Roll Some Dice

Our hero. Hey, so Gateway is this weekend and I never even did a proper recap of Gamex . What can I say? I've been busy. In lieu of recapping -- and also because I'd like to recap GenCon sometime before November -- I'm just going to post some pictures of the Big Board and some props. A brief recap of the storyline, though: The Modron Hierarchy has decided that the Prime Material Plane, and specifically the plane-hopping adventurers therefrom, is a serious threat to Mechanus and the Hierarchy. They believe there's a correlation between extra-planar incursions from the Prime Material and the rising numbers of rogue modrons over the millennia. The obvious solution is to destroy the Prime Material, and thus preserve Order. But you can't just destroy a plane of existence like that, not if you're a modron. There are procedures and protocols to follow. Forms to fill out, presumably. The wheels of bureaucracy turn slowly. Plus, you have to be sure about t...

Finally got around to taking a few pictures of our Living Dungeon World Big Board o' Facts . Right now, those facts are still in sticky-note form. I'll recopy them on the board for improved legibility and post a recap of the weekend soon, but I thought I'd post some pictures just to give you an idea of what went on. (Disclaimer: They will give you no idea of what went on.) An overview of the chaos. Multiple Prime Material Planes, and my shameless AD&D cribbing. Isgoth, an owlbear the size of "OH MY GOD!" Halflings are boring homebodies who do parkour. "Boring" is a relative term here. Bards : Narcotics :: Kobolds : Hot Oil. Halflings are complicated. (Also, more S2 nonsense.) Rinaldo, daring two-eyed leader of the Modron  Rebellion! Shh! Don't tell the Protectors of Dragonmount their lives have lost all meaning.  Confused yet? That makes three of us.

Little change of plans for Living Dungeon World at Gamex . It's still on. We're just trying something new. I'd previously alluded to us doing something very much like what we did at OrcCon , but we've since decided to scale things back a bit. In part this is because two of our GMs from OrcCon won't be around for Gamex ( Hamish has returned to his ancestral homeland of New Zealand for the summer, and Andrew recently relocated to the Bay Area), and while Colin will be around he'll be running the Houses LARP on Saturday night, so he'll have his hands full with that. So with our numbers thusly reduced, it seemed, shall we say, foolhardy to try to replicate what we did last time. New plan! Jesse and I have recruited one Vernon Lingley into our ranks -- whom, if you are lucky, you already know -- and the three of us will be running a total of five  Dungeon World sessions over the course of the weekend. Yes, that's cut down from the 10 previously...

Hey! We're bringing Living Dungeon World back for Gamex , this Memorial Day Weekend. What's Living Dungeon World? Glad you asked! This is DUNGEON WORLD. It is a world of monsters and heroes, gods and demons, swords and sorcery, Good... and Evil. This is your world. And it's alive. Living Dungeon World is a weekend-long series of connected heroic-fantasy games. Play in as many or as few games as you like. Start as a lowly villager Friday afternoon and forge your legend over the course of the weekend, or drop in on one of the nine sessions just to see what this whole awesome thing's all about.  Change the world, or just visit it. It's up to you. New to Dungeon World ? No problem! Dungeon World is a simple system based on Vincent Baker's Apocalypse World , but focused on action and adventure rather than interpersonal drama. No previous experience is required, and all GMs will be happy to have first-time players at the table...

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!

(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'...

This year's Gamex is in a couple days up in LA, and I'm running a hack of a game I've never run or played in its original form: Danger Patrol . My version's all D&D'ed up, because that's what I tend to like to do with cool little indie games like that. The Styles and Roles of  Danger Patrol map so easily to D&D tropes as Cultures and Classes that it was tough to resist hacking it, despite my lack of first-hand experience with the game. So here are a few Culture/Class combinations, along with a list of the "heroic" actions normally attributed to the various Classes. Class Actions Orc/Fighter Easterner/Magic-User Halfling/Cleric If all goes well Saturday night, I'll post the whole hack online. (Personally, I think it's going to go pretty well. These things usually do.)

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!