Hey, I just saw that the 2010 Game Chef competition is underway! You still have a couple days to throw together a complete RPG and submit it. It stretches from Sept. 11 to Sept. 19 and the rules are here. Best RPG put together in short order wins! Not as short order as the “24 Hour RPG” contest, but short. Even if you don’t enter, a lot of time the entries become freely available and are cool!
Did you know Paizo has a link to get to all the various free PDF products people have listed in their store? Neither did I. But here it is! There’s some good stuff in there, for various game systems.
RPGNow has a similar link which is super easy to find, but Paizo’s store is a little more cryptic, so it’s my Gamer Tech Tip Of the Day!
Download them, read them, use them – and if you like them, review them on the site. Publishers give freebies so people can see the quality of their work; if you use a freebie that’s good, say so! It encourages people to buy their stuff and then encourages more freebie giving to you.
Twenty-ninth Session – After we lay Rokk to rest, we go mess with the remaining Lucullan factions. Most are kittycats, except for the insane and violent Picts. But they’re not as insane and violent as we are!
Chris had a new character since Rokk got Thunderholed last time – Drest Talorgin, a Pict subchief. So in good faith, we tried to set things up so that he’d confront the Pict chief, King Steel, a psycho cyborg weren. We planned to hijack Steel’s cyber gear and then Dreth would take him out in combat.
Well, Taveer and Lenny managed to put a virus in Steel’s cyber maintenance gear, and it gave him a 2 step penalty to everything… But he was so insanely ripped out that didn’t matter. When as planned the fight broke out in the Pict assembly during the negotiations, King Steel totally tore Drest to bits, and then our own weren, Haggernak, jumped in, and Steel tore him to bits too.
As a player, I really didn’t want to steal their thunder. So Markus tried to just ask for Haggernak and Drest’s lives (he was willing to settle for Haggernak) but Steel attacked him as well. Well, Markus doesn’t tolerate primitive screwheads putting their mitts on him, so he executed the huge Pict with his chainsword. The whole assembly fell silent; you could have heard a pin drop. So Markus used one of my favorite Conan quotes – “Enough talk!” and issued a call to arms. I have to admit, it was entertaining to be a Conan-style barbarian chieftain for a week. And we got a Pict horde out of the deal; we gave them a camp in a cargo ship Lambert Fulson owns that’s docked with the Lighthouse.
We finished up in Lucullus. The subplots in drivespace were fun. Rokk Tressor’s ghost returned to haunt Peppin. Degenerate gambler Marlok Taneer showed up and wanted Markus to get him “variable density bio-gel,” which I immediately realized he was going to use to load dice with. Which was fine with me, as long as it wasn’t in my casino, and as long as I was getting a cut.
Then a human woman took a liking to our big weren Haggernak. Easter egg: Paul was casting about for a name for the woman and I insisted she be named “Satine”, after Satine Phoenix, one of the stars of I Hit It With My Axe. If you’re familiar with her work, you’ll know why.
And then we took Peppin’s miscreant cousin and forced him to be a steward on the ship we’re keeping our Pict hordes in. WELCOME TO OZ, BITCH!!!
Posted in session summaries
Tagged alternity, lighthouse, RPG, RPGs, scifi, SF, stardrive
Twenty-eighth Session – The Jamaicans must fall under our sway! And for some reason this means we have to go white water rafting. In the end, brave CIB agent Rokk Tressor gets Thunderholed.
I missed this session, but to hear the other players talk, that’s probably not a bad thing. They got roped into white water rafting, and the rules being used meant that pretty much everyone was guaranteed to die – since “boating” isn’t high on the list of skills for spacemen and the Alternity system is unforgiving to the untrained (roll d20! On a 1-3, you don’t die!)
And then another super hard target fight. We feel somewhat torn about how the combats are going. Every fight is against extremely high grade opponents – awesome skills, armor, etc. – and often require heavy weapons to best. The GM pretty much lets us take heavy weapons anywhere, the resistance is more from our sense of realism. “Really? Should I really be carrying a duffel full of rocket launchers everywhere I go? And a quantum minigun?” That’s not very Star Trek/Babylon 5 so the sense of genre appropriateness inclines us not to do it, but when we don’t, people get killed. And that’s what happened to Rokk. He spent all his Last Resort points to survive the whitewater, so then when an uber-NPC got in a lucky shot on him, he was straight up dead.
Since I wasn’t there, you’ll have to get more details from the session summary. Go click it now!
Posted in session summaries
Tagged alternity, lighthouse, RPG, RPGs, scifi, SF, stardrive
Twenty-seventh Session – We go to a system called Lucullus that is run by various criminal gangs. As that is a clear challenge to our roguishness, we pull off a complicated casino heist on the Mafia! Eat that Lucullans!
I enjoyed this session – Lenny, Ten-zel, Markus, and Peppin work well together and we got to freeform plan our heist. I like it when there’s a sandboxey setup – the event was being prepared according to a schedule, so we could be proactive, reactive, etc. based purely on our own merits and inclination.
Probably my favorite part, though, was after the “hot librarian” female Mafia security expert came and set up the casino’s security (we surveilled her the whole time), Ten-zel called up some hookers and got one that looked like her and was dressed exactly like her. I said, “Brilliant! What’s the plan?” I figured he had some elaborate sting in mind and that we’d use the doppleganger to somehow compromise the casino’s security. His response? “Well, uh, I just kinda wanted to bang a chick that looked like that lady.” I think “consternation” is the best word to describe my reaction to that. And of course he just had them come to the front door – of the abandoned building next door our listening post was in. As the Mafia security goons headed towards us, I said “I’m going upstairs to hide our equipment; you’d better bluff them out of here or I’m going to shoot them and you.” He got them out of there, though.
The rest was too many meetings with too many functionaries to wreak diplomacy upon them. It kinda bothers me that despite the huge Imminent Alien Holocaust, every single faction of NPCs everywhere is sitting around jerking off and have to be convinced via doing crap for them to get on board. I mean, some of that is fine, but shouldn’t there also be people wildly in favor of it? That can provide complications too (“We should attack NOW!!!” “No, wait…”) but so far we’re starting to lose respect for pretty much the entire population of the Verge. I find myself thinking, “So if these yokels get their asses enslaved by aliens, it’s probably what they deserve.” I don’t want to feel that way, but when every single person you meet is a helpless, passive, venal snarfhocker… Sure, NPCs shouldn’t outclass the PCs and we should be the drivers of the adventure and all that, but when other characters are too milquetoast it threatens your attachment to the in-game world.
Twenty-sixth Session – Our handler wants us to forge a brave new world with a new interstellar government. Instead, we spend the time screwing around with various personal subplots.
Of those subplots, the mainly interesting one was that the Swede’s crazy mutant terrorist ex-wife shows up with a gang and causes problems – problems we solve with MURDER! And then there’s a wedding.
Not much more to say about it. Some of these sessions where we just do all the subplots while we’re in drivespace are a little trying. There’s a interstellar alien war on, so when people whine to us about some personal problem it’s a bit hard to take it seriously.
Jim Shipman, criminal proprietor of Outlaw Press, is the recipient of an “open letter” from Tunnels & Trolls originator Ken St. Andre posted on RPG.net as well as other locations.
James,
I received your package yesterday with some surprise. Received six copies of the revised Gristlegrim Dungeon. This dismays me, as I told you to quit publishing it back in January of this year when I broke with you. If this parcel was an attempt at a reconciliation between us, then I appreciate the effort you took, but I reject it. Our friendship and partnership is broken and done forever. I do not wish to collaborate on Gristlegrim or any other project with you. Not now! Not ever again! You had no right to add your material to my work. You have no right to continue publishing and selling it. Please stop!
James, you no longer have any right to publish or sell my works. We have no written contracts. We have no formal accounting of royalties. Your habit of sending money and or copies of the items is no longer good enough. Any informal agreements we may have made in 2009 and earlier are terminated on my side of the deal. I no longer wish to associate with you, either professionally or informally.
Find some other outlet for your creativity. Leave me, and leave Tunnels and Trolls, alone. I am rejecting any further association with you.
I hope this is clearly understood. Do not publish anything with my name on it as author. Do not presume to collaborate with me on my projects. Do not keep attempting to infiltrate trollhalla.com under false names–you are banned and unwelcome on that site. Do not attempt to rewrite the history of Tunnels and Trolls on Wikipedia or any other online sources. Do not send me money. Do not send me product. I do not want it from you. However, I am under no legal obligation to send back things that arrive unsolicited in the mail. I won’t waste the money or the effort to send them back. I am not interested in theatrical gestures. I simply wish to terminate our association and to move on with other things in life.
I hereby reclaim my rights to anything I ever gave you to publish. In particular, I assert my right to the novel Griffin Feathers which consists entirely of my own work with some input in the short sections of the book from the members of Trollhalla.
I am forwarding the “royalties” that you sent me to Jeff Freels, the artist whose work you have re-used to illustrate this version of Gristlegrim. He deserves compensation for his work.James, I am not angry at you, and I do not hate you. I simply will not associate with you ever again. For several years we were, I thought, very good friends. Outlaw Press did a lot for Tunnels and Trolls. You know why that time has ended. Let it go. Move on.
James, I will be publishing this letter in open forums on the internet, so that all the world can see how I feel, and how I react to what I can only believe are attempts to manipulate me and to gain control of Tunnels and Trolls. If you have no ulterior intentions, then forgive me for being suspicious, but I no longer feel that I can trust you.
James, you have your own unique style of creativity. Please go and do your own thing, and stop messing with me and with Tunnels and Trolls.Sincerely,
Ken St. Andre
For those who are inexplicably puzzled by this, Jim Shipman ran a Tunnels & Trolls publishing outfit called Outlaw Press, to which end he stole art, from more than 30 artists, committed eBay fraud, vandalized the Tunnels & Trolls Wikipedia article, and even tried to impersonate Ken St. Andre on this blog! And everyone knows about it. But for whatever reason, he just. Won’t. Stop.
I mean, if I were going to put in loads of time and effort to rip off some group – I wouldn’t pick Tunnels & Trolls players; an obscure sub-niche of an industry not rolling in dough anyway. Come on James, if you are serious about a career as a con man, shouldn’t you at least move up to senior citizens’ Social Security checks or something?
Posted in talk
Tagged crook, hobbit_king, jim shipman, outlaw, outlaw press, RPG, RPGs, shipman, T&T, trolls, tunnels, tunnels & trolls
Slow progression is the order of the day in my Reavers on the Seas of Fate campaign. The PCs are fourth level, and that’s after 24 long, hardcore sessions. They may get level 5 soon, but no promises.
But everyone’s sent me their character sheets, and there’s nothing soft about these PCs! When you really settle in to a level and live in it, you learn how to kick ass without always chasing that new kewl power (tm WotC).
Here’s their character sheets – feel free and use them as a pirate crew to strike fear into your PCs – just make sure they’re about 7th level or else they might get their fool throats cut.
Serpent Jorenson, CN Ulfen Druid 2/Ranger 2 – He specializes in the quarterstaff beat-down. Especially versus humans. That’s two attacks at +9/+9 for 2d6+7/2d6+5 when he has shillelagh on! And his pet snake Saluthra is ridiculously effective; the bite + grab + constrict dishes out 20-30 points of damage first round easy.
Girlfriend: Samaritha Beldusk, half-elf Cyphermage
Sindawe Narr, LE Mwangi Monk 4 – Yes, he’s really AC 24. And no, I don’t know why he has half a page of “sex manuevers” on his character sheet. I had no idea about that till right now. No wonder a goddess made love to him.
Girlfriend: Mama Watanna, an old (?) voodoo lady (?)
Wogan, N Chelaxian Cleric 4 – He keeps them all healed. He’s not hell on wheels in combat, but he likes to summon critters and has some guns that he can bust a cap in you with. And I notice he has a Wand of Eagle Slender. Apparently that increases your charisma by making you more svelte and athletic looking.
Girlfriend: His deity Gozreh provides his only sexual release
Tommy Blacktoes, NE Halfling Rogue 4 – Not one of those new style “striker/DPS” thieves, Tommy’s more of a skilled burglar and con man. +17 in some of those thief skills at level 4. I didn’t know that was possible. Watch your nipples when he’s around.
Girlfriend: Lavender Lil, tiefling hooker
Cool! Mega-genre site Topless Robot is having a contest in which you make a helpful RPG random generation table, like unto the old Random Harlot Table from AD&D 1e. Go, enter, win! There’s a bunch of entries already but they’re mostly lame. We need some real RPGers to weigh in!
Woot, it’s live! The RPG Stack Exchange is now open for business.
If you are a techie you may have used one of the other Stack Exchange sites – Stack Overflow, Server Fault, and Super User. They have turned that into an open technology and this is the newest launched site. In seven days of private beta there were 263 users who have asked 234 questions and written 954 answers!
It’s not the usual messageboard. It’s for expert Q&A format only. Hobnob on other forum sites, this one you ask questions and people answer. The community votes up or down the questions and answers based on their usefulness. The gold rises to the top, and the crap gets ejected. Come one come all!
Recently, I came across Dizzy Dragon Games’ online random dungeon generation tool. I’m not a big old schooler, so at first I considered it a novelty. But I watched it roll up a cute little map and it got me thinking.
On the one hand, a purely random dungeon is lame. No rhyme or reason to rooms or monsters. Piles of treasure sitting out loose.
But on the other hand, it has done a lot of the work for you. It’s easier to edit than to create from scratch. And in the real world, not everything always has obvious reasons and is tied up in a nice coherent little package. (Hell, there’s rooms in our office building at work that we puzzle over “what in the world was this supposed to be for?”) Also, a lot of modern dungeons are too “full.” They have something in every damn room. With this autogeneration, you get a more realistic largely-empty abandoned complex with some knots of critters in it. Bonus.
I was going to run an adventure (Showdown with the Arm-Ripper) that had a pretty small dungeon – some very cursory work, mainly about one big awesome room and setpiece battle. I needed more time to work on the next leg of my adventure. So I thought, let’s see what this random dungeon can do for me!
Here’s the one I generated. The format’s pretty rough, but the map is nice, and there’s loads of dungeon dressing and stuff. I think he’s doing something clever with the monster generation – it tends to add more of the same monster, so my dungeon had repeats of hell hounds and owlbears and stuff.
I wish I could show you my edited version – but because of the site’s output format, I pretty much had to print it and mark it up with pencil – I would love it if they added a more editable format. But I can walk you through what I did – and in the end, the PCs enjoyed the dungeon and it seemed organic and not thrown-together. The session summary detailing the first half of the dungeon crawl is up, the other one will be up within a week or two.
The dungeon I needed was an old overgrown ruined shrine. This made it easier to have an incoherent dungeon – this place was all jacked up. Original furnishings, most of the doors, any decorations or murals or whatnot – all gone. They’ve had plenty of other dungeons where the purpose of every room was writ large, so I figured this would help mix it up. Also, part of the plot was that the pirate Black Dog had used the place for caching treasure, which explains the unguarded loot bundles (each one got hidden and trapped by me.) In fact, the dungeon’s randomly generated “Baneful Depths of Demons” name was just a colorful sobriquet he used on his maps to scare off the rubes.
The first thing I did was break it up into zones. There are natural choke points that largely divide the complex up into coherent areas.
First, the northwest zone. I moved the minotaurs from room 38 into the all-secret-doors room 7. They consider the whole NW zone theirs – they don’t like the trolls in room 15 but have trouble killing them, and besides they’re a good buffer against intruders from the entrance. Sure enough, the party went there first but the fake poison gas in room 5 scared them off. You will note by careful observation that the entire western edge of the map is only accessible via secret doors (layers of them, in some cases).
Next, the central zone. From the natural-cave entrance all the way down to room 65, it’s pretty much one big open area. The “dungeon dressing” of breezes and air movement made sense through this zone. The rust monsters in rooms 42 and 34 I kept – I made the central area of rooms 33-63 there their nest. All the doors were rotted out and long gone from age, and I added a doorway between 32 and 62. The PCs were dicking around in room 37 and that attracted the ones in area 42, an d then later they were trying to ambush some hell hounds and the rest in 34 swarmed them. (Since the party’s heavy hitters are a monk and a druid, they were not as terrified of the rust monsters as you might think.) The dopplegangers in area 72 became “Celia” and “Rhody” (named after the rhagodessas and caecelias that were in the dungeon…) , hapless women adventurers. The illusion of 9 adventurers in area 65 became all the Pathfinder iconics, which was entertaining.
Then I did the southwest zone. The hellhounds in 59 were actually in the midst of ravaging that area – they don’t lair there, they got sent in to hunt down a pesky paladin. Several treasure caches got converted into Black Dog-trapped chests.
Next came the southeast zone. The most important thing was eliminating the door between are 36 and 47, meaning you have to traverse the whole SE section to get up into the northeast, and that only via the secret door in area 73. There were a number of owlbears here, so I decided the whole area 70/80/73 area is a big owlbear lair. In fact, that’s what the locals think the cave is, just an owlbear lair, not a big ass dungeon. The PCs got guided in here by the “girls,” and most of the owlbears had already been slaughtered by the principals of “Arm-Ripper”, except for ones in 70 and 73. An owlbear fight later and they looked for and found the secret door into area 74.
Finally, the east/northeast zone. From area 74 on most of the doors were still in good repair. The PCs went right by the NPC adventuring party in room 79 – I decided they were in there on a quest (looking for Gilmy the ettin actually, long story) and had blocked themselves in there to rest and regain spells. I added some doors to the block of rooms in the middle east section and moved the dire bear to comfier quarters in room 50 – three of the PCs snuck in and coup de graced it! That was fair enough, because if it had heard them it would have torn them a new one. They all rolled really high on their Stealth checks, and then the bear made two natural 20s on its saves vs the coup de graces – but sadly failed its third one.
I turned the doors between areas 43 and 44 into huge barred doors, and those curtain walls were all arrow slitted. It was a very obvious hard point and the PCs didn’t chance it. They just went north, and I basically cut out the random dungeon at room 19 and segued it into the druid shrine from Arm-Ripper.
In the end, I just scooted some doors, monsters, and treasure around, and came up with reasons and motives for the critters that were there, and voila – a randomly generated dungeon that suddenly makes some sense! It’s a big ruined sprawling place, lightly populated with coherent sets of critters that all have some kind of reason to be there.
So thanks to Dizzy Dragon. I won’t use random dungeons a lot, but with some care and feeding they can be judiciously used even in a campaign that values realism. If the tool got changed to have better, more easily editable output- just the rooms and stuff would have been nice, but even better the map… It’d be hell on wheels!
Twenty-third Session (10 page pdf) – “The Baneful Depths” – Jaren the Jinx wants his arm back, so the party accompanies him to a dungeon his pirate father sometimes used to stash treasure. Random encounter chart – 01-25: serpent chickens; 26-50: rape bugs; 51-75: bad dogs; 76-00 women!
We’re closing in on the finale of the first plot arc of the Reavers on the Seas of Fate campaign. I comboed up three major things for this session. First, the cultists, including the halfling riding the easy-chair-headed zombie, were from the adventure I used last time, Green Ronin’s “A Dreadful Dawn,” from their Bleeding Edge line of d20 adventures. Then for the “arm recovery” plot, I was using Goodman Games’ “Throwdown with the Arm-Ripper,” from their Wicked Fantasy Factory line. Finally, for the meat of the dungeon, I used a randomly generated dungeon, courtesy of Dizzy Dragon Games’ awesome online Adventure Generator.
I really enjoyed using the random dungeon generator. The process of taking a completely random dungeon and turning it into something that seems ‘real’ is something I’ll post about separately because it’s a big topic, but I was very happy how it did most of the heavy lifting for me, and I just had to edit it and come up with the whys and wherefores. It turned into a pretty organic interconnected area, and since it was super old and all the doors had fallen down and everything, there was an interesting effect; instead of the “open a door, deal with that threat, open another door, deal with that threat” syndrome, there were a lot of locations with critters that could detect or be detected by the PCs at varying ranges. The hell hound mass rush, the rust monsters attacking when the PCs were investigating a pit, the rust monsters attacking while the group was ambushing some more hell hounds, and Sindawe running across the women adventurers while chasing a hell hound all contributed to a very free-roaming and dynamic environment. It was unlike an organized force, though, like attacking a castle where all the guards and stuff communicate and come after you with coherence. So, for example, the hell hounds ended up attacking some of the rust monsters as well.
The illusion of the adventuring party was entertaining. I use picture printouts clipped to my DM screen as visual aids for many NPCs and critters. For this one, I removed all the printouts and indicated the big raft of iconics that adorn the screen itself – Valeros, Seoni, Merisel, et cetera. it kinda tipped Sindawe off that the whole thing was an illusion, but the players’ initial reaction of “Really?!?” was worth it.
Geek Related 
