Roll Some Dice

Some quick and small but important revisions to v1.4 more or less force me to update the PDF again. I declare it to be Leftovers v1.4.1 and available for download . (A full list of what's gotten some attention is at the link.) Here's some more art! On a related note, I checked out Colin Chapman's Atomic Highway in the ol' FLCS* the other day, and man... well done. It's funny, because, as a post-apoc game, it and Leftovers tread on some common ground, but in terms of tone and content, they're pretty divergent. This is good, because I wouldn't want to be in direct conceptual competition with Atomic Highway . I was surprised to see it on the shelf. The only reason I didn't pick it up right away is that I now have a bunch of store credit elsewhere, so if I'm going to buy a game, it'll be from there. Also, we're moving in a couple weeks, and bringing more stuff into the house would not go down well, let me tell you. *They sell games , to...

Just a quick note: The current version of the Leftovers PDF available online has been updated to v1.4. You may notice that v1.3, the version I handed out at Gamex , was skipped altogether; that's because I did some more revising as a result of the playtest there before I'd ever gotten around to uploading v1.3 in the first place. Anyway, quite a bit's changed; a list of revisions is available at the link above.

(Cross-posted on Spirit of the Blank .) So! Gamex was last weekend, and I'm only just now getting around to talking about it. I've had a theoretically busy week. I'll just do this in chronological order, starting with Friday afternoon and ending with Sunday afternoon. Smallville This was only the second time I'd played Smallville , thanks to my inability to get a playtest group together since joining the beta back in February. Oh well. Anyway, it's definitely a big improvement over the Cortex I remember from Serenity , which was rather... meh. As befits the superheroic melodrama sub-genre, traditional attributes and skills have been tossed entirely in favor of motivations, relationships, and rule-bending assets. Has there ever been an RPG this mainstream that defined characters with stats like Love, Power, Glory, and Justice? Didn't think so. My only real issue with the system is surely only a product of having a table full of newcomers for players. Somet...

Just finished running Leftovers here at Gamex. That was without a doubt the weirdest, most bizarre, and definitely most disturbing game of Leftovers I've seen yet. Samuel Mitchell, you are a bad, bad man. However, it was also highly successful -- again! So that's encouraging. And here's some more art, courtesy of artist Stacey Montgomery!

Just a quick note here to let people know about Icons & Sorcery (link fixed!), my swords & sorcery hack for Adamant Entertainment's Icons Superpowered Roleplaying . It strays a bit here and there from the way Icons works, but not dramatically so. The idea was to retain the random character generation of Icons , but for a typical Howardian/Lieberesque fantasy setting -- so instead of Origins (Trained, Birthright, Artificial, etc.) there are Cultures (Great City, Decadent South, Frozen North, etc.), and since only shifty sorcerer-types actually have powers, there's a greater emphasis on Specialties, although these two rely heavily on the roll of the dice. "Equipment" in the conventional sense is practically a non-entity for the superheroes and villains in Icons , but not so in Icons & Sorcery . And so on. Incidentally, I'm running Icons this weekend at Gamex , in case I hadn't already mentioned that. Icons hits the e-market June 1st, with a prin...

Development continues apace on Leftovers . Jenny's initial layout looks great, and Tony just sent me some similarly great art. I figured I'd post it here for interested parties to peruse. Click on it to see it full-sized. From left to right, that's a Fangfist , a Gut-ripper , and a Fly-By-Night . On a related note, I'm running Leftovers at Gamex on Friday the 28th, so if you're in the area come check it out! Event pre-reg begins tomorrow. Get on it!

So in looking over [CLASSIFIED] and thinking about it in terms of this contest, I realized that it's rather... well, needlessly crunchy. There's some nostalgic crunch in there, what with the separation of stats and skills and skill categories, and the way your base rating with a skill is determined by adding two stats together, and the fact that the number of skill points you have available to spend in a given category's skills is dependent on adding another two stats together, and so on. The simplest solution is to ditch the stats altogether, and just have skill categories ( Areas of Concentration , or AoCs -- an obvious nod to Top Secret 's Areas of Knowledge) and skills ( specialties ). The AoCs are Combat , Academics , Technical , Athletics , Subterfuge , and Interaction . Your rating in an AoC is the base rating for every specialty that falls under it, so if you have a 12 in Combat, all of your Combat-related specialties are also rated at 12 by default. I was...