Dark Darker Darkest. Dem schlurfenden Tod sei keine Atempause gegnnt. Zombies knnen ja auch nicht auer Atem sein. Queen Games nehmen sich ein Beispiel an der unendlichen Untotengeschichte. World War Z, Resident Evil, Zombicide und die sonstige beinahe alltgliche Splatterromantik sind nicht genug.
Auch die amerikanische Niederlassung des deutschen Spiel des Jahres-Herstellers (Kingdom Builder) labt sich nimmersatt an den totlosen Eingeweiden der Crowdfunding-Szene.

Worum gehts? 2-5 berlebende durchsuchen gemeinsam das Haus von Doctor Mortimer, um kooperativ die Zombie-Apokalypse abzuwenden. Voll neu und aufregend, oder? Wer beim Lesen noch nicht ermattet seine Lffel abgab oder seine kontaminierten Innereien freiwillig vor sich verteilte, [...]

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It is odd that such a niche game could become so popular and well known. Comedy RPGs are very tough to do right. Most games have comedy in them but that is not the focus of the game like Paranoia. There was a time 15 years ago that most games I would run into would at least understand the phrase "The Computer is my friend" or "Happiness is Mandatory." I'm not sure that is the case anymore. I see less and less Paranoia being run at conventions. The yearly Paranoia LARP at Origins it appears to me attendance goes down [...]

Lately I’ve been kicking around a campaign concept that could be pretty freaking epic if I can manage to pull it off with the right group and the right story and find a time that works for everyone (pretty much impossible, I know). I also blame Gnome Stew/Engine Publishing’s Odyssey for getting me excited about running a campaign again.

The basic premise is this: you’re hopping role-playing game settings, systems, time, and space in order to try and return home after being banished or swept away from where you belong by mysterious forces. Each player creates a beginning-level character in a role-playing game of their choice and brings it to the table, and transposes the concept to whatever system of the month we’re rolling with as the characters explore that world and find the portal to advance to the next. As they go on adventures together and grow in strength, they begin to piece together clues to reveal what brought them together and why, and how their destiny may be entwined with the fate of the entire metaverse. I suppose it’s like Planescape, only you’re not limited to Dungeons & Dragons.

Although it seems like it would be a lot of work [...]

Over on Tor.com, they have put together a Read-Along group covering the storied Appendix N from Gary Gygax's 1E AD&D DMG and included a contest to win one of five sets of dice.  Read more here!

A great tutorial from Dorkadia that shows you how to make your own custom tabletop tokens for your roleplaying games. Though pawns can be just as easy; this is a great little way of making durable minis that will stay with you for a while. And such an upgrade over …

I've found myself absorbed in this game since it came out yesterday. It's fun! It's not great, it's not amazing, but it is fun. It plays like one of those nightmares fueled by 12 year olds and shoddy DMing, which can be extremely entertaining. The classes are interesting and work together well, the system for going on "adventures" is neat, and who can turn their nose up at some meta-gaming where

When I first set foot in the Valley of the Red Apes it was seeking out the Ziggurat of Rhissel the Morning Lord. However it is a good thing we set up a base of operations nearby. We got word from back home that the Hubert the Elder, the sage we had hired to get background information on the region, had made some other interesting discoveries in the libraries, and he sent along a series of letters describing the hiding places of Jen “the Rose” – one of which was almost certainly nearby. Jen “the Rose” was a human adventurer during the last great war, a freebooter who exploited the chaos to make her fortune and acquire great interesting treasures from the various worlds of the Kale – worlds that are difficult if not impossible to find now. This particular lead was to a hall of some mystical power (and possibly treasure) that she had built or found (the stories are vague and contradictory – one even indicates that the hall was brought here from another world). This exploration was deemed less dangerous than our main focus towards the Ziggurat, and thus we sent four of our companions of levels [...]

We had some good movement with our sale last weekend, so I’m going to extend it for the rest of the week! Also, for this week, I’ll throw in even more free stuff!

The Details:

Our Horse Minis and Mini Counters are by far our most popular gaming accessories. So (for this week), when you buy some, I’ll give you more!

First, if you buy 8 or 10 Horse Minis, I’ll throw in 2 more for free. What fantasy adventurer (or cowboy) doesn’t ride a horse? Tactics change and become more dynamic, since you now take up a 2×2 square and gain increased [...]

"What lairs in a maze is good hunting" - General Zaroff

Nomenclature: Minotaur, Tarus, Taurian, Bull-man, Brutal Beast

Description: Taurine humanoid, with the head of a bull

Things that are known:

• They are fond of mazes
• They are terrifically strong

Rumors and other whispers in the dark:

• It is very important that the labyrinth the minotaurs inhabit contain no furniture. They must be bare of decoration
• They are actually terrible at mazes. If they were any good, they'd all be living in sunny little villages retiring ,eh? No minotaur has ever escaped from a maze and they [...]

My next game will be called Space Wranglers. Space Wranglers is a game of starship rodeo roping brought to you by the IGSRJACRA (Intra-Galatic Space Rodeo Jamboree and Cattle Ranchers Association). We are now in initial playtest mode. This will be a cheap download from rpgnow and wgv.

A recent exchange running through a couple of other blogs I follow led me to check out the back catalog of Spells and Steel, a blog focusing on developing a version of Basic D&D that's informed by facts and experience with medieval combat.

What I like about Charles Taylor's approach: he's intent on keeping the simplicity of Basic D&D throughout, resulting in a very boiled-down system that still relies mainly on d20 hit, d6 damage logic. So, multiple opponents are tough, trained fighters have a huge advantage in ability versus civilians, skill and not hit points helps heroes survive, [...]

A bit a go Jez over at Giblet Blizzard wrote a post about the DCC funnel and how the different races didn’t fit into the philosophy that well. His post is awesome and worth a read.

For me I find that it is the case that there is too high a chance to get a demi-human race in the funnel and that having a town with 3 of X race, 2 of another and then 1 lowly human throws off the whole feel of “these villagers should be freaking the fuck out when they are in a dungeon and see a [...]

Occasionally, the Gassy Gnoll can be accused of beating a dead horse. Or poking the bear. To the point where usually the horse comes back to life long enough to exact some grotesque necromantic revenge or gets the bear to do it for him.

What the heck am I talking about? Overthinking. You might have experience with this scenario yourself. Take a concept or idea, ask one round of questions, which leads to another round of questions, and another, incessantly, until such time as you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel and can come up with no additional things to ask [...]

According to Filmclips...

• 01 - Watch more Dracula
• 02 - Watch more Jaws 
• 03 - Watch more Frankenstein
• 04 - Watch more King Kong
• 05 - Watch more The Mummy
• 06 - Watch more The Thing
• 07 - Watch more Jurassic Park 
• 08 - Watch more Ghostbusters
• 09 - Watch more Creature from Black Lagoon 
• 10 - Watch more Gremlins

There are books you own because you know you should own them. There are three such books for Cthulhu set in the modern era. These are Delta Green, Delta Green Count Down and this book. The list used to be five long and impossible to complete and then this beauty was released. It combines the three chapbooks that were released by Pagan Publishing into one book and adds two additional scenarios. The three books were of course Machinations of the Mi-Go, The Fate, and Project Rainbow. These were so hard to find copies of that they were almost in the mythical category for me. The whole problem for me of course is that this is all modern setting material. All of them need to be owned by any true fan of the game though and the compilation book made this possible. 

From the book:


"Are you cleared for this?

For eighty years your organization has fought to protect humanity by uneearthing evils older than the world itself. You violated every law to save people who'll never know you exist. You took down fanatics who worshipped horror incarnate. You dug up truths that all the powers of government and magic tried to conceal.

You're about to wish you'd left well enough alone.

Delta Green: Eyes Only digs deep into the worm-ridden heart of modern power. Uncover its secrets and you'll see why people kill to keep them hidden.

* Machinations of the Mi-Go explores the history, goals and science of the Fungi from Yuggoth, including the plot that shaped the American government for decades.
* The New York occult underground exlplodes with The Fate, an in-depth look at Stephen Alzis and his [...]

This week, my wife expressed a lot of interest inThe Awful Green Things From Outer Space. The non-occult theme and cartoonish violence meant that it didn’t trigger any negative reactions from her. That, and the kids have had their noses in books almost constantly due to library sponsored summer reading programs. Thanks to that, I have carte blanche to make the kids do just aboutanythingelse. These are the factors that lead this game to finally get “on the table.”

I tried playing this once with my son with him playing the crew. He’s ten… and communicating any sort of tactical ideas [...]

White Dwarf for September 1985 takes us to the end of the 60s with issue #69.  This one is going to be interesting to try to do because my copy is falling apart.  In fact I have it in a bag to hold it all together. When I started this I wanted to see if I could find a new copy and then forgot about it till just recently.   I am not even using my own scanned image of the cover. It is in too bad of shape. The cover is an interesting one. It looks like it could [...]

I often talk about Forgotten Asia -- the parts of Asia that don't often make it into F&SF and video games, lost in favor of China and Japan. Well, these weapons came about due to that frustration, since I couldn't find any to use in Mount and Blade. A week or so ago, during a lull between assignments, I downloaded Wings 3D and started playing around with it. Soon I was devouring tutorials like peanut butter sandwiches.  Looks like Wings is real easy to learn and use, since I was able to make these within a few days [...]

We're doing some other bits for a couple of weeks or so, while one of the players is away. For this session, we played a two-player Jurisfiction adventure, to see what that was about.

Arthur Hastings, from Agatha Christie's Poirot novels, joined forces with the new recruit Dr Abraham van Helsing, from Bram Stoker's Dracula. The Bellman never told them that it's technically a single-player mission, but hey, if you take a complete rookie and the somewhat dimwitted veteran Hastings, it sort of adds up to a single, competent player.

The mission itself was a simple matter of internal plot adjustment: making Shadow the Sheepdog by Enid Blyton have a happy ending. It should have been a simple mission that couldn't possibly go wrong, but ... alas ... they got out of a sticky situation by teaching a bunch of villagers all about S&M, in a bid to [...]

Remember Me is the first release from French studio DONTNOD and is available now for PS3, Xbox 360 and PC.

Setting

The game focuses on Nilin, a memory hunter fighting against Memorize, a corporation whose digital memory implants have transformed the lives of everybody in Neo-Paris. As you might expect from such a setup the game exists within a cyberpunk (technically neo-cyberpunk given the wireless nature of the technology employed) setting and opens with Nilin having her memory forcibly extracted. From there you take on the role of Nilin as she struggles against Memorize to recover her identity and understand why she [...]

The recent decade has seen a slew of remakes, from god awful to mildly disappointing. But if there were any remake you would want to see, what would it be?

Answers in the comments.

submitted by Al Bruno IIIThis is Kimberly Kane, adult movie actress, as featured in the io9 article on the Best Wonder Woman Outfit.

If all goes well, this Saturday night will be the final session of our 1950s WitchCraft campaign. For my group, the fact that the campaign was ending is bittersweet. While everyone is excited to see the big questions raised throughout the campaign to finally be answered and everything wrapped up, everyone at the table, including me, knows that there was a lot of life left in the campaign and don't really want to end so soon. So why are we? A little over a month ago, one member of our group announced that he was moving away. Our group is small [...]

The game group and I played our very first session of Spirit of the Century on Monday, and it was a combination of fun, awkward, fast-paced, halting, spontaneous, creative, and overwrought all at the same time, kind of like a teenager out on their very first date EVAR!

The Arctic Club ballroom as it appears today
Everyone seemed to have a really good time and I tried to drop something into the scenario for each player. Most of the awkwardness came from the fact that I had not been able to internalize the rules having never played the game, [...]

Today our hero decides to go south-west, still following the river, entering the farmlands around Weshor.

“You encounter a local Priest riding on a donkey (equivalent to a horse as a mount), with combat skill 3, endurance 3, wealth 25. He seems aloof and not disposed to conversation, but he may be afraid of you…You can let him pass, ending this encounter, or select one of the two options below” (which are fight or talk).

The prince decides to engage the priest in conversation. “You try to talk the character(s) into joining your party, as they seem sympathetic and interested. Roll one [...]

Countdown to the Bidet Shoot: Day 4
This post will be brief as I've had a hell of a day and I have to get up early tomorrow. Therefore, you get bullet points.

• Dad's car died -- suddenly, dramatically -- last week, and so he took the entire week off while it was getting looked at this. This has increased the stress level in the house significantly as dad is one of those crotchety old Jews who isn't happy unless he's miserable and complaining. 
• Also, it turns out he has Parkinson's. Yay.
• Those two points came together today when mom [...]

This one was lost. But, now it is found thanks to retrievers at Google.

Buy this awesome game here.

The post The Making of a Penny for My Thoughts with Paul Tevis and the Crew appeared first on Geeky & Genki.

A fairly common question with point-buy systems like Eclipse is “What if something is too good for it’s cost? Or what if a character buys some massively powerful ability straight off? After all, if some starting character simply invests all his points buying super-ability “X” meant for the settings major gods he or she could just slaughter / ignore / bypass / recruit / outrun / edit out of time / whatever all appropriate opponents!“

Fortunately d20 is complicated enough – unlike, say, Amber – that you can't simply spend all of your points on "Warfare" and assume that you will [...]

This one was lost. But, now it is found thanks to retrievers at Google.

Buy this awesome game here.

The post The Making of a Penny for My Thoughts with Paul Tevis and the Crew appeared first on Geeky & Genki.

Okay, life lesson time.  If you enjoy drawing - don't fuck up your hand by drawing.  Pace yourself and hold your god-damn pencil right.

So, my hand has been slowly recovering - and I've been doing exercises and working back some strength to it.  I get these odd aches in places that were not originally hurt.  I figure it's shifting muscles and stuff around.  Knitting.  Whatnot.

I've also been trying to do things with an economy of movement.  Where I might have once used like a billion scratches to evolve a line - I'm now saying FUCK IT [...]

HERE WE GO!!! Banners proclaiming your victorious entries. Awarded Third place and winning 1 PDF from the entire Earthdawn Catalog hosted at Drivethrurpg with the 'Legendary Weapons for DCC RPG': Awarded SECOND place and winning 2 PDFs from the entire Earthdawn Catalog hosted at Drivethrurpg with the story of Klim the Windling Wind Dancer/Horror Stalker Awarded FIRST place and winning

I've been wondering about including damage scales in Dead & Back for a while. It generally feels right for me to include a damage class for things bigger than humans. However, since this game is a horror and personal level game, for once I'm not too sure. Of course, if included - how would it be implemented?

The first real RPG I played was Rifts, with its infamous "Mega-Damage" (TM) -( they were always very certain to include that TM everywhere!). Rifts is certainly broken in many ways, and a lot of the material seems thrown together haphazardly - [...]

Out of curiosity, what do you do when you want to run more games than you reasonably have time for? Because lately the bug has been hitting me a lot. I love the two games I'm running, I don't want to end them, but there are so many other games out there right now that I also really want to run. It's pretty much the reason I made the "Campaign Proposals" series on here, but I'm not even sure if it's enough right now.



The sad thing is I already game a lot. Every two weeks has [...]

Puppets if done correctly can be quite brilliant, so with that in mind I’d like to bring this KS to your attention. Coming from a LARP background, big 3D puppets and bodysuits can add so much to the whole ambience of a live game and this kind of thing would be ideal. Although this is […]

Movies can be a never-ending source of ideas for your campaign. Truly, the more unwatchable a movie is, the more potential it has. Go try and sit through Manos: The Hands of Fate and concoct a campaign setting. Slight tweaking would make it perfect for a Call of Cthulu setting. Major tweaking will make you ready for any fantasy setting. A GM with real guts will break out a copy of the truly fantastic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles RPG and adapt Manos accordingly. But Manos is hardly the only film that is ripe with gaming potential. Come along beyond the [...]

In a game that combines owls and bears (among other things), where panthers can have tentacles and extra legs, and numerous creatures imitate mundane objects like cloaks, swords, pillows, floors, ceilings, and more, I am not only surprised that the major variable with vermin seems to be size, but also that being able to do things like shoot webbing would be regarded as inappropriate.

When it comes to vermin as a whole I think that the game should offer an actual toolkit approach that goes above and beyond just picking a size and one of two hunting methods. Why not [...]

My oh my, the last post was in October of 2012.  An empty promise to return by December at the semesters close of my first foray into Grad school.  As you can imagine, life did not slow down but instead that roller coaster picked up quite a bit of steam.  In addition to the usual trifecta of work, school, and social life some things took a turn for the extreme at the start of the [...]

Sometimes thoughts come from out of the blue and trip you up bad - they derail your ability to think of anything else.

This is one of those times.

As I sit here thinking about some regular sections and such for the Unofficial OSR Zine, the idea of a "Mad Libs" styled Mini Dungeon came to mind. Instead of using nouns, verbs and the like, it would be things like "choose humanoid", "choose mindless undead" and "giant _____" in the room encounters. Could even work out a system for traps too.

Maybe it's silly, but no two dungeons would run the same. Besides, silly can be fun too.

If you have no idea what Mad Libs are, Wikipedia defines it as:

Back when I was nine-years-old, I like many of my generation, spent far too much time in dimly lit, loud and smoky places deemed to be havens of depravity and generation wasting; arcades. Every summer, every cent I made mowing lawns, watching kids, or found in the bottomless pits of furniture went into the coin-slots of my local arcade, a small neon laced hole-in-the-wall at the corner of the mall known as "Space Port".Pole Postion, Street Fighter II, Mortal Kombat, X-Men and Ninja Turtles swallowed coin after coin. But one game, ruled them all, one game that bound me to [...]

I am the Warden!!

For those of you paying attention to my struggling Kickstarter, you can imagine I'm feeling disappointed. That's not to explain my lack of Video Updates over the past few days, the majority of those were due to prepping and planning for the LUG Con games run over the weekend. (If you haven't had a chance to check them out yet, you can find them on the BRG YouTube page.) As for this morning, I have to admit that I was sitting at my desk ready to fire off another recording session, but didn't have the [...]

Where to start. Verloren is a city ripped from it's place in time, moved forward or backwards no one is truly sure. It is, effectively, an urban sandbox of sorts.

The map of the city is unlabeled, and in truth, probably not needed. The city is in the midst of moral decay. The hooks, and there are many, don't coincide to places on the maps - they are linked to personalities and events.

See, this isn't an adventure and to come to it with that expectation would leave the prospective DM. It's a series of hooks and story elements that can come together as a bigger picture, but the DM and the players are going to be the ones to put that together. It's a [...]

The first game I ran at L.U.G.Con was +matt jackson's little hit, Edge of Space.  I had bought a paper copy while they still existed earlier this year and was fascinated by the little game that could.  My copies are in little brown books.  I ma not sure how many pages there are in the main rulebook as I do not have them with me but there aren't many.  If there are 20 pages in it I would be surprised!
Game and module...
A couple of months earlier +Christopher Hardy  mentioned that he had ran this game for a group and they loved [...]

Have you heard of Hassard Francyn? He was a lawman in these parts, as well as a scout, a gambler, and an outlaw. He was known for his black leather belt with a silver buckle and his matched sword and dagger in their black scabbards with silver fittings. Francyn became famous in the Masulium Lands for killing two men in self-defense before he killed one of his wives while drunk and in a fit of jealousy. He served nine years in the garrison-prison of Highspur before he was pardoned and left for the gold fields of Shaggra. He remarried twice [...]

Not all of the races of the land are purely descended from the First (main collection of articles here). Some have ancestry that holds an otherworldly entity or an escape from death itself within the past seven generations. Those who are share a lineage in such a way are not sterile as some might have hoped and instead can reproduce as easily as any other. Even dhampyr have no greater issue with falling pregnant nor impregnating another. With each passing generation, the connection grows weaker until, by the seventh, there are only superficial similarities to the otherworldly ancestor.

While [...]

I'm getting stuck into the rewrite of Walkabout, especially after learning some great things about it's mechanisms and how they interact with the narrative in the hands of new players. But naturally I'm a visual person, so my mind has shifted toward ways of presenting the rules.

I want this game to look scavenged; pieced together from fragments of the past. I want it to reflect the cultures that will be explored by the characters in their journey across a shattered wasteland.

I want it to look hand-made, without actually being flimsy and handmade.

I'm thinking of [...]

It’s not often that you actually get any insight into the characters that setting and organization books get you. In my opinion, that’s a damned shame – to spend all that time, as a dev, coming up with characters, history, quirks, only to never share these people as they might interact in and with their actual game environment.

One of my favorite artistic pieces we’ve worked with Comicbookist on over the course of the Into the Maelstrom project involved the lieutenants of the operation in Africa, entrusted to a supervillain code-named Anansi. Petra Zamosa, Nyoka, and Aardehart are a [...]

In D&D 3.x, you could multi-class as many times as you wanted, but you suffered an experience point penalty (20%, if I recall) if any of your levels deviated more than 2 from your primary class.

In theory, you could tack on a new class every time you gain a character level under this system. Thus you could run through the entire base class list in the Player's Handbook, resulting in an 11th level character with a single level of Barbarian, Bard, Cleric, Druid, Fighter, Monk, Paladin, Ranger, Rogue, Sorcerer, and Wizard, all with first level abilities.

In theory, [...]

Have you ever played a game of Dungeons and Dragons or Pathfinder and discovered a dragon’s trove full of gemstones? Did you take you pile of large rubies to the market and sell them? Did you stash your small diamonds into a pouch and hide it in a secret place? Were you satisfied with that description or did you want more?

The Gemstone Generator for Pathfinder gives you just that, something more. In it you will find a system of designing gemstones for your fantasy campaign that are more than simple large rubies. You will gain tectural details, appearance, and variations that can affect the value of the gemstone and the personality of it as well. You will be able to increase the joys of finding a treasure trove of gemstones and you will make your campaign much richer than it was with its generic mundane treasures. While the supplement is great it does have a few flaws. One, it requires and existing published game book to be fully useful. The second is that it was designed for Pathfinder or D&D 3.5 and is not completely useful for other game systems. Even with these flaws I found the book most useful [...]

I established Spes Magna Games roundabout December 2009. Between then and now, I’ve written and published almost 20 gaming PDFs, mostly for The Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. On average, I guesstimate I’ve made about $25 a month from the sale of my PDFs. That’s not a lot; I’m in no danger of retiring early, but that’s okay. I run Spes Magna Games because I love the hobby.

Those of you who follow this site know that I teach at a small, open-enrollment public charter school in Katy, Texas. I’ve been there three years. Aristoi Classical Academy strives mightily to offer tuition-free the [...]