Aww… no sign of mine yet. :(
On one hand, it feels a bit over-written in places, particularly around the whole "what is an RPG/GM?" sections, but the odds of this being someone's entry into tabletop RPGs is admittedly higher than your average PbtA hack, purely by virtue of the licence.
I find most of those sections pretty over-egged. The little faux-RP boxouts in particular are always kind of cringey.
The open playtest rules are up for the Cowboy Bebop RPG. I've had a quick flip through and it looks interesting – I always like a dice pool mechanic over flat roll + modifier – but I'm not entirely clear on the resolution of a test (it could really do with a couple of example rolls), and there's a positive/negative split between dice that seems a little clunky at first blush.
Only given it a glance yet, but it's very poorly-explained, with lots of setting-specific jargon that the glossary didn't really help with.
A friend came round yesterday to show off his Mausritter box sets from the Kickstarter. I have to say they are gorgeous! Loads of nice art, solid card tokens for tactile inventory management, and eleven one-page adventures presented as A4 tri-fold GM screens. Great stuff. Especially if you are a fan of Into The Odd.
Mausritter
I was blown away by the cutaway front cover. Such a cool little detail!
I've only had a quick flip through so far, but I'm quite keen to take a proper run at it eventually – the Foundry system is pretty solid too, based on my preliminary testing, and has a tremendous implementation of the inventory management.
Yeah Foundry looks great too.
FoundryVTT is 20% off this week for their 2-year anniversary – makes it £38.40 instead of £48 (once you factor VAT in).
I'm running game's with Foundry twice a week and I still love it. It's well worth it.
Couldn't happen to a nicer couple.
Lol you are not wrong. It's been a long time coming.
Have I missed something?
Satine Phoenix and her partner being called out by dozens of people for being awful people.
Never even heard of her. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
She's like the James Corden of RPGs. She's been around for years in D&D circles, but no-ones exactly sure why. Cons, streaming, general celeb for hire. Turns out she and her partner (who's name I forget) have spent this whole time treating people like shit, taking credit for other people's work and screwing over any potential competition.
She's like the James Corden of RPGs. She's been around for years in D&D circles, but no-ones exactly sure why. Cons, streaming, general celeb for hire. Turns out she and her partner (who's name I forget) have spent this whole time treating people like shit, taking credit for other people's work and screwing over any potential competition.
Because she was one of the cast members of I Hit It With My Axe with He Who Shall Not Be Named. You know, the one with the shit haircut, okay art and a trust fund? The abuser?
She was also a fuckin' terror in support of him back in the G+ days and probably wakes up every day thinkin' how lucky she is all that shit got memory holed.
Early access Blade Runner RPG preview PDFs are going out now - just received mine, though haven't had a chance to flip through yet.
I'm looking forward to hearing what you have to say about it. I didn't back it in the end because I couldn't decide if I actually wanted a Blade Runner RPG.
First impressions after a five-minute scroll through:
It looks pretty grim, thematically – for instance, every player character gets a Key Memory, "a focal point of your personality, and … a powerful source of inspiration and perseverance", the rollable tables for which contain the word "abuse" more than I'd like.
It's also gone with the same boxout-heavy design and light-text-on-dark-background as the Alien RPG book, which I found very difficult to follow (and a fucking nightmare if you want to print anything off); with Alien I found it slightly easier to navigate around the physical book, but in PDF it's horrendous to try and get through.
IIRC, Alien (and other Year Zero games?) only use D6s for rolls, but this lets you assign D8s, D10s and D12s as well, increasing your chances of succeeding with those skills. (It sadly drops the excellent Stress mechanic from Alien.)
I actually really liked the Alien layout on PDF. I suspect in not in the majority there though.
When Fria Ligan wrote Twilight 2000 they switched from dice pools to dice step because when they added in their ammo dice mechanic they found they just had too many dice in the table. Mathematically the two dice mechanics are pretty similar and they kept it for Blade Runner because they thought it was a bit tidier.
I'm still early in the Blade Runner rules, but one thing I like is that you can play as a Replicant who doesn't know it, by having the GM roll in secret for you, and revealing it at a dramatically-opportune moment.
I think there was a similar thing in Alien, where you could turn out to have been a synthetic artificial person without knowing it.
I know you could play as one, but I didn't think it included the option for the player not to know whether they were.
Blade Runner seems like the sort of thing that I'd love to play, but hate to try and run; mysteries and investigations are a real weak point for me as a GM.
Have any of you guys read (or tried?) Brindlewood Bay? Its central mystery mechanic is fascinating – rather than coming up with a canonical solution, the GM just has a list of possible unconnected clues for the players to find as they investigate. The number of clues found is then used as a modifier on a roll when the party agrees on a theory, and if they roll high enough, they're correct.
If they fail the roll, is that solution off the table, then? So repeated failures mean the eventual truth potentially gets increasingly outlandish and tenuous?
It's a PbtA game, so the odds of failure are lower than they would be in other systems, but that's the implication.
On a [failure], the solution is incorrect, and the Keeper reacts.
Of course, you'd hope that the party doesn't just keep guessing over and over and over without considering new or different evidence. Or maybe you can flavour it as just not being the complete solution – there's another piece of evidence that implicates another suspect, or suggests a different motive.
It's certainly pretty clever and everyone I know who has played it loves it.
Wow. Drivethru and Roll20 merging.
That means they'll be able to use the bits which work from each service, dump all the bits which don't, and make one good service from the wreckage… That's how this works right?
There's an updated version of the Cowboy Bebop RPG quickstart out now, and it feels like they've somehow made roll resolution more complicated?
If the roll was with advantage remove the lowest die before counting. If it was with disadvantage remove the highest one instead.
The player can get up to two hits:
- One if the total sum of the dice is equal or greater than the difficulty of the tab
- One if at least two 6s show up
The BH also gets a number of shocks equal to the number of 1s, minimum 1
As the forever-GM in our group, I'm also unsure how to feel about the game-runner's title in this being "Big Shot", shortened to "BS".
Further thoughts: it prioritises theme over clarity, and it's fairly obvious, given the changes between the first and second drafts, that they didn't have a particularly strong grasp of the system before starting this project.
I don't understand why it's not a Forged in the Dark reskin. So much of what it does mechanically is pretty close already.
There’s a new revision of 13th Age coming next year. Details are sparse but it sounds like exactly the update I would have recommended had anyone asked: backwards compatible, more options for each class, revised Icon dice and a different fighter class.
There's a third draft of the Cowboy Bebop RPG rules out today, and they've changed the dice system again.
Do you have access to all three versions? I'm curious to see the progression.
I got to drop a reveal in my Curse of Strahd game last night that I've been seeding little hints at for over 18 months. The reaction was everything I could have wanted. 
I love moments like that. Give us some details!
I played in a game last night for a change. First time playing Delta Green.
I love moments like that. Give us some details!
Okay… wall of text incoming.
One of the players' characters back when we first started in LMoP was Kragorn, a dwarf druid with the Haunted One background - something traumatic had happened to him, and he couldn't remember anything from before he was found in the woods and raised by a group of elves.
From the start, I knew a few things: one, we were eventually going to play Curse of Strahd; two, there are no dwarves in Curse of Strahd; but three, I was going to make some pretty major changes to parts of the plot, because a couple of the party were sort-of aware of bits and pieces.
So I needed to get dwarves into Curse of Strahd, but also have something amnesia-inducingly traffic occur to (at least some of) them. If you know CoS, you'll know the ruins of Berez, a village in the south of Barovia that (in the book) was destroyed by Strahd after they hid one of the reincarnations of Tatyana from him, and is now inhabited by the crone Baba Lysaga.
So I rewrote almost all of the narrative stuff for Berez. Dwarves are common enough across the D&D multiverse, and Barovia already has elves, so I decided that Berez was a dwarven village. I kept Baba Lysaga, but changed her scarecrows into a newer monster called stone cursed, with the explanation that they were what was left of the original dwarf (or, in Barovian parlance, Berezi) inhabitants, petrified then animated as guards by the hag. Then, I added a new location into the notes: The Bailstone House.
In session 17 - some time around January 2020 - the party met a group of Vistani on the road - two NPCs from Curse of Strahd and an extra one I made up, who presented themselves as travelling merchants. They sold the party some magical items, and one of them offhandedly referred to Kragorn as a Berezi. Nobody passed any remark. The term also came up once or twice after they reached Barovia.
When the party finally arrived in Berez last session, the now-dwarven Burgomaster's ghost (who already only really exists in the adventure as an exposition machine) was able to point them towards the Bailstone House, where they discovered and were attacked by a great horror monster: The Lonely, a harpoon-armed creature of pure misery, which only wants a hug, but deals massive psychic damage if it succeeds in getting one.
They killed the thing, and while exploring the house afterwards, discovered a journal, which (short version) explained how a woman, desperate to save her son from life in Barovia, visited the Amber Temple in search of a ritual to get him out. She found one, and it worked - but it consumed all the life in the village to do it.
I kept Kragorn's name out of it until the last sentence.
I gave the journal to them, then muted myself while I waited for the reaction.
…what!? What the FUCK!?
Yeah, that sounds great!
I haven't actually read CoS as one of my players was thinking of running it for us.
It's my favourite of the 5e modules I've read. Very sandbox-y, but also quite well-delineated from a DM point of view that makes it fairly easy to prep.
Exalted Funeral have opened their kickstarter for Monty Python's Cocurricular Mediaeval Reenactment Programme, which I'm not convinced we need but sounds at least interesting.
There was a good interview with the writers on Unwinnable the other week, which assuaged some of my concerns but exacerbated others.
(I at least got a sensible chuckle out of the term the game uses for the GM: you're the "Head of Light Entertainment".)
That's the equally-questionable Cowboy Bebop RPG Kickstarter live as well.
Aaand Mongoose have launched a Kickstarter for their new Paranoia Perfect Edition.
I have the previous Paranoia version (Red Clearance Edition?) with the card-based nonsense, which I never really clicked with, but I love a lot of the ideas so I'm hoping this one tidies up the rough edges and doesn't just complicate everything further.
The kickstarter video and accompanying text did nothing to convince me to jump in. I think I'd rather get hold of 1st or 2nd or XP.
@aniki Have you deleted your Twitter? Maybe you've just blocked me. I thought you would like this if you are still running Expanse: https://mobile.twitter.com/BrianBloodaxe/status/1586460255646425088
No, my Twitter is still there. I did go through an unfollow spree to tidy up my timeline the other day, but you survived the cull. Can you not see me?
I think Twitter search was just glitching out. I can see you now.
Advice - my students at school want to play D&D, or at least try it. I've no experience playing it but have played Shadowrun RPG as a teenager. Is the starter kit thing a good place to look at beginning? I know the head would probably be on board with letting us play during some of our unstructured lesson time, as my class are all ASD or ADHD and a lot of them have a development plan around communication and social development, so D&D would fit that I think
The original starter set, Lost Mine of Phandelver, is pretty good, but it has a famously brutal first encounter for level 1 characters. General wisdom is that you should use average damage and don't let the monsters crit until level 2, and it'll be fine. The plot doesn't make much sense, though.
I also really rate Ghosts of Saltmarsh - it's very episodic, basically a bunch of connected one-shots all working out of a nice little hub town, each based on a classic adventure from editions gone by. Highlights include a haunted house, pirates, lizardfolk, and some cool undead. Disclaimer, however: I haven't run it, only played.
EDIT: There's a free edition of the basic rules, if you just want to take a look at the system/rules - never played Shadowrun, so don't know how different they are!
Yeah, I enjoyed Lost Mine of Phandelver in the Starter Set too, but if you are looking for it make sure you don’t buy the new Starter Set “Dragons of Stormwreck Isle” which isn’t as good.
Yeah, I had a quick read through of that, and didn't think it was very good at all.
Brilliant cheers, will have a look. I liked the idea those sets come with made characters yes?
Correct. Although whatever game you are running you can probably find pre-gens online or in a quick-start or something.