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An Impractical Idea: Cyberpunk via Hard Drive

I was going through some old hard drives with an IDE/SATA to USB converter (thanks to Stew and others for advice on this) and the feel of it — seeing/hearing/feeling a chunk of weighty metal rev up thanks to the most trivial hardware hacking you could possibly do — gave me an idea:

Distribute a retro [...]

Mage: The Dirty Version

You got me.
Mage: The Ascension still seems to have some legs in fandom. I haven’t done much thinking about it for a while. I haven’t played it since running “Judgment” for the Ascension book and have been pretty happy with other things: writing for Awakening, Lost, Hunter and Geist in the World of Darkness, working [...]

RPG Sketch (Old): Fab Force!

Note: This is an old sketch from my personal journal.
It occurred to me a while ago that those lifestyle shows really are one of the closest, non-nerd analogs to superheroics around. Thus, Fab Force: The RPG of Style!
What You Need
At least two Fab Force experts, one person to play the client and one for the [...]

RPG Sketch: Dungeon War!

Here’s a quick idea for a heroic dungeon crawling game. It’s not intended to be innovative — just to play with this:
The Main Idea: We all know that in a balanced level-based RPG, advancement is kind of illusory. So why not ditch it?
Step 0: Get Dice and Writing Stuff
We use d10s in this game.
Step 1: [...]

Guardian Heroes, Pt. 2

The second session of Quick20 supers was a lot of fun. To be brief:
The game takes place in a fast and loose version of the Marvel Universe. The PCs are Team Discord: Aerobot (an robot mascot-hero that escaped from Microsoft, with the ability to shoot missiles, fly and change size), Switch (a magical teleporter [...]

Guardian Heroes

I released Quick20 not too long ago and it’s been doing pretty well. On top of that, I’ve started a second gaming group, so that I’m running Vampire/Mage on Tuesdays and . . . well, I was running a Ready 2 Run cyberpunk genre game, but as I’d already run one of those my heart [...]

Screwtopia: A Singular Farce

This is a quick idea for a game. It even comes with text you’re supposed to read aloud! To start:
You wake up in the body you hand in your early 20s (unless you died younger, in which case you’re that age), healthy and whole. A voice booms out of the white mist:
WELCOME. YOU ARE IN [...]

More Home Are the Heroes

Building off of the last post, I’ve thought of the start of a resolution system for the game. Thinking of card-based concepts like Swords to Swords helped. So did getting out a Tarot deck at a D&D game.
Now using Tarot in an RPG is pretty cliched by now, but Home are the Heroes (or whatever [...]

Game Sketch: Home Are the Heroes

I had a brief thought about a fantasy RPG set after the destruction of Ye Olde Dark Lord. The characters would be heroes at the peak of their power — in fact, you could make them as mighty as you liked. But there would be a catch: The more powerful you are as a hero [...]

More Swords to Swords

To explore yesterday’s idea further, let’s come up with a hypothetical character sheet and some other expansions. We’ll use a typical fantasy game setting.
So what we need are trait listings equal to hand sizes:
Physical

Close Combat
Ranged Combat
Agility
Strength

Mental

Knowledge
Deduction
Additive Magic
Creative Magic

(Note: The additive/creative split in magic comes from one thing I noticed designing stuff [...]