Stargazer’s World

Putting out a game that tries to change, or question, how RPGs are played presents its own problems. To start with, a full 200pp+ system can make learning ‘the basics’ seem like a ‘task’ for new players and players who’ve bought into other games. Treasure’s use of novel approaches to play can also mask the simplicity of the rules or go against what players are used to.

Most tabletop RPGs get round this by following the AD&D model. New players are guided through the basics by a gaming group. Over time, some of those players go on to run games of their own and pass on the skills.

If Treasure is to make RPGs available to a wider audience it needs to offer a ‘crunch’ that doesn’t rely on weeks of tutoring or continued spending. Making the game completely customisable does help, because the rules can be shortened and adapted, easily and permanently. But that isn’t enough!

It makes sense to use text and graphics to show how to play a game that uses text and/ or graphics, so we’ve been looking at how to offer charts that help to visualise how to play Treasure. We’ve started with the Quick Order of Play Table and the Order of Play Options Table.

The first is a very simple list of steps. It shows that Treasure’s ‘crunch’/ key mechanics are no more complicated than a Fighting Fantasy book:

• Adventurer’s Slot in Each Turn
• Check On-Going Events and Actions
• Move
• Reveal
• Act
• Check and Mark Outcomes

The options for each step are now together on the single page SVG or PDF Order of Play Options Tables released with Treasure v 1.13 earlier today. This guides players through a streamlined ‘crunch’ where there’s no need for initiative rolls or several rolls of the dice. Zonal movement and combat also simplifies play, making turns come round fast. Players are free to keep track of simple alarms, bonuses and modifiers without slowing play down. They also start to talk and collaborate more, because Treasure’s ‘crunch’ moves you away from raw fire-power RPGs.

Planning, critical thinking and sharing decisions becomes more important. It’s a lot like going from draughts to ‘team chess’. There aren’t many rules to understand and it’s how they work together that counts most.

See you soon . . .

Jenny

jennyt[at]treasurerpg.com

Treasure Website

Thistle Games Blog

Thistle Games RSS Feed

If you need inspiration for your next horror RPG adventure, check out this video:

Some of you may actually have seen this already. According to this article the creature is living in the sewers under Cameron Village in Raleigh, North Carolina. Experts thinks it’s easier a colony of either tubifex worms or bryozoans. But whatever these things are, they probably would fit neatly into any Call of Cthulhu game.

This morning I noticed that the “Open Game Table” is finally available at Amazon.de and Amazon.co.uk! This is good news for us Europeans, since shipping from the US not only takes ages but also can be pretty expensive.
I’ve also posted my review I wrote for the Amazon.com product page on both sites as well. Perhaps this helps to increase the sales and we’ll see an OGT Volume 2 after all. :)

If you have no idea what the OGT actually is, check out my review.

Cloudship Atlantis is a free steampunk RPG written by fellow RPG blogger Rob Lang as his entry to the 24h RPG Contest. Considering that this game has been designed and edited in just 24h, the result is quite astonishing. You not only get an original rules system, but also a complete campaign setting and an introductory adventure called “Escape from the Boiler Room of Atlantis”.
So, what is Cloudship Atlantis about. Let’s use Rob’s own words here:
Atlantis is a Victorian city floating above a black, barren wasteland of coal dunes, geysers steam vents called Terra Firma. Afloat atop gargantuan sacks of geyser gas and powered by an unfaltering supply of steam.

Atlantean society is split in two by The Bow, a horizontal line drawn from the tip of the prow to the stern. The Gentry of Atlantis live above The Bow, a privileged life of luxury and yet grave responsibility. Below the Bow live the Humbles, they who stoke the fire, service the boilers, mine the coal and inflate the sacks.

Atlantis is a Victorian city floating above a black, barren wasteland of coal dunes, geysers steam vents called Terra Firma. Afloat atop gargantuan sacks of geyser gas and powered by an unfaltering supply of steam.

Atlantean society is split in two by The Bow, a horizontal line drawn from the tip of the prow to the stern. The Gentry of Atlantis live above The Bow, a privileged life of luxury and yet grave responsibility. Below the Bow live the Humbles, they who stoke the fire, service the boilers, mine the coal and inflate the sacks.

The first section of the book describes the world of Terra Firma in detail. Although there is not much to explain since the world is pretty much barren and humans only leave the safety of their cloudship to mine coal or get gas from geysers to keep their ship afloat. There are also skypirates who regularly attack Atlantis for food, resources and women.

The premise of the setting is that the players are Humbles (the working class) that have managed to escape the boiler room and hope for a better life. The introductory adventure is a good start if you plan to play this kind of campaign. I am also pretty sure that the creative GM may even come up with different scenarios like one where you play a band of skypirates or members of the Gentry. The possibilities are limitless. You could even come up with other Cloudcities that fly over the desolate barrens of Terra Firma.

The game uses a dice pool system using d20s. Whenever a character performs an action he may pick one die from the pool and rolls. In order to succeed the die result + the relevant skill and attribute must be equal or exceed a given target number.  The whole group has only one dice pool which contains two d20s for each player at the table. When your Attribute + Skill is high enough, you might not take a die from the pool in order to save dice for later use. When the dice pool is emptied you have to rely on Attribute + Skill alone.

Character creation is pretty simple, too. You distribute 15 points between the three attributes Alacrity, Cogitation and Fortitude. After that you change a trade (like a class or job) which grants you access to certain skills. The available trades are Stoker, Miner and Aerofabricator. There are no non-humble trades but I am pretty sure it’s easy to create trades for Gentry (like Copper, Doctor, etc.) or Skypirates pretty easy. After that you can assign the values 10, 6, 4, 2 and 1 to your skills. Then you have to chose one “humblism”, a tell tale sign that you are of Humble origin. The appendix of the game provides you with a list of Humblisms.

The included adventure gives a good introduction to the world and sounds fun to play. It’s great that Rob found the time to write this adventure since it makes “Cloudship Atlantis” a much more complete game than without it. The 19-page PDF document also includes an Appendix which features the skill list, a humblism list, a name list, a Gentry profession ladder, weapons and armor, a map of the cloudship Atlantis and a character sheet.

All in all Cloudship Atlantis is probably one of the best 24h RPGs I’ve ever seen. If you are a fan of steampunk, you should give it a try! You can preview and download the complete game at Scribd.com for free.

UPDATE: With Rob’s permission I mirror the PDF at my Stargazer’s RPG Stuff site. If you don’t want to sign up for an Scribd account, you can the PDF download there, too!

I’ve seen quite a lot of roleplaying games in my time and I’ve even encountered a few pretty strange ones. But there’s one game that strikes fear in the heart of even the hardiest roleplayer. Recently I learned about “Wraeththu – From Enchantment to Fulfillment”. I just don’t dare to go into detail here, but if you don’t mind losing your sanity, you may check out one of these reviews:

• Review of “Wraeththu – From Enchantment to Fulfillment” by Darren MacLennan at RPG.NET
• The Wraeththu Report by fellow RPG blogger Jeff Rients

I can only imagine what hardships these two proudy souls had to endure while writing their reviews…

Today Chgowiz and ChattyDM announced the winners of the “One Page Dungeon Contest”. 6 judges including the aforementioned RPG bloggers as well as Dave: the Game, Sham, Amityville Mike and Alex Schroeder had to read and judge a total of 112 entries.
I don’t want to repeat all the winners, runner-ups and honorable mentions here, so if you want to have a detailed look on what entry won what prize, check out one of the links above.

But I just have to mention that my own “The Horror of Leatherbury House” is one of the Runner-Ups and won the “Best Non-Fantasy Dungeon” category. Yay! It’s actually ironic that I didn’t want to participate in the first place. I think it was good that I could finally be convinced to give it a try.

Thanks to all the judges and congratulations to all winners, runner-ups and honorary mentions! You all did a great job! I can’t wait to have a look at all entries when they are released.

Imagine you are running a D&D campaign for your friends based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. It might look something like this:

Today, while checking the latest posts on BoingBoing I stumbled upon the mention of this hilarious webcomic. If you are a fan of D&D and/or Tolkien’s work, you really should check this out, you’ll love it.

Michael Garcia released another freebie over at Quick & Dirty Games. This time it’s a complete campaign setting called “Lost Kingdoms”. The 8-paged PDF is licensed under a Creative Commons license and was intended to be used as a campaign template for a sandbox campaign.

Once upon a time, adventurers would embark out to explore new places and make a name for themselves. But this doesn’t seem to be the case any more. It seams that recently all adventures are written the assumption that epic world changing events are required to have a good time.

This is NOT one of those settings. This is my attempt to bring back the good old days of adventuring for the sake of adventuring. No plot hooks requiring intricate weaves of politics and social economics. This is about having fun and fun shouldn’t require hours of prep

If you are looking for a setting with detailed trade routes of turnip farmers this is not for you. If you are looking for an area of recently undiscovered land and ancient dungeons that are just there, without any real explanation, then this is for you.

The Lost Kingdoms is more of a campaign template than a campaign setting. No additional world building should be required to begin quests for fortune and glory. It could be placed into any pre-established world if it becomes important for the campaign to have a sense of history. A very limited history and local civilized are will be provided and will probably be more than adequate. If geographical borders and world spanning travel are required, then you are probably not playing this how it was intended.

You can download the complete document from the Quick & Dirty Games freebies page.

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post I tried to come up with a Savage Worlds version of Agatha Heterodyne, the heroine from Kaja and Phil Foglio’s Girl Genius.

Creating this character was actually harder than I thought. For now I used the Arcane Background (Weird Science) edge for the Spark abilities, although this edge is probably not powerful enough. I also had some trouble coming up with the right powers for her. If any of my readers has some ideas how to improve the character built, I would be very interested to read what he or she came up with.

Agatha Clay (aka Agatha Heterodyne) (as at the beginning of Book 4)
Heterodyne Heir, Novice Spark

Agility d6
Smarts d10
Spirit d6
Strength d4
Vigor d4

Pace: 6, Parry: 5, Toughn.: 4, Charisma: 0

Skills:
Fighting d6
Knowledge (Science) d8
Persuasion d6
Repair d6
Shooting d6
Weird Science d10

Edges/Hindrances:
Arcane Background (Weird Science)
Mr. Fix It
Wanted (By Baron Wulfenbach)

Powers:
Smite

Agatha has built several clanks (including small, self-replicating ones) and worked on a couple of Gilgamesh Wulfenbach’s inventions while she was on the “Castle Wulfenbach” airship, but there were no fitting powers. When running a campaign inspired or based on Girl Genius, the GM definitively needs to add some more powers to emulate especially clanks and some other devices commonly created by Sparks.

Agatha is heterodyning!

This month’s blog carnival hosted by Mad Brew Labs is about Steampunk & Klokwerks. Steampunk is (as you probably know) one of my favourite genres and so it’s no surprise that I wanted to contribute the blog carnival. But for almost a whole month I couldn’t come up with something to write about. But then something finally ”sparked” in me.

When someone asks me what Steampunk is, I usually don’t give lengthy descriptions of all the aspects that make the Steampunk genre, I just show off one of my Girl Genius books. Girl Genius is the definitive steampunk comic series of our times. It has it all: Adventure, Romance, Mad Science. And it’s written and drawn by Phil and Kaja Foglio, the people responsible for my favorite cartoon back from the days, when the Dragon Magazine was still in print: “What’s New with Phil & Dixie?”.

So, what is Girl Genius about? It’s the story about Agatha Heterodyne, heir to the famous Heterodyne family and a powerful Spark. Sparks are that what you would call a “Mad Scientist”. And when she’s building some strange contraption she actually acts pretty mad, but in most cases she is pretty benevolent. Alas not all Sparks are as nice as she is and a couple of years back, an evil Spark called “The Other” has attacked and only the Heterodyne Boys (Agatha’s dad and uncle) and Baron Wulfenbach could save Europe from being conquered by the “Other”. But today, the Heterodyne Boys are missing and Baron Wullfenbach rules the land with an iron fist. But since the series has been created by the Foglios you can expect a lot of weird humor. So, Girl Genius may not be your cup of tea if you like it dead-serious.

Dingbots to the rescue!

You can actually read all the stories about Agatha for free on the web. At www.girlgeniusonline.com Kaja and Phil Foglio release a new Girl Genius episode every second day or so.

A long time ago, the Foglios and Steve Jackson Games announced a Girl Genius RPG based on the 4th Edition of the GURPS rules, but alas the book isn’t out yet and I fear it could take some more months (or even longer) until we can finally get our hands on an actual copy. But don’t despair. There’s already a very nice GURPS Steampunk book. So, if you are into GURPS, you could pick up a copy of GURPS Steampunk and probably create a homebrew Girl Genius RPG.

Another alternative is Savage Worlds. Savage Worlds is one of the few RPGs that comes with Steampunk support built-in. One of the Arcane Backgrounds is Weird Science, an edge that allows characters to come up with all kinds of nice gizmos.

The power level of a newly created Weird Scientist in Savage Worlds may not be on par with a full-blown Spark in the Girl Genius world, but it’s not something you can’t fix.

While doing some research on Girl Genius I stumbled upon a pretty extensive Girl Genius wiki which includes a lot of background information on the setting. I also found a pretty complete Savage Worlds conversion on Emiricol’s Wikispace. I am pretty convinced you could pull off a GG campaign with “vanilla” Savage Worlds alone, but if you are looking for inspiration, it doesn’t hurt to have a look at this conversion. So, that concludes my contribution to this month’s blog carnival. As always I am interested in your thought? Have you ever thought about running a GG-inspired game? Are you waiting for the GURPS version or are you running a homebrew campaign?