Tabletop RPG Podcast and Roleplaying Resources

Month: July 2017 (Page 1 of 2)

Top Campaign I’d Like to Run (July 2017 edition)

Been thinking about the ‘stuff I’m itching to run someday’ so thought I’d jot it down. Interesting how things evolve: see my post in 2016 and my post in 2014 of things I was itching to run in prior years.

Numenera

The Strange

Grimspace 2112

Reich America

Gaslight Heroes reboot

Star Wars Campaigns

  • Rebel Military (Cypher System or Rarescape RPG) — You are Alliance military during the era of Rebellion.
  • Rebel Privateers (jCypher System or Rarescape RPG) — You play privateers (pirates) working for the Rebellion to harass and disrupt the Empire.

a9fae6c1b8ea2a0ca4902edf6cd14820Hard Sci-Fi Campaigns

  • Blood & Steel (Imperium RPG, Traveller, or Rarescape) — After investigating a space anomaly, a group of fighter pilots find themselves on a starhopping quest to save humanity. (Think Battlestar Galactica)
  • Scientorium(Cypher System, Imperium RPG, Traveller, or Rarescape) — Hidden away by sheer distance and forever shrouded from the minds of the curious lies a mammoth artifact from the previous galactic age, the library of Scientorium. Its strange experience chambers offer passage to a million histories on a million worlds, secrets and technologies undreamed of. Now abandoned by all but its automated security systems and enigmatic caretakers, its workings are oddly twisted and jealous, meting out reward and punishment in equal measure. This is a classic science fiction saga, an epic journey across space and time in the vein of Niven or Heinlein!
  • Eris Beta-V(Imperium RPG, Traveller, or Rarescape) — A team of explorers investigates a magnificent ringed gas giant with its numerous moons. Ancient artifacts of enormous power can be found among the rings and asteroids. Every moon is a unique world to be explored. When the system’s valuable commerce is threatened by unscrupulous agencies, the team must root them out and put themselves at great risk on the icy fringes of interstellar space.
  • Eschaton: The Dark Star(Numenera, Imperium RPG, Traveller, or Rarescape) — Interstellar explorers investigate a mind-boggling megastructure hidden in deep space. (Think Ringworld)

Fantasy Campaigns

  • World of Redmark: Caress of Steel (D&D 5e) New sandbox D&D campaign based on the 80’s Rush albums ‘Caress of Steel’ and ‘Fly By Night’.
  • Middle-earth: Darkening of Mirkwood (Adventures in Middle-earth/5e)  — The Necromancer may have been cast out of Dol Guldur, but a lingering darkness remains over Mirkwood, a shadow that will grow ever longer as the years draw on – unless a band of brave adventurers step forward and hold back the gloom.
  • Middle-earth: 4th Age Quest (Adventures in Middle-earth/5e) – Adventure in Middle-Earth a millennium before the Lord of the Rings. “Know this, people of Gondor: were it not for the selfless souls in Arnor who with flashing blades and spilled life-blood fought against the Witch-King and his foul blight in Angmar, our free lands would not have known peace, and our bright cities would long ago have crumbled into forgotten ruins.”

Mini-Campaigns (~ 6 sessions)

  • Firefly: Civil War (Cypher System, Firefly Cortex Plus or Rarescape RPG) — Epic mini-campaign conclusion to a Firefly campaign Todd, Mason and Stan were running a few years back.
  • Reich America: The Shadow Covenant (Cypher System, Rarescape RPG) — Resistance fighters uncover a terrifying secret about the Final Reich.
  • Solomon Kane (1600’s Fantasy/Horror/Monster-Hunters) — (Cypher System, Rarescape RPG) — Cut a righteous path in a world of evil! You have seen the path to redemption, a road paved in the blood and bones of the evil you must defeat to save the world from its unholy taint. Face that which preys on men’s dreams, their fears, and their very souls. Walk The Path of Kane. Your enemies span the globe, reaching out from every shadowy corner of all four continents. Men, magic, and monsters of the darkest hearts and basest desires threaten the very world you tread. Humanity is lost without the will and steel of good folk like you.

Multi-Genre RPGs and Thoughts on The Cypher System

There are a lot of setting-specific RPGs (D&D for Fantasy, Shadowrun for Cyberpunk, Traveller for Galactic Sci Fi) which are very cool. Many of the campaigns I’d like to run though are custom settings that in many cases are genre-mashups (Sci Fi Horror, Steampunk Supers, etc.). What systems currently on the market are best that support multiple genres?

Top Current Multi-Genre Systems

Here are my thoughts (personal opinions will vary of course). For our game club, I think the systems that will work best for us are in-print, have some mechanical depth (not complex math or rules per se, but deep character options to keep players interested as they level up).  This then would exclude games like GURPs and WEG d6 (out of print) as well as Apocalypse World Systems (small community hacks but no universal system in print).

Here then are my top choices for multi-genre games :

Tactical Systems (focus on combat)

  • Savage Worlds — Pinnacle’s system. Tends towards pulp-style games and longer, miniature oriented combat.
  • d100 — Basic Roleplaying or Mythras Imperative mixed with various monographs from Chaosium. Great focus in zoomed-in personal combat and high lethality. BRP is a bit dated and you’ll need to use Errata.

Narrative Systems (focus on story)

  • Fate Core — Great open system. A toolkit really, if you want to create a setting you’ll likely need to create a family of stunts and maybe use some community content.
  • Cortex Plus/Cortex Prime — Mature system used in licensed settings such as Marvel Heroic, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, etc. New ‘Cortex Plus’ system will combine all the genre rules under one cover and will be out in April, 2018.
  • Cypher System — Gorgeous system from Monte Cook Games. Pretty expensive, but supports fantasy, science-fiction, horror, modern-day, and superhero in the core book. Expanded Worlds companion book adds genre support for post-apocalyptic, mythological, fairy tale, childhood adventure, historical, crime and espionage, and hard science fiction settings.
  • Genesys — Upcoming system from FFG will play like Star Wars but will support Fantasy, Steampunk, Weird War, Modern, and Sci Fi. Not a huge fan of the rules inconsistencies, excess crunch, and color-blind unfriendly aspects, but maybe they’ll fix some things.

Thoughts About the Cypher System

Here is a summary someone did on the differences between The Strange, Numenera, and The Cypher System

When it comes to comparing the three games:

Numenera – This was the first Cypher System game. It’s set in a far, far distant future where there have been many previous civilisations that have risen and gone over billions of years – some have fallen, some have moved on, some have transcended flesh in one way or another. Not all of the previous civilisations were even human. The Earth has been so thoroughly and repeatedly terraformed that the air and soil are full of nanotechnology and the place is full of the artefacts and sites of lost eras, the function of most of which is completely beyond the understanding of its current inhabitants. Unfortunately the setting doesn’t live up to the promise of that description I’ve just given. The central premise of the game is exploration and discovering the world’s wonders, but the game takes a firm line that nothing should ever be explained and things should always stay mysterious. This, unfortunately, makes the setting feel rather arbitrary and all style over substance. What little substance there is ends up being Generic Fantasy World #37, just with “ancient technology of unknowable purpose” standing in for “ancient magic”.

The Strange – The mechanics of this game are pretty much identical to those of Numenera, although the setting is very different. This is a game of parallel worlds. There’s a lot of background info about the extinct alien races and hypertechnology that caused things to be as they are, but when it comes down to it little of that is relevant to the average game, which is about exploring alternate worlds and dealing with the things that might come out of alternate worlds to threaten or invade ours. The idea is that most of these worlds are created from our fiction, so you can literally visit Middle Earth or Star Trek or Lovecraft Country or Jane Austen world – and, of course, inhabitants of those worlds can (temporarily) visit ours. Of course, the problem with fictional worlds is that they’re mostly copyrighted so the book can’t give you details about them. They get round this by having a couple of worlds that didn’t originate in fiction and most of the NPCs and organisations are related to those worlds instead of fiction-based ones. The game also has a neat mechanic where one aspect of your character (usually) changes to fit the world you’re currently in; so a scientist visiting the World of Warcraft might find that while there they have magical powers. As you can probably tell from my description, I much prefer this setting to the Numenera setting.

The Cypher System Rulebook – The third big product released for the Cypher System was this stand-alone rulebook. This uses the same rules as Numenera and The Strange, but presents them as a generic rule set without either of those settings. They actually have more options than either of the previous products, so I prefer to play in the setting of The Strange but using the rules from this book. Although this book doesn’t have a specific setting, it contains rules for adapting the Cypher System to a variety of genres; including horror, fantasy, sci-fi, and even superheroes. I’ve not tried the superhero options, but I’m told they work quite well for a particular level of superhero power. If you were only going to get one of the three books, I’d advise getting this one.

Source

I have yet to play it, and I’ve been turned off by their restrictive licensing (I’m a publisher) and costs (would my players buy $60 rulebooks?), but Jeff is running a mini-campaign which I’m unbelievably excited to try out. If it plays well and can be GM’d by mere mortals, I could see it fitting a great niche for some campaigns our game club wants to run!

And of course, I’m going to come out with my own multi-genre RPG at some point, but that won’t be robust and in-print until next year.

 

Ken Hite’s Review of ‘Basic Roleplaying’

Ken Hite (he’s worked on so many RPGs I’ve lost track; LUG Star Trek is the one I most recall) wrote a review of BRP (Chaosium’s d100 system-neutral game) a few years back. I’ve copied it here and highlighted a few points. I need to check out the ‘Passions’ mechanic.

Dry Bones Gonna Rise Up

Consider this the most comprehensive playtest review in history. I’ve probably logged more hours playing one or another form of Chaosium’s Basic Role-Playing engine — the core of Call of Cthulhu, RuneQuest, Nephilim, Stormbringer, Superworld, and Ringworld, to mention only the games that I’ve played with it — than every other RPG system combined. Including, I should add, using it as a “generic” engine for games from wild multiversal action to steampunk to Westerns to space opera to, well, occult horror investigation. I’ve also, for what it’s worth, written plenty of rules for it professionally, mostly for Nephilim and for Mongoose’s latest iteration of RuneQuest.
So I was glad to see that Sam Johnson and Jason Durall did a pretty darn good job of creating a core book for the game I’ve been running, off and on, for the last 25 or so years. Basic RolePlaying: The Chaosium Roleplaying System (399 pages, black-and-white softcover, $39.95) takes all those Chaosium core books and filters them down into one generic RPG system.

Surely everyone knows by now how BRP works: human character stats go from 3-18 (the new book offers point-builds as well as random rolls), skills go from 0% to 100% (the new book has rules for skills over 100% now), you roll percentile dice under your skill, and bang. Armor subtracts from damage, and you can get as crazy as you want with hit locations, but it’s still basically “d100 and a cloud of dust” with characters that are almost always gratifyingly fragile in combat. That, and the robust skills engine (this book’s skill list is a macedoine of Chaosium’s greatest hits), let the game explore other sorts of scenes besides fights. Magic? Depends — this book has superpowers, mutations, magic (a laRQ), sorcery (a la Stormbringer or CoC), or psionics (a la ElfQuest). Pick and choose, or mix and match. Gear, likewise; monsters, again likewise, taken from other Chaosium games and generified. Most of the specific Chaosium games have specialized mechanics and rules; most of them are somewhere in here, usually as optional rules. (The best? The passions mechanic from Pendragon. Use it.) But the core is the same game we’ve all been playing since 1978, when Steve Perrin looked in his white box and said “I’ll bet I could design better rules than this.”

In my experience, BRP remains excellently suited for any game in which combat is dangerous and something important reliably happens outside combat. It breaks down for demigods, but it breaks cleanly — there’s not enough rules to become cumbrous. BRP is also excellently suited for the modular attachment of any other, non-Chaosium game mechanics that you happen to like: at one time or another, I’ve added Ars Magica magic,GURPS advantages and disadvantages, and the old Marvel SuperHeroes superpowers (I’m not a fan of percentile superpowers) to BRP with less trouble than it took to type this sentence. (Not for the same game, I hasten to add. Although…) In short, it’s the cleanest, simplest, easiest generic system around. This is not to berate baroque (GURPS), complex (HERO), challenging (FUDGE) generic systems — but it’s nice to have a really good loaf of white bread, too.

And now it’s in one book, not 20.

(Source)

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