Mind Melter for Cepheus Atom & Barbaric!
Some beings are capable of amazing powers of the mind. You may communicate telepathically with a sentient creature you can see even if you don't share the same language. Additionally, as long as you have at least 1 point of Endurance you may telepathically assault a creature's mind, sentient or not, forcing them to make a Knowledge throw of 8+ or they suffer 2d+1 damage.
Dog Boy for Cepheus Atom & Barbaric!
Genetically uplifted canoids created by the Coalitions States to hunt non-humans. They may throw Lore 6+ to sense any sorcery that has been used in the general vicinity in the last four hours. Further, they gain Advantage on Lore throws to track a target, but require a way to gain their scent.
Ley Line Walker: Some sorcerers train their senses to detect the ebb and flow of sorcery along ley lines and the places of power where they converge. If the sorcerer is within 20 feet of a ley line they heal 2 lifeblood points per day. While within 10 feet of a ley line and a Sorcery throw of 7+ a sorcerer may teleport along the ley line up to 30m and attack or move 60m without attacking.
Over the last year, I've looked at quite a few Traveller/Cepheus Engine products from various publishers. While I understand the appreciation for building your character through Education and Careers but it's not something I'm a huge fan of. However, Stellagama is a publisher that has been making Cepheus products that are lighter on rules yet still capture the OSR appeal I think Traveller/Cepheus has.
My favorite of these began with Cepheus Quantum(it's free )and has carried over to Cepheus Atom (think Gamma World) and Barbaric! (think DnD or RuneQuest).
Yesterday, they uploaded Cepheus Sorcery which is a 2 page set of rules for using the Cepheus system in a Sword & Sorcery setting. Like their other Cepheus Quantum games, it's just a masterpiece of getting to the heart of what I find important as a player and a Game Master. I have less time these days and while I love DnD 5th Edition and Shadows of the Demon Lord it's cool to have such a proven set of rules in a mere 2 pages.
I haven't been taken with a set of rules since the Cypher System.
It's free and there is literally no reason not to download it. If you like it, pick up Barbaric! too.
Stellagama's Barbaric! has really captured my imagination and I'm working on a setting that is very much inspired by Dark Sun and I'm calling the project Burnt World.
Below are two new traits.
I began Cross Planes in April 2012 and my output has varied from multiple times daily to less than once a month but at some point in the last couple of months I hit 2 million views and I'm pretty excited about it. I don't really know how many views other blogs get and I generally assume my blog isn't anywhere close to being as popular as The Others Side Blog, Grognardia, or Jeff's Game Blog so they might have 10 million views as far as I know.
Either way, I'm pretty darn excited and felt I had to share. Maybe we'll hit 3 million views by 2026?
Thanks for reading, I know in the last few years my output has been far less than the first few years and I'm trying to find a better schedule but we'll see what the world does and what my Anxiety does.
Description - Burna Boyz are Orks who cannot stop setting things on fire. These lunatics will set light to anything or anyone for the simple joy of watching them "do the burny dance".
I've never run a single edition of Traveller, but I've been keeping my eye on the OGL version known as the Cepheus Engine and Barbaric! is a neat game, and Groundlings, minions from Thundarr the Barbarian, seemed like a good start.
I'm sure like many of you the past year has been...challenging at best. Last fall I dove headfirst into action figures and DnD, the OSR, and RPGs took a back seat to that and that has been where my passion has been directed since then.
I don't want Cross Planes to go away but I don't know if I can go back to anything close to a post every day. It's not that I don't want to, it's that I just am not sure that I have the time to do it.
I have worked at Comic Book World since November 1999 and it has always been the plan that my wife and I would purchase from her parents one day. Her parents retired in November and a busy job got busier and since there aren't any in-person Pop Culture Conventions, those people lucky enough to have jobs are spending it more locally, so we are busier than ever (and I'm not complaining). On top of that Collectible have EXPLODED, I was hired during the (first?) Pokemon boom, at one point my job involved me going to Wizard of the Coast's website and ordering Pokemon TCG boosters directly from them, and these days about 1/4 of my day involves finding Pokemon TCG boosters again. I don't know how long it will last but I'm going to enjoy the ride.
The blog isn't going away but it's obvious that what I've had to say on here is different now and I'm trying to figure that out.
I'll be seeing you.
I've been interested in RPG designs which often leads me to pick up a PDF of a game just to see how it was designed. I've recently done that with Ruin Master from RiotMind which is a bit of a blend of the OSR and Basic Role-Playing, but there are some places where they seem to pointedly ignore some of the recent innovations to the family of D100 games created by Chaosium's RuneQuest and Call of Cthulhu.
Let me reiterate that these complaints are merely based on my opinions and this might be the game you have been waiting your whole life for.
For one thing, many of their bonuses and penalties are multiples of 5 and in my experience, many people are intimidated by double-digit arithmetic so why not keep their penalties (and bonuses) in increments of 10? If you are going to stick with multiples of 5 then why not use a D20 (which I believe they did with Trudavang).
I was also surprised that Ruin Master uses a version of the old Resistance Table which I have seen replaced with a blackjack-style solution where the highest successful roll wins.
Additionally, when casting spells you have to spend Magic Point and roll your Magic skill but receive a -5% to the chance per Magic Point spent. I get the impression that this is a low magic setting, but why require so much math? If you don't want magic to be prevalent don't provide spells we are all familiar with from every edition of DnD. For reference, a person's Magic skill at character creation will be from 40 to 60%.
I completely grok that everyone has specific tastes in their games I just don't see the point of making things so challenging to use Magic and fill the game system with, in my opinion, unnecessary complexity.
Apparently, I'm not Ruin Master's target audience and that's okay. Its a gorgeous book and for the right group an interesting streamlining of The Design Mechanism's Mythras and Chaosium's Magic World and RuneQuest: Glorantha.
I'm a backer of Privateer Press' Iron Kingdoms setting for DnD 5th Edition. I've loved the setting since it was released for DnD 3.0 back in the day and am looking forward to running it under 5E.
Matt Wilson of Privateer Press made this statement in response to a question about why they stopped supporting the Iron Kingdoms RPG with its own unique system, "5e is the most played RPG system in the history of RPGs, and so if we're going to keep exploring and expanding on the Iron Kingdoms."
Do you think that statement is true?
I know 5E is huge, I mean H-U-G-E, but B/X DnD and ADnD 1E were pretty successful too and they've had the benefit of being played since the 70s and been reinvigorated with the OSR in the last decade.
Let me be clear here, I'm not taking Mr. Wilson to task for his statement it simply made me think about the life cycle of various versions of DnD and the inventory numbers. His statement could be completely spot on and I'm sure he has a better chance of having insight from WotC than I do.
I'd love to hear what you think on the subject.
My first RPG was Champions which allowed a neophyte like me to build anything I could imagine once I learned the language of the HERO System. However, I still had a wandering eye that led me to Heroes Unlimited, to TSR's Marvel Super Heroes, and on and on. I don't know if I realized it at first, but part of my Gaming ADD was looking for that perfect system. For a long, long time I thought that was what made a long-term campaign work, clear, concise, and unified rules. The OSR would eventually teach me otherwise and I now know that what makes a long-term campaign work is a DM who can stay focused and roll with the punches and a group who buys into the game. That is it, in my opinion.
But I still own a ton of RPGs and I still have a yearning for that "perfect system". I've been a big fan of Pinnacle Entertainment Group since Deadlands was published and when they launched Savage Worlds I thought it would be my answer for all further campaigns. It was, however, not the answer and that is mainly because I prefer Hit Points and it lacks them. It's also not quite as fast for my tastes as it advertises. I love PEG and I adore the idea of SW, but not the execution.
However, when I took SW for a spin about two years ago I picked up Chaosium's Down Darker Trails and I realized how much I love the Basic Role-Playing System that powers Call of Cthulhu, RuneQuest, and the forthcoming Rivers of London RPG. I've been thinking about running a BRP game for the last six months or so, but BRP wasn't exactly what I was looking for.
Meanwhile, I've fallen in love with The Design Mechanisms' Mythras RPG (it was RuneQuest 6th Edition for a while) and I really appreciate how many settings and sourcebooks they publish. As a Chaosium fan the release schedule often leaves a lot to be desired. However, Mythras is more fiddly than I like in my D100 games as I don't care for Strike Ranks or Hit Locations.
On top of all of this is a game engine I've been tinkering with for years and is inspired by Mike Pondsmith's Castle Falkenstein. In that game, there are Ability scores just skills and you default to Average in any Skill you have not assigned otherwise.
What I'm getting too is I took Castle Falkenstein's basic Skill premise, plus a D100 resolution system, and pyramid style Skill allocation system that borrows from the World of Darkness, Hero Wars/HeroQuest/QuestWorlds, Chaosium's Magic World, FATE/FUDGE, and the Mythras Companion.
HEre is the set up.
Your Hit Points equal 12+2d6.
You assign the following values to your Skills: 80, 70%, two at 60%, two at 50%, four at 45%, and two at 40%. Any Skill you don't have defaults to a 33% chance of success.
I borrow weapons and equipment from BRP, Mythras, or Delta Green.
I started using this to run another Star Wars game. This time the Imperial Navy, now led by Grand Moff Kaine, wants to remove Darth Vader for his failure at Battle of Yavin. The Grand Moff has an elite unit of the Navy comprised of Force-Sensitive operatives and he has been given the blessing to train them and deploy them to hunt down any surviving Jedi or bring in any Force-Sensitives that they become aware.
The Players are that squad and their first assignment was to retrieve Talon Karrde from the prison planet Eisen alive if at all possible.
We've played two sessions and I'm having a blast. For me, the percentile resolution system is darn easy for online play and I truly appreciate it.
I plan on developing and previewing the system further on here.
Stay warm and stay well.
If you've been around here long enough you've seen me write about my mental illness--I have General Anxiety Disorder--which means, essentially, my fight or flight goes off a fair bit more than usual and doesn't always need a reason. I've been taking medicine for over 20 years and it makes things a lot better and I'm one of the lucky ones.
My gaming group from 1991 to about 2006 was fairly stable and had up to 11 players at any given time. We were all fairly young and there was a lot of drama--almost constant drama--all of the time. If I'm honest with myself I created the majority of the drama because my mental illness was not being treated nor had it been diagnosed. For various reasons my self-esteem was intertwined with being the group's Game Master and also its "leader"--more like a "group mom" really. As my Anxiety increased my decisions became worse and the drama got worse as well. It was a dark time in my life as I took something I loved and was supposed to be fun and twisted it up.
Things got better after 2006, for a variety of reasons, but much of it has to do with the medicine I was on as it was very, very effective. Not all meds are created equal and everyone is very different in how they interact.
I have always had Gamer ADD but after starting this medicine it mostly disappeared which allowed me to start this blog and eventually run several long-term campaigns including at levels 1 to 20 DnD 5E one.
Almost two years ago that medicine stopped working--the truth is it worked for about 12 years which is a remarkable amount of time--and while the new medicine is pretty good it doesn't handle the Gamer ADD as well and some of the old feelings have bubbled up.
At my worst, I was both obsessive and paranoid and my fight response was far more dominant than my flight response so I was a raging bitch sometimes. Thankfully, a combination of coping mechanisms and experience let me see the behavior as it starts to bubble up again but it doesn't remove the emotions.
The emotions are recurring because we've just finished an excellent 5E campaign after almost 2 years and I just assumed that I would run next. However, I didn't share my assumption with anyone and another DM did communicate their desire to run. This DM is a great friend and a great DM but a part of me feels hurt because I wasn't asked to run. Obviously, this is an immature response fueled by my mental illness and there is absolutely no real issue here. My group is filled with wonderful and kind people and we have a great time together.
This situation is compounded by the fact that I'm starting a Roll20 5E game and some of the players don't know if they can commit yet but sadly my anxiety tells me that I'm not a good DM and they just don't want to play in my game because they don't like me. Again, these are wonderful and good people involved and there isn't anything sinister about any of their situations.
I'm writing about this because I try to be very open with my mental illness and I'm just letting people know it's okay to talk about it and realize that you can beat it. I've felt fragile and been really low before, to the point that I considered suicide and I just want everyone to know that you are important, you are stronger than your illness, and the world is a better place with you in it. Don't kill yourself, there are good people out there for you, you can be diagnosed, you can be treated, and you are not the exception to recovery.
My situation probably isn't unique and the best thing I think I can do is to enjoy the new campaign as a player and just be flexible with people's schedules for my Roll20 game.
Coalition Skelebot for Cepheus Atom The Coalition State's have invested heavily in automated troops for hazardous environments and ...
