Gaming

Welcome back to my read-through of Dark Inheritance, a mostly forgotten child of the D20 boom! Find all the entries in the series here. The first chapter after the introduction is a big old lore dump. This matches general expectations at the time, although you know there’s gonna be more lore integrated into the mechanics, and it’s also probably smart for the modern world but occult setting. It’s only 20 pages long, which probably helps explain why it was an impulse purchase for me way back when – I skimmed this quickly in the dealer’s hall.

I don’t own a lot of remnants of the D20 boom any more, just a few select books, for the novelty and quality of the ideas rather than for anything mechanical. Tynes’s D20 Call of Cthulhu, for example. The least remembered of these is a D20 Modern setting called Dark Inheritance, which I bought at GenCon. I absolutely adored this back in the day, for its weird mix of genres and modern occult vibe, plus I always thought D20 Modern looked like an interesting system. So in my constant effort to blog a bit more, I dug around till I found my copy, pulled it out, and am spending some time reading it and blogging my thoughts. This is not a review, because I haven’t played it, although that’d be a kick – it’s just a once over. No promises on how often I write these. The original book was published in 2003; I believe there’s also a Spycraft version, published a year later. It is not available in PDF. Noble Knight has a copy of the D20 version, and it occasionally shows up on eBay. The publisher is Mythic Dreams Studios, which appears to have been mostly Chad Justice. Chad is no longer working in the industry and Mythic Dreams only had these two releases, despite plans for other books as per an advertisement in the back of this one. Still, one solid 200 page campaign book isn’t bad. The other writers are a range, career wise. Alphabetically, we have Edward Milton, Jason Olsan. Aaron Rosenberg, Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan, Jeremy Tibbs, Wil Upchurch, and Sam Witt. There’s no indication of who wrote what, but I’d bet that Ryder-Hanrahan wrote at least some of the words that sparked my imagination back then. The cover artists is a dude named Mark Sasso, who sets the tone with a painting of a shadowy figure stepping forward out of what appears to be a fire. Sasso’s gone on to what looks like a decent career in and out of the TTRPG space, with some fantasy-inflected design work for the WWE and metal bands like Dio. The interior art is B&W, mostly spot illos. The book is good 2000s TTRPG design: clear layout, in-world fiction broken out into sidebars, nothing to complain about. This is definitely the era when people expected big metaplot and lots of fiction in their game books. OK, let’s dig in.

I’ve been rereading Greg Rucka’s Atticus Kodiak books on the occasion of him republishing the first four in the series, and it’s been a pleasure. A gloomy, morose pleasure but a pleasure nonetheless. As always they seem like they ought to be quite adaptable to tabletop RPGs, so I spent a while thinking about that last night while I was falling asleep. The super-easy adaptation would use Night’s Black Agents, drop the vampires. It’s easy to dial that flavor of GUMSHOE into gritty dangerous street level action, and the bursts of competence that result from the Military Occupational Specialty rule – automatic successes once per session on your chosen MOS skill – would also fit perfectly. Atticus and his friends spend a lot of time being able to push themselves to unreasonable levels of competence when the situation really calls for it. ...

I wanted to build something completely weird and gonzo and that’s Heart in a nutshell. It’s a weird dungeon delving game into a dungeon that wants to give you your heart’s desire but isn’t very good at it. The world is just deeply weird. Let’s mess around in it.

It turns out that business trips are poor places to work on posting challenges, especially if you’re horribly jet lagged and you have a lot of evening meetings. I’m gonna try and hit 31 of these anyhow, just not before the end of January. I found myself thinking about action a lot, so now that I’m back in the US I’m gonna do a quick Outgunned character. Outgunned is designed as a modern action RPG, very much in the spirit of John Wick. Since it’s been pretty successful as measured by Kickstarter success, the designers (Two Little Mice) have added a couple of genre books packed full of potential settings – Wild West, space opera, etc. – and a second corebook aimed at 30s pulp action. This time out I’m doing the “A Kind of Magic” mini-expansion, or Action Flick. I’m going to frame this as modern espionage with magic, which seems like a fun game idea.

Man, there were no dice last time. Also I’m just off a transatlantic flight and I’m tired. Thus, I’m going to let the dice do the thinking for me and go for something highly randomized: the Troika supplement Academies of the Arcane. It was a really fun read; I wound up wanting to run a mini-campaign in it. We start with stats: Skill: 6 (nice, that’s max) Stamina: 18 Luck: 9 ...

That’s a lot of OSR to start the challenge, so I figured I’d do something less trad for day three. If I’d been thinking ahead, which I may do later in the month, I’d have thrown the playbook history section open to my pals on social media to crowdsource answers, but in the interests of efficiency I just made up my own this time around. I decided I wanted to play a character who’s a little bit out of sync with the modern world but still effective. Playbook: the Initiate, who belongs to some kind of secret sect that thinks it’s the bulwark against evil. I’m going to call her Jeanne, as a reference to Joan of Arc. ...

Mothership gets to be my second character because a pal of mine wants to playtest a scenario sometime this year. I won’t use this character for the purpose – at the table, I’d rather make PCs with everyone else around – but it’ll familiarize me with the rules a bit. Stats come first. This is another one where you roll stats in order, using 6d10 this time. I get: Strength: 21 Speed: 32 Intellect: 41 (31 + 10 from my class) Combat: 30 ...

Day one is Tunnels & Trolls, in honor of my very first RPG. I’m using the Deluxe rules, no complications. Stats are 3d6 in order and all that jazz. So what do we get? Strength 12 Constitution 5 Dexterity 8 Speed 11 Luck 11 Intelligence 9 Wizardry 8 Charisma 18+10 = 28 Phew, that’s poor. Except Charisma, which is ridiculous. This particular version of the rules allows you to roll and add when you get triples, so when I rolled an 18 on Charisma, I rolled again and added. If I’d gotten triples on the second roll I would have kept on rolling and adding. It’s ludicrous and it means my yet unnamed character starts at level 2, since level is determined by the highest first digit of any stat. ...

I got a wild hair this year, plus I need something to keep me busy in the evenings while I’m traveling, so I’m going to take a shot at the 2025 Character Creation Challenge. Basically: one TTRPG character per day. Details here. Then I missed the first day because I got very distracted by Trenque Lauquen. No regrets. That’s okay, I can play a bit of catchup! Completed entries are tagged as character-creation-2025. ...