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All this Glorantha talk is tempting me to write up a F&F of 13th Age Glorantha. It’s pretty interesting, especially since it has a tight focus on Dragon Pass in the earliest days of the Hero Wars, with a splash of extra Chaos for flavor. I don’t know enough about 13th Age core, though, and I’ve never done a review on here before.
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Feb 20, 2018 23:49
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I think it helps that Wick has brought in a wide, diverse, and young team to help on this edition. I know some of the writers and they’re good folks.
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Jun 19, 2018 18:28
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I’m really digging the Aztlani in general. It seems like a good take on what Mesoamerica would look like if it hadn’t been ravaged by disease and its gods were less colossal assholes.
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Aug 22, 2018 02:40
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Selachian posted:From a couple pages back, but there is a PBTA game for medical drama -- it's called The Ward. I haven't bought or played it so I can't speak to its quality. Someone over on RPOL is using it to run a "hospital in Eberron" game, so I guess it could be adapted to other genres. The Ward is a lot of fun. I had a chance to play test it at a convention and it really focuses on the emotional core and universal tropes of medical dramas, and leaves the medicine much more abstracted. It’d be pretty easy to port it to any setting.
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Oct 14, 2018 03:07
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I'm really digging these writeups. The setting of this game seems real dope, with almost a Dark Souls sorta vibe, as often as that phrase is repeated these days. There's something melancholy and terrifying to the artwork and to the idea of an entire nation moving across the mountains fleeing an undead curse only to wind up in a complex web of societies built on the ruins of an ancient empire, along with a sprawling and barely understood forest full of mysteries and dangers. A lot of fantasy has stopped being interesting to me lately, but Symbaroum is definitely catching my attention.
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Nov 6, 2018 16:45
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Wrestlepig posted:
I’d like to see what an ogre fighter type would look like.
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Nov 7, 2018 17:38
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Succession being a tale yet untold of myth, might, and mystery I recently purchased Succession after hearing it was a game with a melancholy air to it, using a storygame, rules light system. Since I'm designing a similar game, I decided that I'd give it a look. It turned out to be a little too rules light for my purposes, but I figured I could salvage the purchase by doing a F&F of it. The first thing that becomes apparent is that the game has really bad layout. It uses a standard letter sized page, with extremely thin margins and single columns of text. This makes paragraphs stretch too long, with lines that are difficult to read easily. This problem is further compounded by the text, which is written in a way that tries to capture the tone of the world and stories to be told in it, which is not a great choice for rules text. It also doesn't help that the font is small and cramped. Fortunately, the book is only thirteen pages long, so it's easy to read it over multiple times. That said, let's dive into the contents. Origin This page serves as the only concrete setting details for the game, as well as character creation. Essentially, a succession of faiths have led the world from Chaos into Light into Fire and there are new gods around these days and strange things outside of society. You start by choosing which of the faith your character follows, but can only pick the big three, which suggests something about the nature of your character's personality. Then, you choose your Quest, which is broken into two categories. In the first, whether your character seeks, follows, or obeys; in the second, whether your character aims to defend, explore, or destroy. And that's it for character creation! Customs This page is the core mechanics of the game. Normally, when you perform an action, you roll 2d6, then assign one of the d6s to degree of sucess and one of the d6s to the degree of Misfortune (consequence). High results mean greater success but less Misfortune, so there's choice when rolling one high and one low, whether the player wants more success or less Misfortune. If there's more than one possible Misfortune that can happen, as determined by the other players (it's a GM-less game), additional dice are rolled and each potential Misfortune has to have a die attached to it. There are a few other potential modifiers that might into play. A character can get Blessings from their god, which are additional dice that trigger on a 1-2 and counter any one consequence, either one just rolled or an ongoing one. Helping another character adds another dice to the pool, but also adds a Misfortune that a die has to be assigned to that represents what happens to the helper. PvP is also allowed by is not explained very well. quote:Should one of your fellow wanderers take action against you, they may use one of your lingering Misfortunes against you as a Blessing to them, but must confront your Blessings as Misfortunes that may befall them in turn. In any event, they perform a Deed against you, and Aim and Misfortune is theirs to bear; only afterward may you perform a Deed in turn. How exactly the results of a success or Misfortune would impact each character is far more vague than in a standard roll, where the text makes it clear that Misfortunes are decided by consensus of all of the other players. Might This page describes the basic actions that your character can perform. It also introduces new character creation elements out of nowhere. First is the list of the universal actions: take flight or cover, strike or smite, persuade or beguile, hold fast, and supplicate. The list also provides some common Misfortunes that might come with each of these actions, and the collection of actions helps to indicate the general tone of the game, where running and hiding or finding emotional steadfastness are as mechanically important as fighting. In addition, each character chooses two actions from the following list: speak wisdom, command forces, craft goods, and work wonders. This has an interesting effect of making leadership as rare and nearly as mystical as being able to work magic, which also helps to highlight the tone. It also shows the poor layout at work again, as there's no reason for this choice to be presented here rather than earlier in the more dedicated character creation section. Sorcery and Craft This section goes into more detail about the specialist skills, and especially working wonders. The misfortunes from working wonders take the form of Strains, which are lingering curses that can only be removed by reaching out to the character's god and asking for help, which will be offered at increasing cost based on the number of Strains removed and with consequences and costs based off of the god in question. This does make magic the most complex system and gives more narrative push to drive characters that use magic, but also makes magic feel more dangerous in a way that's interesting to play out at the table. Quests This is the longest section, but it also includes a section going over an example beginning to the game. More pertinently, it describes how to make Quests for a character to face. Going around the table, the players first assign the Quest an Adversary from the following list: code:Journeys A simple sub-system is presented for traveling through the wilderness. Degree of success determines how long it takes to arrive at the destination and degree of Misfortune determines how much danger happens along the way. It's pretty simple and feels a little extraneous, but it does put emphasis onto travel as an element of the game, making it a valid option for a character to pursue. Revelation This is the character advancement system. Every time a character completes a Quest, they get access to a new Revelation from a list which counts as a replenishing Blessing. Guidance This section is essentially GM advice, but since it is a GM-less game, it's useful for all of the players. It does a good job of getting across the desired atmosphere of the game, to try to get all of the players on the same page. While it's entirely possible to ignore the advice here and go fully gonzo, following it would likely allow the group to make works with a sufficient degree of melancholy and terror. The advice here also emphasizes the human nature of the player characters, suggesting that their human foibles and weaknesses can be used to drive the narrative just as much as the strange and the awe-inspiring targets of their Quests. Lists The book finishes with a series of lists. First are the Adversary and Bane lists, for use in creating Quests. Then comes Lots which are random idea seeds for Creatures, Regions, Events, Locations, Persons, Groups, Artifacts, and Magics that a character might encounter. These lists serve as a quick and dirty tool to let a player bereft of ideas come up with something on the fly, as well as to help keep tone consistent. The final list is Scenes and Portents which presents 18 different occurrences that might serve as a seed for a scene when no other ideas are present. Conclusion While Succession is a bit too rules light for me, it still manages to use its minimal framing to evoke its atmosphere effectively. The mechanics turn out to be a bit more complex than originally presented, managing multiple Blessings and Misfortunes in order to make sure that the right things succeed and the worst possible consequences don't come up. While it's not breaking any particularly new ground, it's a solid entry in the storygame market with some cool lists of melancholic dark fantasy stuff that is surprisingly unskeevy. If you're interested in checking it out for yourself, you can buy it on DTRPG for 3 bucks. The lists are particularly cool and the Adversaries could easily be reworked into fronts for a Dungeon World game.
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Nov 7, 2018 20:32
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Night10194 posted:By stats, this means an infected houseplant can be a truly amazing sniper, potentially. Yes, this lines up with JoJo, good.
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Dec 19, 2018 07:07
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A lot of new material is coming out, on a daily basis, on the itch.io storefront. A lot of this material is relatively obscure because the creators are super independent and don’t really have much in the way of marketing departments. Some of these games are very interesting and cool, some of these games are (probably) trash. We’ll be covering what I turn up here on itch.io Roundup Honey Heist https://gshowitt.itch.io/honey-heist Grant Howitt https://gshowitt.itch.io/ I’m starting off with the big name in the indie itch scene, Honey Heist. Honey Heist tops the charts on itch’s physical games page time and time again, and it’s easy to see why. Honey Heist is a very stripped down game and one with a light sense of humor. Grant Howitt might be better known these days for the comparatively grim Spire, but he cut his teeth with more humorous games and it definitely shows in Honey Heist. The gist of Honey Heist is that the players take on the role of a team of bear criminals. Not anthropomorphic bears, not talking bears, just bears out on a heist for some incredibly valuable honey. Each bear has some demographic stats that are generated randomly, including the bear’s species and role on the team, and their main mechanical stats, Bear and Criminal, both of which start at 3. Rolling under the appropriate stat is a success. Bear gets a point from Criminal when things go poorly, and Criminal gets a point from Criminal when things go well. In addition, players can manually adjust these stats by either eating honey to raise Bear or by having a flashback to the planning scene to raise Criminal. If either stat reaches 6 at any point, then that character is removed from the game. Following this are a series of scenario generation tables to fill out the details for the heist (which always occurs at HoneyCon 2017). Randomly rolling, I get a convention that is run by someone who is a bit too obsessed with honey, set in a dangerous truck convoy, that is advertising Black Orchid Honey, which turns anyone who eats it into a goth, as the prize for the convention, but the prize is a fake, with security measures of armed guards and an “impenetrable” vault. This table helps to push things towards the comedy and maintain the desired tone of the game. Additionally, there are some rules to cover bear disguises, which also include bear outlines that said disguises can be drawn onto. What Honey Heist succeeds on is delivering its tone well and having a light and accessible system (that can be conveyed on one or two pieces of paper) to allow for the creation of interesting and fun games with little effort on people’s part. Indeed, Honey Heist has become an alternate model to Lasers and Feelings for presenting these incredibly light games. Interestingly, though, Grant does not credit Lasers and Feelings as an inspiration. Instead, he lists All Out of Bubblegum, 3:16, and Polaris as the games that he is drawing. Not being too familiar with those first two, I can’t say how well they fit, but Polaris is definitely an odd one. Still, Honey Heist is good fun and has certainly earned its position at the top. Not every game will get a review as intensive as Honey Heist’s, and those smaller games are likely to be condensed into multiple per post. The next review will… not be that. Next time: The real horror of space is 44 pages of charts.
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Jun 27, 2019 06:02
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While I agree that the Geryo aren’t as nifty as the Idigam, I’m growing more fond of them as I see the specific examples. There’s a combination of understandable motivations and pure alien weirdness that creates an unsettling aspect that the more generally strange Idigam aren’t able to capture quite as well. I think a better approach for the Geryo, though, would be the idea of them as something brand new, perhaps Super-Mimics or something of that sort.
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Sep 7, 2019 04:14
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