What are y'all up to these days?

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I was going to contribute, but couldn't think of anything with the forced theme.
It wasn't easy to go with a summer camp theme. A lot of them were horror/supernatural based; there's a few standout of for trying to be more different (like the Roller Derby one or the Soviet based one), but most (mine included) didn't buck what you'd expect given the theme we had to work with.
 
It wasn't easy to go with a summer camp theme. A lot of them were horror/supernatural based; there's a few standout of for trying to be more different (like the Roller Derby one or the Soviet based one), but most (mine included) didn't buck what you'd expect given the theme we had to work with.
Sometimes forced ingredients can make a good entry - I loved the Game Chef contest. But in most cases, they really stifle with the limited range.
 
Metahumans Rising Adventures: Burning The Midnight Oil, Part 1
Our team of heroes join forces to investigate a new drug on the street, Snake Oil, that's turning jocks into jerks. Can the heroes find the source before things get too out of hand?
Featuring:
Bernadette - A "thoughtless" telekinetic.
Hopcules - Animated stuffie, and guardian.
Miranda Nyoto - The fastest rabbit around.
Paragon - Bearer of the Medallion of Solomon and keeper of the Book of Sealed Rites
 
Sometimes forced ingredients can make a good entry - I loved the Game Chef contest. But in most cases, they really stifle with the limited range.
Yeah. It's my first time doing one of these, and compared to some of the jams I've seen on itch, it didn't really create a lot of original ideas.

On top of that, I felt some of the games are way overpriced for a 20 page product. Also, when you have Cubicle 7 participating, I feel it takes away from some of the smaller (especially first time) publishers from standing out. I don't regret doing it, because it helped inspire me with the two other games I'm writing using the Breathless system, so even if I don't make more than the 1 actual sale I got so far, I'm fine with that.
 
Normally, the D&D 5e game in which I play is weekly, and the Savage Worlds game which I run is fortnightly, but with it being summer and people having vacations and whatnot, both games have been meeting less frequently.

But SW is on for tomorrow (well, technically tonight, since it's past midnight here), and D&D is on for Monday. Looking forward to both!
 
Also, looks like I'll be running "D&D" @ work (public library) soon, but "D&D" is probably going to mean some super-simple OSR system.

Every version of D&D with which I'm familiar has way more rules than I'm comfortable running.
 
So I broke down and bought Other World Mapper, because Hex Kit (which is so easy to use) doesn't have a license for commercial use of their maps. I'm playing around with a small regional map using tiles I got on itch that I thought looked cool. Having some issues, as I like to learn by doing (as reading/watching tutorials just tunes me out). Of course, ORtrail ORtrail waits until I'm 3/4 of the way through the map to point out I should be using a mouse, not the touchpad on my laptop! I now have my usb mouse hooked up, so let's see if things work better
 
So I broke down and bought Other World Mapper, because Hex Kit (which is so easy to use) doesn't have a license for commercial use of their maps. I'm playing around with a small regional map using tiles I got on itch that I thought looked cool. Having some issues, as I like to learn by doing (as reading/watching tutorials just tunes me out). Of course, ORtrail ORtrail waits until I'm 3/4 of the way through the map to point out I should be using a mouse, not the touchpad on my laptop! I now have my usb mouse hooked up, so let's see if things work better
Did you try to contact him (Hex Kit developer)? He's been a nice guy in my interactions.
 
Steel Aces: Playing Jacks 2, Page 13: No Laughing Matter
The battle in the Chimera base rages on, but someone has gotten a little too overconfident.

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Last night was my face to face group’s first session of The 13th Fleet. I backed it in last year’s Zinequest, and finally getting to play it after wrapping up our Spire campaign.

It’s a kind of tongue in cheek take on Star Trek. Each player plays a captain of a starship in the 13th Fleet, which has always been the dumping ground for problematic officers. After the rest of the armada gets wiped out in the Nearly Victorious Battle, the 13th Fleet must make their way back to Imperial space through enemy occupied space. The captains have to work together, but they’re also competing for the position of High Admiral. So there’s a competitive angle as well.

It was a fun session. We made the captains, chose their ships, and created their Redshirt underlings. The book goes out of its way to point out that Redshirts are disposable… when a captain loses a Redshirt, they get a replacement after this cycle of play. They’re meant to be sacrificed for the captains’ needs.

So of course my players are all insanely attached to their Redshirts. Fucking bonkers. It made for a very fun game, though.
 
Last night was my face to face group’s first session of The 13th Fleet. I backed it in last year’s Zinequest, and finally getting to play it after wrapping up our Spire campaign.

It’s a kind of tongue in cheek take on Star Trek. Each player plays a captain of a starship in the 13th Fleet, which has always been the dumping ground for problematic officers. After the rest of the armada gets wiped out in the Nearly Victorious Battle, the 13th Fleet must make their way back to Imperial space through enemy occupied space. The captains have to work together, but they’re also competing for the position of High Admiral. So there’s a competitive angle as well.

It was a fun session. We made the captains, chose their ships, and created their Redshirt underlings. The book goes out of its way to point out that Redshirts are disposable… when a captain loses a Redshirt, they get a replacement after this cycle of play. They’re meant to be sacrificed for the captains’ needs.

So of course my players are all insanely attached to their Redshirts. Fucking bonkers. It made for a very fun game, though.
...Please tell me the PCs in this game are referred to as POs:grin:?
 
So I went back to do my map again. The free map icons I had came with some transparent ones, but had a hex outline. I edited some in paintshop pro to remove them, and combined with icons that come with Other World Mapper, I made the first of 3 eventual maps I want to make for a game I hope to write in the future:
Elf_Lands.png
I know ORtrail ORtrail is happy I finished it, given all the bitching I did about it over Discord to him:trigger:
 
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Still running Traveller (Mongoose 2e) with my family, although we're having problems finding time now that school is starting again. It's just "a bunch of Joes on a Free Trader" right now, but once they have a good handle on everything we're going to soft-reboot the campaign and segue into Pirates of Drinax.

But I've been rolling other ideas around in my head too. I have a new idea for a GURPS science fiction campaign that I might start developing, if I have time. Imagine if Dune and Star Wars had a baby...
 
Well, that isn't the part of Dune I was going to graft.

I was thinking about Star Wars, and what I like about it and what I don't like about it, especially from the perspective of using it as an RPG setting. Okay, sure, everyone wants to be a Jedi and swing a light saber around and do all that stuff. But the overall political layout is crap. It's simplistic and one-sided. The only reason it holds up in the story is because Lucas said it did. And the hero arc makes for a great story, but it doesn't pass the logical sniff test. The Emperor had thousands of ships and millions of soldiers. He didn't need Luke Skywalker to rule the galaxy.

So I started thinking, "How do you make a Star-Wars-like setting that actually makes sense? Or at least more sense." And I thought, well, what if instead of one-zillion Jedi against two Sith, it was feudal? You don't have a massive democracy trying to rule the galaxy, you instead have a bunch of feudal factions who are vying for the throne of a monarchy, something more like Medieval England or Japan. The emperor rules only because he has the support of the lords underneath him, and as soon as another lord thinks he has enough support to overthrow the emperor, there's your chaos/intrigue/RPG fodder. And the Jedi/psionic knights/whatever are the samurai of these factions. And I thought to myself, "Where have I seen this before?" DUNE! It's totally the political landscape in Dune.

And that got more wheels spinning. So, if these are feudal factions, they're probably hereditary. So what if the psionic knights were hereditary as well? Maybe that's what gives the factions/houses their power: their bloodlines are the lines that the psionic knights come from. That's what actually defines a noble house: their bloodline produces psionic knights.

It also gives the whole hero arc more meaning. If the more globally powerful psionic talents, like say prescience or teleportation, are more rare, or very powerful psis are just rare in general, then when one appears they could absolutely upset the balance of power between the houses. Lots of potential for storytelling there.

I also think it would be interesting to go a different route with the technology. Limit the superscience. Knights fighting in zero-G? Knights fighting in vacc suits? Instead of light sabers maybe they use something more like ultra-alloy katanas? Has more of an anime vibe to it. Dunno, still mulling that over.

So, yeah, another one for the "Ideas are Easy" file. Might get developed, might not.
 
Well, that isn't the part of Dune I was going to graft.

[ . . . ]

So, yeah, another one for the "Ideas are Easy" file. Might get developed, might not.

I have a question: What, exactly is the role the geopolitics are going to play in the day to day lives of the adventurers?

If you want swords-and-spaceships, you could certainly lift the shield tech from Dune. So, if you like that conceit then you can do it easily enough. Or, you could go the Ice Pirates route and not bother to explain it.

What are the noble houses to the players? Are the players going to be talking sass to a duke directly, or just working as agents, minor cogs in a vast machine. In the latter case, the politics probably don't matter a lot.

You could just build a section of space with some worlds or pocket empires, each with their own duke, and maybe some minor worlds on the frontier that the dukes are squabbling over. Again, you don't really have to do the geopolitics in a lot of detail for that. Now, you've got something you can build as a sandbox game in a few days. Roll up a couple of subsectors, frig the government and tech levels a bit to suit to setting and then scatter some polities and/or dukes. If you want a rebellion against the dukes, or a couple of renegade dukes, put them in somewhere and make up some reason they haven't been wiped out yet.

If you were doing a strategic empires game the politics would matter, but for a role playing game involving a bunch of adventurers having their mid-life crisis in space, most of that is at least a couple of degrees of separation away from stuff they will actually interact with. You probably don't have to detail the politics for a RPG, and maybe it's better not to do that, rather just making it up as you go along.
 
I have a question: What, exactly is the role the geopolitics are going to play in the day to day lives of the adventurers?

If you want swords-and-spaceships, you could certainly lift the shield tech from Dune. So, if you like that conceit then you can do it easily enough. Or, you could go the Ice Pirates route and not bother to explain it.

What are the noble houses to the players? Are the players going to be talking sass to a duke directly, or just working as agents, minor cogs in a vast machine. In the latter case, the politics probably don't matter a lot.

You could just build a section of space with some worlds or pocket empires, each with their own duke, and maybe some minor worlds on the frontier that the dukes are squabbling over. Again, you don't really have to do the geopolitics in a lot of detail for that. Now, you've got something you can build as a sandbox game in a few days. Roll up a couple of subsectors, frig the government and tech levels a bit to suit to setting and then scatter some polities and/or dukes. If you want a rebellion against the dukes, or a couple of renegade dukes, put them in somewhere and make up some reason they haven't been wiped out yet.

If you were doing a strategic empires game the politics would matter, but for a role playing game involving a bunch of adventurers having their mid-life crisis in space, most of that is at least a couple of degrees of separation away from stuff they will actually interact with. You probably don't have to detail the politics for a RPG, and maybe it's better not to do that, rather just making it up as you go along.
If you're going to go with a plain-old "bunch of Joes in a free trader" campaign, then, sure, creating all of that detail would be a waste of time. But the point of a campaign setting like that would be that the players would be members of the noble houses, they would be in a position where their decisions and actions influence the geopolitical (astropolitical?) landscape. All sorts of adventure potential there: diplomacy, espionage, court intrigue, etc. It also wouldn't be too much of a stretch to see a "bunch of Joes in a free trader" campaign that could develop into a campaign that has global implications. Luke Skywalker was just a farmboy on Tatooine when that all started...
 
I ran Mork Borg for the first time last night.

It plays fast and loose. Easy to pick up and play.

The included adventure in the core rulebook is kind of boring to me though.

The artwork is inspiring, but the actual adventure modules are surprisingly mundane in theme and encounter.

Eg: most rooms are very old school: straightforward traps, random (and weird) sources of healing, monsters to fight.

Sure there are encounter rolls to make, so not every monster will be antagonistic, but the PCs instinct is to kills stuff anyway. So to hell with those tables.

I will get crucified for saying this, but here goes: “Mork Borg really feels like style over substance”. So far, anyway.

edit: one player’s comment: “the descriptions of the world in this game seem really awesomely messed up and Death Metal”… that’s true, but that’s only because of the details that I MADE UP and wrote up just before, NOT from the official yet vaguely ominous paragraphs written by the publisher. Sigh.

edit 2: reading up some other reviews of the game (not from game journalist, but actual players and GMs) has yielding interesting results (ie, all over the place). Lots of people praising the game for it's Death/Black/Doom metal aesthetic. I SORT of agree with this; as someone who has listened to a LOT of that kind of music, I feel that Mork Borg tries very hard to at least harken to the album cover art and track names. The game is very steeped in quasi-religious symbolism (without actually including any actual symbols; nothing ACTUALLY Judeo-Christian in there unless you're familiar with art history) and gory violence (as described, not revealed). Example: you'll have a room that is loosely described as a Cannibal Corpse album cover, but you won't actually SEE that cover in here.

It's very interesting; basically the designers are "this game is METAL AS... HECK!" while showing you heavily censored Belphegor album covers (instead of naked witches and demon babes, you have heavily armored men with shark teeth). Which is a net positive to actually sell the game and not get demonized by Twitter. Logical.

edit 3: Mork Borg is what would have happened if James Raggi had shown restraint in his "EDGYNESS" and kept that to violence only. Also got some cool hip layout artists. And kept it out of the real world (ie, not Earth in the 1600s with all the baggage that entails).
 
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Don't get me wrong: Mork Borg is a very creative and pretty product. I am hoping that it will "click" for me soon. Describing how METAL the game is but without the visuals typically falls flat for me though.
 
Thanks for the analysis. I think for any game to declare itself "metal" it better have some "ours goes to 11" mechanics to back up that statement. I've avoided Mork Borg because of the reputation for it being "all hat and no cattle," but I'm curious if there are any levers and dials in the actual rules that push the game to extremes? For instance, I'd say LotFP's summon spell makes that game pretty "metal." DCC RPG's Spellburn and Mighty Deeds paired with its critical hit tables do a lot to reinforce the 70s "wizard fighting a dragon" panel-van painting, aesthetic. Where's the beef?
 
So there I was, in the emergency room, a month after surgery, being told I had some blood clots in the lungs. I wondered “will I ever play Mythras again?” and “will I get to see my kids play Mythras?” Well, it turns out I’m going to be fine. I’m home now and will be planning the next session…
 
So there I was, in the emergency room, a month after surgery, being told I had some blood clots in the lungs. I wondered “will I ever play Mythras again?” and “will I get to see my kids play Mythras?” Well, it turns out I’m going to be fine. I’m home now and will be planning the next session…
Mythras protects and saves!
 
writing writing writing. not a lot of gaming going on due to summer conflicts. thinking how hard it will be to get a solid streak of PF2e to actually remember any of the rules. am more interested in converting the whole adventure to Mythras ;)
Go ahead and convert it to Mythras Core or Mythras Classic Fantasy, you know your combat scenes will pay for themselves :thumbsup:
 
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It is too hot to think here in the UK, at the moment, let alone write things, so I have put a few things on hold.

I need to finish the layout for Holiday Dorastor: Woods of Terror, finish off Holiday Dorastor: Ragnaglar's Breath and tidy up A New Age, all for the Jonstown Compendium.
 
Go ahead and convert it to Mythras Core or Mythras Classic Fantasy, you know your combat scenes will pay for themselves :thumbsup:
:thumbsup:

I will get crucified for saying this, but here goes: “Mork Borg really feels like style over substance”. So far, anyway.
For the record, one of the main reasons why I haven't gotten Mork Borg yet is that it does feel like "style over substance" from the descriptions. And frankly, I think that's a mistaken idea even when it comes to cyberpunk:shade:.
 
Well, that isn't the part of Dune I was going to graft.

I was thinking about Star Wars, and what I like about it and what I don't like about it, especially from the perspective of using it as an RPG setting. Okay, sure, everyone wants to be a Jedi and swing a light saber around and do all that stuff. But the overall political layout is crap. It's simplistic and one-sided. The only reason it holds up in the story is because Lucas said it did. And the hero arc makes for a great story, but it doesn't pass the logical sniff test. The Emperor had thousands of ships and millions of soldiers. He didn't need Luke Skywalker to rule the galaxy.

So I started thinking, "How do you make a Star-Wars-like setting that actually makes sense? Or at least more sense." And I thought, well, what if instead of one-zillion Jedi against two Sith, it was feudal? You don't have a massive democracy trying to rule the galaxy, you instead have a bunch of feudal factions who are vying for the throne of a monarchy, something more like Medieval England or Japan. The emperor rules only because he has the support of the lords underneath him, and as soon as another lord thinks he has enough support to overthrow the emperor, there's your chaos/intrigue/RPG fodder. And the Jedi/psionic knights/whatever are the samurai of these factions. And I thought to myself, "Where have I seen this before?" DUNE! It's totally the political landscape in Dune.

And that got more wheels spinning. So, if these are feudal factions, they're probably hereditary. So what if the psionic knights were hereditary as well? Maybe that's what gives the factions/houses their power: their bloodlines are the lines that the psionic knights come from. That's what actually defines a noble house: their bloodline produces psionic knights.

It also gives the whole hero arc more meaning. If the more globally powerful psionic talents, like say prescience or teleportation, are more rare, or very powerful psis are just rare in general, then when one appears they could absolutely upset the balance of power between the houses. Lots of potential for storytelling there.

I also think it would be interesting to go a different route with the technology. Limit the superscience. Knights fighting in zero-G? Knights fighting in vacc suits? Instead of light sabers maybe they use something more like ultra-alloy katanas? Has more of an anime vibe to it. Dunno, still mulling that over.

So, yeah, another one for the "Ideas are Easy" file. Might get developed, might not.
You need a good excuse for the swordplay. Dune had shields. Star Wars has… on second thought, no you don’t.

But I like the idea of a psionic knight (you do need a catchier name for them) showing up and people shitting their vacc suits and dropping their swords and surrendering.

Speaking of vacc suits and swords I’d say the Villeneuve Dune movie has some great visuals, especially the Sardaukar.
 
Been on vacation for a week, and could use some more. Did a lot of fun things, and lost out on one (was going to hike up to a chalet but two of my family had injuries and that canned that). Lots of thinking.
 
You need a good excuse for the swordplay. Dune had shields. Star Wars has… on second thought, no you don’t.
Well, exactly. I did say it made more sense than Star Wars, not that it made complete sense.
But I like the idea of a psionic knight (you do need a catchier name for them) showing up and people shitting their vacc suits and dropping their swords and surrendering.
Actually the idea is something like Star Wars, where everyone else is using guns/lasers/blasters, but the knights are so good with their swords that they don't need them and nobody else stands a chance against them unless they have overwhelming odds. Some combination of psionic prescience and cinematic martial arts skills. They parry bullets, dodge lasers, etc. The only person who stands a chance in a fair fight against a knight is another knight.
Speaking of vacc suits and swords I’d say the Villeneuve Dune movie has some great visuals, especially the Sardaukar.
When I saw the movie I turned to my wife and said, "Villeneuve had exactly the same vision of Dune that I've had in my head since I read the book over forty years ago." It's uncanny, actually.
 
Actually the idea is something like Star Wars, where everyone else is using guns/lasers/blasters, but the knights are so good with their swords that they don't need them and nobody else stands a chance against them unless they have overwhelming odds. Some combination of psionic prescience and cinematic martial arts skills. They parry bullets, dodge lasers, etc. The only person who stands a chance in a fair fight against a knight is another knight.
Only one question:
What happens if a renegade knight* decides to develop Gun Kata:shade:?

*A PC, for example...:grin:
 
Powering Through 3: Demon Inheritance
It would seem that there are a few half demon characters out there, and we're here to talk about them. What baseline abilities might look like, transformations, and fun things to add in. Also, like our last article in the series, we talk about the powers we didn't give a full treatment.

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I commented on ENWorld, forgetting that I was not in The Pub. I won’t be making that mistake again. Some of you were in the bar, I think, but overall the clientele is …. different.
Well, it's ENWorld over there...a place that gives me TBP flashbacks each time I visit it, FWIW:shade:.


So did you get banned:grin:?
 
Well, I have started work again on Woods of Terror and have nearly finished the first pass of the Layout. All I have to do now is to fill in the gaps, do some rebalancing of pages and work out what to do with missing images and we are good to go.

The heat wasn't as bad today, so I could think.
 
Nah. “Ignorance - as a function of the system justifying tendencies it activates - may, ironically, breed more ignorance.”
What a roundabout, almost Homeric answer:tongue:!
 
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