Neitherworld Stories

September 11, 2008

To the pain!

Combat in RPGs tends to have a serious problem: it ends in death. Sure. Some RPGs have morale rules and such. Usually, these are limited to NPCs and they tend to be more applicable in mass combat than skirmishes or duels. It is duels that I’m concerned with here, duels and practice bouts. Non-lethal combats have a place in many...

September 10, 2008

The Temptation of FATE

Since I read through Spirit of the Century, I want to run everything in FATE. I expect this is largely because it is new and shiny (to me). Perhaps it is heightened by the fact that what FATE seems to do extraordinarily well is the stuff that I feel was left out of 4e D&D. Still, it seems like an...

September 8, 2008

Romantic entanglements

On Saturday, we played our temporally-displaced Exalted game. It was a good session in which I got to explore my character a bit more than usual. One thing that I sometimes have trouble with is figuring out how characters feel about things. Sometimes it is obvious. Sometimes, though, people have unpredictable desires… and PCs should be no exception. So, yeah....

September 4, 2008

100 experience points and a bit over a year later…

Then. Now: Strangely, he’s not too much better in combat (I should fix that), but he is a lot better at most of the things he does… More importantly, I am still having fun playing him.

September 3, 2008

Summary of a campaign, Part 2

…continued from yesterday’s post. We headed back north with Rogenvald. The lich lived in a strange wild magic zone that was located north of the goblin lands. The only civilized inhabitants of this area are gnomes. Getting into the wild magic zone wasn’t difficult, but there was a checkpoint manned by volunteers – mostly goblins, but they appeared to be...

September 2, 2008

Summary of a campaign, Part 1

I’ve mentioned Angela’s D&D campaign here before. On Sunday, it reached a major turning-point… so I thought it might be a nice time for a campaign update/log/thing. I’ve mentioned the game a few times, but I haven’t gone into much detail about it. I’m playing a Dwarf chef-turned-adventurer. Here’s a synopsis of the campaign-so-far: It begins, as many D&D campaigns...

September 2, 2008

Deal-breaker: random character generation

Last week, in reaction to our Wednesday-night game-planning meet up, Jeff mentioned that random character generation is a deal-breaker for me. Yes, I grew up on it, but I grew up doing a lot of stuff that I no longer enjoy. This weekend, though, I got to thinking about why – specifically – I don’t want to play games with...

August 29, 2008

I love it when a plan comes together…

As Jeff noted, we sat down the other night and figured out what the group was interested in doing. Jeff and I will trade off story arcs (probably every 4 sessions or so) in two different games. He’ll be running a pulp SF game in the Buck Rodgers style. I’ll be doing a cyberpunk-fantasy-post-apocalyptic mashup – Shadowrun meets Gamma World....

August 26, 2008

Vampire allergies and other strangeness

I’ve talked a bit about the Monday night game that I play in – it is a Morrow Project game that uses White Wolf’s Storytelling system. The Morrow Project is a game about operatives for a shadowy philanthropic paramilitary organization who are cryogenically frozen in case of disaster. We woke up to a post-apocalyptic world ~150 years after a nuclear...

August 25, 2008

Spirit of the Century

I didn’t pick up much at Gen Con this year. One thing I did buy, though, was a copy of Spirit of the Century. I’d almost bought it last year. In the meantime, I’d heard only good things about it and had developed a potential use for it. So, yeah. I read the book over this weekend. It is awesome....