Deities & Demigods Let me set the record straight on this again. I wrote the book Deities & Demigods with some slight help from others. In doing this work I included myths from H.P. Lovecraft's works and Elric of Jack Vances works. Gary Gygax gave me Jack Vance's address and I wrote him for permission and got it because I said it would renew peoples interests in his books. I wrote to Arkham House which was in my state of Wisconsin and also got the rights to Lovecraft's material. Going forward both groups sold their rights to Chaosium in California. Lawyers from Chaosium then sent a cease and desist letter to TSR. TSR had the permissions I gave them, but they had no money for lawyers at that time. So Brian Blume decided to take out those two sections. I went crazy. I had done my homework, I had gotten ironclad permission, and TSR wasn't going to fight it. I offered to replace the two sections with new ones and was told no. There was no copyright infringement. That was 30+ years ago. Every five years or so some idiot brings up the fact that TSR was in infringement on this book. Let me tell the people of the world who bring this up that they don't have their facts straight and it irritates the hell out of me.
I have backed this, and seen the quick-start document, and I'm super excited to actually play it now. Plus, you don't get a better pitch than "Blades is a tabletop role-playing game about a crew of scoundrels in an industrial fantasy city. If you've played video games like Dishonored or Thief 2, or read stuff like the Lies of Locke Lamora, or Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos books, or Fafhrd and Gray Mouser, you probably have an idea what I'm talking about."
So a while ago I basically got the inspiration bug and jotted down this idea that's been rattling around in my head, and we did a test that very day and it went so perfectly I put everything else on hold to get this out quickly before the magic was lost. I called it PATROL.
Well, the book is finally shaping into something recognizable, and I'm starting to get excited. Somehow this will be my first "big" RPG, by virtue of the basic rules coming together in just a few days startlingly close to final form and it being very easy for me to write thousand and thousand of words on the Vietnam War.
(NOTE: Text is super not final.)
If I had to sum it up, basically it's Torchbearer meets Palladium's RECON. It's got a simple basic system (3 stats, large d6 pools, 6s are successes, skills make it so that 5s are successes), a cool incentive to behave irrationally (as status effects advance, you gain fatigue, you need to offset fatigue with victory points, players earn VPs by completing mission objectives and personal objectives, the personal objectives are dangerous and/or morally dubious) and all turns solidly represent a half-hour passing.
The result in the test games is that these search-and-destroy missions actually end up feeling like real after-action reports; burning daylight searching villages, players engaged the enemy for hours before breaking off the fight at nightfall, everyone making sure to dig foxholes to sleep in, and these weird little tragedies unfold rapidly as the game goes on. The Pragmatic soldiers execute wounded enemies after a bad firefight for the VPs, which lowers the morale of the Principled soldiers, which incentivizes them to avoid fighting, which affects the Righteous soldiers...
I've never had a game of this scale come together so quickly before and I'm super, super happy about it.
So following a test, I revamped how death is handled in PATROL.
Being a high-lethality game, in PATROL you get XP towards your next character if your remains (or your dog tags) are recovered. Keeps the party roughly level. Characters can also straight-up lose XP and degrade if they take too much Fatigue and don't get enough Victory Points.
I realized right away that, as an emergent consequence, there is actually a perverse incentive to commit suicide if shit sucks too bad. After all, you can probably get your body recovered and get a shiny new character stronger than before.
I'm interested in running a game which is based on Stephen King's Mid-World universe from the Dark Tower series. I really love the setting; a dying world, a mix of old but powerful technology with magic, and a splash of horror. I also want characters to be relying on their skills as much if not more than their ability to fight in this world.
Does anyone have any suggestions for a RPG system that would fit this world and what I want to do with it?
I think having the characters have their own motivations and goals is very important.
How does one survive let alone thrive in a place like this? What keeps you going, and what pushes you further into unsafe lands? The world is dying but by no means are you obligated to save it, whatever that means to you.
My only concern is being able to keep my players together, too much 1 on 1 time is boring for the rest of the table.
If you're hung up on this world, then take the rules of Lady Blackbird, change all the proper nouns, make characters that fit to start, and then go nuts from there.
Played a Fastaval style game called Let the World Burn last night. It was about a lady who had gone missing and we were all searching for her as the world crumbled around us.
I played the abstract concept of Love interfering with the actual characters. Another player played Destruction and was kind of my rival.
I played at first to support the characters I liked and resolve their conflicts. But it wasn't working well and Destruction was doing so much better than me.
Eventually had a brainwave and I started to goad the most destructive character to hurt the character I most wanted to help and everyone at the table thought I'd abandoned the Love role! But toward the end of this pivotal scene it became obvious that this self declared nihilist was hurting this other character because he was pointing out their flaws and how to overcome them. I felt so pleased that it worked and no one saw it coming until I explained exactly why this brutal admonishment was an act of pure love with no expectation of gain from the attacker.
At the end the players had to vote whether Love or Destruction ruled the group and that scene edged me to win by the narrowest margin!
Exporting as a jpg seems to have eaten the table borders, but PATROL got shiny new pages for the MOS selection as a near finishing this stupid thing.
I swear, after I finish this it'll be one page RPGs and nothing else for at least a month.
I need this to exist right away. And one suggestion. Hard drugs like LSD or Heroin reduce the rate at which you gain fatigue for as long as you are taking them, but if your supply dries up you take a massive hit to fatigue.
Exporting as a jpg seems to have eaten the table borders, but PATROL got shiny new pages for the MOS selection as a near finishing this stupid thing.
I swear, after I finish this it'll be one page RPGs and nothing else for at least a month.
I need this to exist right away. And one suggestion. Hard drugs like LSD or Heroin reduce the rate at which you gain fatigue for as long as you are taking them, but if your supply dries up you take a massive hit to fatigue.
Well, good news, right at this very second I am writing the final pages of this book. The mechanics are entirely complete and well-tested, I'm just fleshing out the GM section and some of the background stuff before shipping it off to proofreaders and getting a print proof back. Plus I wanna do more playtesting...
There are indeed rules for addiction, as well as overdose. Drug use is pretty integral to the rules, which is a sentence I'm pretty proud to write about a game I made.
The game looks like this nowadays.
There's detailed vehicle rules, tons of equipment, a sizable GM section, a ton of historical background, and like 20 different character creation paths for playing just about any imaginable combatant in the VIetnam War.
Seriously. Wanna be US Marines? Done. US Navy? Sure! Special Forces? Got you covered. Australian troops? Sure. Australian armour? Yep. ARVN troops? Regional, regular or rangers? There's also militia, navy and national police! Viet Cong or North Vietnamese Army? Rural hill folks with crossbows? They all have their own ruleset.
And the NPC guidelines are pretty expansive too. Like, I dunno if your campaign will bring you into action against the Pathet Lao, but I threw it in just in case. Hey, maybe you'll have an alt history campaign where you fight against the People's Liberation Army or Russian Spetsnaz or something, so I put in some guidelines for them too. Fight a fucking tiger? You bet!
This book was a hell of a learning experience on how to make large books (it took forever but I learned so much doing it that I'm certain my next one will take a third of the time) and I'm really proud of the results.
Comments
I have backed this, and seen the quick-start document, and I'm super excited to actually play it now. Plus, you don't get a better pitch than "Blades is a tabletop role-playing game about a crew of scoundrels in an industrial fantasy city. If you've played video games like Dishonored or Thief 2, or read stuff like the Lies of Locke Lamora, or Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos books, or Fafhrd and Gray Mouser, you probably have an idea what I'm talking about."
I'm not sure what to think of that, but my first thought was “Two bad tastes that might taste better together.”
Well, the book is finally shaping into something recognizable, and I'm starting to get excited. Somehow this will be my first "big" RPG, by virtue of the basic rules coming together in just a few days startlingly close to final form and it being very easy for me to write thousand and thousand of words on the Vietnam War.
(NOTE: Text is super not final.)
If I had to sum it up, basically it's Torchbearer meets Palladium's RECON. It's got a simple basic system (3 stats, large d6 pools, 6s are successes, skills make it so that 5s are successes), a cool incentive to behave irrationally (as status effects advance, you gain fatigue, you need to offset fatigue with victory points, players earn VPs by completing mission objectives and personal objectives, the personal objectives are dangerous and/or morally dubious) and all turns solidly represent a half-hour passing.
The result in the test games is that these search-and-destroy missions actually end up feeling like real after-action reports; burning daylight searching villages, players engaged the enemy for hours before breaking off the fight at nightfall, everyone making sure to dig foxholes to sleep in, and these weird little tragedies unfold rapidly as the game goes on. The Pragmatic soldiers execute wounded enemies after a bad firefight for the VPs, which lowers the morale of the Principled soldiers, which incentivizes them to avoid fighting, which affects the Righteous soldiers...
I've never had a game of this scale come together so quickly before and I'm super, super happy about it.
Being a high-lethality game, in PATROL you get XP towards your next character if your remains (or your dog tags) are recovered. Keeps the party roughly level. Characters can also straight-up lose XP and degrade if they take too much Fatigue and don't get enough Victory Points.
I realized right away that, as an emergent consequence, there is actually a perverse incentive to commit suicide if shit sucks too bad. After all, you can probably get your body recovered and get a shiny new character stronger than before.
I consider this a feature, not a bug.
I'm interested in running a game which is based on Stephen King's Mid-World universe from the Dark Tower series. I really love the setting; a dying world, a mix of old but powerful technology with magic, and a splash of horror. I also want characters to be relying on their skills as much if not more than their ability to fight in this world.
Does anyone have any suggestions for a RPG system that would fit this world and what I want to do with it?
How does one survive let alone thrive in a place like this?
What keeps you going, and what pushes you further into unsafe lands?
The world is dying but by no means are you obligated to save it, whatever that means to you.
My only concern is being able to keep my players together, too much 1 on 1 time is boring for the rest of the table.
If you're hung up on this world, then take the rules of Lady Blackbird, change all the proper nouns, make characters that fit to start, and then go nuts from there.
Exporting as a jpg seems to have eaten the table borders, but PATROL got shiny new pages for the MOS selection as a near finishing this stupid thing.
I swear, after I finish this it'll be one page RPGs and nothing else for at least a month.
I played the abstract concept of Love interfering with the actual characters. Another player played Destruction and was kind of my rival.
I played at first to support the characters I liked and resolve their conflicts. But it wasn't working well and Destruction was doing so much better than me.
Eventually had a brainwave and I started to goad the most destructive character to hurt the character I most wanted to help and everyone at the table thought I'd abandoned the Love role! But toward the end of this pivotal scene it became obvious that this self declared nihilist was hurting this other character because he was pointing out their flaws and how to overcome them. I felt so pleased that it worked and no one saw it coming until I explained exactly why this brutal admonishment was an act of pure love with no expectation of gain from the attacker.
At the end the players had to vote whether Love or Destruction ruled the group and that scene edged me to win by the narrowest margin!
There are indeed rules for addiction, as well as overdose. Drug use is pretty integral to the rules, which is a sentence I'm pretty proud to write about a game I made.
The game looks like this nowadays.
There's detailed vehicle rules, tons of equipment, a sizable GM section, a ton of historical background, and like 20 different character creation paths for playing just about any imaginable combatant in the VIetnam War.
Seriously. Wanna be US Marines? Done. US Navy? Sure! Special Forces? Got you covered. Australian troops? Sure. Australian armour? Yep. ARVN troops? Regional, regular or rangers? There's also militia, navy and national police! Viet Cong or North Vietnamese Army? Rural hill folks with crossbows? They all have their own ruleset.
And the NPC guidelines are pretty expansive too. Like, I dunno if your campaign will bring you into action against the Pathet Lao, but I threw it in just in case. Hey, maybe you'll have an alt history campaign where you fight against the People's Liberation Army or Russian Spetsnaz or something, so I put in some guidelines for them too. Fight a fucking tiger? You bet!
This book was a hell of a learning experience on how to make large books (it took forever but I learned so much doing it that I'm certain my next one will take a third of the time) and I'm really proud of the results.
Time to vomit with relief and die.
THIS IS NOT A DRILL.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnwickpresents/7th-sea-second-edition
(Of course, the old RPG IP I actually want is Underground 2021... I'm doomed.)