Test tubes

Categories: Gaming

Spirit of the Century (which is cool, buy it if you like pulp gaming) has an interesting character generation system that reminds me a tad of Lexicon. Hm, Wikipedia has failed yet again; there’s no page for Lexicon. That one, I might actually fix. Anyway. Spirit’s character generation is a group activity that ensures pre-play connections between characters. I think it can be played out in blog entries. Let’s try it. ...

September 23, 2006 · 2 min · Bryant

File under myths

Categories: Gaming

Opinions: do vampires (specifically, Vampire: the Requiem vampires) leave fingerprints? Also, what are the odds of rolling 25 ten-sided dice and not getting anything above a 7?

September 5, 2006 · 1 min · Bryant

Talk talk talk about it

Categories: Gaming

Sorkin D20. Classes: Leader, Advisor, Star, Writer, and Technician. Toby Ziegler is a dual class Advisor/Writer. Sam Seaborn was a Writer, but in season 4 he decided to multi-class to Leader. The control room guys in Sports Night and Studio 60 are Technicians. Nancy McNally (the National Security Advisor) is dual class Technician/Advisor. Danny Tripp is a director, which I think means he’s a dual class Advisor/Writer, emphasis on the Advisor. Hard to say, though.

August 31, 2006 · 1 min · Bryant

I wrote that

Categories: Gaming

The Trinity Players Guide is available for free (original) over at DriveThruRPG. It’ll only be free till April 20th, so pick it up now. Cause I wrote the section on the Orders, and it’s pretty decent.

April 11, 2006 · 1 min · Bryant

GILTed age

Categories: Gaming

Oh, OK, Rob. Our Canadian overlord talks, and we listen. Unplumbed Ephemeral Circus genre time. The Empire is decaying. It has always been decaying; it will be decaying for millenial. Nobody remembers the time when it was not, except perhaps the positronic computators that remain. They grind equations into dust for purposes that were set back when the Empire was bright. It is rumored that a man knows how to change those purposes; that legacy was passed down in his clan from mother to son, from uncle to niece, and cannot be used until the time is right. ...

March 16, 2006 · 2 min · Bryant

Origin of awards

Categories: Gaming

I’m running out of elliptical titles for posts about awards. Ah well. Um, yeah, the Origins Awards (original). I didn’t game much this last year. That won’t stop me from commenting, though! I see, among the Best RPG nominees: five licensed games. Well, four; I don’t think it counts as a license when the same person is writing both the original text (Artesia) and the RPG. Four out of the five use existing systems, with varying degrees of adaptation to the world. ...

March 14, 2006 · 1 min · Bryant

Top ten

Categories: Gaming

“He was known throughout the world for his engineering accomplishments, also.” “He was probably one of the greatest living experts on geology and archaeology.” “He was a wizard with electricity.” “Ham looked what he was - a quick thinker and possibly the most astute lawyer Harvard ever turned out.” Excellence is a core aspect of any good pulp game. In order to establish this for Huey Long’s Men of Action, I’m going to steal a trick from San Angelo: City of Heroes and write down some top ten lists. Top ten doctors, top ten boxers, top ten research scientists, top ten aviators, top ten criminal masterminds, top ten archeologists, top ten diplomats… what else? Suggestions for more lists are welcome. ...

March 6, 2006 · 1 min · Bryant

Grim Satanic

Categories: Gaming

So, steampunk. It’s a loose, poorly fitting excuse for a genre. The Wikipedia entry reveals that pretty definitely. You got your computer parables, you got your obsession with steam, you got your fantasy tropes. You do not got decades of cheap adventure novels defining the genre. We make do with what we have, thusly. Let us assume that the class warfare aspect of steampunk does not appeal to our prospective player as a primary focus of the campaign. I’m keeping the steam-powered automata-driven London, cause come on, how cool is that? The task at hand becomes finding a premise that makes good use of the setting. Doing Scotland Yard operatives is easy but then the setting is just background, rather than integral. ...

February 6, 2006 · 2 min · Bryant

Charting directions

Categories: Gaming

IFMapper (original) is pretty sweet, if you’re wanting to map interactive fiction. I’ve tried a few mappers over the years, and none of them had a sufficiently low degree of friction for me to keep using ‘em. IFMapper is nicely painless.

December 17, 2005 · 1 min · Bryant

Tell me these things

Categories: Gaming

The character questionnaire for “Whitey’s Boyos” (name still tentative, suggestions welcome) follows. The context: Whitey’s squad of demon-killing hard-nosed bruisers has around for nine months or so now. A couple of the original members have died; there have been a couple of new recruits. The player characters are the entire squad. They are not expected to have jobs outside the life — Whitey pays a generous stipend to people willing to risk their lives fighting demons. ...

November 16, 2005 · 2 min · Bryant