These are good skills, to start with:
https://twitter.com/cbsa82/status/851863147392622592
Continue reading Tweet of the Day, Three (And One More) Skills For GMs edition.
Category: RPGS
Creature seed: the Screaming Death Killbot 6000.
Blame this. Because I sure do.
Screaming Death Killbot 6000 – Google Docs
Screaming Death Killbot 6000
It’s three feet tall, made of mirror-smooth and polished flexible steel that somehow never shows any sort of seam or joint. It has a roughly humanoid face, with two alarmingly large glowing eyes and a LCD ‘mouth’ that flashes when it ‘laughs,’ which the Screaming Death Killbot 6000 does often — typically when it’s killing its prey. The hands and feet all end in alarming-looking blades that shock, stab, serrate at high speed, or otherwise inflict prodigious amounts of blood and pain. And it talks just the way, while using just the dementedly-cheerful child’s voice, that you’d expect from something called the ‘Screaming Death Killbot 6000.’
Continue reading Creature seed: the Screaming Death Killbot 6000.
Item Seed: Octavian Doom Candles.
Octavian Doom Candles – Google Docs
Octavian Doom Candles
This somewhat esoteric protective artifact is supposed to not really be ominous, aside from the name. Unless you’re a minor auto-scripted, semi-autonomous post-corporeal soul fragment (or, sure, ‘ghost’), of course. Then it’s a big, heaping serving of Doom..
The Octavian Doom Candle (the origin of the name is slightly obscure) operates as a two-stage incendiary device: lighting the top causes the candle to eventually ‘unfold’ into a rotating wheel of eight large candles (and a second tier of six smaller ones). In the mundane world, this is mostly used as a gimmick for birthday cakes. In the esoteric world, the interaction of the flames and the movement is absolutely irresistible to minor ghosts. They get entranced, get sucked into the center flame, and then get burned up.
The mildly depressing Steve Jackson Games 2016 Stakeholders’ Report.
Mildly depressing if you’re a fan of SJG’s roleplaying game lines, at least: essentially, you can pretty much forget about getting anything new in print for GURPS this year. Dungeon Fantasy and Ogre Kickstarter commitments have pretty much hijacked their schedule, which is kind of ironic, no? And if GURPS is going to be sidelined, you can bet that we’re not going to get even a sniff of an In Nomine 20th Anniversary edition, either. Which saddens me even more than the GURPS news does.
Normally, I’d be hoping for some form of GURPS be made available as Open Access, on the grounds that if they’re only going to be doing PDF publishing of GURPS stuff anyway then they might as well encourage people to sell sourcebooks and thus generate more of a market for buying the main rules books. But I know that Steve Jackson keeps a pretty close lock on that IP. Which is absolutely his privilege, of course. But still.
Creature Seed: Blobees.
Blobees
Yup. They’re little flying blobs with gooey wings that pollinate plants. They’re about the size of a bumblebee, move about as quickly as a bumblebee, and live in what’s sort of a hive. Crack a Blobee ‘hive’ open, though, and you get a lot of undifferentiated protoplasm and a bunch of something that kind of tastes like honey (good luck figuring out a hive’s lifespan, assuming that the question even makes any kind of sense.). Where Blobees also differ from regular bees is that, since they’re pretty much flying droplets of goo, they can get through screen doors and windows without very much trouble.
Location seed: The Chesterton Annex.
Chesterton Annex – Google Docs
The Chesterton Annex
So-called because the only human-compatible portion of the underground complex (found just north of Little Horwood, Buckinghamshire) has this quote by GK Chesterton on one wall (at the orders of Winston Churchill, and he never would say why):
I knew no harm of Bonaparte and plenty of the Squire,
And for to fight the Frenchman I did not much desire;
But I did bash their baggonets because they came arrayed
To straighten out the crooked road an English drunkard made,
Where you and I went down the lane with ale-mugs in our hands,
The night we went to Glastonbury by way of Goodwin Sands.
The nonhuman portion of the Annex, however, is a good deal more topologically interesting, and impossible to navigate by anybody who is more than three feet tall. Recent advances in drone technology have allowed the British government to finally adequately map the area, which is apparently a three-dimensional crazy-quilt of passageways, gently pulsing ‘buildings,’ bizarre-looking floating objects that move with purpose and glow faintly blue, and a general hum of activity that seems to center around a slowly spinning globe of liquid metal that occasionally flickers with the obligatory lightning flashes that one gets with this sort of thing.
Summon/Control/Create Sunsent [GURPS]
Summon_Control_Create Sunsent – Google Docs
Summon/Control/Create Sunsent
This set of spells is used to summon, control, and create Sunsents, or ‘sunlight’ elementals. Mechanically, the spells are equivalent to the Air Elemental spells found on pages 27-28 of GURPS Magic; use Light College spells when determining prerequisites. Interestingly, Sunsents are not morally neutral: they react badly to evil magic and acts, and will retaliate, if possible.
The Third Edition Unknown Armies RPG is hitting mailboxes! Including mine.
My Kickstarter deluxe copy of the Third Edition Unknown Armies RPG is here. And it is pretty. So very, very pretty:
The GM screen magnetically locks to become a case for the books, because Kickstarter. I am going to enjoy reading my physical copy…
Creature seed: Torquigener albomaculosus occultarum.
Torquigener albomaculosus occultarum – Google Docs
Torquigener albomaculosus occultarum
This particular fish was first ‘discovered’ in 2013, off of the coast of Japan. Sort of. In boring, mundane terms it’s a species of pufferfish whose males attract mates by drawing remarkably symmetrical and elaborate patterns in the sand. Torquigener albomaculosus occultarum will even decorate the pattern with pieces of shell and seafloor debris; it is presumed that all of this is due to the usual blind, aimless iterations of the evolutionary process.
Continue reading Creature seed: Torquigener albomaculosus occultarum.
DEX [GURPS 4E]
DEX [1]
Used to be, people assumed that ‘reality shard’ was just Infinity, Unlimited’s way of saying “something weird and tangible that we can’t really explain.” Then it turned out that when you broke a reality shard — which was at first assumed to be almost impossible, until field teams started doing so on a regular basis* — you were usually left with about a couple dozen bits of crystallized… reality? Luck? Potential? Whatever it was, the bits could themselves be implanted in mundane items, to be used up later.
This revelation significantly changed Infinity’s cost-benefit analyses on when destroying reality shards were justified.