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: Gaming material

  • Post-scarcity Traveller

    I have begun a campaign set in a post-scarcity science fiction setting, called the Spiral Confederacy. The setting is a sprawling corner of the galaxy that was once a sprawling human interstellar empire. This empire fell apart in some ancient catastrophe that separated all the planets, and over thousands of years they lost contact with…

  • Character Classes for a Mad Max RPG

    One of the members of my regular gaming group is thinking of running a one-off set in the world of Mad Max, probably hacking the Fate rules. I don’t know how the Fate rules work but I’m very excited to consider gaming in Mad Max’s crazed world. So here are a few ideas for character…

  • After the Flood: A Message to Ryan

    After the Vladimir Putin left the borders of the Gyre and was past the point of turning back, Ryan received a private message from Captain Dilver, which he took a little bit away from the other characters, where he could view it without disturbance. Yesterday we played out the final session of this mini-campaign, but…

  • Cyberpunk House Rules: Lackeys

    Kill them along the way, but count your bullets, for there are more worthy targets – The Falcon, dialectical ephemeralist revolutionary, talking about lackeys Our recent train heist involved a serious number of low-ranked enemies, the full complement of which hasn’t been described yet (Drew’s breathless reports take her a lot of time to write,…

  • Cyberpunk House Rules: Armour, and Some Tactics for Breaking it

    The original Cyberpunk rulebook has a simple and nasty system of armour, which is completely broken. In this system your gun does a handful of dice of damage, between 3d6+1 for a good submachine gun to 7d10 for a high quality sniper rifle, and your armour has a stopping power (SP) that ranges from 4…

  • Poison Rules for the Cyberpunk System

    One of the PCs in my Flood campaign, Quark, has gained a level (even though they don’t exist in Cyberpunk rules), so he has access to a new set of abilities – the ability to make and deploy poison. He has two types of poison: poison darts and gas canisters, which he can deploy from…

  • After the Flood: A Tale of Two Ziggurats

    GM Note: I may be running a short mini-campaign in the world of the Flood, probably only three sessions long, which I have tentatively named Vladimir Putin’s Last Voyage. It’s a direct follow-on from the last adventure (described here, here and here in order). This post is background material I am sharing with my players,…

  • Perils of the Flood: The Miasma

    Next weekend I will be running another short adventure in my Flood campaign world, and the adventure trigger will be the arrival near the Hulks of one of the drowned earth’s most potent environmental threats: the Miasma. The Miasma is a special type of jellyfish swarm that can only exist in the depopulated aquatic deserts…

  • Malifaux Character: Penitent Benny

    If the Autumn Bridge shakes in your bellows Your every breath will be your last For you must dredge the waters till the Just give up the Dead … The sands of waters will make you clean And you will hear the whispers beyond I recently started playing in a short Malifaux campaign, with my…

  • Kingdoms of the Flood: The Gyre

    Sometime ago I wrote some posts about a campaign idea set in the world of Stephen Baxter’s Flood, where sea levels had risen to cover the entire earth and what little remained of the human population had been forced to make its life on the open ocean. I envisaged raft cities and OTEC remnants, and…