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Cthulhu Style Investigations

Thoughts on a small set of extensions to Cthulhu Dark

Over the last year or two, I’ve played a good bit of Call of Cthulhu and related games. While I love many things about that particular game, I don’t like the crunchiness of the character sheet. Investigators have nine attributes before we even get to things like Sanity, Luck, Magic Points, and skills! One thing I’ve done is play Cthulhu Dark a good bit. I stopped playing it lately in favor of my…

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Cumbersome Star Wars Combat

A quick set of thoughts on combat in the original Star Wars RPG.

I’ve been playing the original Star Wars RPG (WEG 1987) in a solo game and damn if combat isn’t cumbersome. Lots of rolling and comparison and adding numbers up, as trad games like this commonly require. Photo by Zacharias Korsalka on Pexels.com First, you roll your skill (e.g. “Blaster”) to attack against a target number defined by range. If the defender chooses to dodge, they roll and add…

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Micro hack of Mothership

Microship: A simple little hack of @MothershipRPG based on a conversation in the Discord for that community.

During a discussion in the Mothership Discord about reskinning the game for other settings, I came up with the following little hack. If anything, it’s just a small set of house rules for creating classless characters and maybe simplifying the stats and saves. Please feel free to comment any feedback. It’s completely untested, just a fun little idea. “Ufo” by kai Stachowiak Microship You have…

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Spinoff solo blog

I’ve been playing a lot more solo sessions, and I didn’t want to clog this place up. Plus, I just wanted to experiment with something different. Photo by lalesh aldarwish on Pexels.com So in April, my spinoff blog Solo Skald launched. So far, I’ve played campaigns of Blades in the Dark as well as Scum & Villainy, a solo adventure with Call of Cthulhu, and experimented with both Starforged and…

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Be specific about unwritten rules

If you're going to leave intentional gaps in your design, tell us what they are so we're not left guessing.

Lots of discussion happening today around games that are missing rules or worlds. That’s a bit simplified, so here are the posts I’m thinking about: Negative Space“F**k-You” Design As a note to the latter: I don’t really love the way the author implies such a strong sense of emotional negativity, but this does resonate with me: Fuck-you design treats one or both of the mechanics and fiction as…

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NSR, FKR, APT, XYZ...

Inspired by @pandatheist, I dashed off some thoughts on #NSR and #FKR and how the meanings have evolved.

Photo by Sora Shimazaki on Pexels.com Years ago, when the idea of computer security intrusions by nations pursuing typical espionage goals was in its relative infancy, some US government investigators needed to be able to talk about these intrusions in non-classified environments – meaning, they couldn’t say “China” because that identity was classified. So they’d say “Advanced Persistent Threat…

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Why I like Into the Odd

What makes Into the Odd - and, by extension, Electric @Bastionland - so great? Here are a few reasons. This post inspired by @JasonTocci! #OSR #NSR #TTRPG

“Well of Bolonchen”, Catherwood 1844 Jason Tocci recently wrote a post about why he keeps going back to the Odd and I thought I’d riff on it a bit. To be clear: +1 to basically everything he said there. For my tastes, Into the Odd consists of D&D boiled down to the most essential mechanical bits: roll a d20 for saving throws to avoid bad outcomes (at least when they’re avoidable), HP (albeit…

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“Janus” Mothership Campaign – Session 6

The crew takes shore leave on Station 472 and considers changes to their future business plans. Also, bricks of human flesh. #Mothership #TTRPG #OSR

As we pick back up on Station 472, the crew has a few things to take care of during shore leave. Shore Leave Billy Ray gets smashed in Hotel Artemis to make it through his, uh, social engagement with Audrina, the massively powerful and intimidating medical supplies vendor. The Hotel is pretty low-rent (literally, as they have an hourly rate). He also moonlights briefly for Dave, heading out to…

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Handling luck

Luck rolls represent the GM choosing to be surprised rather than just deciding what happens. I look at how a few different games do this (especially @BladesInTheDark and Electric @Bastionland) and talk about my currently preferred approach. #TTRPG

One of my favorite procedures to use in games is some sort of a “luck roll”, which basically comes up when I want to introduce some amount of uncertainty in a game that doesn’t depend specifically on player actions. (This is distinctly not blorby but sometimes I want to be surprised!) J. J. Grandville, “The Lucky Star” Existing Rules Following is a brief survey of some games I’ve played…

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“Janus” Mothership Campaign – Session 5

One of my favorite sessions of @MothershipRPG! I took a small location from the @DissidentRPG Whispers book, added some content from Dead Planet and the third-party module Black Heart of Paradise by @2Shva, and just let the players explore and interact.

“Farts are just stinky, boogers need to get chiseled off the wall.”BR3ND4 when dealing with the black market In this week’s session, I took a small location from the Dissident Whispers book, added some content from Dead Planet and the third-party module Black Heart of Paradise, and generated one of my favorite sessions of Mothership yet. Crew BR3ND4, Android (corporate representative)Dr…

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Blorb: The Technoskald Interpretation

Blorb is a neologism (created by Sandra Snan) for a particular play style that occasionally creates controversy because it means the game world is "real" even before it shows up in a session. Here are my notes on what I think it means. #OSR #TTRPG

NB: This is my summary of how “Blorb” works. I have opted to avoid discussing most of the philosophical underpinnings, largely because that is not the sort of thing I personally understand particularly well. In general, I am attempting to summarize her writing; to the extent I’ve misrepresented anything, it’s entirely my mistake. To be clear, I appreciate this approach. It’s not the only good way…

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"Janus" Mothership Campaign - Session 4

This week's @MothershipRPG session (or what my players called a "cubic worsening") comes to us from @sigmacastell and @junkgolem... SO. MUCH. HAIR.

Session alternate title: “Cubic Worsening” The crew this time consisted of: Aeris (Teamster)Billy Ray (Marine)BR3ND4 (Android) Dr Wilson stayed back on the ship, both because the player was unavailable this week as well as because that’s his nature. Narrative The crew finished up some business on Prospero, namely the cyber mod installations for BR3ND4 and Billy Ray. When they showed back up…

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Mausritter Musings

I've been thinking about what we liked so much about @Mausritter last night, and honestly it's more than one thing. But the kinds of stories it can tell... that matters a lot.

I could just say that Mausritter is Into the Odd plus GLOG magic plus arts and crafts inventory. But it’s more than that, because setting matters – mice are not humans, and they do not believe themselves to be apex predators. When you live in a world where things that are orders of magnitude larger want to kill and eat you, “adventure” means something else. So when we got together to play…

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Rolling Dice in Call of Cthulhu

One of the most traditional of trad RPGs has excellent advice about what happens when the dice hit the table, and how often that should happen. #CallOfCthulhu #TTRPG

Generally speaking, I dislike binary pass/fail mechanics in games. Mixed success or success at a cost drives stories in much more interesting directions. Sometimes you want outright success to wrap things up, but most of the time progress is enough and the cost creates interesting decisions and dilemmas. Call of Cthulhu Keeper Rulebook p. 185 (c) 2015 Chaosium Inc. Surprisingly for such a…

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"Janus" Mothership Campaign - Session 3

A @MothershipRPG shopping session was interrupted by unrest and corporate investigation. You know, like you do. #TTRPG

This session mostly consisted of shenanigans on Prospero Station, the locale from A Pound of Flesh. The crew arrived last session; this time, they wanted to do some shopping. Some narrative threads needed to be resolved or at least advanced as well. Narrative Our Marine (Billy Ray) and Android (BR3ND4) wanted some modification, so they headed to the Chop Shop. This is listed as a cybersurgery…

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Digging into the original Star Wars RPG

Starting to look at the old #StarWars RPG from West End Games. Do you have enough six-sided dice? #TTRPG

Many folks have written roleplaying games for the Star Wars universe. I can think of four different officially-licensed games with different systems: West End Games (d6), Revised Core Rulebook, Saga Edition, and the various Fantasy Flight games. Others, like Scum & Villainy, file off the serial numbers so they don’t get in legal trouble regarding trademarks and such, or (if they’re small and…

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"Janus" Mothership Campaign - Session 2

Thanks to @Victor_el_DM for a fun little @MothershipRPG pamphlet (ALCOR Station). Mischief on a space truck stop before heading to Prospero.

“How do you break an android? You give it feelings.”Elsa (BR3ND4 player) The crew of the Janus arrived at ALCOR Station – basically a truck stop in space – before heading to Prospero. Special thanks to Victor Merino for kindly providing a cleaned-up version of the station image I could share with my players. If you run Mothership, go pick up this little pamphlet and drop it someplace in your…