Compromise and Conceit
Infernal adventuring…
Category: RPG Systems
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My Spiral Confederacy campaign is heading towards its conclusion, which means bigger battles and more annoying enemies, which (just as happened in Cyberpunk) inevitably requires rules for handling minions. Combat in Traveler tends to be quick and brutal but it also involves a lot of tricky management of attributes and penalties as the damage grinds…
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I have begun a new campaign with a new group, playing The One Ring. This is Cubicle 7’s Middle Earth role playing game, which seems to have been broadly well-received and is certainly a thoughtful and beautiful work. We’re playing on Wednesday nights for about 3 hours, and so far we’ve only managed to complete…
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My gaming group has begun a short Vampire:The Masquerade mini campaign, which I haven’t yet joined, but I happen to think that the World of Darkness system is quite terrible. At the same time we’ve all been yearning for some classic fantasy, and the manifold shortcomings of Traveler’s system have become obvious, even though I…
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Two good friends and I are doing occasional Sunday evening sessions of original Dungeons and Dragons (OD&D) over skype. I reported the first session here, and haven’t reported the subsequent four because … well, because there’s nothing to hang onto. Our second session ended with a TPK, but I think I didn’t report it, and…
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The Spiral Confederacy is a huge, galaxy-spanning civilization of thousands of systems, linked by a tenuous faster-than-light technology that strongly proscribes the way that these systems interact. Space travel and its associated technologies has liberated the people of the Spiral Confederacy from scarcity or poverty, so that everyone has everything they will ever need; the…
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Except adventurers, obviously … Karameikos is the first campaign setting for Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), and the setting in which my new skype campaign occurs. Karameikos is described in the TSR supplement The Grand Duchy of Karameikos, which gives information about the major towns of the region and the major personalities living in them. This…
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On Saturday I ran another session of The Spiral Confederacy campaign, culminating in a vicious battle in a floating forest built on the ruins of ancient spaceships (report to come). One player went down in the first round of the surprise attack and the entire battle (with three waves of attackers, approximately) was over in…
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For some time now I’ve been thinking about ways to simplify the Warhammer 3 (WFRP3) system to make it less cumbersome and more free-flowing, while retaining the basic structure of attributes and skills. I previously described dropping action cards and moving to a more skill-based system, and also simplified ways of calculating difficulty. This, combined…
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My group’s regular member Grim D returned from his annual Christmas holiday in Germany bearing a sleek black rule book for a German RPG called Degenesis, revised and newly translated into English. We were astounded by this book, both for the beauty of its contents and the scale of the project it represents, and as…
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[Told in the words of Sylvan, an Apocalyptic from Balkhan] If you want to make it in this world you need scrap; if you want scrap you need to travel with Scrappers; and if you travel with Scrappers you’re going to tangle with Chroniclers. Chroniclers are a kind of pimp, squatting over the ravaged body…
Compromise and Conceit 