Love Letter to D&D

So I was thinking about what I said in my last blog post about making my own “love letter” to D&D – what would that mean to me? What could I do to make it my own? I spent so much time playing only 3.5e and Mutants and Masterminds that I now feel so free and open playing and running Cortex Plus, Edge of the Empire, and similar, more story-oriented games.

Continue reading

Hacking Threat and Advantage

Who’s played Fantasy Flight Games’ Star Wars Edge of the Empire game? *counts hands* Awesome. Whaddya think of the dice? At first, I was afraid. I was petrified. Kept thinkin’ I could never live without numbers on my dice. Seriously though, it’s crazy to try to wrap your head around it if all you’ve ever seen are numbered dice. I had to listen to Order 66 to really get it. But once it clicked? Heck, I even made my own dice roller. The way the two axes of action resolution interact with the game is pretty incredible.

Continue reading

13th Cortex Accelerated Kids

So I’ve been thinking lately about getting my four year old son into gaming. I went and downloaded rpgKids by @newbieDM (btw, check it out – it’s super cheap and pretty awesome), but something doesn’t feel… quite right, at least for me.

I’ve been getting pretty excited about the concepts and methods espoused by both Cortex Plus and Fate Core/Accelerated, as well as amazed at the seemingly at-odds simplicity paired with boundless depth. There are also a couple of neat mechanics in 13th Age that I like – and are totally explicitly borrowed for Cortex Plus Fantasy Heroic Roleplaying!

Continue reading

Avatar Cortex Plus

So I backed the Cortex Plus Hacker’s Guide on Kickstarter. I’ve got the preview PDF (which includes a bunch of nifty ideas, but not all of them). But I’m itching to be doing this hacking stuff now!

A few months ago (holy crap, has it been that long?) I ran our playgroup through a 1st level D&D 4e adventure in the world of Avatar: The Last Airbender. It was a lot of fun, and I think the story was pretty neat. As I delve deeper into Cortex Plus, it seems like an awesome way to impart the flavor of Avatar directly into the game, and I’d love to play the scenario again with the different mechanics.

Continue reading

End of Arcana Evolved Saga Edition

So a while ago, after falling in love with Star Wars Saga Edition (which, btw, is the system I used to run the short-lived PbP on this blog), I started working to convert my favorite game setting/system into a Saga version. Monte Cook’s Arcana Evolved and the Diamond Throne setting contained within – a pretty ambitious goal. It’s been a long time since I updated any of it on my Wiki.

Continue reading

Leverage RPG – Browncoats In the ‘Verse

Our Continuing Quest…
So in our gaming group’s continuing quest (or perhaps it’s my quest, since I’ve been guest-GM for a couple months now) to explore new games, we sat down to play the Leverage RPG. I’d never seen the show, heard a liveplay, or played it myself, but I was fairly confident given my comfort level with Marvel Heroic RPG so, hey, why not?

Continue reading

Avatar: The Next Airbender One-Shot Adventure

Over the last three weeks, I’ve run my local gaming group through my second convention module. I say second, but I never actually got a chance to run the first.

The mod takes place fifty years after Avatar: The Last Airbender and twenty years before Legend of Korra. Two of the PCs and one prominent NPC are the children of the main characters in A:TLA, and several characters in the mod go on to be part of TLoK.

Continue reading

Yet Another Fantasy Marvel Hack

Ok. I know. Dave Chalker (@DaveTheGame) and Adam Minnie (@atminn) have already put their four cents into this discussion at Critical Hits and Exploring Infinity respectively. The basic concept is taking Margaret Weis Productions’ Marvel Heroic RPG and adapting it to fantasy roleplaying, in the same milieu as Dungeons & Dragons, or Sword & Sorcery. So, while I’m analyzing, I’ll also put together a character – Gallifrey, the gnome bard I play in a weekly D&D 3.5e game.

It seems to me the big difference between folks’ interpretations about how this should go is in the Affiliations dice. Let’s take a look at the various options between posts and comments:

Continue reading