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Showing posts from September, 2020

Winter's Daughter - Review

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  As part of my Curse of Strahd campaign, I recently ran Winter’s Daughter. Ever since it was released, I had wanted to run it, but could not find a good spot to put it in. Eventually, I did, and here we are. It took about two 4 hour sessions to play through. Since I’ve run it, I feel I can give it a review.  Winter’s Daughter is written by Gavin Norman of Necrotic Gnome and was published April 27, 2019. The pdf clocks in at 32 pages. Warning, this review contains some spoilers. 

FKR Revenant Sector Session 1 Report

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This week I got to playtest Revenant’s Hack in the sci-fi sandbox I am developing . I was joined by three players from the Free Kriegsspiel Roleplaying discord. Here is a brief recap of the events that took place. Character creation Character creation went fast for all players involved. There isn’t that much to do in Revenant’s Hack besides distributing 2 points over 3 stats. However, I also tested out a skill list which they got to distribute 4 points over. Besides the stats, I also asked them “Why did you die and wake up in a cryogenics correctional facility?” which sparked a brainstorm about why these characters were in their predicament.  It turns out that Terry died in a car crash, allegedly escaping from law enforcement. Silas apparently shot Malik, but it was unclear why this happened. Discovering their past becomes a mystery that they would like to uncover, but due to their cyberbrains being installed in new bodies, their memories are vague and unreliable.  In the course of a

The Revenant Sandbox

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Last week, I made the case for writing adventures, not systems . This week, I decided to follow my own advice and continue the preparation for my sci-fi sandbox. I’ve posted before about the most important NPC in your sandbox , but I haven’t addressed the sandbox itself. So this is the entry in which I start the work on a sandbox!  Behold, the Revenant Sector! The black dots are solar systems without descriptions.

Make adventures, not systems

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For the last ten years, I have been really committed to making stuff for tabletop games. Despite that amount of time, I have only ever published one thing for roleplaying games - that’s an 18-page zine. Yet, I have a digital graveyard of games projects on my Google Drive account.  What is happening here? 

In praise of having few hit points

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  Recently, I was a player in a campaign using the Knave rules. The setting was inspired by Norse mythology close to the end times - Ragnarok. Amongst many locations, the Referee had put in set-dressed versions of Keep on the Borderlands and Barrowmaze. Despite the delves and riches, I never actually reached level 3 or higher with any of the characters I played. I delved deep with only 5 hit points, and it was great!  They all have 5 hit points, but so do you.