Review: Legacy--Life Among the Ruins...and more.

Okay, so I haven't been posting very actively lately.  I'm going to blame it on...let's see...too much gaming on Roll20, a welcome uptick in in-person gaming, and Netflix.  Also, I purchased several more gaming books which I'm slowly working my way through.

One of my latest acquisitions is Legacy--Life Among the Ruins by James Iles.  I came across this game while browsing all the games I could find at DriveThruRPG.com which use the Apocalypse Engine.  I bought another game "Powered by the Apocalyse" a little while ago (Dungeon World, see my review here) and was intrigued by the mechanics and its fresh approach to gaming.  I've been wanting to run some sort of sci-fi game to balance all the fantasy and superhero gaming my group does and so I bought Legacy and the two expansions: Legacy--Echoes of the Fall and Legacy--Mirrors in the Ruins.  I got all three pdfs for under US$20 so that's less than one typical print book for the whole set.

Legacy is set in a not-too-far future after civilization has collapsed.  The game does not lay out any specific timeline or even a specific location on earth.  There is mention of stories passed down by grandparents and great grandparents.  It could be that the very oldest people around (90+) still remember the pre-fall world, or maybe it's a generation or two beyond that, depending on what suits the GM's concept best.  But it's not so far back that everything old has crumbled.  There are still a few working vehicles, weapons, tools, and machines around.

Players play both a single character, as one expects in an RPG, but also that character's family.  There are eight character classes and five types of families.  Because this is a PbtA game, there are Moves which represent what you can do.  Each class has a set of unique Moves it can perform but so does each family.  Characters have four stats but families have three: Reach, Grasp, and Mood.  Reach is the family's influence in the wider world; Grasp is the family's ability hold onto what it has; and Mood is the family's overall well-being.  A family also has points of Tech which can be hoarded or spent.  An average family is posited to be 20-30 able-bodied adults.  Interacting with other families in your area is intended to be a feature of any campaign.

Another feature of Legacy is "Ages".  Ages allow you to move the game time forward, apparently by a couple generations.  There is a move for this called The Age Turns, the roll for which is modified by your family's Mood.  This feature may not appeal to all groups but it is a nice addition to the PbtA system overall and could easily be adapted for making other campaigns multi-generational.

As noted above I also bought the two expansions, Legacy--Echoes of the Fall and Legacy--Mirrors in the Ruins.  Echoes of the Fall adds two new family types and one more PC class.  Mirrors in the Ruins adds four very science-fictiony families and a new PC class to go with each.  While the main rules and Echoes are about humans in a near future Mirrors goes much farther into the realm of science fiction and I would definitely use it in a Legacy game to spice things up.

Review: Call of Catthulhu, Book 1: the Nekomonicon

It finally arrived!  I say finally because back in early June by friend Bill got me Call of Catthulhu as a birthday gift (because he that sort of awesome dude) on RPGnow.  But then...nothing happened.  It just sort of disappeared into cyberspace.  Happily it recently reappeared and I eagerly dived in.

Catthulhu is a very rules-light game where you play ordinary cats (well, if any cat can ever really be called "ordinary") having adventures opposing the forces of Lovecraftian wrongness.  The GM is called the Cat Herder, which is perfect (or should I say purrfect?).  There are five roles (classes): Catcrobat, Pussyfoot, Scrapper, Tiger Dreamer, and Twofootologist.  These roles are combined with a Breed and a Tale.  Breed is whether your cat is feral, a house cat, or a show cat.  Each combination of the five roles and three breeds as a couple background tales or stories to choose from.  For instance a Pussyfoot/Feral could have the background of Pitiful Beggar or Friend to All. These stories add talents to your cat.  For instance, a Friend to All will "make a circuit of many associates, from fellow street cats to friendly restaurant workers to house cats in windows to kindly old ladies.  A saucer of milk here, a place to sleep in a catpile there, some choice scraps and life works our pretty well for this free spirit."

The mechanic is very simple, basically rolling 2d6 and seeing how many successes (roll of 3 to 6) you get.  Apparently there was a boxed set with "cat dice" where the 1 and 2 sides are each a sad cat face and the 3 to 6 sides are happy cat faces.  The difficulty of the task determines how many happy cats you need, plus there are some special situations involving an extra die, etc.  Injuries are a simple three-level model with injured, badly injured, and dying--and, of course, you do get Nine Lives.

There are two other books which go with this 40-page basic book.  I haven't read them (yet) but from the descriptions you'd probably need at least the GM book to run a game.  The third book is a selection of settings from vikings to spaceships.

Bottom line: this is a fun game, but you might need at least one other book to play.

Review: The Petal Hack

Okay, so I was perusing the cornucopia of gaming goodness which is DriveThruRPG, drawn there by their "Christmas in July" sale, and purchased several reasonable priced items.  One item I obtained, particularly reasonably priced in that it's free, was The Petal Hack.  The Petal Hack authored by Brett Slocum is a hack of the old Empire of the Petal Throne (EPT) game using The Black Hack rules.  The pdf is just 64 pages and yet it provides just about everything to play.  The only thing lacking is in-depth information about this unique campaign world but the introduction has links to several excellent sites which provide plenty of resources.  The Petal Hack takes all the cool elements from EPT and mates them up nicely with the simple mechanics from The Black Hack.

I bought the original EPT back in the late '70s.  I still have my boxed set with the extra full-color maps printed on thick plastic like shower curtains.  Alas, back then I was only able to talk my players into playing it once.  This version of the game is simple enough to jump into that I could probably get my current group to try it as an off-night game.  Brett did an amazing job in not only converting EPT to TBH, but also in fitting everything into a mere 64 pages, including cover, legal, etc.

I definitely recommend checking out The Petal Hack.

Servants of the Cinder Queen for Dungeon World - via Belgium

Okay, so I jumped in to back a project by this crazy guy in Belgium called Bastien 'Acritarche' Wauthoz to do an edited and translated version of Servants of the Cinder Queen (La Serviteurs de la Reine des Cendres).  I saw this as an opportunity to 1) get an interesting-sounding adventure to show me a bit more about how Dungeon World is supposed to work, 2) practice my Belgian (which I was pleasantly surprised to find is remarkably similar to French), and 3) support some indie type gaming efforts out there.

My Phat Lootz

The project was funded through Ulule, which is just like Kickstarter.  For 25 Euros I got the adventure and an extra "forward" with some nice little additions and play aids tailored to the adventure.  The project funded quickly and I got my loot in a very reasonable amount of time.  One is always a bit nervous tossing money into one of these projects but Bastien came through for us like a champion.  He provided very good updates as things went along to keep us informed and excited.

The book is 24 pages plus the cover.  The art by Keny Widjaja is great.  It has a cartoony feel which I think goes well with the general vibe of Dungeon World and gives the story a unique feel.  The couple of maps are hand-drawn style which I have come to appreciate and enjoy.

The adventure is the classic "villagers are disappearing, find the bad guys are behind it, explore their lair, save the world" type, but in a very compact, clean package.  There are only a couple maps and a diagram to link the locations together, the rest being Theatre of the Mind.  There are only a few "monsters" so you don't get lost in pages of stats, and the two big baddies are explained in just enough detail.

After reading through this I now have a much better idea of what a Dungeon World adventure should look and feel like.  And, more importantly, I think this style of game works well with my actual DMing style.  I'll see if I can convince some of my players to try it out some time.

Kuro, a Japanese horror RPG

So my good friend Bill very kindly gave me a gift card for my birthday from our local FLGS, Games and Stuff.  I love going in there because it's full of exactly the sort of cool nerdy game stuff I love, but I hate going in there because it's full of exactly the sort of cool nerdy game stuff I love.  Thus, having a gift card helped save me from myself.  After wandering for a bit I decided I should get something new and different rather than adding to my Pathfinder or D&D archives.  Then I spotted this game, Kuro from Cubicle 7.

Kuro (exercise bike not included)

I love the cover and was immediately captivated by the blurb:

The year is 2048, and something dark has returned to Japan. With an international blockade set up around the beleaguered country, there is no escape. To ignore the horror will only delay the inevitable, but do you have the strength to face the nightmares?  Kuro is a developing game setting that mixes a dark near future with unremitting Japanese horror.

I was pleasantly surprised because it sounded a lot like a game I ran in the early 2000s I called Neo Tokyo using a mashup of some homebrew mechanics, skill trees ripped from Paranoia, and hacked anthro races from Teenage Mutant Turtles and Other Strangeness.  The setting was a near-future Tokyo in the aftermath of a mysterious catastrophe, full of Yakuza, aliens, robots, furries, interdimensional wierdness, and a dollop of the supernatural.

Naturally I bought Kuro immediately.

The basic mechanics are a d6 dice pool using dice from your attribute plus any dice for a relevant skill.  One very appropriately Asian twist is that fours don't count because the word for the number 4 sounds like the word for the word for death.  (I was a bit surprised here because I thought the taboo on the number four was a purely Chinese thing.  FYI, kuro/黑 means black or dark/darkness.)

Once I wrap up my current Pathfinder-based fantasy game I'll see if I can pitch a bit of Kuro to my group and revive my old Neo Tokyo campaign.

Review: Ronden Marr Explorer's Guide

I've been following Jesse Morgan's work on his Ronden Marr setting for a while now.  Jesse's Ronden Marr setting is the eponymous dwarf city (probably the last city in the world) plus the Undercavern below it.   I did a review earlier on the Ronden Marr Campaign Setting Player's Guide.  Like the earlier book this one is also system neutral which I consider a big plus.  I've never felt like I really grasped D&D's Underdark as a place to adventure and thus avoided it.  This guide seemed like a potentially fresh approach and I wanted to see Jesse's take on the concept.

First off, a quick bit about the art.  The first thing I do with any gaming product is jump all over the art.  In this case Jesse did all the art himself, which I think is pretty cool.  Here are a couple nice examples:

The intro with historical background leads you into the setting well.  The content is presented as a compilation of information brought back from earlier expeditions, many of which were hideous disasters.  There is a well-written section "A Feel for the Undercavern" which did indeed provide a good feel--and without resorting to a lot of system crunch you'd have to unpack mentally.  The maps are great but don't come with a grid or scale.  That's excellent for showing them to the players, especially since the earlier expeditions often weren't able to map carefully, but slightly inconvenient for the sort of DM who wants full details.  A set of DM's versions at the back with square or hex grids would be a good addition for later.  The locations are all pretty cool.  Descriptions don't go into heavy detail but give you a clear idea of what's there--well, except for a couple weird mystery places such as the creepy Isle of Nyares.  There's just enough detail to work with while staying away from specific system crunch.  Also, all the major locations have their own map or illustration.
Jesse surprised me (in a good way) by including an environmental danger called "reality fissures": "Throughout The Undercavern, there are places where the fabric of reality breaks down. These fissures lead to other planes and demi-planes, or even into the magical fabric of reality itself."  These allow for fun random old-school weirdness in a region where multiple "dungeons of the mad wizard" would make no sense.

The book includes several intelligent races/societies living down in the depths, unique creatures, and impressive sections on mushrooms and lichens which provide great information on dangers and benefits of the many types.  The information on mushrooms and lichens isn't just for flavor: these items serve as gatherable resources (if the PCs can properly identify them) to keep parties supplied down in the middle of nowhere.

Finally, I loved the labeled diagram/drawing of Rock Formations (Appendix C), a fun visual catalog of underground geophysical features.


So if you want to see an approach to doing an Underdark this book is a good, usable guide.  It's reasonably priced so grab a copy at DriveThruRPG.

The Morning After, A Review of Dungeon World

Okay, so I've been researching one of the "new" OSR games out there: Dungeon World (DW).  I first became interested in it from David Guyll's Points of Light blog where he posted about the Sundered World campaign setting (to be reviewed later) for DW.  At first I assumed it was another OSR clone game, perhaps like Swords & Wizardry with a few indie touches.  A bit more reading led to a mix of excitement and confusion.  I knew it was leading me on but it seemed like the sort of game I wanted to be led on by.  The free download materials on the DW site were intriguing but I just couldn't quite grasp how DMing was supposed to work.  Since I usually DM (and like it) this was a potential deal breaker.  Finally, I decided I'd just have to take the plunge and buy the darn thing.

At first Dungeon World lulls you into a false sense of security.  It is indeed an indie take on the earlier editions of D&D, more AD&D than OD&D.  You have the traditional six stats, eight classes (bard, cleric, druid, fighter, paladin, ranger, thief, wizard), and three races (human, elf, dwarf).  Stats come from placing an array (but there are optional rules if you wish to roll), then you pick your race and class.  The rules as written only allow one of each class per party but it's the first rule I'd toss.  It's a dick move.  Why force a player to play something they don't want when you can just print out another ranger or whatever? But I digress.  So far, so good

Then it starts showing you it's kinkier side by introducing the "move" concept.  There are basic moves, like Defy Danger (all saving throw types rolled into one) or Hack & Slash (make a melee attack).  There are Special Moves for leveling up, carousing, taking watch, etc.  And finally there are the many class moves unique to each class.  Basically these are like class abilities, spells, and feats blended into one mechanical concept.  The moves for each class cover the sorts of things you'd expect but with a few twists and surprises here and there.

Okay, so a little different but so far nothing your mom would disapprove of as long as you're home by dinner.  Then DW lures you into a conceptual back alley, by revealing that all moves are resolved not with a nice, clean-cut d20 roll but one of those slightly sketchy 2d6 rolls.  All rolls in DW (except damage) are 2d6, usually with an appropriate attribute modifier applied, and expressed like "roll + INT".  The basic rule is that on 10+ you succeed, on 7-9 you succeed but there is a downside, and on 6 or less you fail and often suffer a penalty.  Spellcasting is a real departure from D&D, this one most welcome, where if you roll 10+ you cast successfully but do not expend the spell.  It's bit odd, you say to yourself, but your dad's Traveler used 2d6 so no need to freak out or anything.

Then DW suddenly sticks a big needle into your neck to inject you with something called DM Moves, and tells you to stop struggling and relax.  After carefully explaining to your gullible face for many pages about how moves are where you call out the move you want to use and roll 2d6 modified, it explains that there are no rolls for DM moves.  What a fool you were to not see it coming.  If only you'd listened to your mom this time.  Essentially DM moves are all plot twists (including dealing out damage from attackers!?) which you throw at your players like anvils or banana peels to confound them.  These come in response to player actions and questions but also spark them.  DM moves are very generic, like "Put someone in a spot", "Separate them", or "Reveal an unwelcome truth".  Each of these generic moves is then briefly described in an equally generic way.  You start getting a bit light headed and disoriented from the lack of structure, but also a vague euphoria from a rush freedom you've never quite experienced before.

I rolled around in a daze for a while trying to grasp how DM moves really worked.  There were some guides and discussions here and there on line but they only helped things briefly swim into focus, like a friend slapping your face and yelling something like "cake pup" over and over.  Eventually I came to, all feverish and sweaty, and wasn't sure these were the same underwear I'd left the house in this morning.

To clear my head I moved on to the sections on monsters, which are grouped by general environment and delightfully simple in description.  Finally I stumbled into the very cool bit on Fronts.  Fronts are how to build the threats which drive the plot and in a neatly structured way.  After the bad trip brought on by the GM moves Fronts was like plunging one's head in a bucket of cold water and then sitting down in a diner for a big stack of pancakes.

Fronts are a really nice concept for building plots, both for adventures and for larger campaign elements.  There are Dangers, which have Impending Dooms, Grim Portents, a Cast, etc.  I think this is the best thing I've ever seen for showing someone how to put together adventures and campaigns. I almost forgot all about the puncture wound in the side of my neck from that earlier chapter I'd rather not talk about right now.  Along with the Fronts are rules for characterizing "steadings" which are the populated places in your campaign world.  These range in size from little villages to large cities.  Again, the concepts here are absolutely great and usable with any rules set.  For me the rules for fronts and steadings alone were worth the price of the book.

So the bottom line is that I enjoyed reading Dungeon World, will definitely be using the fronts and steading rules, and would like to try running a game with it.  I'm just still really not sure how the DM moves work in actual practice and I want my underwear back.

Review: Technology Guide for Pathfinder

Okay, so this was something of an impulse buy for me.  It's been on my wishlist for a while but I doubted I'd ever use it, except maybe a Pathfinder-based game of Hulks & Horrors.  But the friendly (and devious) people at Paizo offered a discount code for 10% off and, well, you can't just not use a discount code--it'd be like throwing money away, wouldn't it?  So I took the plunge on two of their "science fiction" books, the Technology Guide and People of the Stars.

The Technology Guide is mostly lots and lots of equipment but includes good general rules for technology, including crafting, making hybrid magical/technological items, and handling "timeworn" technology.  Timeworn technology is a nice touch.  The book assumes you will probably be using it to add ancient technological devices to a fantasy campaign.  Older technology will be low on charges and have quirks after all this time.  There is a nice set of tables for characterizing each item so the players never know what exactly will be wrong with this particular frenzychip.  Actually I quite liked several of the device names including frenzychip, cranial bomb, and zero rifle.  In addition to the expected weapons and armor you also have a wide selection of medical stuff, a few cyber enhancement items, comms gear, and more.

For characters there are technology-related feats and traits, several archetypes, and one prestige class called the technomancer. Finally there are some really cool high-tech materials and a quick look at high-tech environmental hazards and traps.

Note that missing from this tome of wonder are robots, vehicles, and starships.  I think some robots appear in the bestiaries and there are definitely several in the Iron Gods adventure path books (worth buying for ideas on running a hybrid fantasy/sci-fi campaign).  Androids are covered in the People of the Stars book as a playable race rather than a technology item.

Review: People of the Stars for Pathfinder

I'm not a big fan of mixing fantasy and sci-fi in gaming.  I see them as two very distinctive genres and typically I want to be immersed in either one of the other during play.  But a little while ago I had a subscription to Paizo's adventure paths and got the "Iron Gods" one, which is an extended homage to the old D&D module "Expedition to the Barrier Peaks".  I got it just to see how they'd do an entire campaign of mixed fantasy and sci-fi.  Overall I liked it but still wasn't sure I'd want to run that type of game.  Paizo has a couple companion products out to support it.  I've had them on wish list, but as lower priorities.  Then yesterday Paizo put out their "rainy day" sale for 10% off and I decided to take the plunge, buying their "Pathfinder Player Companion - People of the Stars" and the "Technology Guide".

"People of the Stars" is only 38 pages, cover to cover, but it does what it says. You get four full player races, a couple less detailed races, a good selection of thematic traits and archetypes, sidebars on each of the planets in the solar system for Paizo's campaign universe (properly detailed in their "Distant Worlds" book, which I recommend if the topic interests you), some magic items, and brief rules on gravity, vacuum, and other planetary/space conditions.  There is tantalizing mention of the Dark Tapestry, an evil alien interstellar conspiracy, but you'll need one of the Iron Gods books for details on that.

I liked two of the races (android and kasathas) but wasn't exited by the other two--but that's just a personal thing. The other bits were only okay I thought.  So overall I was mildly disappointed but don't feel I wasted my cash.  I'm considering how to run a campaign set in the D&D ethereal plane, which is similar to a interstellar setting, and this book is good food for thought towards that end.

Review: Towns of the Inner Sea, for Pathfinder's world of Golarion

As I've mentioned before my favorite RPG books are setting books, from full-on campaign worlds down to city or wilderness settings.  Towns of the Inner Sea from Paizo for their Golarion setting world is one of my recent buys in this category.  The book presents six towns but also starts with a great listing of towns already detailed in earlier modules or adventure paths which is a really nice touch.  There is also a Golarion overview map showing you where the six are, which is very handy if you aren't familiar with that setting world.

Each town starts with a nice bit of art with a panoramic view of the town.  These are great for showing the players as they arrive.  Then there's an overview/background section to lead you into the various numbered locations.  Pretty much every single location has interesting details, an NPC, and plot ideas. There are also sidebars with more general adventure hooks, rumors, and a fully fleshed out major NPC at the end.  All this content is great.  You can easily run a bunch of adventures in and around any of these towns.  I particularly liked the desert pilgrimage town of Solku as a place to start a campaign.

The one feature which was disappointing is the maps of the towns.  As with the Neverwinter Campaign Setting book for D&D 4E I reviewed earlier, four of the towns as mapped out are just too small to encompass all the activity going on.  The town of Pezzack sounds like a bustling place and looks pretty cool in the opening panoramic view.  But the town as mapped is way smaller than shown in the panorama--it's only a quarter-mile across.  Unless all those buildings are very tall (and even then) there just isn't enough room for all the people and activities described.  Solku and Issurian look about right as mapped but I'd re-do and enlarge the maps of the other four before I'd use them in actual play.

Trying podcasts again...this time successfully

Okay, so the first couple times I tried a gaming podcast I thought they were terrible.  They all seemed to be a random bunch of dudes (always an all-male group) rambling about random crap.  There was a lot of chuckling over in-jokes which only meant anything to them, references to people only they knew, etc.  I was totally put off and moved on to other things.  More recently I decided to look into podcasts again as something to listen to while I work out.  I was fortunate to give Play on Target and Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff a try.

Both of these productions are packed with goodness.  Play on Target episodes typically center around a main theme for discussion, such as running long campaigns.  Ken and Robin cover multiple topics, moving between "huts" (topical areas) over the course of the broadcast.  Ken and Robin also toss in an advertisement or two (done by the two gentlemen themselves in typical fashion) for products they are involved in.  Both are free from the websites or from iTunes to check them out!

Santa brought me...Super Dungeon Explore!

Okay, actually it was my very thoughtful wifey and daughter who went to the slightly scary game store and got me this fun game.

I've been looking at this game for a while now.  It looked fun but my gaming group is mostly into tabletop RPGs and computer gaming.  Board and card games usually only come out on the occasional "off night" when we don't have a quorum for one of our RPG campaigns.  Thus I have avoided buying board games in general, despite the fact that it was historical wargame board games that first took me from "playing with plastic soldiers" to games with actual rules and stuff.  But this Thanksgiving my family surprised me by suddenly being interested in playing a game.  So my wish list for Christmas this year was board games we could all play, including Super Dungeon Explore.  After excitedly unwrapping SDE and giving the rules a quick scan we ran a game and a half.  My quick scan of the rules just before and during play was kind of a fail so we actually missed out on a lot of the key rules but it was fun anyway.

As for the game itself, the first thing you'll notice is that the production values are very high.  The miniatures are excellent, there are plenty of dice for everyone, loads of marker counters, and all the dungeon boards are double sided.  You will definitely not be disappointed with any of the components.  The rules are not complex, but the rule book is not well organized and there is no index which leads to a lot of re-reading to find where that mention of topic X is hidden in the text.  Play is fast and fun.

So now I have to decide whether to take a plunge back into miniatures painting...I'd love to paint up the fun minis but my eyesight isn't really up to it anymore.

Review: D&D 4E Neverwinter Campaign Setting

Okay, so I stopped by my friendly local game store recently and picked up a couple books, including this one.  As I've mentioned before I love setting books no matter whether it's for a town, city, region, or entire campaign world.

This book covers the town of Neverwinter in the D&D Forgotten Realms world.  Well, actually it covers the town and the immediate region around it as well as a jaunt to the Shadowfell and the borders of faraway Thay.  The locations in town and nearby are given just enough detail to work with but almost not enough in some cases.  Several groups of baddies are included with key personalities and their on-going plans described.  Overall it's a great book for starting a campaign.  It even has a very nice pull-out poster map of Neverwinter, with the material plane version on one side and the shadow plane version on the other.

Even though it was published for D&D 4th Edition there aren't a lot of crunchy edition-specific rules bits inside.  For the majority of the creatures it simply provides references to earlier works.  This is good because it cuts down on space wasted repeating information you might already have in the other books and because it makes it reasonable generic so you can use it with other rules.

There were a couple things I wasn't totally happy with.  The main one is that although it is a setting guide with lots of locations, there are only a couple maps.  The maps they do include are great but more are needed.   Maybe I'm spoiled with what Paizo usually provides in their books and adventure paths but I can see GMs doing a lot of work making up maps. For example, there is a lost dwarven "Moria" type underground city complex which is described as huge but there no map and only a few locations are described.

Another thing was that descriptions of the groups of baddies give the impression that they each have a small army but this book is meant to take characters from level 1 through level 10.  Unless the baddies have a lot of easily killed minion types, which is apparently not the case, I'm not sure how they're supposed to fully defeat them.  Also, the town itself is beset by multiple violent threat groups and sources.  The impression is that there is almost constant violence of one sort or another.  But when you look at the map Neverwinter is obviously not very big--and one quarter of it is uninhabitable and another quarter is partially occupied by a group of orcs.  When you match up the threat group activities with the size of the town as shown it's pretty clear it wouldn't last long.

Now, on to read the huge Southlands campaign seting book...

Review: Rogue Trader

Okay, so I've been looking for a good go-to set of sci-fi RPG rules for a very long time.  Since 1978 in fact.  I started with Traveler, but it was too limited, too "hard sci-fi", and the concepts were boring.  Quite a bit later I came across d20 Modern and d20 Future.  This was better and catered to concepts I wanted to use but suffered a bit from being kind of "d20 stodgy".

A couple years ago I downloaded some free Warhammer 40,000 (WH 40K) quick-start rules (or other free thingy like that) and ran a decent one-shot about a group of imperial inquisition troubleshooter types arriving on a frozen mining planet and investigating chaos tainted trouble down the mines.  I wasn't super excited about the rules mechanics themselves but the WH 40K universe clearly had a lot of potential for the sort of "non-hard" sci-fi gaming I was seeking.

I didn't buy the books then but I've been watching the new books coming out from Fantasy Flight Games and putting them on my wishlists.  Finally they came out with Rogue Trader and I decided to take the plunge.

Now, going in I was expecting a sort of "Traveler 40K" game: a bunch of random-ass WH 40K types goes around in a small ship trading, pirating, exploring, adventuring etc.  But the book makes it abundantly clear that your little band is much, much more than than.  A Rogue Trader is a unique and powerful person possessing a Warrant thingy to be a Rogue Trader and only people with some Serious Background can get one.  And being a Rogue Trader implies that you are part of a larger organization with resources (represented by a Profit rating) and you are out to accomplish Big Things.

It's like you're supposed to be the East India Company in space, or a space-faring version of Sir Francis Drake on the Spanish Main.  I was actually pleased to see this relatively British take on things.  Most RPGs are American made and tend to use "the frontier" and the Old West as the models for space.  There's a lot of that "rugged individual" and "manifest destiny" type crap built in.  This is refreshingly different.

Character generation has a really nice system where you use a cascading Path chart to work out your character's background and those choices add to skills, etc. which reflect that background.  I like it a lot.  It's simple but effective.  Then you have eight career paths (classes) to choose from. These are all very useful for the setting and absolutely 40K flavored.

But it still left me with the question of just what is this game about, exactly.  Okay so we have this small group of spacer-types in one ship--like the TV show Firefly--but we're supposed to be out colonizing planets, wiping out pirates, and other Big Things--more like Star Trek(?).  Even the ship is supposed to have a crew of hundreds, if not thousands of people.  Maybe the game is actually supposed to play a bit like Star Trek, where you have a big ship with a big crew doing Big Things, but the stories are all about the handful of lead characters.  So, more "Star Trek 40K" than "Firefly 40k"?

For the campaign, the game master is supposed to set up Endeavors, such as "Establish a Cold Trade From Dead Xenos Worlds".  These are usually divided in to three phases (sub-adventures) which lead to accomplishment of the Endeavor once all three are completed.  Naturally there is room for side adventures, interacting with NPCs, etc. but it's all on the way to accomplishing your Endeavor.  A series of Endeavors, related or not, is the course of the campaign.  The book includes an example Endeavor, NPC opponents, and campaign setting to start you off.  It is very self-contained.  You can easily run an entire campaign with just this one book.

Bottom line: I like this book.  I like the career paths, the background Path chart, the campaign setting included with it, and the whole Endeavor concept is way beyond my (somewhat unimaginative) initial expectations.

So, I watched this Korean pirate movie last night...

...and it was suprisingly very good.  Let me backtrack a bit first and mention that I generally find pirate-themed stuff to be kind of hokey or campy.  All the clothing looks like Halloween costumes.  There always has to be some guy with an eyepatch, some guy with a pegleg or hook, etcetera.  If it's done well, like in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, it's entertaining and I'm quite happy to watch.  But I generally prefer to sail clear of them.

So last light I jumped on Netflix to find something to watch.  For weeks (maybe months) now this Korean pirate movie called, um, "The Pirates" (duh) has been lurking in my suggestions and daring me to do something about it.  So I figured okay, let's just get this over with.  What's the worst that could happen?   Well, THIS is what happened: [Warning: contains cool images from random internet sites!]

And it was really good!  Take three parts classic Korean historical/war/court drama/martial arts stuff, carefully blend in one part western pirate tropes, and serve immediately.  Lots of sailing around, cannons, duels, guy with eye patch, wacky sidekicks, dude with mohawk and scar, gunpowder blowing up, romance, awesome pirate warrior princess, a missing imperial seal from Ming-dynasty China, and even a baby whale are in there.

Okay, we got our characters all rolled up!

I think if I ever run a pirate type game I'll have to sandblast the traditional campiness off the genre and do up a properly re-skinned version like this movie.

Movie: The Admiral: Roaring Currents

Okay, so I had some time to movie watch tonight and spotted this Korean film called "The Admiral: Roaring Currents".  It is based on the actual battle of Myeongnyang in 1597. 



Now, in the past I've found Korean films to be hit or miss.  Either they're kind of awful or really good.  Luckily this one turned out to be one of the really good ones.  As a historical war movie you've got tons of scenes of serious-looking dudes in cool-looking armor all over the place.



  The ships were very cool and actually looked like something you might want to fight in, as opposed to some of the silly designs you see in fantasy films.


And the battle scenes were great, particularly the desperate boarding melees.

[All images from random internet sites]

Some thought on using Hero Lab at the table...

Okay, so last night we had another of our rare but much anticipated sessions of our buddy Steve's campaign.  As with most of our group's fantasy genre games we're using Pathfinder.  Our group generally likes and is comfortable with very crunchy systems like Pathfinder and Mutants & Masterminds.  Crunchiness means a lot of record-keeping and fact-checking when building and leveling characters and so Lone Wolf Development created Hero Lab is a great tool for PF.  For Steve's game, and mine to a lesser extent, we're almost all using Hero Lab for our characters.

Hero Lab is almost as massive and crunchy as Pathfinder.  It supports other games as well but I've only really used it for Pathfinder (and indirectly for Mutants & Masterminds).  So it is a great tool for managing the crunch overload of Pathfinder.  It can be used not only by players to build and level their characters but for GMs to make NPCs.  GMs can also load in the players' .por character files, sent via email or Dropbox, for reference and thus make notes real time during play, such as during combat.

But this is where Hero Lab fails to keep up.  During combat there are situational modifiers, spell modifiers, spells and arrows expended, hit points lost, hit points healed, etc.  Unfortunately all of that has to be laboriously entered by hand for each and every PC and NPC each round, round after round.  The program hold and tracks all of that very well but it's just too damn slow to operate.

Combat can be a wearying grind in may systems and Pathfinder is on the edge here.  You can fudge stuff and push things along to keep up a pace (like I usually do), or you can go by the book and make sure every T is crossed and every +1 accounted for.  Using Hero Lab naturally moves you in the direction of the T-crossing approach.  That's not a wrong thing, because the rules are actually written that way, but by actually slowing combat down Hero Lab becomes sort of an anti-aid.

I suppose the obvious cure is to go full 21st century and have every player equipped with a computing device connected to the GM's.  That way the data entry work is distributed  and all data shows on everyone's copy with only one person entering any one bit of data.  This character casts a buff, notes it as cast in Hero Lab, checks the boxes for all other characters affected, and clicks "send" or something about like that.  Almost everyone in our group has a device or could borrow one so that will work for us if the folks at Lone Wolf Development decide to add networking in the future.

Review: Ronden Marr Campaign Setting Player's Guide by Jesse Morgan

(Okay, so I need to start this review off with the disclosure that I was one of the people on Google+ providing feedback and suggestions to Jesse as he crafted this nice bit of work.  He kindly included me in the credits with the other helpers.  Although I got a pdf of the final product free from the author I bought a publication copy anyway to express my support for the project.)

Ronden Marr is a campaign setting for a fantasy RPG.  It is a generic setting not tied to any specific game system.  This first publication is the Player's Guide, a 77-page pdf available at Drivethrurpg.com.  Even though it is a player's guide it provides a complete enough description of the central setting (the underground city of Ronden Marr) that a GM could base a game on it.  Additional core documents are planned, as well as adventures and some D&D 5th Edition specific rules; there is a Patreon available if you want to help the project along.

The setting is the underground city of Ronden Marr.  Originally it was a dwarf city but a devastating calamity rendered the surface of the world too hot to inhabit.  Refugees of many other races were allowed in.  As far as its current inhabitants know this overcrowded city is the only remaining inhabited place left in the world.  The city has had a bloody history since then, with uprisings, genocide, enslavements, and now a brutally enforced peace.  Below the city is The Undercavern, a deep, dark place filled with dangerous creatures but much potential.  (I think Ronden Marr can be run as-is out of the box just fine or you could plop it into an isolated corner of your existing world with some adaptation.)

The player's guide posits that the characters will either be "consultants" who serve as oath-sworn troubleshooters for the dwarf overlords or be "freelancers" who make a living doing odd jobs which often require not asking too many questions.  There are plenty of adventure hooks to keep the players busy no matter which path they take.

It's an interesting campaign world in one compact, well-written pdf.  At just $1.99 you can't go too wrong getting yourself a copy.

Review: The Slave Trenches of Hakotep (Pathfinder adventure path)

Right, so this is the fifth book in the Mummy's Mask adventure path.  This adventure takes place in a sprawling outdoor maze of huge trenches with lots of small dungeons and outdoor encounters areas.  And all that exploring is with the goal of activating a magic tractor team to bring down the flying pyramid (did we mention there are flying pyramids?) of the main villain.  It is a major undertaking for the PCs and will tax their endurance.

The adventure actually starts with the PCs defending the city where the entire path starts from a menacing smaller flying pyramid, one of a fleet fanning out over Osirion.  This is a fun albeit small dungeon and it foreshadows the big, nasty flying pyramid in the final book in the series.

As with the other books in the series this one has an extra article revealing the background of the ancient Shory empire, who ruled from flying cities.  I've been wanting to find out more about the Shory since I first came across them in the Serpent's Skull adventure path.  So this was a very welcome inclusion.

The art throughout is excellent, as it is in the earlier books in this series.  There are also more magic items, in this case with more extensive background lore.  The fiction story continues.  I'm not sure I like having bits of fiction in these adventure paths, since it's not why I brought the product, but they are good for getting you into the atmosphere and always include a small map handy for GMing.  The monsters at the back were pretty good this time, although I'd probably only use about half of them in my games.

Bottom Line: The overall format of this adventure was a pleasant surprise and the article on the Shory was welcome extra.  I'd recommend buying it if you're at all interested.

Review: Secrets of the Sphinx (Pathfinder adventure path)

Okay, so I'm doing up reviews of the rest of the Mummy's Mask adventure path books from Paizo Publishing for their Pathfinder game.  This path is set in the part of their game world which is a fantasy version of ancient Egypt called Osirion.

This adventure is split into two parts: a sandbox hex crawl, then a huge dungeon.  The hex crawl locations were great, lots of variety to keep the players guessing and challenged about what's coming next.  Among the encounters are several interesting NPCs who could re-appear in later adventures if you wanted.  One possible problem with the hex crawl, typical to all hex crawls, is what to do if the players take it into their heads to go totally in the wrong direction and off the map.  I guess that's where the GM's creativity comes in.  The big dungeon, which is actually inside of a huge sphinx, is quite a challenge.  The encounters in here are also quite varied and will keep the players challenged and entertained (even if they don't survive). 

The book also has two extra small encounter areas which can be added to the hex crawl or any adventure.  There is a great section on curses to inflict on the PCs, a set of monsters which I actually liked this time, a bit of fiction (part four), and new items.  The major NPCs get extensive write-ups in a section at the back, which is very handy for GMs to reskin them for re-use later.  The art was excellent, as it has been in the previous three Mummy's Mask books.  I'm glad to see them continue applying ancient Egyptian themes successfully in the NPCs and creatures.  I have six of Paizo's adventure paths and this one compares very well to the others.  Some I buy just for the ideas, but I would actually run this one if I got the chance.

Bottom Line: yes, this was worth the money and I can recommend buying it if you're at all interested.