred years to the early modern era (circa 1500-1600) to play up the tension between the mythic wilderness and the dawn of the age of reason, also heavily inspired by Terry Gilliam's Brothers Grimm movie.

If my players are interested, I'd really like to play around with some of the shared world-building from Further Afield; I'm curious to see what happens if I give my players some rough guidelines and let them go wild producing setting elements from their character's perspective (obfuscated with secret rolls to determine accuracy/veracity to keep them on their toes). In addition to whatever they add to the game world, I'd probably focus on the stuff from those books that I find a lot of fun: Filling the world full of plotting witches and wizards, changelings, trolls, mountebanks, knights errant, greedy clergy, and a dozen petty kings all locked in a never-ending game of intrigue, assassination attempts, and schemes.
 
Nick J Nick J Sounds interesting. Let us know how it goes.

I don’t have Further Afield yet but I might just stretch my RPG spend this month :smile:
 
Tooling around with my 5th edition home rules and thinking about a future campaign that would lean hard on feudalism. For this purpose, I've found A Magical Medieval Society (2nd edition) really useful, and perhaps one of the best general purpose GMing books I've ever bought. It's all the stuff my younger self wished he could have efficiently researched about medieval life in one convenient place.

I could really use an interesting acid damage spell around level 4 to round out the energy damage types.
 
Nick J Nick J Sounds interesting. Let us know how it goes.

I don’t have Further Afield yet but I might just stretch my RPG spend this month :smile:
The base system of Beyond the Wall, is kind of a bog standard D20, retroclon-ish, hybrid that's only marginally interesting to me, but there are some really cool concepts with respect to integrating the player characters into the setting and tying them together in the rulebooks and its supplements. Definitely worth owning in PDF.
 
The base system of Beyond the Wall, is kind of a bog standard D20, retroclon-ish, hybrid that's only marginally interesting to me, but there are some really cool concepts with respect to integrating the player characters into the setting and tying them together in the rulebooks and its supplements. Definitely worth owning in PDF.

I have the same impression. It's a no-frills TSR D&D with a rudimentary skill system but it makes great use of lifepath character creation and there's an Apocalypse World-ish codification of adventures and collaborative setting creation that just... works for me. Greater than the sum of its parts.

Can't wait to play it.
 
I have the same impression. It's a no-frills TSR D&D with a rudimentary skill system but it makes great use of lifepath character creation and there's an Apocalypse World-ish codification of adventures and collaborative setting creation that just... works for me. Greater than the sum of its parts.

Can't wait to play it.
I know next to nothing about Apocalypse World type games, but what I like (at least on paper) about Beyond the Wall's player-made content, is that even if a player fleshes out a place/faction/whatever, they have no idea if what they've cooked up is strictly true or not, so there's still a sense of mystery. I'm anxious to try it out.
 
I know next to nothing about Apocalypse World type games, but what I like (at least on paper) about Beyond the Wall's player-made content, is that even if a player fleshes out a place/faction/whatever, they have no idea if what they've cooked up is strictly true or not, so there's still a sense of mystery. I'm anxious to try it out.

Same goes for AW. In our game I suggested a monastery of scholarly scavengers who revered the past, thinking of A Canticle For Leibowitz, and the GM made them crazy militant mutant zealots led by an perverted ogre-like brute.
 
I'm running a play-by-post game of Demon: the Fallen. It's going surprisingly well so far. Man, it's almost embarrassing to admit this, but I've missed the Old World of Darkness. Those games that you can just pick up and run are all very well, but... it just doesn't feel like roleplaying if you don't have to read half a shelf meter's worth of sourcebooks to fully understand the philosophical and psychological underpinnings of the setting. ;)
 
The base system of Beyond the Wall, is kind of a bog standard D20, retroclon-ish, hybrid that's only marginally interesting to me, but there are some really cool concepts with respect to integrating the player characters into the setting and tying them together in the rulebooks and its supplements. Definitely worth owning in PDF.
When I was fourteen, one of my biggest knocks against D&D was its boring ass combat. Having gone down deep down in the pit of complexity hell, early D&D's combat is one of my favorite things about it. It's fast, it's fairly abstract, and it ends quickly so you can get on with the game. I've come to the conclusion that a lot ways in which games try to make combat interesting ultimately end up just slowing the thing down and making it more boring.

I'm not completely against more detailed combat though. I still love Mythras. I just have an equal love for dirt simple combat as well.
 
When I was fourteen, one of my biggest knocks against D&D was its boring ass combat. Having gone down deep down in the pit of complexity hell, early D&D's combat is one of my favorite things about it. It's fast, it's fairly abstract, and it ends quickly so you can get on with the game. I've come to the conclusion that a lot ways in which games try to make combat interesting ultimately end up just slowing the thing down and making it more boring.

I'm not completely against more detailed combat though. I still love Mythras. I just have an equal love for dirt simple combat as well.

My favorite combat systems:
1. Mythras (combat styles, special effects, hit locations)
2. Palladium (yes, you read that right. Great nothing-is-assumed pacing)
3. ORE (initiative, attack, defense and damage all in one roll? Yes, please)
Runner-up: Zweihänder looks pretty cool. Now if only I can make sense of it... ;)
 
My favorite combat systems:
1. Mythras (combat styles, special effects, hit locations)
2. Palladium (yes, you read that right. Great nothing-is-assumed pacing)
3. ORE (initiative, attack, defense and damage all in one roll? Yes, please)
Runner-up: Zweihänder looks pretty cool. Now if only I can make sense of it... ;)
Man, I love ORE, but I mostly game long-distance by video chat these days, and that is a dice mechanic that shines brightest when everyone is around a table looking at each others dice sets. With a new edition of Reign on the way, ORE would be an easy pick for me in the three systems thread if I could just find a good way to make it work online.

I still need to give Zweihander a proper read. I really don't need to derail my current game though, so I am holding off.
 
The main thing I liked about Palladium was the addition of the mega-damage system. That made quite a bit of sense to me, rifle does regular damage, tank cannon does mega-damage! While I didn't like the power creep that happened with the Palladium book releases, I did like that element of the game system.
 
The main thing I liked about Palladium was the addition of the mega-damage system. That made quite a bit of sense to me, rifle does regular damage, tank cannon does mega-damage! While I didn't like the power creep that happened with the Palladium book releases, I did like that element of the game system.
I thought MDC was pretty damn cool when it showed up in Robotech. However, I could only shake my head sadly when I heard it had turned up in my beloved Palladium Fantasy.
 
I thought MDC was pretty damn cool when it showed up in Robotech. However, I could only shake my head sadly when I heard it had turned up in my beloved Palladium Fantasy.
What deals mega-damage in Palladium Fantasy? Dragon breath weapons? Or spells?
Never played it. TMNT and a copy of the Rifts core book (which I never played) was my only exposure to Palladium Games.
 
What deals mega-damage in Palladium Fantasy? Dragon breath weapons? Or spells?
Never played it. TMNT and a copy of the Rifts core book (which I never played) was my only exposure to Palladium Games.
I don't remember. It was in a revised version of the game that I never owned, so I can't get into specifics.
 
Man, I love ORE, but I mostly game long-distance by video chat these days, and that is a dice mechanic that shines brightest when everyone is around a table looking at each others dice sets. With a new edition of Reign on the way, ORE would be an easy pick for me in the three systems thread if I could just find a good way to make it work online.

I still need to give Zweihander a proper read. I really don't need to derail my current game though, so I am holding off.

Not much of an ORE player TBH but I love the elegance of the task resolution system.

I don't remember. It was in a revised version of the game that I never owned, so I can't get into specifics.

AFAIK PF2 books list MDC values for monsters and artifacts in case you want to use them in Rifts Earth, Phase World or other MDC universes. Good ol' Palladium World (they really could've put a little more thought in the name) is still SDC.
 
AFAIK PF2 books list MDC values for monsters and artifacts in case you want to use them in Rifts Earth, Phase World or other MDC universes. Good ol' Palladium World (they really could've put a little more thought in the name) is still SDC.
Well that doesn't sound as bad as I thought.
 
In case there are any Pathfinder fans out there, i've just bought Green Ronin's Advanced Bestiary for Pathfinder as it's currently priced at £12 with free delivery on Amazon. Only got a few copies left, so get in fast.
 
My Advanced Fighting Fantasy campaign gets underway later this day with character generation. (I've ended up with seven players. Which is more than I'd originally planned for. But we had an unexpected influx of newbies and all the GMs are in the same boat).
 
I've committed to running a Shroompunk game at the local gaming bar. Barbarians of Lemuria rules, same setting as the MUD. I'm filing the serial numbers off a little further than before, renaming all of the major kingdoms, renaming the Koopa to the Lovecraftian "Valusian", and using the Japanese names for the Goomba and Shy Guy. I'm in the process of populating my Worlds with different human cultures-- the civilized and decadent Myconians, the obligatory Nordic culture "sharing" the Cold Mountains with the mysterious Ice Climbers, the nomads from the Burning Desert, and so forth.
 
My Advanced Fighting Fantasy campaign gets underway later this day with character generation. (I've ended up with seven players. Which is more than I'd originally planned for. But we had an unexpected influx of newbies and all the GMs are in the same boat).
Advanced Fighting Fantasy is such a great little game, its does BasicD&D better than D&D ever did. The setting of Titan is fun as well, very Terry Pratchett/Brian Froud flavoured.
 
Advanced Fighting Fantasy is such a great little game, its does BasicD&D better than D&D ever did. The setting of Titan is fun as well, very Terry Pratchett/Brian Froud flavoured.

Titan was my first pen and paper game world and will always hold a special place in my heart. I'm especially fond of the region detailed in the four Sorcery! books.
 
Advanced Fighting Fantasy is such a great little game, its does BasicD&D better than D&D ever did. The setting of Titan is fun as well, very Terry Pratchett/Brian Froud flavoured.
It's such a great game.

I don't know what edition you're running, but Arion Games' second ed is really good - tidies up some of the rules, adds some new spellcasting traditions without adding complexity, slightly tweaks character mechanics.
 
Yes I run Arion Games version and its really great. My main houserule is I ditch the MAGIC characteristic and replace it with KNOWLEDGE instead, so it can be used by everyone for lore rolls etc as well as for Magic.

The only other rule I tend to use is that I prefer to make all modifiers +/- 2,4, or 6. Its an easy handwave and just saves time instead of hunting down the exact modifer in the book. Plus the rules encourage you to handwave, so its all good.

Its great being a GM as whenever a roll is required I just ask players to roll either SKILL or KNOWLEDGE, whichever is more relevant, and I do this for every situation. Its up to them to highlight to me if they have a Speciality or another bonus that they may apply to the situation.

Advanced Fighting Fantasy has a very simple char gen process, and you can easily point-build a character along the lines of classic fantasy archetypes, but you can also create roguish jack of all trades, much like RQ.

This was the kind of game that Basic D&D presented itself as, yet Basic D&D had some clunky rules and limits that got in the way.

I always liked the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks and had the original version of the RPG, but it really needed more meat on the bone. By the time the second edition was published (called Fighting Fantasy Dungeoneer) I had moved onto other rpgs.

Years later I stumbled across Dungeoneer and thought it had alot more potential, but it still needed some work.

So Advanced Fighting Fantasy is actually the 3rd edition of the game, and it runs really well for a simple beer n pretzels game.

Probably the closest thing to Advanced Fighting Fantasy is PbtA Dungeon World which gets rave reviews for its simplicity in running classic fantasy. I agree with its praise, however I'm not sure why Advanced Fighting Fantasy doesnt have the same rep and profile.

I also like how Arion Games kept the original setting from the books, Titan doesn't take itself seriously and its a great place to sandbox.

I really love all the artwork from the old Fighting Fantasy books from the 1980s, so its great to see most of that reappearing in the Arion Games version
 
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I'm about to wrap up my D&D 5E game, likely this week. I've been running a modified Lost Mine of Phandelver. Once that's done, someone else is running Curse of Strahd. While that's going on, I'll be planning a Fallout inspired post Apocalypse game, likely using Savage Worlds.
 
Sounds very much like 'The Day After Ragnarok' which was in a few systems, Savage Worlds included

One of my favorite settings ever and one of the best-loved campaigns I've ever run.

But Fallout is a more traditional post-WWIII nuclear winter hecatomb, isn't it? DAR is... its own thing really.
 
Yes its not exactly Fallout, but DAR came to mind I guess.

I love DAR although I really wanted to see it in more gritty mechanics like BRP rather than Savage Worlds or Fate. The same would go for Fallout, but its easy enough to convert if I ever do run it. Both are great settings
 
I haven't been running or playing anything at the moment. Which make me a sad panda. But it is hard to get the fellas together now. Kids, responsibilities, and distance all play a role in that. But I have been working on a project. A pulp, crimson skies with the serial numbers filed off rpg.
 
Yes its not exactly Fallout, but DAR came to mind I guess.

I love DAR although I really wanted to see it in more gritty mechanics like BRP rather than Savage Worlds or Fate. The same would go for Fallout, but its easy enough to convert if I ever do run it. Both are great settings

Should be an easy Mythras port, no? Gun rules in Mythras core, vehicles in Luther Arkwright. Damn, imagine statting up so many Serpent cults!
 
Yeah Mythras Day After Tomorrow would be very visceral, which matches that setting perfectly
 
Gaming is going great, but while I focus on my book, I’m taking a break from social media and forums until November 10. Take care!
 
One of my favorite settings ever and one of the best-loved campaigns I've ever run.

But Fallout is a more traditional post-WWIII nuclear winter hecatomb, isn't it? DAR is... its own thing really.

I do like DAR, but yeah I'm going for more of a traditional post-apocalyptic game, though with some of the wackiness of Fallout. I'm borrowing equal parts from Broken Earth, the Apocalypse Campaign Guide and Savage Fallout (https://savagefallout.blogspot.com/).
 
Just found this place and joined up.

I'm currently running Ashen Stars and Curse Of Nineveh (CoC 7e) and playing Blades In The Dark online.

In the works are Cthulhu Confidential at home and Yggdrasill, Esoterrorists and 13th Age for the online gang.

Gaming life is good.
 
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