 The OSRIC RPG, short for Old School Reference and Index Compilation, is a fantasy role-playing game system. OSRIC is what is known in the Old School or OSR (Old School Renaissance) movement, as a retro-clone, in that it is a faithful, as much as legally possible, recreation of the First Edition of the world’s most famous role-playing game, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. It’s recently been a topic on social media, and unfortunately not in a good way, because of a kerfuffle regarding some negative comments by one individual, not formally associated in any way with the authors or creators of OSRIC, regarding the laudable and evolved decision by Wizards of the Coast, current creators of Dungeons & Dragons, to foster and encourage inclusion and diversity in the game. It is an ideal that we should all embrace, and one which, as a four decade long player, I heartily support. Our game should reflect the wonderful depth and variety of humanity, and I am happy that the time has come where people of previously underrepresented groups can now see themselves in the game. In the aftermath of the unfortunate social media incident, a lot of folks were hurt, angry and upset, justifiably so, but in their confusion some began to condemn OSRIC for the comments of a lone individual with no official standing. They began to confuse that one person’s comment with what the game stood for. Some began to wrongly think OSRIC supported and was based on an intolerant or non-inclusive ideology. All of these things are inaccurate. It was all very unfortunate because OSRIC is a great system. Full disclosure here, I am a GM and author of OSRIC content, so I am a big supporter of the system. On the other hand, it also means, I know of which I speak! The owners of this site reached out to me after the kerfuffle, for my sort of “expert opinion” on OSRIC, as they liked my work and felt people were getting the wrong idea about the game; I was asked if I’d like to explain what OSRIC is, what it isn’t, and why you all should like it. Frankly, there’s no reason not to, and with this list I am going to show you 8 reasons why you should check out the OSRIC RPG! 8) OSRIC was one of the earliest and most successful retro-clones. For this reason, there is a lot of content for this particular game system. Looking at current content, the last time I checked DrivethruRPG.com (a mainstay of mainstream and indie RPG content, such as my own) there were nearly 400 OSRIC titles currently for sale. Lulu.com has nearly 280 OSRIC titles for sale. In addition, looking at legacy content, there are thousands of BECMI (which stands for Basic, Expert, Companion, Master, Immortal rules, i.e. “Basic” D&D), Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (aka AD&D or 1E), and AD&D 2nd Edition (aka 2E) publications to choose from which are compatible with OSRIC (Although separate from 1E, the BECMI and 2E rules are compatible enough to make their materials useable). So if you are looking for a game that has a lot of support, with tons of compatible legacy content and continually developed new content, OSRIC is a great system to choose. 7) Did I mention it’s free? That’s right folks, OSRIC itself is completely free! In fact go and download it right now, here’s a link. But wait, there’s more! Not only is the game system free, but so is its version of a “Monster Manual”, which you can download via this link. But wait, it’s version of the “Player’s Handbook” is also free as well; download the OSRIC Player’s Guide directly from its author via this link. Now go back to the aforementioned DrivethruRPG and Lulu and search for “OSRIC” and you’ll find a tonne (because one of the creators is British) of free content alongside the paid content discussed above. Don’t get me wrong, I love Wizards of the Coast and their content, and as a content creator myself I strongly encourage you to support creators active in your gaming interests! However, if you’re like me, you have a lot of gaming interests, and isn’t it kind of nice to have a game you can check out and play for free? Heck yeah! 6) OSRIC is accessible. It made me sad when people mistakenly thought OSRIC was somehow mean or cruel or anti-anyone, because one of my favourite things about OSRIC is that it is very accessible in a democratic way. As I mentioned above, the basic game is free. Go online and use a dice roller and download some free minis and you are ready to play! You can teach people to role-play via OSRIC for free. This is incredibly inspiring and democratizing! When I was a poor kid growing up, Dungeons & Dragons changed my life by offering a wonderful outlet into a dream land of magic, like Middle Earth and Narnia, but I actually got to go there and not just read about it! The books were expensive back then as well, but my friends and I scraped together the money, over a long time, and we eventually bought a set of books to share. We took turns reading them, grudgingly turning them over when our week was up. Before we got books it was really embarrassing when the rich kids would tease you about not being able to afford the hobby, as bullying kids are wont to do throughout time. It makes me weep tears of joy to know that poor kids and adults today have access to a completely free retro-clone of the game I grew up loving, and there is no more fretting or worrying about how to pay for it. 5) OSRIC is community driven. Since the creation of the OSRIC game system and its companion manuals it would seem the gracious founders and designers Matt Finch and Stuart Marshall (our OSRIC version of Gygax and Arneson) essentially stepped back and let the world have at their creation. What that means is that the content being put out is coming primarily from the community of players and it has fostered, in my opinion, a renaissance of imaginative fantasy art and writing. I myself am an OSRIC creator, because I can be: it was just that easy. I had always wanted to send a dungeon off to TSR’s “Dungeon Magazine”, or an article to its “Dragon Magazine”, as a youth, but I was always afraid it wouldn’t be good enough or people would tease me for being a geek (those darn bullies again!). There was an editorial board and a big fancy company deciding who and what got published (or so I assumed) and it was very intimidating. Flash forward a few decades and the internet and self-publishing have reshaped our society. I found OSRIC, I was inspired to write, and I did it. There are tonnes (lol) of people like me doing this (and so can you!) and it is a great community to be a part of! 4) OSRIC is kinda British. OK this is a quirky reason, I know, but bear with me. If you love Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and cut your teeth on that style of high fantasy, chances are you might be just a wee bit of an Anglophile. If you are, then why not play a game where the programme running in the head of one of the creators, Stuart Marshall (editor in chief), was a British view of RPGs? I feel a little twinge of glee deciding what my favourite colour of cloak might be, and I can take a fortnight deciding what armour to purchase or calculating my saving throw against petrifaction! A silly reason perhaps, but it made me immeasurably happy to write, in one of my modules, of a sword composed completely of ice: “However, extended exposure to extreme heat (38°C) may damage or destroy it.” 3) OSRIC is fairly easy to learn. I don’t want to stir up even more controversy (i.e. Edition wars!), so just hear me out. Being a fairly stripped down, retro-clone of a forty year old game means there are not endless pages to read before you start playing. For example, an average race description in OSRIC is about half a column long. The average character class description is about one and a half pages long. The entirety of the equipment list takes up two and two thirds pages. The average monster description is maybe half a column. Part of this may be because most of the OSR folks are coming to OSRIC with a very good understanding of how to play RPGs and possibly a lifetime of rules floating around in their heads. However, if you are a new player, the rules light approach means there is not a huge amount to learn and memorize and you can fairly quickly get down to learning how to role-play. Which is the focus of all good games, in my opinion. While the rules can actually get quite complex and detailed, as anyone who has played 1E knows, OSRIC “feels” light and can be played as simple or complex as you want it to be. I have taught several people to play RPGs, who were previously scared of the “stacks of books”, by using OSRIC. As the adage says, KISS (Keep It Simple, Stu! -- remember I said OSRIC is not mean!) 2) OSRIC is flexible. The upside to what I consider to be a “rules light” approach is that the game is very flexible and open to what you want it to be. As an example, in my very first module (“The Corrupt Temple”) I had a section where players might fall into the water and drown. So I looked in my trusty OSRIC manual for drowning rules and found…nothing. So I made up my own rules for this situation based on researching past rules and present rules and then threw in what sounded logical and reasonable to me. There are many unanswered questions in OSRIC, as in life, and I like that about it. It makes me more inventive, creative and it challenges me! 1) OSRIC is for all of us! The last and final reason to try OSRIC is because it is for all of us, not just grognards! It is a great opportunity to see what gaming was like in the past and to get to know the roots of modern Dungeons & Dragons, an activity that seems increasingly popular with the release of Wizards of the Coast’s “Tales from The Yawning Portal”, for example. I read a great quote about OSRIC once, which stuck with me because it exactly summed it up: “OSRIC is a love letter to First Edition.” Those of us who played the game when it first came out were entranced, as are those of you who are just discovering the game now, and to us 1E is just our happy place for that reason, and likely always will be. It’s not a criticism of 5E or the progress of gaming or of our society since the 1970’s. It’s just what makes some us feel the old “buzz” of gaming excitement, and that brings us lots of happiness. Now before I close, I feel like I should also deal with the elephant in the room: grognards. It seems the term grognard has taken on a very pejorative meaning lately, and that is a shame. For I am here to tell you that not all grognards are the angry grumbling complainers or potentially racist, homophobic, transphobic, able-centric, and mean trolls that online slang dictionaries or some blogs or social media posts would have you believe. I have met and known a lot of folks over the years that have played a long time, for decades, and they all have one thing in common with newer players: a love of the game. Our love of the game is what binds us all together. Grognards are just folks who have a wealth of experience in a hobby we all love, who for the most part may enjoy playing the games of their youth (we tend to grow nostalgic as we get older), and who still have a lot to offer to the RPG community. Are there jerks and wing-nuts in the grognard and Old School community? Certainly, as there are in every walk of life, but I believe they are the exception and not the rule. I think many of us are kind, gentle, understanding souls who are happy to share a table with anyone who is like-minded and wants to enjoy some communal role-playing fun! So if you encounter us in the wild trying to play 5E, as we stumble on unfamiliar ability checks or look bemused as you try to explain spell slots…again, please try and be patient! Or if we invite you to try out our OSRIC game, take us up on it to see what it’s like! Most importantly,though,I hope your take-away from this article is that OSRIC and its practitioners are no different than the modern game and its players; it’s simply another way to play one of the most exciting and inventive hobbies ever created! Louis “sirlou” Kahn is an avid OSRIC and Dungeons & Dragons game master, role-player, and author. When he's not creating fantasy role-playing content through Starry Knight Press, he’s spreading love & unity with The English Beat! http://starryknightpress.com || http://englishbeat.net/  This is the second of a series of articles where I share some of the detailed characters, places, and things created during my recent campaign. The campaign used Evil Hat’s Fate system, and took place in Edward Turner’s “The Aether Sea” world. We decided as a group to use Fate Core rather than Fate Accelerated Edition, so the things presented here will work better with Fate Core. You can also listen to the adventure on our website and podcast feed.
The game items presented here were spun out of an adventure prompt at the end of the Aether Sea book, which I will quote later. First, I’ll describe the setting of the adventure. My group and I had a lot of fun bantering and sharing details of what this kind of place might be like. Here is what we came up with: 1) The Annular Necrocracy A moderate distance from Tun, the Annular Necrocracy is in fact a group of sectors united not so much by their political ideals - similar as they may be - as by the basis of their economic system. The lich kings of the Necrocracy animate corpses to do most menial tasks, thereby freeing up the time and labour of the living for other pursuits. It works very well… if you can get over the smell. In keeping with the sector aspect, however, nobody really knows where all the bodies come from. Don’t ask, don’t tell. Sector Aspect: Far away in the deep, dark aether. There are several sectors within the Annular Necrocracy. There is a division of labour; each sector has a kind of specialization that sets it apart from the others. They all share a couple things in common, however: a relatively small living population, and ubiquitous undead performing menial tasks. There are two that appeared in our adventure: 2) Noble Noble is like the banking district of the Necrocracy. It is often where deals are brokered, though not necessarily where cargo is to be shipped. It features a single grandiose (but sparsely populated) city, and a number of outlying settlements that support it. Most business takes place in the city. If you use the Snarf racing rules, there is a stadium here! Sector Aspect: Fancy brickwork and the smell of formaldehyde Moon Base Noble has two moons. One of them serves as a remote refuelling station for merchant ships passing through to other sectors. The whole place is ‘automated’ using corpses; it’s not much use to try and deceive them if you don’t actually have money. There is one living soul that manages the moon base. Poor guy. Clement High Concept: Master of an isolated moon base Trouble: I can’t believe I’m stuck here 3) Grange Grange Sector – Wheat barons, plantations, and vast crop fields. This is the agricultural sector of the Necrocracy, providing food and cotton for the living and for trade. The Makepeace plantation is on this planet (see below). Evelyn Grange (male) is the Seneschal to Lord Makepeace. He is the great-nephew of King Grange, the ruler of the planet. His life and that of the King have been magically extended, but they are not undead. Lord Makepeace and Lord Grange both hope to join the ranks of the Necrocracy’s ‘ascended’ lich oligarchy someday; the sooner the better. Sector Aspect: Ruled by an aspiring lich king. Planetary Aspect: A land like Dixie... 4) Makepeace Disaster The drama of this adventure plays out on the backdrop of the Annular Necrocracy described above. The adventure centres on the character of Vanessa Makepeace and her necromantic communications equipment; I added quite a bit to her character, and we squeezed a lot of play out of this scenario. Here is the text of the adventure, taken from The Aether Sea: “ Contact: Countess Vanessa of House Makepeace, a Royal of low bearing. Cargo: Several bound specters, part of some necromantic communications equipment. Destination: The Annular Necrocracy, a short distance away, to be delivered directly to Lord Makepeace’s estate. Complication: The binding on the specters is weak. They’ll unbind and start haunting the ship in transit. “ (The Aether Sea, page 44. Emphasis mine) The player characters can meet Vanessa in any place, but her destination will always be the Grange sector in the Annular Necrocracy. She will offer a fair price to board the ship with some cargo, and will respond to reasonable attempts at bargaining. The equipment? A steampunk high-powered transistor radio that happens to be animated by bound spirits. She will also board with a small retinue of three zombies that serve as porters and bodyguards. 5) Vanessa Makepeace A slender, beautiful woman of dark features. She is well-dressed in comfortable travelling clothes. As if by long habit, as soon as a deal is reached she will immediately begin trying to create advantages on the player characters’ trouble aspects, or other social aspects. High Concept: Secretive Royal of Low Bearing Trouble: Obsessed with Necronomics Aspects: Unconventional genius for using necromancy on the living Voice like silk Irreproachable +5 Rapport, +4 Magic, +3 Contacts, Empathy, +2 Deceive, Burglary, Will, +1 Investigate, Notice, Stealth, Resources 2 Physical Stress, 3 Mental Stress, Consequence slots as normal Focuses on Necromacy in Alteration. Use Magic to attack, create advantages, and overcome obstacles when Necromancy can be applied. Soul Reaver. Use magic in place of Provoke to cause mental stress. Shadow-weaver. +2 to create advantages using Deceive. Zombie Bodyguards (3) High Concept: Eat anything that attacks Lady Makepeace 2 Physical Stress One mild consequence slot 6) Ghost & Spectres Ghost: As soon as the crew takes the job, a host haunts the crew of the ship. She will only approach characters who are alone, and provoke the daylights out of them, self-compelling to avoid being able to transmit her message. I used the Ghost stats from this fantastic Fate Fantasy Creatures website, so I won’t copy them here. Save the link, though, because you’ll need it once more for... Spectres: Once the ship is inconveniently far from its point of origin, something (I used an asteroid field) causes the communications equipment to malfunction. I used the character card on p. 43 of Aether Sea for the spectres. If your players decide to try and free the spectres from their chains (which, yes, my group did - I still don’t know why), then the spectres so freed take on the Spectre stats from the Fantasy Creatures site. 7) The Morganis Orb (a.k.a. The Soul Bubble) This is a facinating artifact that evolved organically as our group progressed through the adventure. To rebind the spectres, Countess Makepeace will propose a ritual to rebind them. This is not actually necessary – the ritual she wants to perform is actually just her taking the opportunity to test a theory that she can power an old Homeworld artifact by usurping the life force of the living. Players may use Lore, Magic, or Empathy to oppose her Deceive (feel free to use Fate points to win this one). Anyone who participates in the ritual gets the aspect Drained essence. This is permanent until they can deactivate the Homeworld relic – which the Countess will not do willingly. After the ritual, the Countess will go about re-binding the spectres. The Countess knows that the Orb is an artifact from the Homeworld; she does not know what it does. To let your players shine, here are some overcome difficulties they can use Contacts, Magic, or Lore to gain more information: Fair (+2) The name rings a bell... Great (+4) They know the name of the artifact, and can invent one rumour about it Superb (+5) Tell them why the Orb is a problem for the crew Fantastic (+6) Give them a comprehensive history, and let them add details, because damn. If characters want to do something with the Orb, it is a: Good (+3) Challenge to steal Epic (+7) Challenge to offload or sell it without any trouble. As you can see, this is kind of a big deal. The Morganis Orb High Concept: Indestructible Ancient Artifact Trouble: Powered by the life force of sentient beings. Aspect: Necromancy power source. Extras: Soul Sucking - A correctly performed ritual can be used to steal aspects from player characters and replace them with the aspect Drained essence. If a character has all five aspects removed, they go into a coma until the Orb is deactivated, or they die. Undead Army - The equivalent of 5 lives (25 aspects of living beings) will power the Orb fully. When fully powered, the Orb can animate and preserve an army of zombies. The Orb is currently animated by the soul of Erica Makepeace, Countess Vanessa’s cousin. Erica is the ghost that is haunting the characters. She and Vanessa performed the ritual together, during which she died and her soul became bound to the Orb. If she manages to communicate with any of them, she will alert them to the nature of the Orb (providing an advantage aspect with free invocations), and ask to be freed from it. This little episode provided us with weeks of interesting play time. I hope that you can have fun with it, too. Please leave a comment if you decide to use any of these ideas, and let me know how it goes! Landrew is a full-time educator, part-time art enthusiast. He applies his background in literature and fine arts to his favourite hobby (role-playing games) because the market for a background in the Fine Arts is very limited. He writes this blog on company time under a pseudonym. Long live the Corporation!  As I brought up in a previous article, to play around with the mechanics is to create the rules by which the game world is governed. Role-playing games are an attempt to simulate reality, but not actually the reality we live in. (What is there to simulate? Double-stuff Oreos already exist!!)
Role-playing games simulate the logic of the fictional worlds we see in books, movies, TV shows, and other media. One rule that applies in many of these fictional worlds is that when things get really tough, characters have a resource that they can tap so that they can succeed at their task. It may be called luck, fate, edge, hutzpah, moxie, karma, the goodwill of the audience, the matrix of leadership, or any variety of things; the character applies this resource at just the right time so that everyone can live happily ever after… if that’s your genre. There are a variety of ways that this is simulated in role-playing games. The great John Kim wrote an article to give a quick history of the origins of these mechanics. They are called something different in almost every game that uses them, but for simplicity’s sake I will be calling them luck resources. Luck resources vary between games, but generally they allow players somewhat greater agency by allowing them to reroll, modify dice rolls, and add or change story details. Some luck resources can only be used by the players, some by both the players and the gamemaster. They may sometimes be used before making a roll, afterward, or both. In spite of all these differences, however, I’ve identified the best luck resources as 1) simple to use, 2) providing effective agency (in quantity and quality), and 3) balanced so that they don’t break the game. Let’s start with the ugly: 1) Bad Karma: Marvel Superheroes (Ugly) I hate to beat on TSR’s Marvel Superheroes so much, because I’ve spent many a happy session playing Beast and any number of homebrewed superheroes; but the luck resource used in this game is broken. It is called Karma: characters earn Karma by doing good deeds, saving the day, and otherwise behaving heroically. Karma can then be spent on character advancement or to succeed on rolls. Spending Karma to succeed is where this becomes a luck resource. The difficulty, however is that you need to use the same resource pool for both advancement and luck. The mechanic is simple to use, but it fails to allow effective agency. I agree with John Kim in his above mentioned article; this mechanic generally leads players to either hoard their Karma to make their characters stronger, or to spend it all the time and leave their character weak. This creates a disparity between characters and bad feeling around the table about Karma spending, making for an ugly mechanic. 2) The Hand of Fate: Fate Core and Fate Accelerated Edition (Good) Can I write an article without talking about Fate? I admit my bias, this is my favourite game.That being said, this luck resource leaves just enough to be desired. It is based on Fate Points, which are integral to the game. Players begin each session with a certain number of Fate Points (usually 3), and they earn extra points when bad things inevitably happen to their character. Fate Points can be used to modify rolls before or after they are made, to re-roll, or to create story details, but with a catch; they can only be used to invoke different story elements, called aspects. Without going into great detail, what that means is that your character design will flavour the way ‘luck’ works in gameplay, which adds great storytelling value.The limitation I mentioned is in the value assigned by the mechanic. According to the basic rules (there are variations), a Fate Point is worth +2, no matter how perfectly or poorly it applies in a given situation. This makes the mechanic very simple to use, but at the cost of the quality of player agency. 3) The Bleeding Edge: Shadowrun (Hella Fun!) Say what you want about Shadowrun; in an entirely-subjective-not-measurable way, this is my favourite luck resource. Shadowrun uses a dice pool mechanic to resolve tests. Edge, a kind of luck mechanic, is treated like a character attribute - that means players can choose whether or not they want to have it during character creation. Very early on, I realized what it was and pretty much always bought it up as high as functionally possible. In a single session, you could call on Edge a number of times equal to your Edge attribute. You could call on it before or after your roll, with different effects. After the roll, you could re-roll or roll a few extra dice. If you use it before the roll, however, it would allow you to add a number of dice equal to your Edge score to your pool. Also, if invoked before the roll, sixes got re-rolled in a sweet exploding dice mechanic. All that just to say that five times a session, I was shaking a mitt-full of dice that meant the odds were most definitely in my favour! 4) Where Have All the Heroes Gone: Mutants & Masterminds (Bad) Now, to clarify, Hero Points is not actually a bad mechanic. It’s quite good. It does everything that you want a good luck resource to do. In writing this article, I just noticed that there’s only one luck resource I marked as bad, so I’m going to pick on the one flaw in this one. In Mutants and Masterminds, players get Hero Points that allow them to re-roll, modify a roll, and add or change story details, much like Fate. Players receive them for doing heroic things, like Marvel Superheroes, or for accepting complications built into your character concept, again like Fate. What’s the drawback? The problem is that even if you’ve earned points, the amount you have resets to just one at the beginning of every session. This weakens an otherwise powerful mechanic by limiting the quantity of times players can take agency. Just make a house rule to fix this one - it shouldn’t break the game. 5) A Muse of Fire: Dungeons and Dragons, Fifth Edition (Good) So simple, and so fun, the Inspiration mechanic from D&D 5E is the first luck resource for the WoC franchise that applies to all characters regardless of race or class. It is somewhat different from the others mentioned above. Instead of allowing players to reroll or modify a roll, it permits the player to invoke the ‘Advantage’ mechanic. This increases the odds of success (including critical success) by allowing the player to roll a second 20-sided die and choose the highest result. Like the Shadowrun mechanic, this improves the odds while still allowing for titanic failure when the dice gods demand it. Players may only have one point of inspiration at a time, which is somewhat limited… but borrowing the Advantage mechanic and allowing the resource to only affect dice rolls keeps the balance and just adds a layer of fun to the classic game. There are many other luck resources that I’ve heard of and read about: Savage Worlds’ ‘Bennies,’ Open d6 ‘Fate Points’ (not to be confused with Fate ‘Fate Points’ - stay with me), and many others. I’ve written about the ones that I’ve actually played; but from what I’ve read, the luck resources covered above represent most of them in functionality. All of them are intended to give a larger-than-life movie feeling to your game, and will hopefully help you to take your games to the next level!! Landrew is a full-time educator, part-time art enthusiast. He applies his background in literature and fine arts to his favourite hobby (role-playing games) because the market for a background in the Fine Arts is very limited. He writes this blog on company time under a pseudonym. Long live the Corporation! Tags: Dungeons and Dragons, d20, Marvel Superheroes, Fate Core, Fate Accelerated Edition, Shadowrun, Game Design http://www.darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/systemdesign/heropoints.html http://www.highlevelgames.ca/blog/5-good-bad-and-ugly-dice-mechanics  A few months back, I reviewed Vampire: The Masquerade 1st Edition for my website, Keep on the Heathlands. One of the most fascinating elements of this original edition of VtM, at least to me, was the concept of The Rebirth. What was this? Why did it exist and moreover, why was it removed in Revised and Vampire 20th Anniversary Edition? Will we see it again in 5th edition when it is released from White Wolf’s crypt? In 1st Edition and 2nd Edition Vampire, The Rebirth was this idea that it was possible to somehow escape the Curse of Caine. Or more succinctly, to become human again. Such an idea is anathema to almost everything I thought I knew about White Wolf’s flagship game, and I’ve never heard of any group using the plotline in their games. The idea of becoming human once more was the bailiwick of high level rare disciplines of the most rare of bloodlines. That being said, I think The Rebirth deserves a place at the Blood Feast.
1) The Rebirth is Human Vampire: The Masquerade is a game about humanity. I don’t mean Humanity, the statistic on your character sheet. I mean people. VtM and vampires in the World of Darkness need humans. They must live among them to feed and survive. Imagine being a person living among pigs. Now, imagine being the type of person who randomly kills, eats, and or tortures pigs when the mood strikes you. You don’t hide it, you do it in front of the other pigs. You think those pigs are going to like you, or trust you? Not likely. Now imagine being a Vampire, you used to be like the humans around you. You are told that being humane is the most important thing, that doing so prevents you from becoming a beast. Yet, you must feed. You hunger. Without the blood of your fellow man you will die; even animal blood only sustains weakly, and not at all for elder Vampires. The Rebirth is a way for you to rejoin those you feed upon. The Rebirth is a hope, ever so infinitesimal, that you can cease being a monster. 2) The Rebirth is Horrific Sit down for this. Or not; whatever, I’m not your father. The Rebirth is personal horror at its best. I’m your Storyteller, you are playing in a small group of recently embraced Kindred. I offer you a story tidbit: you can become human again. You just have to kill your Sire. I don’t tell you how. I drop this information in a small fragment of the Book of Nod. An elder confirms, “Yes, in the old country I heard of such a thing happening. Surely you don’t want that, as such a thing steals from you all the benefits of immortality.” Now you plot, you plan, you create an entire masterpiece detailing how you are going to kill your Sire and be Reborn! Oh, did I forget to mention how you had to do it? Did I forget to mention that you need to do it within a month after being embraced? Did I forget… oh sorry… you failed your Willpower roll. You think diablerized your Sire seems like a fantastic way to ENSURE they are dead. The sun begins to set on your hope to be Reborn. 3) The Rebirth is Hope I know, I know, the WoD is darkness on darkness with no hope or light. I think that is reductive. The darkness is only terrifying when there is light for you to retreat to. Despair is only poignant when hope still exists. Those that lose hope don’t care about Rebirth. They care about Blood, and they care about their unlife continuing for another year, or decade, or 1000 years. To have the hope Rebirth is to have the hope that one can escape the Beast, escape the hunger for blood and feel again. The emotions of humanity are stripped away from a newly embraced Vampire. Love, friendship, and empathy are things that are only memories for the Kindred. The Rebirth offers a small potential to return to true emotions once more. That is hope; that hope is something that should be cherished and cared for. Only then should it be dashed and destroyed on the altar of the Cathedral of Flesh. Use the Rebirth in your games. It is an underused idea in Vampire and it offers all kinds of wonderful plot hooks. Let us Rebirth this torpid story idea and bring it into the new era. What harm can it do? With 18 years of playing rpgs, Josh started with Mind's Eye Theater LARPs and loves the World of Darkness. He launched,www.keepontheheathlands.com to support his gaming projects. Josh is the administrator of the Inclusive Gaming Network on Facebook. He’s a player in Underground Theatre LARPs and is running a Mage game and a D&D 5th Edition campaign. He’s a serious advocate for inclusive gaming spaces, a father, and a graduate from the International Peace and Conflict Resolution graduate program at American University in Washington, D.C.  To say I love cyberpunk would be somewhat of an understatement. I mean, how could you not? I absolutely LOVE Star Trek, but there’s something that is too clean, too utopic in Rodenberry’s vision. Then in comes cyberpunk, stating that the future will be as good and as bad as today is, it’ll just have more rain, more neon and some of the cars will have the ability to fly.
A while back, I ran a cyberpunk setting, under the Savage Worlds rule system, in the dirty, spiraling metropolis that is New Hades (www.welcometonewhades.blogspot.com) and this is where I came across the Interface Zero (IZ) setting. Published by Gun Metal Games, it has now been adapted to the Fate rule system, and this is where we pick up our story….. 1 – The Setting Almost 40% of the book is setting. This might seem overkill, but it doesn’t feel like it. Divided both chronologically and geographically, the book does an excellent job at introducing us to the IZ world. At the start of the book, a couple of pages are dedicated to a timeline, showing what happened to our planet in the years between the present and 2090. If one then wishes a more in depth study, the latter part of the book has the mentioned huge world history/atlas section, detailing the main countries/areas/players on the world stage. Is it too much? Perhaps, but by Cthulhu, it reads like a novel, and gives you the ability to base your players anywhere in the worlds, without it feeling same-y and boring. I won’t spoil it, but environmental catastrophes, diseases killing a not-insignificant part of humanity, cybernetics, robotics, space colonies, etc, etc. 2 – Gameplay As mentioned, it follows the Fate rule system, with everything that comes attached to it (flexibility, adaptability, etc.). It feels, however, that IZ has made a lot of effort to ‘pin things down.’ Whereas the Fate system itself is happy with letting the characters be as fantastic as you can make them, IZ seems to try to make them more centered, more focused. The Fate rules and fudge dice rolls are still there, but one gets a feeling that IZ characters are real, with real armor and real pistols and swords and real cyberware. 3 – The Characters This is where I feel this system shines. It doesn’t allow a free for all of character identities and creation, but it gives the players a huge number of possibilities of races and backgrounds, so varied, in fact, that I’m sure the possible permutations are in the hundreds. Just on race, you can chose Android (robot), Bioroid (synthetic human, think Ash from Alien), Cyborg, Human, Human 2.0 (biologically enhanced), Hybrid (human spliced with animal DNA) and Simulacrum (synthetic human). Each will of course have their advantages and disadvantages: a Hybrid with bat DNA might see in the dark, but might be denied access to polite society. Add to these races occupations as varied as bartender or bounty hunter and you have a huge scope to play around with. Furthermore, although it is mentioned they’re just guidelines, major and minor aspects are suggested, depending on your choices. This, I find, is the Fate system’s greatest strength but, especially for players unfamiliar with the rules, it can be a weakness. Allow me to explain. In Fate, your character has a number of short sentences that describe him/her/it, called Aspects. You call upon these aspects during gameplay for bonuses. My character is a thief, so I invoke my aspect ‘Best thief is my neighborhood’ for a bonus to lockpicking. Now this works amazingly, but for new players it can be tough. How do you pin down a character when your scope is infinite? IZ does a great job pinning this down. It might rob a tiny bit of flexibility, but it makes character creation faster and easier. 4 – Archetypes An inspired idea was the addition of archetypes: pre-made, almost ready to go characters, that can be copied off the page and used in a game almost immediately. I really enjoyed this, as it seemed to bridge the two types of Fate players, the ones that are happy with creating almost everything ‘bout their player from scratch, and the more casual players that only want the flexibility of the dice rolling and Aspects, and would prefer their characters to be more grounded. 5 – Rules The Fate rules are used almost to the letter, with minor alterations. A few pages are spent describing the system in detail, so you really only need this book to start playing immediately. Conclusion I really really like it. The setting is fantastic, the rules are straightforward and straight from the Fate Core, and the characters feel real and interesting. It looks like a system that is parallel to... say, Shadowrun, as in it has the same sort of dark futuristic setting, but attempts to be smoother, faster, yet equally engaging. If you like cyberpunk and want a fast, exciting system, look no further! Rui is a Portuguese scientist that, after ten years doing strange things in labs, decided to become a teacher. Then, two years ago, like he was bit by a radioactive D20, RPG’s came into his life, and he’s now juggling teaching, playing and GMing quite happily. He lives in the UK with his partner Joana, an ungodly number of potted plants, 4 to 5 RPG’s at various stages of completion (and across as many rule systems), and maps, cursed idols, evil necklaces, and any other props he can get his hands on. He’s been writing for HLG for a few months, and is one of the resident vloggers. He can be reached at @Atomic_RPG.  “Your sword is gone.”
“WHAT?!?! What do you mean??” “It doesn’t exist anymore. You have no sword.” “But that was my +5 family heirloom sword! It cost me 50,000 GP and we spent four months in real time on a side quest to get it!!” “...and you put it in an annihilation portal trap. Tough.” “Don’t I get a saving throw?!? Or something??” WARNING! All of the mechanics I mention below are risky. This does not mean any of them are forbidden, nor even bad. Some of them are actually quite common. They are risky in the sense that they threaten to take the fun out of the game for some players. I wrote an article about some rewards that role-playing gamers want to get from their games, then another about some of the games that do a good job of providing these rewards. Now it’s time to talk about the games that will ruin your fun by taking these rewards away. Taking away or delaying game rewards means consequences for in-game actions start to affect the player as well as their character. Players often invest a lot of time and effort to get their characters to a particular stage, and these mechanics tend to negate that time and effort. To be fair, there is definitely an appropriate time to have your heirloom sword permanently removed, or for your character to die. Gamemasters and players often want to play a high-stakes game. Before you decide to apply a mechanic that could potentially undo or complicate the real-life work that players have put into the game you should talk about the risks, and decide as a group if having high-tension drama is worth suffering player-affecting consequences. I mention three joykill mechanics, but there are certainly more pit traps out there. If you think of any that I should have targeted, write them in the comments! I picked these three because they are typical of the worst reward-removing mechanics. Here is the list. 1. Bad Karma - TSR Marvel Super Heroes I’m really looking forward to playing Cyclops and being able to shoot around corners. Now, if I get karma every session and only spend half of it on having good rolls and don’t accidentally kill anyone or do anything out of character, I should be able to earn that stunt in…. oh, about two years of play time. The Marvel Super Heroes character advancement mechanic is a joykill. Which is a shame because I love the game! Character development is handled with Karma - save someone, beat the bad guy, or just do something awesome, and you receive Karma. Karma can be used to buy power stunts - cool things that your character can do with his/her powers. Brilliant! There are two problems with the Karma mechanic, though. The first is that Karma can also be used to buy successes in-game: to karate chop Magneto’s face or narrowly miss being mesmerized by Mysterio, spend Karma. This drains the resource that you would normally use for character advancement. The second problem; to successfully gain a power stunt, you need to succeed several times at different success levels; really cool, in theory. Unfortunately, in practice, it means that unless you have a prohibitive amount of Karma stored up in case you fail a roll, you could end up having wasted your Karma and starting back at square one. It’s important to separate character development resources (like Experience Points) and burnable assets in your game, because otherwise players risk burning up their hard work just so they don’t lose their character. 2. Dungeoneering Drain - Dungeons and Dragons “The vampire succeeds on a touch attack. You lose two levels.” “Noooo! I just got to level twelve! I really wanted to cast sixth-level spells!” “While you’re standing there, lamenting your fate, the vampire touches you again.” “Nooooooo!” There are more than three joykills in the grandaddy of all role-playing games (see the opening vignette about a 2nd edition AD&D scenario), though many of them have been ironed out in subsequent editions. Some of them persist. Try not to use them without warning the players. Rust Monsters: Given that new gear is one of the rewards that players who like Dungeons and Dragons crave, creating a monster whose sole purpose is to eat gear is risky. Whether gear is bought, found, or quested for, a rust monster can easily remove an irreplaceable reward from play. Experience Points for Effects: Just like with the bad Karma above, there are some mechanics in Dungeons and Dragons that require a player to spend the points they would normally use for character development to achieve certain effects (usually magical ones). This is done to maintain game balance; the effects that are bought with experience points are usually quite powerful. This is risky, though, because having a mage at 10th level when everyone else is at 12th can get tedious; character advancement is as rewarding as new gear, if not more. Level Drain: THE WORST!! Again, in a high-stakes game, level-draining creatures (often powerful undead) are specifically designed to hit the player where it hurts the most - in the experience points! Don’t pit yourselves against a vampire unless everyone is on board with the fact that they might lose a couple of levels before it’s all said and done… as if levels were the worst thing to lose. Which brings me to my next point: 3. The Ultimate Joykill - Character Death “I’m going to run across the rickety bridge that spans the chasm.” “Okay, roll for it.” “Natural one.” “Oh. Ouch. Um, make a reflex save.” “Uh… also one.” “Oh. Uh, I guess you fall screaming to your death.” “On the first day?” Something that is nearly invisible because it is assumed in most games, character death is a joykill mechanic. I may be opening myself to criticism, but I think allowing character death to be determined by the random rolling of dice is risky, and leads to a million absurdities from a storytelling perspective. What happens when your character’s goal was to deliver information vital to the success of a world-saving mission, and they get taken out by a couple of bandits who happened to roll really well? No, thank you. I applaud games like Mutants and Masterminds and Fate that deliberately remove character death from the mechanics. Characters can be ‘taken out:’ knocked out, captured, lost, or forgotten… but that just creates an interesting twist in the story. Fate takes it a step further, and allows players to decide when character death would be appropriate, thereby allowing the players and the GM, in conversation, to decide when to raise the stakes. It is essential to have conversations about when you are going to use high-stakes mechanics. High-tension drama is vital to role-playing games, and these mechanics can provide that when appropriate. Bust them out at the wrong time, though, and you will kill the fun for the players in your group. Landrew is a full-time educator, part-time art enthusiast. He applies his background in literature and fine arts to his favourite hobby (role-playing games) because the market for a background in the Fine Arts is very limited. He writes this blog on company time under a pseudonym. Long live the Corporation!  Hello. My name is Landrew, and I’m a role-playing game junkie…
“Hi, Landrew…” Hello fellow junkies! In an earlier article, I talked about some rewards that games give players to keep them hooked. After listening to the feedback I got on the article and giving it some more thought, I decided it might be nice to hook my readers up with some solid tips on where to get the rewards they want. In this article, I point out some games (we’ll call them ‘dealers’) that do a great job of providing players with the rewards they want (e.g. a ‘fix’). These recommendations are limited by word count (all hail the corporate leaders) and by my own experience - which is heavily based on Dungeons and Dragons 3.5, the original Rifts, Marvel Superheroes, Fate, and Shadowrun. If you have your own recommendations for reward mechanics, please post them in the comments! 1. “Uppers:” Levelling Up/Character Advancement There’s nothing like good old Dungeons and Dragons for enjoyable character advancement. Although there are definitely some cool things about 5th edition, I’ll take 3.5 any day to get a good high. Feats, skills, and base attack bonuses... the rules are crunchy, maybe, but that’s part of the fun! It’s like a tinker gnome assembling nifty trinkets into a deadly whole. While I prefer simplicity during gameplay, complexity during character creation and advancement is a heck of a lot of fun. Pass that rare, dangerous, and somewhat broken source book, please! Honourable mentions go out to cool combat tricks and spells that can be earned in Kevin Siembada’s Rifts, and the power stunts mechanic in Marvel Superheroes. 2. “Bling & Benjamins:” Gear and Money The nominees for the ‘best gear’ award are tied, in my mind. If you want cool gear with its own stats, you can’t get much better than the gear lists from Rifts and Shadowrun. The detailed weapon descriptions add an irreplaceable layer of realism to the game world in both settings. I would be remiss if I didn’t include the gear lists from Dungeons and Dragons, as well. Again, recent game design theory is often critical of gear lists, saying that gameplay gets bogged down in the details. “Do you have a ten-foot pole on your inventory list? Doesn’t that make you encumbered?” However, removing gear lists also removes the fun of neat equipment-specific tricks and having exactly the right piece of gear at the right time. There’s got to be a happy medium out there somewhere... 3. “Hallucinogens & Immersion:” Exploring Game World Settings Which games have the best settings to discover? With all due respect to the many worlds based on Dungeons and Dragons (or were they called realms? I’ve forgotten), this award goes to Shadowrun first, with Rifts as a close runner-up. In the funny world of game publishing, game mechanics are not considered intellectual property - check out the first two paragraphs of this handy pdf from the US Copyright Office. Given this, a lot of the effort that goes into game design is poured into things that can be copyrighted, like setting, supporting characters, and game history. Hands down, nobody does this better than Shadowrun. It is based on an alternate timeline beginning in the 1980s and winding up in a dystopian cyberpunk future where magic and dragons have returned. The history of this alternate timeline is compelling, detailed, and strangely realistic. It features complex interactions on both the geopolitical and local level. For example, the last will and testament of the great dragon Dunkelzahn, late president of the United Canadian and American States, features enough loose ends and just enough interesting detail to provide plenty of role-playing hooks, while also just being a great piece of fiction in its own right. Also, Rifts. Thank you Kevin, for successfully describing a world in which literally anything can happen. Because, magic. 4. “The Mind Job:” Problem Solving Again, not to play favourites, but Shadowrun is my favourite for built-in problem-solving opportunities. The many heist-style modules lend themselves well to sitting down with your buddies trying to figure out a way to beat the odds. I like it because, though it is frankly combat-heavy, there are still a very large number of non-linear possibilities. Oh, that powerful security team can outgun us? How about when the commander is persuaded to give just one poor order to his team because his cousin’s buddy has the BTL he wants? Now the security goons are in the wrong place at the right time for them to notice our distraction, while the mage hacker ghosts in undetected. There’s nothing like the satisfying click of an opening safe in a heist gone right. 5. “The Happy Ending:” Resolving Story Arcs Jumping off the Shadowrun train for a bit, the best story-based mechanic that I’ve encountered so far is Evil Hat’s Fate system. I say ‘so far’ because I know there’s a ton of games emerging that have built-in story mechanics… I just haven’t tried them yet. Fate has a lot of cool points. The use of descriptors, called aspects, as part of the mechanic means that conflict has a built-in narrative quality to it. More importantly, however, is that character advancement is tied to story development rather than arbitrary monster XP values. Gameplay is divided into chunks like a TV show: scenes, scenarios (think episodes), arcs (seasons), and campaigns. The characters advance by reaching different ‘milestones,’ which are reached at the end of each chunk of the story. Advancement happens because of the characters’ experiences, which makes a ton of sense and is super satisfying as a player. With this structure, it becomes very easy to enjoy the feeling of closure you get from finishing the latest season of your favourite show. As you can see, no single game has everything. There are enough great games out there, however, that it’s not too difficult to find the reward you’re looking for. I hope this article helps you put a handle on what you want out of your games as a player; or maybe it will help a gamemaster find out what to give his/her players to keep stringing them along. No matter what, post your ideas in the comments, and let’s take our games to the next level. Landrew is a full-time educator, part-time art enthusiast. He applies his background in literature and fine arts to his favourite hobby (role-playing games) because the market for a background in the Fine Arts is very limited. He writes this blog on company time under a pseudonym. Long live the Corporation!  There comes a moment in a role-player's life when we think we've seen and played through enough that we can come up with our own take on things. This comes in a couple different categories: settings, and dice-chucking systems.
This is the first of a two-part mini-series, dealing with system creation, to begin with. Beware. Here be personal DOs & DON'Ts, your mileage may vary greatly. Especially since I drive a Diesel. 1. Do Your Homework. Nobody walks into this hobby knowing everything. Time, precious commodity as it is, is even more important for understanding what makes you tick as a role-player and what makes a system run smoothly. Spending copious amounts of time playing through or running various systems is a necessity when you’re developing your own. This isn't to say that some people aren’t just born with it, and may manage to come up with a solid system with no prior experience. Some join pen and paper role-playing from video or board gaming, some may just have that math-inclined mind I'm desperately wanting to rent, or even a knack for putting two and two together. That being said, often, practice makes perfect. So make sure you perfect your practice before you practice perfecting your pen and papering product. I... think that makes sense. 2. Do... IT! No amount of reading, gaming, more reading, or thinking about putting something together will ever replace actually doing it. Once you think your homework's done, and you know what you want to get out of your system, grab your pen, pencil, tablet, keyboard, blood of your enemies or Ouija board of choice and start creating! Start small, don't think about too many special rules/skills – main character attributes, dice, mechanisms that players use to influence the story, etc. – JUST START! Try not to overdo the research part, find your niche and stick with it – you're realistically never going to be able to know everything that has come out over the years, experience every take on the genre that's out there, or even know about most systems on the market. Which is why you should pop by the Role-Playing Gems article series, and give those a look sometime... #shamelessplug 3. Do not be afraid to retcon. Alright, so now you know what you're aiming for, and have actually started work on it, you come across something that helps you see things in such a light that you want to either fix, erase, or simply exchange some aspects of your system. That's fine! You've been working on this for what... A few weeks, give or take? Pretty sure Rome wasn't built in a few weeks either. If you end up flailing and failing you can always roll everything back. You don't have a budget you're supposed to justify to anyone. You'll gradually see your system heading into new territory as you get more acquainted with what you can do as a world-builder, and what your finished build can actually achieve. Early stages are always filled with variant rules, different dice sizes, character points, plot twists, explosions, and most likely your brain imploding. Several times. If your system's first version is what you end up calling final, you're either a genius or doing it wrong. Always be prepared to put new things in or take stuff out when it seems like it's not working. Hitpoints to combat, fantasy to sci-fi to horror, and back into fantasy - these can all be changes you make over time. Experimenting is the mother of all ulterior cock-up preventions. That being said... 4. Do Not Be Afrad To Fail. We fall, we curse the jackass who tripped us up, we get up, we start over. Failing will definitely be a part of the process. Big, small, it all hinges on your own abilities, workrate, and set goals. You'll either realise your dice sizes don't convey the experience, limiting your skill spread. Maybe that character sheet layout you've been working on doesn't fit with anything anymore, or maybe the main rolling formulae you've based your work on doesn’t scale well to higher levels. This falls into the previous point a bit, but hammers home the point that you will end up making the wrong choices. It's your duty to yourself, and the experience as a whole, to not let those moments bring you down. Learn from them, and – as much as possible – try not to make the same mistakes again. How do you avoid those mistakes I hear you ask? Why, I'm happy to tell you... 5. Do A Lot Of Testing. Fast. We've got information, we've started work, we're not afraid to move things around, and we're definitely not afraid of failing. It's time to crunch some numbers, make sure we fail as little as possible, and deal with it as early as we're able to. It doesn't matter which numbers get crunchy, doesn't matter how well it goes, it's always a good idea from the get-go to see if everything will really work when and how it’s intended. Grab a bunch of dice, splatter some attributes around, see if that David vs. Goliath thing works. Testing early and often saves you time through identifying bugs, and other aspects that only actual playtest can uncover. Just look at what Wizards of the Coast did with D&D 5e – going through each playtest pack and seeing the game evolving was a real treat to early playtesters, let me tell you! All you need for this are a few pregens, a simple adventure taking you through some main aspects of the game, a couple of willing friends, and some Sprite (or other beverage of your choice). 6. Do Not Keep It To Yourself. This one's a no-brainer for any and all creative projects you develop: get people involved! Nobody's telling you to go to Kickstarter within the month. Start small, with the aforementioned friends, spouse, whatever. Maybe you're lucky enough to have geeky parents that can give you some pointers? Just make sure you don't keep this close to your chest and only come out with it when you think it's perfect. Newsflash – it ain't! As someone who's done work on three different iterations of a ground-up system, I'm pretty sure the design I'm using right now is not the one I'm going to end up calling finished. Feedback is the key here. You shouldn't bend your knee to any and all voices out there, but having a chorus of opinions to sift through will greatly improve your chances of ironing out the kinks in the system. 7. Do Not Go Tt Alone (?) This one's always largely a matter of personal taste, but most of us in these hobbies are not lone wolves. You've certainly got at least one or two other likeminded individuals who you regularly play games with, thus people who (hopefully) have the same tastes in games as you. One of the biggest hurdles you'll come across when going into creative mode is the motivation to keep going until the end, especially once you realise any creative endeavour is... well... a pretty big endeavour. Having a Samwise to share the load with may end up being the difference between getting something done or finding your notes in a dusty drawer twenty years from now. Just make sure you don't end up fighting, going your separate ways, and then taking your systems to crowdfunding at the same time. I'm guessing that doesn't make for fun conventions. I think I've covered most of the issues I've faced. One more thing to add: have fun! It doesn’t matter if you're doing this to have a system you know inside and out or you actually want to make a living of it, the end product is going to suffer if you're going through everything with stormclouds above your head, and a frown. So clear those skies, pop some music of your choice on, and give things a go. Worst case scenario, you'll get depressed at not getting anything done, try to sell off a half-finished system to various companies, end up trying to self-publish, pawn off your assets, left kidney, your dog, mortgage your house thrice over and live the rest of your days in an asylum with your imaginary friend, Binky von Grim. But don't let my fears put a damper on your hopes and dreams... Writer, gamer, and - provided he's got the time for it - loving husband, Costin does not rule out sacrifices to the Great Old Ones in order to get into the gaming industry. He's been role-playing for the better part of 6 years, but has been a joker, gamer and storyteller for as long as he can remember. His greatest pride is once improvising a 4-way argument between a grave digger, a dyslexic man, an adopted child and a sheep, all by himself. That moment is also the closest he's ever come to giving himself a role-playing aneurysm... thus far. He's been dabbling in plenty of writing ventures lately, and you can find him hanging his words around the Oh Be Wandering hangout page on Facebook - https://goo.gl/4be3Bj |
All blog materials created and developed by the staff here at High Level Games 
Click here to support our community for as a little as $1.00 for exclusive content, free downloadable stuff, and even discounts on role-playing game items.
Archives
April 2023
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed