The first RPG I bought this year was 2300 AD at Bundle of Holding. This is an old Game Designer’s Workshop game originally called Traveller…
Another Obscure S-List Writer
Tag: rpg
The first game I played this year was Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition. This was a continuation of a game I’ve been in since mid-2020…
Monday, we covered the combat portion of The Fantasy Trip in its microgame incarnation, Melee. Yesterday, we covered it’s basic magic system in the microgame…
Today is day two of The Fantasy Trip. The series began with Metagaming’s Microgame 3, Melee in 1977. It continued a year later with Wizard,…
I’m on the road for the next few days. I won’t have a lot of time so I’m moving to a much simpler system. For…
Generic Extended Character Generation System is a variant for Classic Traveller written by James Jensen. I discovered it over a decade ago, and it is…
Given we died in character creation yesterday, let’s try to do advanced character generation again, but opening it to any of the five official versions.…
Today, we’ll continue with classic Traveller. I’ll admit, this was not my original plan, but I remembered two things as I got out the old…
Today I’m making another Traveller character. After the original boxed set, there were several official and otherwise expansions to character creation. Books 4-7 created a…
Yesterday, I noted when I first got into RPGs I was much more a science fiction reader and watcher than a fantasy reader. That would…
Yesterday I generated a character from my first edition of Dungeons & Dragons, the wonderful blue book by Dr. John Eric Holmes. It is not…
Now that we’ve started at the hobby’s beginning, let’s move on to my beginning in the hobby. My first copy of Dungeons & Dragons was…
I can’t think of a better place to start a 31-Day Character Creation Challenge for RPGs than with the first RPG. Welcome to three classes…
Right now I’m looking to start a new game. My plan is to run it at Tin Roof Cantina in Atlanta, Georgia on Thursdays after…
I was introduced in 1977. There are two memories and one activity which could have been the first inkling. First, I remember hearing Uncle Jeff…
I will give the kind of answer I think this is aiming to elicit in a minute, but first I want to give what I…
My nieces and younger nephew. My oldest nephew and brother-in-law have played D&D online and in person with me. Technically, my younger nephew sat in,…
Blast from the Past, 2009-02-08 This is a world without a sense of creation: While the one faith of man (The Church of the Holy Succession)looks…
What if, for the hell of it, someone paid a black magician to let all the demons out of Hell for just one night?
Then, what if they didn’t go back? In fact, what if the result was a judgment day won by the Devil?
If I think of weapons in RPGs, my first thought is my favorite character story. In the early 80s, I played in an AD&D game…
I am an awful tactician. While this delights my players, it makes today’s topic very hard. You would think for someone who started as a…
It was the best of maps; it was the worst of maps. They were a pair of maps in a set of books that would…
The first time I encountered the word scenario, I was not yet a roleplayer. I was barely a hex and chit wargamer. The scenarios in…
How can you not love a conspiracy setting whose first published adventure had the elevator pitch of “What if you woke up one morning and accidentally found that part of your life was missing? And found someone was willing to kill to keep you from getting it back? Kill you, that is…”
The idea was for 30 days to use a small set of sources picked according to Jeff Rient’s “Alchemical Proposal” to create an RPG setting from scratch. I never finished it, but I think I did make a few very creative elements. This is one of my favorites.
This past week was Star Trek day. I wrote about Star Trek in terms of genre and ownership, but Overlord DVD really captured what Star Trek means to so many of us.
That’s great if they cover something you wanted, but what if you want to build something else. Psi-Wars is a worked example of creating such a framework for your specific campaign idea.
Even if you don’t read the whole book, seek out “By His Bootstraps” which may be the ur snarled time travel story. The first part of “The Year of the Jackpot”, like the parts of Heinlein’s Future History that describe the Crazy Years, hits too close to home. It did before 2020, but now it is a harder hit. “The Menace from Earth” inspired part of the background to J. Daniel Sawyer’s Hadrian’s Flight.
New feature, in addition to videos and song, why not share a book. I am a writer, even if I’m just an obscure S-list one.
This letter/diary was written four years and a month before my birth, but I feel a strong kinship with the writer.
Today is the fifth Sunday after Pentecost and the Fifths Sunday of Matthew. It is the feast day of Holy Martyrs Proclus and Hilary of…
I listening to Sophia’s video, where she discusses how she would have no more right to change a game they complainers created that matched their desires and expectations, I was reminded of this post.
She gave up the chance to answer my question, because it was sincere. I wanted to know if we were discussing assault in general terms, sexual assault broadly, or sexual assault of player characters. I asked about the last of those, figuring if it was not the case we would at least get some clarity on where the discussion was.
Carella wrote two supplements before moving on from Palladium. The first, Between the Shadows introduced that standard of all urban fantasy, and most fantasy, fiction and games, a dream plane. This particular version is called The Dreamscape.
In the end, however, the Mr. Hyde side of Palladium on the subject of generosity hurts the company more than anyone. Sharing my conversions and materials on the web might get me feedback to make them better. People coming across those conversions and materials, however, might be inspired to buy Palladium books by those derivative works.
This reward for engaging the world being baked into the system is one reason Palladium’s system, for all its warts, appeals to me. Want a super powered hero at level one, then play a Glitterboy or a Knight of the Cosmic Forge. You’ll be a big boy on most blocks, but there will still be other blocks that no matter how much you level up the crazy powers on your character sheet will not be the sole solution there.
I hope I’ve given you a glimpse into the unique things about Palladium that keep me coming back, especially those comic sensibilities and old-school DIY mentality. At the same time, I hope you have a glimpse into what often leads attempts to play Palladium games to fall apart.
The final, and biggest, first is the first Palladium RPG, The Mechanoid Invasion. It is a very cheap comic book sized book printed on newsprint.
I had a very hard time writing this week. I missed Thursday’s blog and would have missed Tuesday’s post if it hadn’t been for Mary Spender this week. Her Tuesday Talk this week, which I listened to on my Tuesday lunch walk got me moving.
The last Sunday in March is here, and it appears the lion is roaring one last time. Today at noon was over 20 degrees cooler…
We try to hide, but as the rock cried out, there is no hiding place. We celebrated his ideas even as we excused his being an ass.
D4: Treat your players well Don’t spoil them with too much treasure, but don’t make them wait until level 10 for a +1 sword. More…
D4: Restarting the Atomic Age I grew up reading a lot of 50s and 60s science fiction which had dates in the Year Atomic or…
D4: Pandora’s Gun D6: DIY Aluminum Lower Receiver I’m not a fan of the 3D printed firearms, but not because they do not work. I…