Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

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An Australian statistician and role-player living in Japan, interested in the theory and practice of role-playing…

Category: Fantasy

  • The Last Call

    In stillness a silent weight Pausing as the minutes each evaporate A desire to leave a scar To raise a voice from within the dark Decaying, cascading, existence falls apart Around me, within me So I must leave my mark This is a sacrifice To prove that I was here This is a sacrifice To…

  • Europa Universalis 3: Building the Islamic Enlightenment, 1533 – 1582

    Everyone knows that the people of Christendom are lazy and morally weak. What else is to be expected of people who have been led so far from the path of righteousness as to believe Jesus is the son of Allah, the One and Only, who begets not nor is begotten? These people show themselves in…

  • The Captain’s Speech

    My current role-playing group hold minor adventures away from gaming sessions using Facebook. After our first Iron Kingdoms session ended with the war-caster killing captain Mayhorn in cold blood, one of the players opened a whole new chat session in Facebook to discuss the implications. This led to a long debate, mostly in character, about…

  • Will the Industrialization of Mordor Cause Global Warming?

    The Guardian reported recently that a researcher in the UK has developed a climate model for Middle Earth. Apparently he developed a climate model and ran it over six days in a super-computer at Bristol university, and has been able to identify different climate zones in Middle Earth. We now know that the Shire had…

  • Steamlands Session 9: The Drowning Well

    The murderer was clearly in the volcano. Our heroes, having been asked to go and find him, set off up the mountainside to the location of his victim, from whence they hoped to track him. Now they were joined by Grunstein the wizard, who had travelled ahead to Steamline Spa on his own business. The…

  • Playing Simplified Warhammer 3: Dropping Action Cards

    Yesterday I GM’d a session of Warhammer 3rd Edition (WFRP 3), the next instalment in the Steamlands Campaign, but this time due to a lack of space and the ongoing fragmentation of my card collection I decided to implement some of the ideas I’ve been working on to simplify WFRP 3. Today we used the…

  • Simpler Methods for Resolving Combat Actions in Warhammer 3

    Continuing my series of posts about the unnecessary complexity of Warhammer 3rd Edition (WFRP3) combat and skill resolution, today I want to focus on the construction of dice pools in combat. I have already shown that action cards may not provide much benefit in combat, and I have also explored an alternative method for setting…

  • Comparing Dice Pool Mechanisms in Warhammer 3

    Recently I have been examining dice pool mechanisms in Shadowrun, to compare two methods for resolving opposed skill checks. In those posts I have found that for opponents with equally matched skill the probability of success tends to nearly 50% as skill increases, and that skill checks based on target numbers lead to sudden changes…

  • Are WFRP 3 Combat Action Cards a Waste of Time

    I GM’d session 7 of the Steamlands campaign on Saturday (report to go up shortly), with an old friend from London joining for the day. The session was essentially an extended encounter with two rally steps and three ferocious battles. This was an in-between session, setting up some story elements and run to enable my…

  • New Deity: The God that Failed

    When Japanese people want to succeed at life’s challenges, they will often visit a shrine and pray to the God therein for aid and succor. Most shrines have a designated purpose, with the God ensconced there tasked with aiding childbirth, or the accumulation of wealth, knowledge, or success in love, for example. Those who live…