A Role Playing Games Blog
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 definitely 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?
I stumbled upon this video today while checking one of my favorite non-RPG blogs and it’s just too cool not to share with you guys.
And damn, I need that coffee machine. 
Category : Dark Heresy, Freebies, News, Reviews & Culture, RPG
On Free RPG Day a free copy of Forsaken Bounty, the introductory adventure to the upcoming Rogue Trader RPG by Fantasy Flight Games, was available at participating game shops. Alas not everyone was able to get his hands on a copy.
But don’t despair, because FFG finally made the adventure (including game rules and a couple of pregenerated characters) available as PDF documents. There is a web version and a high-quality print version that is a whopping 78.5 MB download. So, if you want to give it a try, you can download everything at the Rogue Trader support site!
PLEASE NOTE: If you are part of my gaming group, please avoid reading the adventure, since I might want to run it sometimes in the future. You’ve been warned!
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