Roll Some Dice

After much delay, brought on by nothing in particular, my D&D -ish hack of Danger Patrol is finally available for download . You'll need Danger Patrol to play, though; I converted everything I wanted to convert, but I didn't go through the effort of rewriting the whole thing, so the zip file doesn't have, for example, a list of Threat Moves, which is something you're going to want to have. Also, on the advice of counsel, it's now called Dangers & Dragons . Let the word go forth!

As I've enthused elsewhere on the Internet, I recently picked up the original three Traveller LBBs at my FLGS for six bucks inclusive, and it's been a real psionic blast from the past. I have a lot of nostalgia for Traveller , but in all honest I don't think I ever actually played it. I didn't have a lot of people to play with back in 1980 or whatever, and my little group in elementary school was mostly about D&D and Tunnels & Trolls , with Top Secret added sometime in junior high. By then, I think Traveller was mostly forgotten, although we did squeeze in a little Star Frontiers , so it's not like sci-fi or space opera was totally unappealing to us. (How could it be? We're the Star Wars generation, man.) At any rate, the thing I do remember doing with Traveller was rolling up characters. Like the AD&D DMG , those Traveller books weren't written for my demographic -- but unlike Gygax's work, Traveller 's text was almost as hard

(This covers the non-FATE games, which was almost all of them; for FATE coverage, see  Spirit of the Blank .) A week late -- typical! -- but here's the stink from last weekend at  Gamex . Friday Afternoon I'd been hearing a bit here and there about  Vicious Crucible , one of (apparently) a couple new games from  Josh Roby  and  Ryan Macklin , so when I saw it on the schedule I knew I'd be signing up for it. I knew nothing of the system, other than it sounded like it was intended to drive a number of specific scenarios, or at least use them as introductions to various mechanical add-ons the like. The scenario we played was The Vicious Crucible of Verdigris Valley, and essentially involved a long-simmering dust-up between European-style imperialists and native barbarian-types in a fantasy-medievalish world. (There was magic, and some monstrous things, but those things were mostly there to exacerbate the political situation.) I played a half-breed scout who'd been ostrac