I was really hoping to keep up bi-weekly posts on this little project but sadly it was clearly not meant to be. While there are some minor extenuating circumstances the main reason for the delay is the process of getting to grips with GURPS that I mentioned in my previous post. I love the idea of a modular endlessly customisable and adaptable system. I also love the basic idea for this campaign. But as it turns out I don’t love reading (literally) hundreds of pages of generic advantages and disadvantages. My first few attempts to slog through it met with failure. Clearly my tolerance for reading pure RPG mechanics has faded as it woudlnt have phased me in the least in the past. While I can appreciate the depth reading through it just to read through it feels like a waste of time. Not that all the effort is wasted as I’ve mentally made provisional lists of which advantages and disadvantages are suitable for the campaign. The customisation options are also impressive, but I think I’ll need to mock up some sample characters just to stop myself falling asleep. I did switch to skimming the text but that only brought me up to the skills chapter. Which is equally unexciting. How an RPG reads has little to do with how it is in play. But this is a spectacularly dull book to read. I shall soldier on, but with no chance to run this in the near future my interest and drive has drifted a bit (to running “pure” Lovecraftian Call of Cthulhu or first edition Earthdawn). I shall try to solider on, if for no other reason than the hopes of making some use of this blog again. I have thought more about the setting (because its easier and I’m lazy). I’ll try and fire up a post outlining that this week (preferably when it isnt five in the morning).
Tag: giwtr
GIWTR 02 – Eight Devils of the Demon’s Gate – Part 02 – GURPS and Iterative Conversions
Came up with a snappy title, and by came up with I mean just took the literal translation of the antagonists from Ninja Scroll. But I won’t tell if you don’t. So when we last looked at EDotDG (behold my mighty acronym powers) I was considering how best to create a system for the Tracking/”Discovery” phase of the game. I do have some thoughts on that, which I’ll get to later, but while thinking around it other elements sprung up. Perhaps the most pressing of which was how to make the combats against the “Devils” feel both different and fun. Considering the menagerie of huge monsters that show up in most fantasy RPG’s (and a number of other genres) there is surprisingly little written about how to run such combats, in terms of either GM advice or actual mechanics. Continue reading…
GIWTR 02 – Part 01 – (Ninja) Hunters of the Shadows of Monster Colossi (Scrolls)?
If you have forgotten what the amazingly unwieldy acronym “GIWTR” stands for it is “Games I want to Run”. Spawned in the heady days of 2013, when the world seemed a much brighter place (I mean I had a job and a working chair which are two things I lack now), it (like this blog honestly) hasn’t seen as much use as I thought it would. But as running and playing RPG’s is now a vaguely regular thing I’ve started to have those hot movements in my brain pan that the village elder assures me are what the gentry call “thoughts”. Thoughts for campaigns of such magnificence that playing in them would alter lives, cure illnesses and doubtless increase sexual potency (no refunds). I suppose at this point I should stop amusing myself and get to the subject at hand, what is this campaign idea about? Continue reading…
Games I want to run – My Goldilock’s problems
It’s been a few years since I ran a game, well the odd one off here and there, but nothing particularly long. The last campaign-ish thing I ran was a terrible Vampire campaign that fell apart, largely because I made every NPC an unbelievable cunt. Earlier this year I ran a short Traveller campaign, which started off rocky as I was fairly rusty but I was getting back into the swing of it by the time it ended. Last week I picked up the most recent mega-campaign for Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition, Curse of Strahd. Continue reading…
GIWTR 01 – A Mecha in King Arthur’s Court – Part 6 – Knight Armour’s – Updates, Claymore & Dirk
Well after getting into the swing of things and designing six units I’ve learned a few things about the process and got a much better handle on how to adjust the MTS to get the results I want. So due to a better understanding of the system and the comparative expense of the Saxon Armour’s I’m going to make a few tweaks to the Sweord and Pendragon Knight Armour designs as well as introducing the Claymore and Dirk Knight Armours. Continue reading…
GIWTR 01 – A Mecha in King Arthur’s Court – Part 5 – Saxon Armour’s – Berserker & Ettin
So in the last post I started designing some of the Saxon Armours, we designed the basic “footsoldier” unit, the Ceorl as well as two versions of the officer unit, the Oegn Standard V and the elite Oegn Beowulf Variant. In this post I’m going to design two of elite Saxon Armors. The Berserker and the Ettin. Continue reading…
GIWTR 01 – A Mecha in King Arthur’s Court – Part 4 – Saxon Armour’s – Ceorl & Oegn
So in the first mecha design post I used the MTS to design an average KA, the Sweord. In the second mecha design post I used the MTS to design a top of the line KA, the Pendragon. In this post I’m going to look at creating mecha from some of the other factions in the world, in this case the Saxons. I still havent entirely pinned down how the Saxons will work and what exactly they are yet so this may change a bit. However I’ll throw out a list of concept stuff for both the Saxons and their mecha and work from that. Continue reading…
GIWTR 01 – A Mecha in King Arthur’s Court – Part 3 – Mecha Design Continued – The Pendragon
So in the last post I took a look at the MZ+ MTS and used it to design an “Average” Knight Armour. This time I’m going to design something more unique and more specialised. The Pendragon, the personal Knight Armour of the Strong Arm King Uther Pendragon. Continue reading…
GIWTR 01 – A Mecha in King Arthur’s Court – Part 2 – Mecha Design – The Sweord
So as I mentioned back in Part 1 I’m planning to use Mekton Zeta for the giant robot portions of this game. By that I mean the combat and the mecha construction. Theres actually a (weirdly?) small number of dedicated giant robot/mecha rpg’s and Mekton Zeta is one of the oldest and in my opinion one of the best. A number of the more recent mecha games use systems where the attributes are defined narratively, e.g. I mentioned Camelot TRIGGER in the last post. It uses FATE so you have statistics for your robot like “Torso: Great armour”. Nothing wrong with that per se, it lets you quickly model the salient features and start playing. I actually have a lot of time for the FATE system and its various offshoots. But when it comes to giant robots, even if you’re talking about super robots, I like the feel of getting down to the nitty gritty, to the nuts and bolts, to complex systems and sub-systems and lots of numbers. Mekton Zeta’s mecha construction system is a nice middle ground between the fairly light system of something like FATE and the overly detailed/fiddly tech creation systems from something like the Silhouette Vehicle Creation System or T:TNE’s Fire, Fusion and Steel (basically I dont want to deal with complex forumlae). Continue reading…
GIWTR 01 – A Mecha in King Arthur’s Court
What the fuck is GIWTR? I hear the world call out as the entirety of the internet voraciously consumes my latest blog post. Worry not gentle reader, the mysteries behind the acronym will be revealed in the very next sentence. It stands for “Games I want to run”. I’ve mentioned in the past how for some odd reason spending time playing/running rpg’s makes me feel weirdly guilty these days (still cant really decide what makes it stand out, its no more time consuming than my other pastimes) so thats one barrier to getting games off the ground. Though its largely a theoretical one as the main barrier is the geographic dispersal of my usual gaming group and our seeming inability to schedule a game. But I’m sick of thinking “Oh I’d like to run this game, oh but I wont get the chance or I should be thinking about something more productive”, fuck it, from now on I’m just going to throw up whatever ideas I have whenever I have them. I’m going to think about them as much as I want and spend as much time on them as I want. You hear me brain? Anyhow the idea I’m kicking around at the moment is a post-historical reskinning of the King Arthur mythos where plate armour and warhorse’s have been replaced with anachronistic pieces of super hi-technology, specifically big fucking robots. And not “Real robots”, no sir, “Super robots” all the way. Well perhaps not. Somewhere inbetween really. Functionally equivalent to real robots but treated in terms of technology as super robots would probably be the best (if slightly unweildy way) to put it. Continue reading…