Review: Adventures of the Moss Babies

The Adventures of the Moss-Babies is a #rpg #zine writing up the adventures of a group of players who are notionally playing the #Pathfinder Rise of the Runelords campaign.

It is a mixture of in an out of character material that both serves as a kind of game scrapbook and literally as a fanzine of the players to their characters and I guess to themselves as a group.

I haven't read anything quite like this before. Aslan used to have in-character game reports but the mix of different perspectives seems different. Here the celebration of the game is held as being of equal importance to the game fiction.

The mix is stranger still because one of the members of the group is an internationally celebrated artist who has drawn mainstream comics like Batman as well as her own fantasy romances (you should totally read The Mire if you haven't already).

This naturally leads to a level of finish and quality that is ridiculously top-end for a "fan" product. Cloonan's contributions clearly stand out but its an egalitarian mix of content from all the group.

The Moss of the title is essentially a marijuana reference with a page dedicated to the effects of various herbs and moss along with the exhortation to "Smoke moss everyday".

This combined with a character called "Bardley Cooper" sets the general tone of light-hearted, meta, pop-culture referencing. This is not really about world building or a shared fiction but instead a communal comedy set inside the framework of a published campaign and ruleset.

This means you probably already know whether you are going to love this or not.

Cloonan fans are going to want it, vicarious gamers will find an openness that connects here. People who game rather than reading about games are not going to get much out of this. Those into the ephemera of roleplaying will get a kick out of such a well-executed window into a group and their game.

Songbird

A character writeup of The Lyre skin from a game of Sword, Crown and Unspeakable Power. #rpg #scup

Songbird is well-known around the city, his glorious face wrapped in a cap of exotic seabird feathers he has plucked or found himself. He is thin, a legacy of missed meals and empty pockets, but he gets by on his charming smile.

He has a patron in the form of Alm Tuck, a corsair captain, who has cornered the market for luxuries (legal and illegal). They've been friends since childhood but recently they have been on the outs over a popular tavern song credit to Songbird that Tuck believes to be a slight.

Preview: Electric Sheep

Electric Sheep is a #fantasy #cyberpunk #rpg hack based on the extremely influential Lady Blackbird game but it's a bit of a strange Frankenstein of other games.

Unlike Lady Blackbird the game doesn't strongly define a situation or a clear relationship setup between the characters. Even more strangely it doesn't really describe the character very much at all. It's clearly intended to be a much blanker canvas than Lady Blackbird.

The basic system is the same, you build pools of dice (d6) based on the traits on your character sheet that are relevant to what you are trying to do. Rolls of 4 to 6 are a success and the GM decides how many successes are required to achieve the character's outcome.

Failing a roll either allows the GM to escalate the situation or the GM can give a character a Condition (this is drawn directly from Masks) which can only be cleared by taking a specified action in a downtime scene.

The pool refresh scenes were something I really liked in Lady Blackbird and I feel their replacement here with the more prescriptive cues from the Conditions is inferior.

Recovery scenes allowed people to explore the relationships between the characters but with conditions you now have to be looking to hit a particular beat within the scene, such as hurting the other person in the scene which doesn't sound like much fun for the person on the other side.

What does work better than the original though is the stronger game structure which is based around the idea of missions. Lady Blackbird starts strong but then tends to lack the conclusion that a good one-shot needs.

Here the missions allow you to control when to end the game and the experience system allows some kind of evolution of the character in a small amount of real-time but a potentially longer span of time than the manic 48 hours of Lady Blackbird.

Each mission is made up of steps that have associated dice pool difficulties. The players know the sizes of the each of the pools but the GM assigns the pools to the challenges.

The game provides some standard missions such as infiltration, ambush and net run but it feels like the GM is meant to come up with a mission and it attendant stages more on the fly. It feels like the good parts of Shadowrun Anarchy with a kind of clear act structure.

Presumably the magic starts to flow when the GM can chain together these missions to give a narrative arc to the campaign or one-shot.

Electric Sheep is a Frankenstein's monster, but one of great taste, it borrows liberally from many excellent sources but the assemblage is the less than the sum of its parts. I'll want to play it before I pass my final judgement but I suspect that I'll want to hack it more than play it straight.

I've been putting together some pitches for Tobcon 3, the annual #WFRP convention. These aren't really sales pitches (you've already decided to go to a convention dedicated to WFRP, I mean c'mon!) but are meant to sell the tone of this #game over another choice. The first one is a bit influenced by Beyond the Wall and Dungeon World, the second is more comedy and I was tempted to hack MonkeyDome for it but I feel that Lasers and Feelings actually has a more consistent narrative feel despite having a very similar mechanic.

#rpg

The Black Island

All the old men told you to never go to the Black Island, that dark and terrible things lurked there and no-one who ever visited returned. You grew up with these tales but also others of gold in the darkness, of gems and magical wonders. Quieter tales of the adventurers who did return to the island but vowed never to return, not that they needed to. Those who take the risk and pluck a treasure from the island would never have to fish or darn or haul again.

You're young but you can already see the lives that lie ahead of you. So you've borrowed a boat and you're sailing over the grey sea to brave the Black Island and meet your destiny.

Rules: WFRP 4th Edition

Grim Fantasy: The revenge of the Necroprancer

It's a bad day to be the Prefect of the Bridge District. This morning a local merchant was found hanging from the Grand Bridge with horseshoes in his pockets. The local gossip says suicide but it seems unlikely he broke his own fingers or branded his own forehead with a magical symbol.

Looks like dark forces are at work and if you can't get to the bottom of it quickly the whole city may be damned.

Rules: A hack of Lasers and Feelings

Friday 5th May 1854 - Day 3

Mythical London shared universe.

Dramatis personae:
Kerryn - [Leece] - Adventurer who has lived among the Inuit.
Augustus Abelgoff - [Rob] - Antiquarian, surveyor and amateur mountaineer with experience in Scandinavia.
Sam (Samantha) Drydale - [Elaine] - Hunter and explorer with arctic experience.
Aseir - [Gary] - A young noble of the Winged Folk (a GURPS Fantasy race) with temperature tolerance and great ambition.
Chris Heyerdahl - [Richard] - Hunter and prospector with arctic experience.
??? - [Matt] - Mining engineer with arctic experience.

Today's foray was a quick trip up the "beach" to asses the condition of the glacier. The party set out accompanied (as usual) by a sergeant of marines and 8 men. The beach is an expanse of small rocks largely un-smoothed and mostly free of snow. With no time spent trudging through snow, progress was fast to about half a mile of the glacier. While the party was trudging along Aseir soared aloft and reconnoitred the glacier area. The glacier flows in two streams each a little less than one mile wide. Between the streams is a stagnant area with 3 sizeable islands. The final approach to the glacier was a tangle of ice blocks up to 4 meters high. The party would have to tread their way through these until they reached a point where they could transfer to the tops of the blocks. The party was not happy with this and comments about "ambush central" were aired so Aseir was sent aloft to find a better route. When he returned and reported the party decided to cross the snow and enter the city and head up through the city to the snow. FYI the map scale is 1 square is 1/3 of a mile and east is to the top of the map. The snow was slogged through until the city wall was reached. The wall is not much of a barrier as it has many breaches. Immediately outside the wall the snow piles deeply, up to 5 yards thick, while inside there is considerably less snow and many patches of low arctic bushes. Also on the inside there are many piles of rubble all of the black rock that gives the city it's name. Our geologist examined the rock and pronounced it perfectly ordinary dark basalt. This is quite at variance with the local rock for hundreds of miles around which uniformly has a high feldspar content as is pale coloured or stained reddish with iron.
It was decided to leave two soldiers at the entrance in case a retreat needed to be covered and to carry word back to camp if they should get into trouble. The party headed east until they neared the glacier edge. Near the start of the ice the party spotted a regular shape that appeared to be a building. Sketches were taken and two soldiers we detailed to take the sketches back to the entrance detail for safe keeping. While they waited for the runners return they idled around and chatted with Aseir about the best place to put their ladders. Suddenly shots rang out two and then two more. Aseir sprang into the air and the party grabbed their stuff and headed back at a run. Aesir spotted their four soldiers under attack by a band of half a dozen vikings. Our intrepid wingman swooped in and emptied 3 revolver shots into the back of one of the vikings but he was made of stern stuff and did not falter in his charge. This annoyed him enough that he conjured a fireball and started charging it up to full power. While this was happening the soldiers, who were fighting with cutlass and buckler against the long axes of the vikings, downed one and wounded 3 more. The fireball took the rear most viking in the back and he fell in a heap with his clothes burning. As Aseir circled around for another pass the soldiers finished off the rest of the vikings. All four soldiers were injured and losing blood but luckily there were no crippling blows. The party soon arrived and first aid and some healing magic was applied. Attention was turned to our fallen vikings who were not staining the snow with blood and it was found that they were skeletons dressed in viking clothes. It was thought prudent to smash the bones and a sample set of clothes armour and weapons was taken for later investigation. The skeletons were backtracked to a snowdrift where they had been covered so an aerial sweep was made and a humanoid figure was spotted lurking to the South East. The interloper spotted the Wingman and quickly ducked out of sight. At his point a retreat was called and the party retraced their steps back to the beach. As they did so there was a loud hooting call from the vicinity of the glacier margins.

Back at the camp the soldiers were hustled off to a healer and the party examined their loot. The clothes were well patched and somewhat threadbare. The axe heads were ordinary iron forged in perfectly respectable 13th C Norse style but the hafts were not wood. Instead they were of some hard compressed fibrous material. The cloak was not wool or linen but some mostly waterproof woven fibre. The biggest surprise was the penannular broach that pinned the cloak. The metal seemed unreasonably light and a chemist was summoned to investigate. His verdict was the new expensive metal Aluminium. The helmet was ordinary iron but the faceplate had been hammered out and patched at some point. If the repaired damage had been caused by a weapon then the blow had probably been fatal for the wearer. Finally the chainmail was in a sorry state with more holes filled with woven cord than solid patches of links. None of the material seemed old enough to date back to the time it's style suggested and the aluminium broach was a flat out impossibility. But as Augustus said "someone has gone to a lot of effort to make these skeletons look like vikings".

During the late afternoon another party that had gone to investigate yesterday's ruin returned with stories of carved rocks and platinum discs found among the piles of rubble.

Kerryn was an unhappy man after the encounter with the skeletons as he had been warned by his shaman that this was a forbidden place because things did not stay dead here.

Yesterday.
Day one.
#rpg #rpgplay #gurps #blackcity #hexcrawl

Thursday 4th May 1854 - Day 2 - Mythical London shared universe.

Thursday 4th May 1854 - Day 2 - Mythical London shared universe. The morning dawned bright and early at around 2am. Some hours later our protagonists arose and started preparing for their first expedition. Kerryn sorted out his dogs and harnessed...

The Adventures of the Moss-Babies is a #zine writing up the adventures of a group of players who are notionally playing the #Pathfinder Rise of the Runelords campaign.

It is a mixture of in an out of character material that both serves as a kind of #game scrapbook and literally as a fanzine of the players to their characters and I guess to themselves as a group.

I haven't read anything quite like this before. Aslan used to have in-character game reports but the mix of different perspectives seems different. Here the celebration of the game is held as being of equal importance to the game fiction.

The mix is stranger still because one of the members of the group is an internationally celebrated artist who has drawn mainstream comics like Batman as well as her own fantasy romances (you should totally read The Mire if you haven't already).

This naturally leads to a level of finish and quality that is ridiculously top-end for a "fan" product. Cloonan's contributions clearly stand out but its an egalitarian mix of content from all the group.

The Moss of the title is essentially a marijuana reference with a page dedicated to the effects of various herbs and moss along with the exhortation to "Smoke moss everyday".

This combined with a character called "Bardley Cooper" sets the general tone of light-hearted, meta, pop-culture referencing. This is not really about world building or a shared fiction but instead a communal comedy set inside the framework of a published campaign and ruleset.

This means you probably already know whether you are going to love this or not.

Cloonan fans are going to want it, vicarious gamers will find an openess that connects here. People who game rather than reading about games are not going to get much out of this. Those into the ephemera of roleplaying will get a kick out of such a well-executed window into a group and their game.

#rpg

Tabletop Gaming recently carried a long interview with Mark Truman about the upcoming Root #RPG. It was interesting to read how enthusiatic about the boardgame he is and what influence things like Mouse Guard are having on the design thinking. However it also mentions that it is highly likely to stick to the Magpie #PbtA formula and as someone who is not a massive fan of Masks I think that's a bit disappointing.

The factional relationships might be a good fit though so I guess it is just wait and see unless anyone knows what the playtesting plans are?

Root: The RPG

Root was 2018’s standout board game: a triumph of asymmetrical design, breathtaking presentation and a stirring sylvan world. This year, Mark Truman leads the way deeper into a war-torn woodland with Root: The Roleplaying Game

The Golden Bees

The Golden Bees are a commoner clique that provide a network of mutual support and aid in the drowned world. Refugees from the oceans arrive at the last city with no support or family other than the crew they arrive with, if that.

The Golden Bees provides a way to survive, a place to build new relationships and ultimately it is to be hoped families.

Members of the Golden Bees benefit from their large numbers (which includes many of the common people of the last city) and the gossip that flows through the group. In particular news from new arrivals means that the Bees often hear of events from distant places before those in the palace.

The Golden Bees are allied with the Hydromancers who maintain the defences of the last city and in open conflict with the Hidden Wave who seek to let the sea water rule all the land.

#scup #roleplaying #rpg #pbta

Thursday 4th May 1854 - Day 2 - Mythical London shared universe.

The morning dawned bright and early at around 2am. Some hours later our protagonists arose and started preparing for their first expedition. Kerryn sorted out his dogs and harnessed them to his dog-sled and most of the others prepared their skis. Accompanied by a Sargent and 8 Royal Marines the group headed South to investigate the circular feature Aesir had spotted yesterday. Two hours of tramping, gliding or lounging on the sled brought the group to the site. Along the way some snake tracks were spotted which caused some confusion until Kerryn volunteered that the Inuit have stories about poisonous furred snakes. They also have stories about lots of other monsters too. A bit further on an old set of Polar Bear tracks was seen (I was making rather disappointing rolls on the encounter dice so I decided that missed by one means tracks). The feature was located in a shallow valley in some low hills protected from direct sight if the city. The team first dug a trench through the snow across the feature and discovered a course of laid stones forming a circular feature about 5 yards across. Within the laid stones was a tiled floor consisting of several colours of Pentagonal and diamond shaped tiles. Some magical detection and investigation was done and it was determined that the stones were most likely formed using some variation of earth to stone and they had decayed traces of other spells that possibly indicated it supported some magical structure. While this was happening Kerryn set up to provide hot drinks and lunch. When he chose a flat rock to set up his stove he spotted some Norse runes reading something like "Hrothgar waited here" ... there was some disagreement about the exact translation. This prompted the others to clean up the foundation stones looking for inscriptions. To their surprise they found writing in a script something like Arabic. They took rubbings after lunch and then packed up to head home. Some cursory investigation of some rubble piles was made put people were more keen on heading back to camp.
Back at base camp they reported to Dr Jackson who was well pleased with their efforts. He summoned an middle east expert who had come to look at the coins and he confirmed that the writing was Persian calligraphy contemporary with the coins found in the viking encampment. The text appeared to part of a ritual phase used in enchantments and the summoning and binding of djinni.
I awarded each member of the 1 character point for a successful hex explore.

Day one is here.
#rpg #gurps #blackcity #hexcrawl

Wednesday 3rd May 1854 - Mythical London shared universe.

Wednesday 3rd May 1854 - Mythical London shared universe. So the players have arrived at the Black City after an uneventful voyage from Liverpool on the SS Great Western (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Great_Western) which has been purchased by...

Wednesday 3rd May 1854 - Mythical London shared universe.

So the players have arrived at the Black City after an uneventful voyage from Liverpool on the SS Great Western which has been purchased by the Royal Society (at fire sale prices) to transport expedition members to the site. The site is on the Greenland mainland near Upernavik. As they approached the inlet they spied a man shaped Inuksuk guarding the location. During the approach one of the organisers gave the party a look through an enchanted telescope so that they could see what attracted attention to the area. Through the telescope a bright beacon reaching into the sky was visible. Waiting in the inlet there were two Royal Navy frigates waiting at anchor. On shore there is a small cluster of tents and industrious construction and archaeology work.
The expedition leaders, Dr. Cyril Jackson of the Royal Society and Commodore George Crozier of the Royal Navy came aboard to welcome the main party and brief the special party of our protagonists.
Kerryn - [Leece] - Adventurer who has lived among the Inuit.
Augustus Abelgoff - [Rob] - Surveyor and amateur mountaineer with experience in Scandinavia.
Sam (Samantha) Drydale - [Elaine] - Hunter and explorer with arctic experience.
Aesir - [Gary] - A young noble of the Winged Folk (a GURPS Fantasy race) with temperature tolerance.
Christopher? - [Richard] - Hunter and prospector with arctic experience.
The site was discovered last year during searches for the lost Franklin expedition. Franklin also had one of the limited supply of enchanted telescopes (Which the navy uses to gauge the intensity of distant storms) and appears to have diverted here and his expedition was lost here. The burnt wrecks of his two ships are occasionally visible at low tides. At this location there is the remains of a Viking encampment of at least 4 longhouses surrounded by a rough wall of stones. A number of finds from last summer were displayed, the prize one being a Viking pattern spear head made of an unknown black metal (it is worth noting we are talking antiquarians rather than archaeologists in the modern sense doing these excavations). Attention was also drawn to the unusually large proportion of 13th Century Persian coins. Such coins do turn up in viking hoards but here they make up over half of the found coinage. A rough map of the black city was produced based on observations from kites and ground surveys. The one party that penetrated the city disappeared without trace. Several places were marked where large statues had fired on surveyors approaching the walls various magical effects. Warnings were made about polar bears and other hostile wildlife including a story of a caribou corpse in the hills that looked like it had been hacked apart by "a party of madmen with axes".
The party gathered their gear and went ashore to sort themselves out and start acclimatising. One of the party immediately decided to take a solo walk about 7 miles along the shingle beach past the city to a small glacier marked on the map. It was only with difficulty that he was dissuaded ( I consider it bad form to kill PCs on the first session ). Aesir did some reconnaissance flights and discovered some previously unsuspected trail cairns leading to a circular structure about 4 miles south of the camp. It was decided to visit there the next day ( I had to hastily extended the map to cover the new area).

#rpg #gurps #blackcity #hexcrawl

SS Great Western - Wikipedia

Alright, I'm going to say something I've said before. Something that is maybe a little unfair and little unpopular in certain quarters. And I'm going to preface it by saying this is not me judging the people involved, just pointing out a pitfall that I don't think most of them see.

OSR gaming is a trap.

Trying to recreate the magic of your first days of gaming is toxic nostalgia for most of us. Because for most of us, it is trying to evoke an era that was, by and large, a pretty crappy time and a pretty crappy experience unless you were a straight, white, cisgendered and middle-class or rich man or boy.

The baseline assumptions of early D&D, AD&D and clones/supporting products were vile. Harlot tables, homosexuality as a mental disorder, gender dysphoria as a joke and curse, women characters with lower stats than men because 'that's the way it is', etc. And let's not even get into the crazy racial subtext.

I think I may have seen that earlier than most because I am gay and the guy who taught me to play was black and I watched him try to figure out where that fit in the D&D game worlds where everybody was white by default or later when the only people of color were bad guys or savages. (By the way, Reggie, wherever you are, I owe you for a lifetime of gaming love. Thanks, dude.)

Nostalgia in small doses is not a bad thing. Making it your focus, without critical commentary, artistic expression or attempt to bring the best of those ideas into the modern world and a more inclusive ethos, is very much a bad thing.

If I saw more attempts to transform those old games, rather than venerate them, I'd be a lot less skeptical, and frankly worried, about OSR gaming and the culture it creates. But as it stands now, seeing that culture birth and sustain monsters isn't exactly a surprise. It's all about recreating a time when those guys weren't seen as monsters.

#tabletop #rpg #DND #OSR

I am shortly (like within the next 2 weeks) going to be starting a play be email game of trading in 17th century Europe.
It’s like the Han Solo game in Traveller but just before The 30 Years War.
It is a test of rules I’ve been writing. They’re for LotFP but also work as a stand-alone trading and traveling game - by horse, cart, ship and letter of credit.

The year is 1599. You play a junior member of a rich European family. You have been loaned 1000sp with which to make your fortune in the next 2 years - whoever comes back with the most profit gets to be part of the East India Company and sail to the Spice Islands where money literally grows on trees.

Play will start in 1-week turns, (one week of game time = 1 week of real time) but hopefully speed up to 1 month per week. It will be conducted over email and/or discord, so it survives the demise of G+. There’s a map and info available about ports, wars etc. You decide what you’re going to do, how you’re using your money, where you’re going, and I DM it all, using bespoke rules for trade and sea fights. There is potential to get into trouble with pirates, capture each other, spread rumours, run blockades etc along the way.

Comment here if you’re interested - you’ll need to give me an email address. Maps, details forthcoming. Everyone is welcome.
#rpg #osr #traveller #pbem

If you are interested in #rpg #actualPlays or advice check out my blog:

https://www.reddicediaries.com

#rpg #art #illustration #mywork full res

(if image doesn't load hit me a shout)

#art commission #illustration for a #tabletop #rpg called Genship Exiles here full res

Hey everyone, I’m #newhere and a #gplusrefugee!

I’m interested in #boardgames, #cats, #cisv, #coffee, #currentevents, #dnd, #editing, #googleplus, #knitting, #photography, #pottery, #rpg, #socialjustice, #vegetarianism, #wilderness, and #wordsmithery.

Hey everyone, I’m #newhere. I’m interested in #diydnd, #dnd, #osr, and #rpg. I guess we're all being thrown out of G+ where I am also +Richard G, the guy who runs http://lurkerablog.wordpress.com/ and Counter-colonial Heistcrawl and Tartary.
I guess that's #countercolonialheistcrawl and #tartary now.

Richard's Dystopian Pokeverse

Mostly Old-school RPG musings

#Würfel aus #China .
#Erwartung vs. #Realität.
Ich mag rot-orange. Rosa-orange ist aber echt nicht meins.

#DnD #Dice #PnP #RPG

Ich muss mal wieder Werbung machen für den D&D #Podcast von mir und meinen Freunden.

Mit viel pubertärem Humor, einigen Saufgelagen und häufig darauffolgenden ... Akten. Wobei, die sind auch immer mal zwischendurch.
Die epischen Abenteuer und Kämpfe fehlen natürlich auch nicht.
Und alles aufgeteilt in mundgerechte 30 Minuten Stückchen.

Achja, ich empfehle mit Folge 8 oder 10 anzufangen. Da ist alles etwas eingespielter. Ab Folge 10 gibts dann auch mehr als nur ein Lied in Schleife :-D

Der Kanal:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSvnMC0Uc9qUr9Q5o47MpnQ

#DungeonsandDragons #DnD #rpg #youtube #PnP #penandpaper #rollenspiel #dnd5e

Seit ein paar Wochen spiele ich bei einer Runde #Dungeons&Dragons mit. Der Spielleiter ist Mitglied bei einer #Pen&Paper #Podcast Seite. Er hat gefragt, ob er unsere #Abenteuer hochladen darf und wir haben zugestimmt.
Wenn jemand von euch interessiert ist sich so ein #Rollenspiel anzuhören:
http://tripletwenty.net/
Ich mache bei #IronGods mit, was aber eigentlich eher eine #Homebrew Kampagne ist, für die Leute, die sich da auskennen. Bisher sind nur 2 Folgen hochgeladen. So wie bei jeder Serie muss man sich noch etwas einspielen. Und noch ein paar neue Mikrofone kaufen..immernoch. naja. Es wird definitiv noch richtig lustig. Der Podcast ist übrigens ab 18.
Hörts euch gerne an :-D

#Fantasy #Fantasie #RPG #Deutsch #DnD #D&D #DnD5e #PnP #P&P #Tabaxi #Halbelfe #Elfen #Orcs #Elf #Orc #Ork #Hörspiel