Category: RPGS

Forjas Taurus “Arpão” Deck-Mounted Mechanical-Action Ballista [Day After Ragnarok]

Needed to practice my Savage Worlds crunchy bit writeup skills a bit.

Forjas Taurus “Arpão” Deck-Mounted Mechanical-Action Ballista – Google Docs

Forjas Taurus “Arpão” Deck-Mounted Mechanical-Action Ballista

[The Day After Ragnarok]

 

The Brazilian firearms company Forjas Taurus has been working on these monster-killers since just after 1945, thanks to a series of what turned out be prescient dreams suffered by the board of directors.  The Arpão is a fairly ingenious weapon: it’s basically a ship-mounted ballista that uses a small diesel motor to cock the swing arm that fires its forearm-thick bolts.  Interestingly, the Arpão is also designed to be cocked by hand – well, by using a hydraulic jack.  It’s obviously much slower to reload that way, but an experienced crew can still put out a decent rate of fire.

Continue reading Forjas Taurus “Arpão” Deck-Mounted Mechanical-Action Ballista [Day After Ragnarok]

Quote of the Day, This Is Great News About The Cyberpunk Video Game edition.

Creator Mike Pondsmith is actively working with CD Projekt Red on the Cyberpunk 2077 game:

“My wife told me that these guys in Poland wrote to us and said they wanted to do a Cyberpunk game,” says Pondsmith. “They told me that the game was really important to them back in the Iron Curtain days – back then, they had Cyberpunk and communism. What impressed us was not just their capabilities and their well-organized toolsets, but that they knew and loved the material. I said, let’s do this thing.”

“I go over there pretty regularly,” says Pondsmith. “I’ll probably go back in the next couple of months. I’m in a room with a hundred people, all firing ideas back and forth. We jump up and down on the systems and see how well they work. I really got lucky.”

Also: mayyyyybe more tabletop Cyberpunk.  That could be a thing.

Campaign Seed: The Great Drone Wars of 800 AD.

Yes, it’s mildly awful. Or at least the implications are.  Gotta give the PCs a suitably awful Ultimate Big Bad to aim for, right?

The Great Drone Wars of 800 AD – Google Docs

 

The Great Drone Wars of 800 AD

 

Well, it’s like this. Time travel is possible, you can change the past, but it doesn’t effect anything that happens back in your home time period.  The nations of the world — at least, the ones whose governments survived any number of revelations by people raiding the recent past for evidence of awkward or illegal shenanigans — have banded together to create an international organization dedicated to making sure that all the awful consequences of time travel stay strictly Downtime, and never impacts Uptime (currently 2057 AD) at all.  OK? OK.

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Item Seed: Ozone Pills.

…You know, I should just write this up as a short story.  After reading more about ozone, of course.

Ozone Pills – Google Docs

Ozone Pills

 

Ah, Mad Science.  It’s like regular science, only the explosions are judged by their aesthetics. Or pyrotechnics. Or possibly their ability to dissolve sand.  And so it goes with Ozone Pills.  These particular bio-metaphysical pills were designed by Doctor Archibald Harriman Cheverly-Button, Baronet of Woodly-on-the-Avon. As you may have guessed, the good doctor was called mad at university, and he spent the rest of his very long life proving them right.  The man was an admittedly inspired chemist, but: he had the bad habit of never checking secondary effects.

Continue reading Item Seed: Ozone Pills.

Item Seed: the Affinity Polygraph.

Yes, I find it a bit alarming as a game concept, too.

Affinity Polygraph – Google Docs

The Affinity Polygraph

 

There is a saying among those involved in espionage and such-like activities: “What you do not know, you cannot reveal.”  This device was designed to circumvent that rule of thumb.  Note ‘was:’ it is 99.99% likely that every version of it was destroyed, and thrown into a blast furnace — right alongside of the bodies of its creators, as well as any documentation whatsoever that might have been useful for reverse-engineering it.  And then the more patriotic and/or idealistic of the people involved in the blast furnace thing probably murdered everybody else working on the cleanup project, dumped them into the blast furnace, and then shot themselves.  It’s that kind of item.

Continue reading Item Seed: the Affinity Polygraph.

GURPS Infinite Worlds: Breckinridge [GURPS]

Had to revise this a bit: it was too much show-your-work.

Breckinridge, 1863 – Google Docs

Breckinridge

There are surprisingly few timelines where the United States does not have a Civil War at some point.  On Quantum 7’s Breckinridge, they’ve avoided it so far — but as the 1864 election looms, it would appear that something is going to happen, and soon.  The compromises that kept the Democrats unified enough in 1860 to win the election all died with Vice President Stephen Douglas: today, President John Breckinridge is loathed by half his party, but his refusal to stand aside in the upcoming election worries a lot of people. Including those on Homeline: they know how the story can end.

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The not-WEG’s long-awaited Galaxy Guide 13: Rogue One RPG supplement.

Hey, did you enjoy seeing those pictures of the Rogue One crew that were drawn in West End Games’ Star Wars RPG’s style?

Continue reading The not-WEG’s long-awaited Galaxy Guide 13: Rogue One RPG supplement.

I am contemplating reviving an old In Nomine project.

No, not the kind of infamous Tattered Symphony one from WAY back in the day: it was a group effort, the files are scattered and I don’t remember who wrote some of them, and to be honest parts of it aged hideously (it was mostly done pre-9/11, which should give you a hint). What I was actually thinking of was my half-developed Matter of Poughkeepsie; I think that I could maybe finish it, because who knows when new In Nomine content is coming out?  Mind you, this would be strictly for fun, and for when I’m not working on stuff for money*. Which is less time than I’d like.

Thoughts, folks?  It’s for a game system that most of my regular readers don’t even play, to be honest. That might make it not really cost-effective to do, alas.

Moe Lane

*I’m confident that I can’t put any of it – or other licensed material – on Patreon, and I’m not going to even try.

RIP, Loren Wiseman.

This is sad news:

I’m familiar with him from both GURPS Traveller and Twilight 2000: I may even still have his T2000 adventure Going Home around here somewhere, although I sent off a lot of my older gaming stuff to Iraq a while back to help out a RPG convention that needed games for the troops. My condolences and good wishes to his family and loved ones.

If you Kickstartered 7th Sea Second Edition, check your email.

The PDF for Pirate Nations just dropped.  It’s not yet released to the general public, but if you backed the Kickstarter above $40 you should be getting a copy.  On a personal note… this isn’t the one that immortalizes my wife, alas.  Not that her character was a pirate.  Her character punched pirates.  Until they were good, or at least quiet.