April 12

Kickstarter – Fantasy RPG Bookmarks for Players & Game Masters

Finally a series of bookmarks that are both beautiful and functional to enhance your tabletop gaming experience!

I’ve mentioned about using bookmarked pdfs before but never talked about a proper physical bookmark that you can stick inside your gaming books.  This Kickstarter does just that, a collection of bookmarks that you can use in your gaming books.

I like the look of them and the art is pretty good, I’m undecided whether or not to back the project since they only appear to be printed one side; I suspect it would be too much of a headache to print bookmarks containing basic class information for all the OGL games on the reverse.

 

Category: fantasy, RPG | LEAVE A COMMENT
April 9

Pathfinder – Changing horses midstream

I apologise for those people who may be confused with the title of this post and came looking for rules on changing horses midstream.

What I really want to discuss is the possibility of changing my current campaign from an adventure path style game to a sandbox style campaign.

My players have mentioned to me about the Elder Scrolls style games they have played and I thought it would be interesting to see what happens if I give them an open ended environment in which to play. Luckily I have plenty of resources to draw upon and can use them to populate the region they will be exploring.

I should be able to generate quests for them to undertake and slowly tie the events together into a seamless puzzle for then to solve.

The last time I gave them something like this to play with was the Legend of the Five Rings supplement Mimura; I recognise where I went wrong there was bombarding the players with too much information in one go.

If I slowly add information to the campaign Wiki  I should be able to refer them there and allow them to refresh their memories of past events.

Fingers crossed that I may have found a potentially winning game idea.

Posted from WordPress for Android

Category: fantasy, RPG | LEAVE A COMMENT
April 6

Shackled City Adventure Path #3

I was planning on writing a different post to this one but after reading the bits of the adventure I have been researching I gave up.

I was wondering why the town watch hasn’t been investigating the missing people in the first chapter and I poured over the books looking for how many guards the town should have; the answer I found was 45. Later on in the book I discovered that rather there are 750 town watch, which is rather different from the 1% suggested.

At this point I realised that the adventure was flawed and with my upcoming holiday I would have no way of fixing it before the next session.

We decided in the end to drop this adventure and try something else instead.

Posted from WordPress for Android

Category: fantasy, RPG | LEAVE A COMMENT
March 30

Shackled City Adventure Path #2

So another session is wrapped up and the players have been meeting some of the other residents of Cauldon while disposing of the loot they have collected.

They’ve also managed to have one of the npcs arrested for being an accomplice to a crime.

Trouble is now they have done this they are questioning their motivation for continuing their exploration below the city.

I have a week to try and get them back on track with the campaign and I think I may just have the way to do it.

Posted from WordPress for Android

Category: fantasy, RPG | LEAVE A COMMENT
March 28

Shackled City Adventure Path

After a brief hiatus I’m once more back in the saddle as gm and starting to run the Shackled City Adventure Path for my group.

I’ve debated with other gms the pros and cons of such large scale adventures before and this is going to be my first real attempt at a long term D&D campaign.

It’s also the first time I’ve had the players control multiple characters, two each just do we have the required four player party basis which became the norm for D&D 3.

I’m cheating slightly and I’m using Pathfinder as my core rules and the players seem to be happy with the rules set.

We’re only a couple of sessions in and things are going OK but there are still areas that need to be addressed; like the combat manoeuvres. Despite the design team trying to simplify them there are still questions over whether or not you would actually use grapple or disarm unless you really had to.

Before embarking on running this mighty adventure I did search the web to see if any conversion notes had been published and I didn’t find many at all; those that I did find were incomplete although there was an amazing one which I bookmarked but apart from that I’m having to convert on the fly.

While I’d love to post details of how they’re progressing I have a feeling that my players may decide to read this blog and see if I accidentally leak a spoiler or two from each session.

Posted from WordPress for Android

Category: fantasy, RPG | LEAVE A COMMENT
March 23

One year on

So it’s been a year since I started this blog and I’m pleased with how it’s turned out so far.

Once I started I realised how much I missed writing for pleasure; most of my penmanship has been dull technical stuff that while serviceable isn’t something that I can point to and say “I did this”.  Which is  very unlike this blog my main outlet for my creative urges although  my muse seems to be driven by my sickness, something that I find very amusing.

I thought it was also time to expand upon my origin story that I first mentioned here, while searching through a box of books it turns out that I had accidentally deceived you all and my first purchased RPG turns out to be the basic edition Marvel Superheroes RPG.  I purchased in 1986 while on holiday after being driven to find it by the amazing adverts in the back of the Marvel comics I was reading.

I think I forgot about buying it as I never seemed to know what to do with it or how to get other people interested.  Bear in mind this was before the days of the internet and gaming magazines in the UK were had to get hold of from the local newsagent.

What really grabbed my interest in gaming was a programme I saw on LWT back in the early 80s called “South of Watford” and presented by Ben Elton.  I remember watching him go to the Games Workshop store in Hammersmith and talk to the store manager before later on playing some D&D.  Five years later I would be in that very store and buying my first games.

Games Workshop then was a different store, one that sold other peoples material and long before the advent of the Games Workshop hobby which is what they’re best known for these days.  In those days you could pick up a licensed copy of Runequest, Traveller or even Call of Cthulhu.

Moving behind the screen.

After being a player for a short period of time I decided to try being a gamesmaster and looking back on those days I think it was my sheer enthusiasm that kept me going.  I was at one point gaming five nights a week running a different game each night with a different system.  It was during this time that I started to understand what I liked to run; science fiction piqued my interest more than fantasy did and I loved the four colour superhero genre.  Much Traveller and Marvel Superheroes was played along with a side dish of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

The Critical Miss years.

It all started simply enough with an open call for players at a local comic shop; the owner knew me and the people organising the event and  I decided to turn up and try to play with a different group of people.  Let me tell you those first few weeks were a great time, we all brought games down to play and since we never really that organised you could never count on the same group of players for each game.  I took my chances and dusted out Paranoia second edition and over the course of several weeks I ran through the published adventures I had bought.  The players had fun trying to kill each other and deal with the game forms a friend had photocopied.

Slowly the group started to crystallise from the raw elements we threw at it, after a few months we lost a player and the venue; we found a new home in a building owned by the father of another player and we played in that cold cramped warehouse amongst the boxes of paper.  Summer came around and then we started to lose players until by the following October we were d0wn to a handful and we moved once again to my place.

I found myself running more games and with a stable group we could try to play campaigns together.  I was now playing twice a week with two different groups and this became once a week when the two groups melded together.   We lost more players as well; one went off to university, one moved away and one left for personal reasons I won’t go into here.

It was during this period I broke out Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and embarked upon the Enemy Within Campaign.

The present.

I’ve been playing with another group of friends online using Roll20 and that’s what caused the genesis of this blog back with this first post . 

 

 

 

March 18

Kickstarter – Beasties & Bygones: Raunchy Comedy RPG – Dungeon World & 3.5

EU-FRIENDLY! An RPG & a guide to creating comedic, satirical adventures! Play a one shot game or run a season! South Park meets D&D!

I’m not sure if you could sustain a comedy campaign, believe me I tried back in the day when I tried running Steve Jackson games Toon.

Still at least you get the Dungeon World version of the game which is somewhat of a bonus.