Ninchilla

I guess you don't know about Offworlders?

…not until now!

The kids wanted to play something Star Wars, but I thought the FFG/Edge SWRPG might be a bit complicated for them yet. So instead, I figured I'd do a quick Star Wars conversion of Mausritter, which they've played a bunch and know pretty well.

Unfortunately, because of who I am and what I'm like, I've ended up cobbling together bits of Mausritter, SWRPG, YZE, and the X-Wing miniatures game into basically a whole new RPG. Yay!

The start of our latest Adventuring Phase in The One Ring ("just a last quick one before Yule!") was an absolutely brutal Journey, taking 10 Travel rolls to cover fifteen hexes* - through the Shire. I've never seen so many Eye results on the trot. Fortunately this particular adventure is more of a social interaction (unless they decide to pick a fight), so even with half the party Weary, it shouldn't be lethally disastrous… 🤞

Additional, midly-reluctant Wants, courtesy of the Game Awards:
Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis: The coverage I've seen has been describing this as a ground-up remake of the 1996 original, but to me it looks more like an overhaul of 2007's Tomb Raider Anniversary - they've definitely lifted Lara's moveset from that game: bullet time dodging the raptor and the flip/somersault along the burning corridor particularly stand out. I'm just hoping they've re-redone the Lost Valley T. rex fight, since Anniversary ruined it. If they're going to do remakes, though, Tomb Raider II and III are right there.

Tomb Raider: Catalyst I'm possibly even less sold on; I like the (older-looking?) Lara, but the India setting and grappling-hook action just remind me of Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, which I really liked, and seems like a high bar to set for themselves.

Read
I had an about-to-expire £10 credit on the Modiphius store for some reason, so I grabbed the Fabula Ultima Atlas: Techno Fantasy, and have been flipping through that a bit. There's a lot of worldbuilding ideas there, some of which are kind of neat, but their approach to a Materia-style swappable class/ability/magic system is also quite interesting. Dunno if I'll ever run it, but there's stuff I might poach.

Play
I'm back in a D&D 5e game, this time going through Princes as the Apocalypse. It's not a well-balanced campaign - lots of easy dungeons with impossibly difficult bosses at the end (the first boss can cast a level 5 magic missile, against level 1 characters). The party TPK'd twice before I joined, then TPK'd again almost immediately after. We're now restarting as level 3 characters to see if we have any more success.

GM
The One Ring continues! Everyone seems to be having a good time, though I really need to find a way to make combat more interesting; the PCs don't generally have a lot of options for what to do, and their stats still aren't brilliant (though the next Fellowship Phase should help with that - it's been a while, and they're sitting on stacks of XP). It also doesn't help that my regularly-godawful dice rolls mean that the monsters aren't great at landing hits, so fights against bigger enemies tend to turn into a bit of a slog. I do think I'm getting a bit better at it, just not as quickly as I'd like.

I'm also writing/adapting a festive-ish/wintry one-shot for Mausritter, since the kids have been asking to play again. Just need to remember to keep things short, breezy, and not too complicated!