Tag Archives: role playing

A Fistful of Roses, Part II: Fire and Blood (WIP)

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Hey guys, welcome back to my campaign journal for A Fistful of Roses, the Savage Worlds cyberpunk campaign I’m playing in using the Interface Zero 2.0 setting. For anyone who hasn’t seen part one, you can check it out here: A Fistful of Roses, Part I: My Name Is Roxy

Alright. Posting part two of this, but as you might have noticed from the title, this is very much still a work in progress. Honestly it’s been a struggle to write this part, I haven’t been able to get it to a point I’m happy with. But it’s been a few weeks longer than I’d planned between posts, and I need to move on to other stuff. I’ll be coming back when I’ve had a chance to get some feedback so I can try to fix it up, but if I let myself dwell on it now I’ll never let it go.

A quick note. As is almost always the case, we’ve changed a few things about the setting, and made our own assumptions when something may not be perfectly clear in the book (or we’ve just missed it somehow). So we’ve assumed that the Tendril Access Processors (TAPs) that people have implanted in their heads act as general comms devices as well as providing augmented reality feeds and data access. We also changed the JUMP bikes a bit, neither the GM or I were a huge fan of the Formula One looking cars shown in the sourcebook for them, both of us had been picturing motorcycles that hover instead of having wheels, kind of halfway between a high end sports bike and an ATV. Actually I’m not even sure if they’re meant to hover or not, or are just able to leap into the air when needed. Either way, that’s how they look in our game.

All of that said, hope you enjoy it, and as always, feedback is very much appreciated.

NOTE: Profanity is a little more prevalent in this one than the first entry. I’m still working out Roxy’s character, and I’m leaning towards making her relatively foul mouthed and prone to bursts of anger.

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A Fistful of Roses, Part II: Fire and Blood

0015 Hours – The Strange Island, Korea Town

Shit. It’s after midnight, and I’m still sitting here, nursing another beer, waiting for Felix’s damn bartender to show up so we can get down to business. At least the night hasn’t been a total write-off. Turns out that hybrid couple those Bloody Hand gangers were hassling run the local hardware store. Said they’d have something for me in a few days, a thank you for running off the goons. I’ll have to try to keep ’em sweet, it’s always handy to be on friendly terms with gunrunners. Still, it doesn’t look like things are going to calm down here any time soon, and I’ve got other places to be. Felix and I’ll just have to have our chat another time.

I savour the last of my beer. It’s heavy and rich, bitter-sweet with undertones of chocolate and coffee. I push the glass away, the taste of  toasted hops and malted barley lingering on my tongue. Hell, forget about finding a fixer, I’d come back just for another glass. I stand, stretching, the leather of my impact suit hugging my body, a familiar, comfortable feeling. No point trying to say goodbye to Felix, he’s busy serving the crowd. A hand darts out from behind the bar, grabs my wrist as I turn to leave. Clawed and lightly furred … I follow the arm back to see Felix looking over my shoulder. He’s worried, I can see it. Slitted pupils wide, tufted ears laid flat against his skull. Something’s got him spooked good and proper.

“Trouble coming,” he hisses, leaning in close. “Your friends are back, and they’ve brought company. I figure this ain’t good for either of us, so what’s say we back each other up here. I turn to follow his gaze out to the street. The gangers from before are on approach to the bar, along with a group of their friends. Four of the others look like carbon copies of Tweedledum and Tweedledee, same shitty tatts and grubby gang colours. The last one though … looks like they went crying to their boss-man. Same sort of thug, just trussed up in a badly fitted suit instead of the leathers and muscle tops the street crew favour.

“Deal. But the drinks are on you after this,” I shoot back at him, a grin on my face. “And I’ll be expecting some extra consideration when we’re negotiating my cut for any jobs we might work together in the future.” I’m whistling in the dark, trying to hide the rising panic. Three, even four of these guys between us, easy. Seven … Well, I hope Felix has some heavy ordinance back there with him, ’cause all I’ve got is my revolver and a pair of stun-gloves. They’re just street trash, but a near four to one advantage is going to count for a lot. I pull the gloves out of my pocket and slip them on. There’s a faint buzzing in my palms as they hum to life, and I slide a hand behind my back, drawing my revolver and flicking off the safety, concealing it between my leg and the bar

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Interview with Eloy Lasanta, Third Eye Games

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So, in my last post I talked about AMP: Year One, and the current Kickstarter campaign for AMP: Year Two, the first expansion book for the game. Well shortly after that, I got in contact with Eloy Lasanta, the creator of AMP: Year One, and he graciously agreed to let me bludgeon him with questions in order to assuage my curiosity about his work as a game designer. So a big thanks to him for that!

If you haven’t read the previous post, you should go and do so right now… but just in case, a quick bit of background. Eloy created Third Eye Games back in 2008, and since then has written and published a number of well received games covering a very diverse range of genres and themes. He’s a prolific and successful user of Kickstarter as platform to get his new projects up off the ground. As well as working on his own games, Eloy has written for a number of other publishers including Margaret Weis Productions, Varja Enterprises and House Dok.

So, let’s get down to it. Without further ado, I present the Grassy Gnoll’s interview with Eloy Lasanta.

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Tink: How exactly did you get involved with role-playing games? Did you start young, or come to it later in life? 

Eloy: It depends on your definition of young and old. I wasn’t raised on it like many kids that I meet when I venture out to conventions everywhere. I started in high school around the age of 13 with RIFTS and didn’t play any other games for a long time. Eventually, I check out other things and it’s all downhill from there. A lot of World of Darkness and the like. Lots of fun was had.

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AMP: Year Two Kickstarter is up and running

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Hey guys,

Just wanted to talk a little about a Kickstarter project I’m backing at the moment. AMP: Year Two, is the first expansion book for AMP: Year One, a game by Eloy Lasanta of Third Eye Games.

Eloy is a very talented designer who I first encountered through his previous game Part-Time Gods, a brilliant RPG about playing as people who have gained a spark of divinity, and their struggles to balance their humanity against their divine power. So once I heard he was making a supers themed game, well, I was 100% in. Sure enough, when it arrived, it was everything I’d wanted it to be.

So, let’s take a look at it shall we?

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Professor Jimbles Presents! How to make a backstory.

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I said it was coming, and here it is. The three steps I follow to make a workable and vaguely interesting backstory that will work for any game that doesn’t require extensive and detailed character histories. I’d pop in a little more detail if you were going to play in a social LARP or Sandbox (GM creates a world and unleashes the players upon it. Plot hooks, no railroad.) game.

Generally you make a character while considering the others in your party, and choose a class first (in the tactical games, at least.) so I suggest grab the rough outlines of your mechanics, and build the backstory around that.

I’m going to be using one of my new favourite characters. His personality and powers are best shown in a rules-light, “make up your own damned abilities” game, but he’s a great example of how my three steps turned a basic idea into someone that can entertainingly work with the others in the party. If more questions arise while writing, run with them.

Enter Karas, the Herald of Death.

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Professor Jimbles Presents! Still dying a lot.

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[Note from Tinkergoth: Sorry for the long silence. Jimbles has had this post and another one ready to go for almost two weeks now, just waiting for me to go over them before publishing. Unfortunately I’ve been letting things slide, haven’t been feeling great physically or otherwise, so it’s been a struggle to do anything other than curl up on the couch of an evening and binge on anime (on the plus side, I’ve been catching up on series I’ve owned for ages and hadn’t got around to watching), haven’t even really felt like gaming recently. Anyway, finally not feeling so ill anymore, and the other stuff will sort itself out sooner or later, so starting today I’m forcing myself back into the blog. I’ll publish this and Jimbles’ other post first, and then get back to work on my own stuff. I now return you to your scheduled ramblings from Professor Jimbles.]

I’m beginning to think it’s something personal, and maybe stacking resistances and AC would be better for me.

Now, where was I?

Learned the hard way that Black Puddings are not delicious.

Felled by the Orc Hireling in a single strike.

Crushed by a brainwashed dragon after a Sudden Maximized disintegrate missed.

Oh, right. I’m going to leave out the Elemental Plane of Fire, it’s pretty obvious, and has little in storytelling value, despite the gales of laughter from the table when it happened.

I’m playing in a World’s Largest Dungeon game specifically designed to let the players experience as much as possible from the tortuous place. We are on a 32 point buy gestalt (any, not base only) with all of 3.5 available subject to approval. I can imagine hundreds of monocles popping from outraged eyes, but in defense of the game I raise two points.

  1. Action Economy (Paizo Forums has information, but it’s not a perfect description.)
  2. I’m really bad at optimizing.

So I’ve got nearly countless options ahead of me. I make a fighter-ranger who wielded light maces in the lightning hammer style, giving me another attack whenever I threat. I planned to take adaptable scimitars eventually, and score additional attacks about a fifth of the time. His name was Parker. He was a part-time novelist. He made the decision to become a wererat once it became clear the party was trapped in the dungeon. His answer to fiendish troglodytes is to draw and charge. Technically, if the party leader didn’t tell him to hold off, his default reaction to anything threatening was to draw and charge. It lasted about 7 levels, until our crack team broke past a incredibly difficult lock on huge marble doors. Inside was a HUGE black pudding. It had scoured its prison for all life, and was desperately hungry for fighter/ranger flesh. Reasoning that dessert never hurt anyone, Parker charged with both maces drawn.

This was ill-advised.

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Role-Playing 101: The Laundry RPG – Session 1

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Hey guys,

I’m starting off a new feature for the blog today. Role-Playing 101 is going to document the trials and tribulations that I face as I teach a group of teenagers to role-play. There’ll be some funny moments, occasional glimpses of glory, and a not insignificant amount of frustration (mostly on my part), but also a hell of a lot of fun. It’ll be updated on a very irregular basis, as it generally require me to have actually run a session for the group recently, and it’s not often that we actually get to play. The actual content will be a combination of a session recap and brief discussions about the system (though more in-depth reviews may come later on).

How did I end up running introductory games for teenagers? It’s my attempt to continue the chain that my uncle started when he bought me my first role-playing book for my twelfth birthday, the Player’s Handbook for D&D 3rd Edition. A bit over a year ago, I offered to teach my cousin to play. It took a while to get started, as he needed to gather a group of friends to play with, but eventually we were ready to play. The first session I ran for them was Pathfinder, where I quickly learnt that running for bunch of fourteen year olds is far different to running a game for adults. They picked up the notion of “kill things and take their stuff” very quickly, but were having a bit of difficulty with the idea of “talking to things to see if we can avoid killing them”. Now, to be fair, D&D/Pathfinder is at its core, the game of “killing things and taking their stuff”, but Paizo’s work with Pathfinder has really started to move beyond that, often allowing for other means such as diplomacy or subterfuge to be just as effective as barreling in with swords drawn. Trying to get this concept across sparked an idea, that maybe I could help them learn that there are multiple approaches to these games by running a variety of systems for them, with the added benefit that they’d be able to pick a system they liked when they’re eventually ready to run their own games. So the group agreed that I would run each system for two to three sessions, then pick another one.

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Welcome to Night Vale, a sleepy desert community…

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Hey guys,

Bit of a random update today. While I’ve been stuck at home with this chest infection, I’ve been listening to a podcast that I stumbled across while browsing the Paizo message boards.

Welcome to Night Vale is a twice-monthly podcast produced by Commonplace Books. It’s done in the style of community radio broadcasts for a small desert town. The only way I can think of to describe it is as public service announcements in the Twilight Zone. It’s incredibly surreal, and I fell in love with it instantly. In another couple of days or so I should be caught up on it (there are 26 episodes so far).

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Shattered Star: The Quest Begins…

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Good evening ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the campaign journal for my Shattered Star gaming group.

Shattered Star is the Pathfinder Adventure Path that just wrapped up a couple of months ago, and I’ve recently managed to put a group together to play through it. It’s a campaign that ranges from investigation through to old-fashioned dungeon delving and Indiana Jones/Tomb Raider artifact hunting.  It’s also a direct sequel to the earlier Adventure Paths that have taken part in the country of Varisia, but for the most part avoids retracing the same ground – As far as I’m aware the only revisited locale is the city of Magnimar.

Anyway, onto the journal itself. At the moment I’m undecided about how I’m going to write this. Since I’m pressed for time at the moment, the first update is just going to be an overview of the party and a bit of an explanation about optional rules that I use. Later on I’ll be doing recaps of each session, but am still unsure as to whether or not I’ll be doing it as a story with notations about out of character details, or just summarizing events.

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Kickstart my Heart!

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Welcome back ladies and gentlemen. As you may have guessed from the title of this blog entry, I am a bit of a fan of Mötley Crüe, particularly their album Dr Feelgood, which was released the year I was born. I’m also quite a fan of Nikki Sixx in particular, and really enjoy the work he’s been doing with his current side project, Sixx: A.M. Seriously, if you’re a fan of him at all check out their two albums, The Heroin Diaries Soundtrack and This Is Gonna Hurt.

Anyway, my love of Mötley Crüe aside, the name was actually chosen because it ties in nicely with my topic for today. I’m sure some of you have guessed it already, but for those who haven’t, it’s time for a Kickstarter round-up. I’m going to be having a quick look at what I think are the most promising gaming related projects on Kickstarter at the moment, and providing links to the project pages so you can check them out for yourself. This time around we’ve got three projects that are directly RPG related, a board game, and a project that’s a little different.  So, let’s get started.

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A Friendly Word of Advice

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Today I just wanted to share something that I’ve learnt from spending half of my life as a role-player on both sides of the GM’s screen. This is probably going to come across as a rant, and if I’m being honest, that is exactly what it is. But I like to think that it’s a justified rant, and also fairly topical at the moment given a situation that is occurring in a game that I run.

The advice is this:

Do NOT be a dick to your GM.

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