Marvel Super Heroes/FASERIP: Additional Damage Revised

I've revised my FASERIP Damage Bonus originally posted here. 

If the roll of a d10 is even you gain a +1 Column Shift per die and if your roll is a double and a success you gain +3 Column Shifts.

Example 1 - My roll is a an 81 so I gain a +1 Column Shift to damage since one of the dice is even.

Example 2 - My roll is a 64 so I gain a +2 Column Shift to damage since both are even.

Example 3 - my roll is a 95 so I don't gain a bonus to damage since both dice are odd.

Example 4 - My roll is a 77 so I gain a +3 to damage since my roll is doubles and it succeeded and even or odd doesn't matter.

That's it. It's fast and fairly straightforward.

Marvel Super Heroes/FASERIP: Additional Damage

I love the old TSR Marvel Super Heroes/FASERIP rules and its an old favorite of mine, however I would like some random element to damage and have two different options:

Option 1: When an attack hits a target roll a d6 and on a roll of 1 or 2 the damage increases by that many column shifts and on a 3-6 nothing occurs.

Option 2: Works as above but when you roll a 6 it counts as 1 column shift and you preroll the d6. As long as you roll 6s you keep increasing the column shifts, but a 1 or 2 are ignored on all additional rolls.

That's it. Pretty straight-forward.

Excelsior!

#RPGaDAY 2023: Day 16 thru 27

Game You Wished You Owned? This is tough. DnD popped into my head. HERO System/Champions too. Rifts. Savage Rifts is cool but I'd like to fix Rifts. It is my White Whale.

Funniest Game You've Ever Played? Tales of the Floating Vagabond.

Favorite Game System? HERO System. It's a like a language that I'm still fluent in.

Favorite Published Adventure? L5R's Tomb of Iuchi-Ban for 1st Edition.

Will Still Play in Twenty Year's Time? DnD most likely. Hopefully Savage Worlds and Dragonbane.

Favorite Licensed RPG? West End Game's Star Wars RPG.

Best Second Hand RPG Purchase? Villians and Vigilantes.

Coolest Looking RPG or Book? Castle Falkenstein RPG Hardcover.

Complex/Simpler RPG you Play? Complex is HERO System. Simple is Call of Cthulhu.

Unplayed RPG You Own? So. Damn. Many. Rifts.

Favorite Character Sheet? Vampire: The Masquerade's Character Sheets.

Game You'd Like a New Edition Of? West End Game's Star Wars. I appreciate the slipcase FFG did but I'd love for that line to come back.

#RPGaDAY 2023: Day 1 thru 15

First RPG Played This Year? Savage Worlds Deadlands.

First RPG Game Master? My old buddy Todd back in 1991. I was a sophomore in College.

First RPG Bought This Year? Harthbreaker. An OSR + Powered by the Apocalypse hybrid.

Most Recent Game Bought? Shadow of the Weird Wizard. It is on Kickstarter right now and you should back it too.

Oldest Game You've Played? Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2nd Edition.

Favorite Game You've Never Played? WitchCraft from Eden Studios.

Smartest RPG You've Played? I don't know what this means to be perfectly frank. I'm going with Numenera for some reason.

Favorite Character? Billy Ray Cordite, a Pathfinder 1E Paladin that wore cowboy boots.

Favorite Dice? My friends bought me those really expensive Sapphire Anniversary DnD Dice that are metal.

Favorite Tie-In Fiction? West End Games had at least one novel for Bloodshadows that I really enjoyed.

Weirdest Game You've Played? Skyrealms of Journey at Gen Con in 1993. Strange setting.

Old Game You Still Play? Marvel Super Heroes/FASERIP from TSR

Most Memorable Character Demise? I had this Monk in 5E, an eladrin, he was just a combat monster and I was it hard to make him unique so I leaned into an existential crisis where he is tempted to join the cult of Iuz because he thinks he is a remorseless killing machine. However, first he discovers a Deck of Illusion and just loves the chaos of it. Then he discovers and then later wishes for a Deck of Many Things and he gets a magic belt from Kord and he begins to believe that the deity worships HIM. He goes off to defeat a Black Dragon in one on one combat but then decides to seduce them. He was almost holing his own in the fight but a grenade a gnome tinkerer gives him blows up on a count of 2 instead of 3 and the Dragon then finishes him off. It was crazy fun.

Favorite Convention Purchase? I have the Castles and Crusades White Box from years and years ago.

Favorite Module/One-Shot? Any thing published by Schwalb Entertainment. They are short and succinct.

 

If You Build It They Will Play: Hedrons

I started playing Magic: the Gathering with the Antiquities set...so 1994, I guess? I've always found many of the game's Planes fairly interesting and Zendikar is among them. In the setting, a geomancer, created these floating monoliths or Hedrons, to imprison the game's riff on the Great Old Ones known as the Eldrazi.

Since the Craglands have been dealing with the threat of expansion of the Far Realms I decided to use the Eldrazi as a change of pace.

The Hedron appears, passing through a newly formed Rift, moments after an unexplained explosion within a nearby mine and immediately begins floating at about 15' in the air where it remains stationary and vibrates at a frequency that is just barely audible (DC 13 Wisdom (Perception) check).

The Rift, which appears as a night-black oval set into the ground, is a slightly larger than an average human and is 15° cooler than the rest of its environment. Looking directly into the Rift requires a DC 12 Wisdom Saving Throw which causes a level of Exhaustion on a failed roll.

Anyone who succeeds on a DC 12 Intelligence (Arcana) check knows what the Hedrons are and that they are rare on this Plane. If the total is a 15 or higher then it is known that the Mage King Suleiman III of Khersia wrote that our Plane and Zendikar's were somehow linked during the sinking of Hem-Hoomod, the Ivory Seat of the Woodeel Empire, which marked the end of the 7th Age and the beginning of our current one. With a total of 18 or higher it is know that Ur-Hukar, the High Vizier to the Ivory Seat, came upon the Invector Prima, a foul tome devoted to the Higher Ungods, the name of the Eldrazi during the 7th Age, which corrupted him body, mind, and soul. If the total is 20 or higher then it is know that that Hussars of Vim use a strange form of magic to detect, track down, and destroy Hedrons and then cleanse the area via the Meteor Swarm spell.

If You Build It They Will Play: A Simple Start

A few months back I put our Tuesday Deadlands game on pause and started a Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition game with mostly the same players.

I chose 5E because two of my players hadn't really had much of a chance to try it, DnD Beyond is a HUGE time saver, and if I'd run B/X or ADnD I'd have used a fair number of house rules to make it somewhat closer to 5E.

I decided having a good introductory adventure to get things moving worked really well with Deadlands so I looked for something similar for 5E. With DL I used a sandbox setting but I feel more comfortable with DnD fantasy so something simple would just fine. We were starting at Level 3 and I chose the 4th Level adventure A Deep and Creeping Darkness from Candlekeep Mysteries because two of my players had play tested the 3rd Level adventure before. 

Without going into too many details the adventure gave me two locations the town of Maerin and the abandoned village of Vermeillon. Additionally, I know that I will be dealing with the Feywild and the Far Realm. I cut the part about Candlekeep and have the Players being hired by an older woman who is looking to return her Mother's ring to enhance the dowry of her great-grandaughter.

I'm going to take a step back and share that some goals this campaign: I want this campaign to be 99% player drive and since I have some very active players they make this easy for me to accomplish.; I'm not looking to make the Big Damn Heroes who have to save the world; the rules are far less important than fun -- again, my players have all kinds of ideas if sounds good why not do it? For example: our wizard had an idea to distract an enemy and while he knew Color Spray he didn't have it prepared, so I let him make an Arcana check and since he succeeded he was able to cast it. I think there should be some extra incentives for utility spells that might get overlooked and I've enhanced this process by giving him a magic item with several utility spells he can cast once per day.

We are couple sessions into this campaign and I've been sketching out the setting as the Craglands. There is something sinister trying to turn a nature portal into the Feywild into a hole to the Far Realms and they have met someone from 50 years in the future of Vermeillon whose exposure to the aberrant energies of the Far Realm have twisted him physically and impaired him mentally and there has been some concern about Hill Giants making deep forays from their mountain strongholds.

More soon.

Dungeons & Shivan Dragons: Sword of War and Peace for B/X D&D + Old School Essentials

Sword +3, War and Peace

Grants special benefits of healing and protection from against fire and evil creatures.

▶ Healing a living subject: The wielder gains the following benefits: 

• Healing: Restores 3 hit points of damage. This cannot grant more hit points than the subject’s normal maximum. 

▶ Protects against evil: The wielder gains the following benefits: 

• Save bonus: Gain a +1 bonus to saving throws against attacks and special abilities of affected creatures.
  
• Defense bonus: Affected creatures gain a -1 penalty to attack the wielder.
  
• Magic protection: Affected enchanted, constructed, and summoned creatures cannot attack the wielder in melee but may make ranged attacks against them.

▶ Protects against fire: The wielder gains the following benefits: 

• Normal fire: Unharmed by non-magical fire.
  
• Save bonus: Gain a +2 bonus to all saving throws versus fire-based magical or breath attacks.
  
• Fire-based damage: Is reduced by 1 point per damage die rolled. (Each die inflicts a minimum of 1 hit point damage.)