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Showing posts from March, 2010

Customer Service

The RPG Blog II pointed out that MWP pricing for the Cortex .pdf didn't make any sense. So they changed the price! My Kingmaker Pathfinder issue showed up with a broken spine, I emailed Paizo and they are sending me a new one. Good customer service does still exist.

Dear,

Anarchists Socialists Libertarians Porn Stars Pro-wrestlers Lion Tamers Republican Congressmen Southern Baptist Ministers Pagans Rabbis Witches Librarians Accountants Lawyers Yale Graduates GEDs MBAs Communists Doctors Cashiers Bankers Music Critics IT Professionals Video Game Designers Public School Teachers Engineers Housewives Stay-at-home Dads Artists Garbage Men Whale Trainers American Idol Contestants Pen and Paper Game Designers RPG Bloggers I'd gladly play D&D with any of you. Yes, even after this week RPG Bloggers.

Stonehell: Advancement

I recently was asked in a comment if there was enough gold in Stonehell to support the training costs in OSRIC for gaining a level. According to the OSRIC rules it costs 1500 gp per level to gain a level in training costs. I am using the entourage system in my game so there are 4 players but each also has a dedicated henchman. I would like for there to be enough gold on the first level for all of the primary characters and main henchman to advance to level 2, even if some of the henchman don't get enough XP until later. This means there will need to be around 12,000 gp. Some notes about my calculations: 1. This includes only the first level of the dungeon even though we also are playing the above ground areas. 2. I am including only treasure. I am not including the gold gained by selling weapons and armor taken off corpses. I am assuming that most of this goes to equipment, supplies, hirelings etc. 3. I am not including obscure things like selling natural resources to an alchemist.

Bad News for Catalyst

One of the RPG darlings of the last few years is in bad shape. From RPG.net by way of Fear the Boot : OK, as you may well have been able to surmise from release schedules, Catalyst Game Labs is in a bit of a financial pickle, and it is somewhat unlikely that they will retain the license to make Shadowrun products. This is not because Shadowrun hasn't been selling enough to cover expenses, but merely because a significant quantity of money is missing outright. Reliable sources put this figure at roughly $850,000. Which sounds like a lot, and it is. It is roughly 40% of Catalyst's entire sales for last year, missing over a three year period. There will of course be lawsuits, and there are already people drawing up legal documents accusing Loren Coleman of having hired people to construct an extension on his house through the company as "freelance writers" and somehow reporting an estimated $100,000 of convention sales as $6,000. Whether that is actually true or not is

Hackmaster GMG

I was going to review the Hackmaster books some time in the near future, but there is nothing I can say about the GMG that Labyrinthian didn't say here . The book is an excellent resource, it is full of great stuff no matter what version of The Game you are playing. I will probably still talk about it later, but I wanted to pass the link along.

Taming the Savage Beast: Dragon Subdual

Way back in the 1980s a young boy was paging through his Mentzer Basic Set and noticed a section about subduing dragons. You could fight them with the flat of your blade, and capture them. Even sell them for money. Oh the possibilities... Historically there are two different methods for subduing a dragon, you can reduce it to 0 hp with subdual damage, or you roll against a ration of damage done over total HP. 4th Edition charts new and interesting territory on this subject. Chainmail : While dragons are in the fantasy section of Chainmail, nothing is said about subduing them OD&D : OD&D uses a ratio method where a ratio is kept of total damage done over the dragon's total HP. Each round percentile dice are rolled, if the roll is less than the ration the dragon is subdued. The rules cap the number of people attempting to subdue a dragon at 8. The characters can choose to sell the dragon for 500-1,000 gp per hit point, or they can keep it in their own service. If they sell th

A Long, Strange Trip

Two ago a former player of min passed away. He was about 30 years older than me, so he would be in his early 60s now if he had lived. One of his children recently sent be a box full of hid RPG stuff. It is full of all kinds of cool old stuff as well as a DVD with a bunch of Judges Guild .pdfs. I have no idea how legal these .pdfs are but amongst them were some fan made products, including a few by Gabor Lux. I have remarked before that Gabor Lux is very prolific in the two old school magazines and there have been several of his articles that I really enjoyed (in fact there is an adventure in FO5 that is great). I have been meaning to search around to see if he has a blog or website for a while and decided that this was the perfect time to do so. While I did not find a blog or website my search brought up this very level headed review of Carcosa . This was something else I have been meaning to pick up so I started checking out some of the posts by Geoffrey on Dragonsfoot. I found two, a

Whitebox Arrives

My Whitebox arrived today from Brave Halfling. It looks good, I have to go to class but I don't see any obvious quality issues. Let me tell you, it is chock full of stuff too. Now I need to find a way to make Akrasia's Swords and Sorcery mods from Knockspell into a booklet that I can put in there. I also want to get a copy of Carcosa, I have been reading a bunch of threads by "Geoffrey" on Dragonsfoot and I like this guy's style. I am not talking about the "mature content" stuff, I'll wait till I see that myself, I am talking about his ideas for the Holmes box set. More to come..