If you like supers games then this may be worth giving a few dollars to back the Kickstarter project EXTREME EARTH: A dystopian superhero setting. Depending on the level you back you get all sorts of goodies including a setting book for the system of your choice.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jaerdaph/extreme-earth-a-dystopian-superhero-campaign-setti
It looks like I forgot to include links to the games in yesterday’s post, so here they are.
BASH Ultimate Edition: http://www.bashrpg.com
Mutants and Masterminds: http://www.mutantsandmasterminds.com
Squadron UK: http://squadronuk.co.uk
All books are available in print and pdf versions.
To kick things off number 10 on my list is a BASH Ultimate Edition the super RPG.
I’ve always had a thing for super-powered gaming, I guess this stems from my love of the comics. My first super game was Marvel Superheroes basic set, a bright yellow box containing a few books, dice and maps. From there I picked up one or two more other games but found myself desiring something else.
BASH is one of those happy accidental purchases which I seem to have made a few of in my time; as I thought I was originally buying a different game and was happily surprised with what I actually bought.
BASH was going to be the game to introduce a new player to the group and I wanted something that enabled everybody to be heroes and do good deeds while protecting the innocent. It would also allow us to evaluate the new player before we could resume the regular Pendragon campaign.
I also wanted a simple game with flexible character creation options and BASH gave me all of them, requiring nothing more than a pair of six sided dice and using multiplication to do all the super stuff. In practice the game does work rather well plus the book has a table reminiscent of the old Marvel table which I thought was a nice touch.
There are other point based systems on the market but since this was going to be an introductory game I eschewed them all in favour of this one. Like most systems you pick a set point level and you can exceed the points you spend but your character tends to attract bad stuff.
There are supplemental power books with one or two new powers to be found within and the rest of the book is filled with powers based upon existing ones in the main book; as well as organising them into various categories like attack and utility powers.
BASH has some good advice on different eras of play and I had no trouble with the Golden Age, the characters were going to be part of a task force operating in the City Of London during the 1960s.
After some discussion we ironed out the kinks for certain advantages and the players certainly came up with some interesting concepts including; a water elemental from an alternate dimension, an immortal Scotsman, a ghost who could posses the wheelchair bound host and someone in a suit of power armour.
I don’t normally discuss behind the scenes stuff about adventures but in this case I shall since it was such a wonderful idea I feel it has to be told. I have no fear of my players using the information as I will not be returning to my unfinished creation because the sad news is that but three weeks into the adventure the new player suddenly died and I was unable to contemplate continuing it.
The idea was borrowed from an old episode of Doctor Who, something that was written as a period piece in the 1960s and concerned the Post Office tower, a slightly sentient supercomputer who could control minds and it was all under the control of the then postmaster general. I had fun writing or rather adapting it to the group and I was able to use the stock resources provided by the main book to flesh things out.
Mutants and Masterminds was probably the best OGL version of a supers game I ever ran across, it was flexible and you could certainly create the characters that you wanted but it got a bit fiddly in places and I found the odd point here and there which I couldn’t easily spend. The system did away with hit points and had you make damage saves instead. I have only experienced the first edition and I understand some changes were made in later versions but I never had the desire to purchase them.
Golden Heroes. The second supers game I ever bought as Games Workshop had it all on sale and I was intrigued by it. The first game I encountered that had everyone roll for their powers randomly and you had to rationalise them, any that couldn’t be explained had to be discarded. This did have the wonderful rationale from one of the players that the CIA had messed with his DNA. Until I found BASH this would have to be my favourite supers game as it was simple, elegant and had you rolling a detailed PC up in half an hour or so. I understand the game lives on as Squadron UK.
Every gamer out there has a list of their favourite games; either ones that really resonate with the player as a result of a killer setting or perhaps it is that the game brings happy memories of a golden time.
Over the next few weeks, I’m going to countdown my top ten list of pen and paper games and give you my notes on why it deserves a spot in my list.
Come back tomorrow when the countdown will start.
I mentioned once before of my love of dice and I probably have more than I need.
My first set of dice came with the TSR Marvel Superheroes rpg; two blank ten sided dice with a white crayon to colour in the numbers. I still have them somewhere and the once sharp edges have softened somewhat.
I also have the two tiny miniature twenty sided d10s that came with Middle Earth Roleplay and the two sharp red twenty sided d10s that came with my edition of Deluxe Runequest. Both of these sets also required colouring in and I’m glad I still had the crayon to do so 🙂 .
Until recently I kept my dice in a simple padded pouch which used to house a laptop mouse. Several years of use and a growing number of dice prompted me to replace it with a proper dice bag with a greater capacity. So I did a little checking around and found one that met my requirements and ordered a limited edition space patterned bag from http://www.koeddicebags.co.uk/ . I’m quite happy with the bag and it makes a change to see something attractive sitting at the table rather than the old plain pouch I had. Plus it also houses the d100 I bought all those years ago without bulging at the seams 🙂
I know this may seem somewhat of a redundant post doing two in one evening but this doesn’t really belong there and it should be separate and distinct. Rather than being a story related article, its more of a nuts and bolts piece; a glimpse behind the curtain.
When I started gaming miniatures were not exactly the norm, you could quite happily get away without using them but they did add another dimension to the game. You could see where people were in relation to the things that were trying to eat them and it was a good thing.
The problem lay with trying to find the perfect miniature for your character or the monster for the evening. You could get common miniatures like giant rats or goblins for the games but some of the more esoteric creatures were harder to come by. Plus you also had to be a dab hand with a brush to bring them to like; anyone who ever saw my undercoated space marines knows what I’m talking about 🙂
So while the added dimension was worth it the many complications weren’t and slowly I gave up trying to use them.
When D&D 3 was released like many other gamers I picked up a wipe clean ChessexTM battlemat and wondered how I was going to portray the action to the players. That’s when I discovered the joy of map tiles, pre-printed tiles you could purchase on-line and print them out to assemble a map. I bought a few, printed several out, cut them and laminated them to great effect but there was also the added work of trying to assemble a dungeon that resembled the one in the module that you had.
It was about this time that I discovered Fiery Dragon Press, a company producing 25mm tokens in packs that you could buy and cut out, so if you needed a few goblins you were covered. The quality was certainly a step up in the counter market and I got a lot of use out of them. They later sold CD-ROMs packed with the images and you could easily print one or two or even a whole host of these tokens for you game. Since they were paper you could abuse them knowing that more could be printed out for another day.
Anyway, moving the clock on a bit further I came across Roll 20 the Virtual Table Top, a browser based service that lets you play virtual games with your friends almost as though you are sitting around the same dining room table.
A system like this calls out for quality maps and tokens and this is what I wanted to draw your attention to; several manufacturers who produce high quality products for you to use.
DramaScape produce some excellent maps both in pdf and have taken to including a file for use with your virtual table-top. I have purchased quite a lot of their product and have been impressed by it. The only downside is that the files for Roll20 are bigger than the maximum upload size and I have been using an image program called RIOT to shrink them. You can find DramaScape here: http://dramascape.net/
Fabled Environments also produce some excellent blueprints and they are pretty good, I just wish they would provide a file that can be used in Roll20 rather than a straight pdf. There homepage is here: http://fabledenvironments.com/wp/
Stoneworker Cartography have some very good looking maps and some interesting designs. I am quite taken with the modern ones and hope to use one or two of them in an upcoming game. Website: http://www.stoneworkercartography.com/
Arion Games have created some great looking paper miniatures and I hope that they will branch out into the marketplace for Roll20 tokens. Website: http://www.arion-games.com/
Devin Night recently saved my backside with his free zombie token and I have since purchased some more to use later on. Website: http://immortalnights.com/tokensite/
Studio Wyldfurr produce top down tokens with a variety of poses for each character with distinctive features that make them stand out from other companies. Website: http://www.wyldfurr.com/
I’ll add more posts as I discover and use more content.
The Roll20 Website: Roll20.net
So the All Flesh Must Be Eaten campaign carries on.
The intrepid heroes heave made a bold escape from a diner out on the middle of the interstate and are speeding back to their city in a school bus that was found in the parking lot.
With the diner stripped of the food, something in the region of 45 days of canned food and several new survivors added to the team, at least the players have replacements in case somebody succumbs to the plague.
Next report coming soon 🙂
I have spent some time considering this post, an origin story of how I got started in gaming and rather than stew on it for much longer thought it about time I put pen to paper.
My first ever RPG was 1st edition AD&D, I spent a weekend poring over the players handbook which I purchased from my local games store; the long since closed Games World in Hammersmith for the sum of £11.95. After much deliberation and some consultation with the DM I created a cleric. We played one session as the group sort of broke up after that.
At that point I was hooked.
I played with several different games systems from the heavy simulationist Phoenix Command and the sci-fi version Living Steel to other systems.
Phoenix Command Combat System (PCCS) was a real revelation to me, I had never imagined such a detailed game could exist and I devoured it, charts and all. Of course some people claimed it was cumbersome and somewhat unwieldy in play and I agree that they were right, but if you wanted to know the effect of a bullet on the body you could certainly do so. I still have the books and supplements but haven’t played it in a very long time indeed. In fact I don’t think you could play it, rather experience it would be a more apt description.
Living Steel was the futuristic equivalent of PCCS and had everything I wanted in a game; power armour, teleportation, strange aliens, a lifepath based character creation package which threw you into various periods of the climatic battles before your character was frozen and shipped off for revival at a later date. The problem was that it was rather deadly and also a sandbox environment.
I still played AD&D then but I seemed to prefer the modern day or futuristic games. I remember one of my friends getting Traveller and playing through the character creation process; the idea that your perfect character could die during the process lent a note of caution when rolling for survival. The idea that one more term could potentially kill you left the galaxy full of 36 year-old ex-servicemen or that’s how it appeared to me 🙂
I lusted after more strange worlds to plumb the depths of my imagination during which period I stumbled across Call of Cthulhu the game of Lovecraftian horror where your poor character could go mad rather than die. I have a lot of fun with CoC, even if I do make the occasional blunders as the GM and trying to maintain an atmosphere is very tricky but it is a game of the Jazz age and who doesn’t like the idea of standing on the running boards of someone’s roadster while blazing away with a tommy gun?
So there we are, a brief if somewhat rambling introduction.
A quick disclaimer before I write this review. A long time ago I used to be a play-tester for Eden studios but that was for the Conspiracy X game line and not AFMBE.
Since I’m going to be running All Flesh Must Be Eaten I thought I’d do a quick review of the core book. I have three different editions of the book; two printed and a pdf version of the revised edition. This review is therefore of the revised edition.
What grabbed me about the whole game was the ability to not just do a Romero style zombie game; of which you can find an example in the books Deadworlds chapter; but the whole tool-kit approach. The game gives you the tools and you can craft your own tailor made zombie apocalypse.
The game uses the Unisystem mechanic and requires nothing more than an ordinary d10 to resolve actions. At the simplest level this involves rolling stat + skill + 1d0 and try to get higher than 9. It is an easy system and the genius lurks in the design of it. Take combat for example; if you wanted to fire a pistol then rolling your characters skill and dexterity seems a logical combination. What if you wanted to aim? Some games just give you a flat value to add to your next attack, AFMBE allows you to roll perception and handgun skill with each success level adding +1 to your next attack roll.
This makes it easy to add to the Roll20 virtual table-top as you can easily script macros to take advantage of the flexibility of the system.
The game also contains several example player characters in the archetypes section. These can be used as is, as a inspiration for an new character or as an NPC. I do like this approach as it can get you into a game quickly and with a little difficulty.
Finally the revised edition has rules for using it with a very popular d20 based gaming system.
In conclusion, if you want a tool-kit to create your own zombie apocalypse then this game does take some beating. If I had one complaint to raise it would be the lack of bookmarking in the pdf but I think this is a small price to pay for such a fun game.
There is a free introductory adventure complete with characters and this can be downloaded from Eden’s website, by following this hyperlink:
I’ve always looked at a zombie apocalypse game and wondered what is the best way to play it. Do you do it as though the zombies don’t exist in modern cinema and the players are reacting to the threats anew or do you embrace the genre and say the films have been made?
Since session two of the campaign has come to a close and after a player specifically asked me the question I decided to go with the latter option; George made his movies so the head is a suspected weak point for them. That isn’t to say that there aren’t going to be surprises for the party as having everything like the movies can become predictable.
With one of the group seizing the initiative the party has made inroads into obtaining supplies and gear for the long haul. Which I think is a good thing as what I have to unleash is a sandbox environment with its own strengths and weaknesses. As an aside, I do like the sandbox style of play but you do need a spine to hang it off. I understand that some sandbox computer games can leave the players wondering what to do as there can be too many choices or too much freedom.
So the party has left the woodland camp and is off in search of a nearby roadside diner.