Circle of Dar Janix

The second session of my OSRIC game went very well. While creating characters was a pain the first week, the game plays very well. I only went with the OSRIC rules for now with the optional shield rules and entourage system in place. I did not add in weapon speed or weapon v. AC. Combat moved fast, by my count we got in six different combat encounters. We started the session off with the characters getting off the boat from The City State of the Invincible Overlord in Magnus Aquila, the colony city. They didn't hang out in town very long because the place was a mud-ridden, depressing dump. They hired two torchbearers and a boat and headed for the dungeon. That's right, there were 4 players, each with a primary PC and a favored henchman, and two torchbearers. If you are keeping score at home that makes a party of 10 characters, and we managed to get done 6 combats in about 5 hours of playing. When they arrived at the Stonehell canyon they dove right into exploring. They decided ...

Fear the Boot is having its annual convention on March 12-13 in St. Louis. I attended the first one and had a blast, they have expanded it since then. Sadly law school will keep me away again this year. If you are looking for an affordable con and can make it to the St. Louis area, this is a great choice. The last time I went the size of the con was great, enough people that there was alot going on but few enough that you got to meet almost everybody. You can check it out here: Fear the Con 3

Over at Aeons & Augauries, JDJarvis posted a bunch of symbols of different door types . What, you aks, would I want with all those door symbols? The main thing I want with all those door symbols is to figure out how they would mechanically differentiate themselves in game. This is another one of those great blog posts that gets me thinking, it doesn't give me any answers, just a launching point for an evening of RPG related thought. This got me rereading godog's From Kuroth's Quill #01 that dealt with special doors, stairs and sublevels. And this got me excited about getting back to work on my changes to Stonehell (after loosing play time to the snowpocolypse we should be back on track next week, I hope). So what would I do to make these doors different? Pivot Hinge: Have to choose between a one handed weapon attack or your shield bonus while standing in the doorway. There is no enough room for both or for a two handed attack. Flapped Hinge: Surprise penalty while enter...

Iron Tyrants is a mech mini game by David (I may accidently also call him Adam from time to time) and Luke at the Podgecast. I was lucky to get a chance to play it at Gen Con last year and now their website is up as launch draws closer. First, David and Luke are great guys. I went to Gen Con with them last year and Luke was one of the people I roomed with. The guys a roomed with were a fun multiplier for the whole event. If the quality of the person making the game matters to you, they check that box. Second, I think that podcasts, and especially shows like The Podgecast and Fear the Boot, are one of the best things the RPG world has going right now (the old school revolution and Fantasy Flight Games being the others). This is a game being made with that same "do it yourself" spirit that makes podcasting and the OSR so important. Third, it was a fun game 6 months ago. I imagine that as playtesting has progressed it has only gotten better. It moves fast and the overdrive mecha...

Just finished reading through it. If only this had arrived a few weeks ago, I could have avoided a ridiculously long character creation session in OSRIC. Oh well. Looks like I am not the only one who has had these problems .

Last weekend I was fortunate to be a player in an excellent Rogue Trader game. I played the Seneschal on a ship owned by a crazy, spoiled Rogue Trader with a Napolean Complex. It was my job to translate his vague instructions into commands that could actually be used to run the ship. We also had a dead world warrior and a navigator along. Our first mission was to recover a city building artifact to pay off the Rogue Trader's charter. We set off to meet our contact to get the co-ordinates. We met him deep in the bowels of the space stations machinery. As he was passing off the data some kind of mechanical bird swooped down to steal the crystal. We made quick work of the bird and its psycher owner. While our fearless leader was standing on the cooling body of our foe making odd proclomations we tracked the psycher back to another Rogue Trader named Garren Fel, who was trying to jump our claim on the city building McGuffin. As we prepped the ship for the journey the navigator approach...

Two weeks ago we had our first OSRIC game session. The players created characters to take on Stonehell dungoen. Since we are using David Bowman's Entourage system from Fight On! #2 I had each player create two PCs one of which will be their main character and the other will be their Loyal Henchman. I pretty much want to leave the world open for the players to create as much as possible so I was happy to see them start filling in the racial details as we made characters (female dwarves have beards!). It has been a long time since I had a group make up 1st Edition Characters and I forgot what a pain it was. Character creation requires a total of 8 die rolls (6 stats, hit points, starting gold) for most characters, but it still takes almost as long as 3.5 until people get familiar with the system. The problem is the race/class combos and the non-universal stat bonuses. Not only do the stat bonuses vary from stat to stat, they also vary from class to class! AAAAARRRGGG! This problem wa...