Category: RPGS

Robin D. Laws doing an AMA on Reddit, for you Redditers.

I got tipped off about this via email: legendary (that should disconcert him) game designer Robin D. Laws is doing one of Reddit’s Ask Me Anything threads.  This is one of the ones that apparently goes on for an entire week, so if you wanted to, ah, ask Robin anything about the seemingly-endless stream of groundbreaking games that he keeps insisting on making, now would be the time.  He’ll be popping in and out of that thread on a regular basis.

Moe Lane

PS: My suspicions that there will be a The Yellow King RPG announcement soon have not been quieted by this event.

Got Your Number on the Wall [Unknown Armies]

Got Your Number on the Wall – Google Docs

Got Your Number on the Wall

[Unknown Armies]
Yes, the song was a spell. In Unknown Armies terms, it was gutter magic that managed to get elevated to some weird cross between it and a no-fooling ritual (and getting to that point was thought to be flat-out impossible).  It largely went out of style when pay phones disappeared from the American landscape, but the few pay phones that do remain tend to be very well protected.

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A look at GURPS Mysteries and its PDF version.

My print-on-demand (POD) copy of GURPS Mysteries came in the mail today; as it happens, I bought the PDF version years ago. But I also rather wanted a physical copy to go with my other GURPS books, so I picked up the POD and decided to compare the two.  If nothing else, it’s a little instructive about how the state of the art has advanced.

  • Similarities: Both versions have clean, easily-read pages.  The interior to the PDF version happened to be in black and white, so there’s no real difference in coloration.  Obviously, the text has remained virtually unchanged.
  • Differences: The pages of the POD are not glossy (the binding seems firm and stable).  The PDF version has marginally sharper text than the POD version.  Images are likewise slightly better-looking in the PDF version.  Obviously, you can search the PDF copy for text; just as obviously, the POD copy still works if the power goes out.

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Is The Yellow King RPG Kickstarter going to drop next week?

I suspect that it might, given that Robin Laws is doing half-taunting Tweets right now:

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Tweet of the Day, Many Will End Up Paying Dearly For These Fallout 4 Wargaming Minis edition.

Via @vamoose comes the Doom that will fell us some:

Continue reading Tweet of the Day, Many Will End Up Paying Dearly For These Fallout 4 Wargaming Minis edition.

Location Seed: Retro-Active Temporal Stabilization Sites.

Retro-Active Temporal Stabilization Sites – Google Docs

 

Retro-Active Temporal Stabilization Sites

 

Apparently, way in the future our descendants — somebody’s descendants, at least — are going to have a real problem with sudden, geographically-focused, bouts of space-time instability.  The usual stuff: reality quakes, gaping holes in the structure of the universe, the disembodied screams of the damned, and so forth.  Fortunately, for given values of ‘fortunately,’ there’s a method for dealing with the problem.  Unfortunately, it involves ‘bleeding’ the instability backwards in time until sufficient ‘pressure’ is released to allow for a permanent fix.

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Adventure Seed: The Grant Escape.

Just as a reminder: Julia Child was a member of the freaking OSS.

Grant Escape – Google Docs

 

The Grant Escape

Turns out that Ulysses S Grant is not actually buried in Grant’s Tomb.  He’s apparently not buried at all, in fact. And, yes, we’re talking about something that’s a bit creepier than mere grave-robbing.

It’s like this: old H.P. Lovecraft was onto something with regard to Essential Saltes — or, rather, the books of his grandfather’s that he mined for ideas were onto something.  Not the bits about cosmic horror, hopefully; but the techs keep babbling something about DNA echoes and the holographic residue thrown off by souls and the short version is, if you mix enough of a corpse with enough carbon, water, sodium chloride, and [CLASSIFIED] you can get a self-aware humanoid product of science that more or less has the skill set and memories of the original donor.

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“So, hey, Moe: convert GURPS Black Ops character templates into 4E!” [UPDATED]

“How hard could that be?”

…Hard.  GURPS Black Ops PCs are very skill-oriented; I had forgotten how much space they’d take up on the character sheet.  It looks like I’m going to have to break down the common skill list on paper, try to group them by 4E’s wildcard skills, then break down each department’s skill list similarly and see where that gets us in terms of point totals.  This will… take longer than I expected.

Honestly, at this point I’d turn this into an article for Pyramid if I thought that it’d get accepted.

[UPDATE] Got it about half-done, but I’m starting to think that I may need to do a conceptional translation of the character templates, not a point-to-point one. Heavy use of wildcard skills and Talents, in other words. And maybe re-calibrate the final skill levels, too.

Santo (Location) [The Day After Ragnarok]

I wish that this game line would come back.  There’s a lot of fun to be had in WWII meets Conan.

Santo (Location) – Google Docs

Santo (Location)

[The Day After Ragnarok]

 

Santo – more properly, ‘Espiritu Santo’ is an island in the New Hebrides archipelago which was the site of a truly massive American military buildup during World War II.  Engineering teams built camps, Marine and Navy bases, airfields, hospitals, and artificial harbors and drydocks capable of repairing battleships. By post-Serpentfall standards, the island is an endless treasure trove of valuable, and possibly irreplaceable, military loot.

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Campaign seed: The B.A.B.Y. Protocol.

I blame Internet videos.

BABY Protocol – Google Docs

The B.A.B.Y. Protocol

 

The Broad-ABility Yield Protocol (at this level of security, you’re allowed to make puns) is that rarity: a genuine international conspiracy.  One that every government in the world has either signed up for, or at least sworn to keep quiet about.  And that’s not an idle oath, either: even the threat of the failure to do at least the latter has resulted in at least six regime changes since 1978.

Continue reading Campaign seed: The B.A.B.Y. Protocol.