Archive for the ‘other systems’ Category

crit cards and threat cards

Monday, November 14th, 2011

I dreamed I was playing a duel-flavored card game where you could play two types of cards on your opponent: “crit” and “threat”. Threat cards had point values, so as you played them, the Threat on your opponent mounted. Crit cards represented actual wounds, and each Crit card required you to discard a certain number of Threat points from your opponent.

It’s actually not a bad mechanic, I think, for a dream. As you apply more Threat to your opponent, you think: should I apply a minor Crit now? or should I wait till I can stack up more Threat and play a devastating Crit? If I wait, my opponent might find a way to lower his Threat.

I also posit that there are probably Action cards that have effects like lowering Threat and other special effects.

Here’s a sample of a dozen cards I just pretended to draw randomly from the nonexistent deck:

-Threat: Place this card next to your opponent. It represents a Threat of 5 points.
-Threat: ” 10 points.
-Threat: ” 10 points.
-Threat: ” 15 points.
-Threat: ” 20 points.
-Crit: Hampering injury. Discard Threat cards totaling at least 30 Threat to play this on your opponent. While this Crit is active, your opponent may not discard Threat cards.
-Crit: Beheaded. Discard Threat cards totaling at least 100 Threat to play this on your opponent. Your opponent is killed, and you win!
-Action: Breathing room. Discard one Threat card on your character.
-Action: Timely interruption. Discard all Threat cards on your character.
-Action: Riposte. Take one Threat card on your character and put it on your opponent.
-Action: Healing potion. Discard one Crit card on your character.
-Action: Haste potion. You may draw two extra cards.

The One Ring – A Quick and Dirty Review

Tuesday, September 27th, 2011

Featuring innovative travel mechanics!

At Gen Con, I purchased The One Ring Roleplaying Game, the newest roleplaying game set in Middle Earth. It has some pretty fun mechanics that help distinguish it from traditional fantasy roleplaying games.

Some highlights below:

  1. Travel Mechanics: Most systems don’t handle travel very well, mostly leaving it up to the GM to decide what happens when adventurers travel long distance, but this one has a fun system where you plan out your journey and then make travel rolls to see if you increase your fatigue or encounter hazards along the way. These rolls really matter since rolling poorly can leave you less prepared for battle when you arrive at your destination. It is also fun to have a mechanic for handling days or weeks of game time passing during adventures, creating a natural timeline throughout the campaign that requires more thought to replicate in D&D.
  2. A Surprisingly Fun Encumbrance System: In most systems, encumbrance is ignored or begrudgingly tracked. That’s because for the most part, it involves A LOT of micromanagement as you keep track of every piece of gear, and it just feels like you are trying to stay below a certain number. In The One Ring, you really only track your armor and weapons. Every other piece of reasonable equipment is just assumed to be part of your traveling gear, which has a total rating of 1. You add everything up to determine your fatigue score. If your endurance (the systems equivalent of hit points) ever drops below your fatigue score in combat or otherwise, you are considered to be weary, which means rolls of 1-3 on your d6s don’t count towards success. So you definitely get rewarded for traveling light, since it means you’ll be able to take more hits in combat before being weary, yet at the same time you’ll have fewer weapons to choose from in combat and you’ll be more likely to suffer wounds because of your light armor (see below).
  3. Wounds and Death: In The One Ring, whenever you or an enemy roll the equivalent of a critical hit, there is a chance of causing a wound. Your armor gives you bonus dice towards avoiding a wound and the difficulty varies depending on the weapon. Wounds don’t hurt your performance in combat, but they do make your more susceptible to dying in or falling unconscious. If you are already wounded and get wounded again, you go unconscious. If you are wounded and go to 0 endurance, you are dying. You are killed outright if you are wounded and then wounded again by the blow that knocks you to 0 endurance! Wounds also make it more difficult to heal after combat. So with this system and the encumbrance system there is a fun tension between wearing lighter armors and risking being wounded more often and wearing heavier armors and become weary earlier in combat.
  4. Corruption and Shadow: This system mirrors the insanity mechanic in Call of Cthulhu. Basically, when you are exposed to the darkness of shadow or when you do terrible things you must make corruption rolls and risk acquiring points of shadow.  If your shadow score ever goes below your hope score (a pool of points you have to gain bonuses to rolls), you risk acquiring a shadow taint that gives you a negative trait. Get enough negative traits (hopefully somewhat rare), and you go insane and lose control of your character! So this is a fun system that mirrors some of the changes we see in characters from Lord of the Rings as they are exposed to the corrupting influence of the Ring of Power.
  5. Traits: Speaking of traits, these fun things add a nice indie mechanic to things, where you can automatically succeed on rolls if you invoke the appropriate trait. So you might say that OF COURSE you gather the necessary information about rumors around town with your SMOKING trait because, seriously, who wouldn’t sit down with an old hobbit enjoying his pipe and shoot the breeze? You can also invoke a trait to roll on something the DM would normally consider part of the story. For example, if your trait is “suspicious” and the DM ruled that an NPC ran off in the night with the map to the destination you are traveling to, you might argue that your trait allows you to make a perception check to see if they steal the map because OF COURSE you’ve been sleeping with it in your breast pocket ever since they arrived.
  6. Special Dice: The dice for this game are really cool. There is a d12 with a Gandalf symbol and a Sauron’s Eye symbol in place of the 11 and 12. The Gandalf is an auto success (fun) and the eye counts as a zero (reversed for enemies!). There are also d6s, which are rolled with the d12 as skill dice. The 1, 2, and 3s have different outlines to show that they don’t count if you are weary, and the 6s have a symbol to denote great and extraordinary success if they are rolled! So there are some fun and pretty mechanics rolled up in those dice.

Middle Earth never had such pretty dice!

ancient junk in Gamma World

Wednesday, June 29th, 2011

Gamma world has exciting technological treasures (omega tech), but it also has an extensive Ancient Artifacts table that is, well, puzzling. It has a lot of the kind of items that the writers could see from their cubicles: hand lotion, mp3 players, etc. It’s a big percentile table that was included instead of the 4e rules on, say, charging, or recovering from unconsciousness.

It’s really hard to know what to do with any of this ancient garbage, but nevertheless, during character creation, you spend a lot of time determining exactly which junk you have. I actually chose to forgo a lot of my rolls on the Ancient Artifacts table. Then, during gameplay, we figured out what it could be used for. Ancient artifacts are currency.

We decided that the Dabblers (tech-loving raccoons) run stores, but they’re based on the barter system. You can get something you want (fuel for your motorcycle, ammunition) if you can get them sufficiently interested in the ancient He-Man lunchbox you dug up. We ran an entire barter-based session around acquiring cordless mice and a piece from a nonfunctional microwave from a dabbler warehouse (called “Beast Buy”: one of the players named it as a joke, and the GM went with it).

Sweet Character Portraits for My Little Pony RPG

Sunday, June 26th, 2011

The My Little Ponies RPG!

So it’s been almost 5 years since WotC released the My Little Pony RPG, and I’ve made it all the way to 17th level (my group usually only meets once a month or so).

I am not much of an artist, so I never bothered making a character portrait for my sweet bronie. Luckily, my friend Anna has stepped up to the plate, making character portraits for not only me but also the other PCs in the game! Check out the portraits in her blog for Rory (me), Scott, and Alison.

Notice her attention to detail with our cutie marks!

Printable Mazes and Monsters game board

Monday, May 23rd, 2011
This entry is part 34 of 34 in the series Mazes and Monsters

You probably remember sitting around with your friends playing Mazes and Monsters back in the 80s, but your mom threw away all your M&M stuff during the Tom Hanks Scare of ’82. And original Mazes and Monsters gamebooks are so hard to find on eBay! How are you supposed to play M&M retro clones?

Problem solved! I’ve lovingly restored the Mazes and Monsters game board onto hand-crafted free PDFs. Just print out two of each PDF and tape them together.

Mazes and Monsters board, bottom left and top right

Mazes and Monsters board, top left and bottom right


Between this and the Maze Controller’s screen, you’re just about ready to descend into a spiral of fantasy and madness. Candles not included!

Coming in a week or two: Paper-doll minis, suitable for Mazes and Monsters, or for any game system that features fighters, holy men, and frenetics.

Finally you can have your own sweet Mazes and Monsters GM screen!

Monday, May 9th, 2011
This entry is part 33 of 34 in the series Mazes and Monsters

The original Mazes and Monsters MC screen.

The original Mazes and Monsters MC screen.

Or Maze Controller’s Screen, to be more precise. Just like the one that Daniel rocked in the movie.

I’ve made a printable screen that is JUST AS COOL as the original, and it has all the Mazes and Monsters charts you need to run the game. (Edit: I’ve added a blank template as well, for use with other games: see below.) Wandering monster matrix, Maiming Subtable, it’s all here. It looks something like this:

Click for a bigger view

Click for a bigger view

Here are all four PDFs you need to construct it. They’ll be in the completed M&M PDF.
left front section
left section
right front section
right section

Or if you want blank templates so that you can play with your own rules of choice but LOOK like you’re playing Mazes and Monsters, you can use these instead of the left section and right section:
left section (blank)
right section (blank)

I’ve tried printing and cutting it out, and the completed castle looks pretty nifty. I can’t wait for my next M&M playtest.

treasure of the unicorn gold

Friday, April 29th, 2011

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Oct 1981

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Oct 1981

I lost my 1981 issue of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, so I can’t make a scan of the bizarre real mystery it contains.

Among the usual contents of the magazine (fantasy and science fiction stories, mostly) was an ad for “unicorn gold”. I don’t remember the ad very well, but I don’t think it was clear about what it was for. I think it was one of those oblique buzz-creating ads, like the spots in the old Strategic Review magazines that just said “The Dragon is coming!!”

The Unicorn Gold ad caught my eye because it had messages written in runic. Because of a childhood misspent playing the Ultima games, I can sort of read runic script. I remember translating the runes – but I’ve now forgotten what they said. I feel like the dad in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. “I wrote them down so I wouldn’t have to remember!”

After my copy of the magazine was stolen, I went online to see if I could find any information about the ad. What was it for? Did anyone else remember it? And that’s when things got weird.

It seems that it was part of a promotion for a 1980 Steve Jackson RPG called The Fantasy Trip. One of the RPG products was called “Treasure of the Unicorn Gold”. As part of the advertising campaign, the book was part of a real treasure hunt: a real golden unicorn statue was buried somewhere in the United States. The RPG book contained hidden clues to its location, most of them oblique and many of them in heiroglyphics or other ciphers.

Here’s the thing: the publisher, Metagaming, went out of business before the contest ended. The golden unicorn was never found. The people who buried it have stayed silent about its location.

Here’s a story about a guy who went on a road trip to find the unicorn, and his solution for the puzzles. He didn’t find the unicorn, but he thinks he came close.

The unicorn statue is probably long gone – or, in the midst of Metagaming’s financial troubles, they never buried it at all. That would explain their later silence on the issue. But maybe it’s still buried, and some intrepid puzzle solver will find it some day.

I keep thinking about the ad in my lost copy of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. I haven’t been able to find any scans of it online, or mentions of it in the lists of Golden Unicorn clues. What did that runic message say? Was it a clue, like the message on the back of the medallion in Raiders of the Lost Ark that tells searchers to subtract 1 kadam from the measurements given on the front?

There’s a fantasy for you. Maybe there’s a treasure still out there, buried somewhere in the United States, just waiting for someone who can find and read the map.

Synnibarr Sunday: paradrakes

Sunday, April 24th, 2011

“…a small amount of gamma radiation was released and mingled with the radiations emitted by the damaged drives and the power plant within Synnibarr. This caused the creation of the first drake-type creature, the paradrake.

This creature was discovered by an Alchemist whose name is known only to his greatest creations – Lord Midnight and the 72-headed chameleon hydra. This Alchemist created several different species of hydras and drakes, intending to build a vast and powerful army. When he finished his last two projects, he found that the family of hydras were made all too well. They had learned that he was not overwhelmingly powerful after all, that inside he was actually quite weak. In a surprise attack, they dispatched their master and stole his books of knowledge.

Using this acquired knowledge, the dominating hydras (known as the midnight sunstone hydras) granted the other hydras and drakes the gift of intelligence and established a strict social order. This order lasted for 26,000 years, before The Great Rebellion of the Drakes.”

-The World of Synnibarr, introduction (page 2)
Highlighted passages make you go YEAHH!

Mazes and Monsters: Monsters!!!

Monday, April 18th, 2011
This entry is part 32 of 34 in the series Mazes and Monsters

Here’s the M&M bestiary from levels 1 to 5, from the lowly Pixie to the mighty Mazosaurus Rex. The Mazosaurus Rex is not SPECIFICALLY attested in the movie, but I think it can be inferred from the awesomeness of Mazes and Monsters.

Download Monsters PDF

Synnibarr Sunday: Steelbreeze

Sunday, April 17th, 2011

“By the time they reached the Terra Isles, there was only 1 week left. To the humans it seemed hopeless, and indeed it might well have been if not for the courage of another Mutant named Steelbreeze. His powers were Invulnerability and Super Speed. He ran the distance between the Terra Isles and the Antarctic and found and entered The Womb. He then braved deadly radiation and fought off several mutated monsters until he reached the main control room.”

-The World of Synnibarr, introduction (page 2).
Capitalized proper nouns are in bold.