Seek the Wolf in Thyself!
A couple of years back, while at the Charleston SC convention, StormCon, I had the chance to meet the writers of Battle for Oz. Dan Smith and Dave Hardee are stand-up guys and very passionate about gaming and their product. They work together at each and every con to run as many slots of their game as possible. They have run for me at MACE events several times now and their game has been very well received.
T. Glenn Bane and Davey Beauchamp are two dynamic and energetic individuals I have had the pleasure to get to know in my years of running cons. It was at one of these cons that they gave away an opportunity to have a character named after you at one of our charity auctions. As it turns out, my name was one of those names placed in the book – as the alter ego of a young sidekick hero named Aegis Lad! So when it went up on Kickstarter, I had to support it.
Kontamination is a new RPG Adventure/One Shot from Modiphius Entertainment Ltd. When I try to run a published adventure, I sometimes find myself asking if the adventure was written with the GM in mind. For me, it’s important to convey the story of the adventure to the players in the most succinct and clear fashion with minimal page turning and book diving as possible. However, not everyone retains the same information at the same rate and every GM is different. So what is the way to best write an adventure? Keep it as simple as possible in terms of wording and stat blocking, and make key aspects of the adventure easy to reference if at all possible.
From: Gypsy Knights GamesReviewed by: Ron McClung 21 Plots: Samaritan is a new RPG Supplement from Gypsy Knights Games. I have used Plot seeds from Traveller before, either as inspiration for a one-shot or for a launching of a campaign. I have not only used them in Traveller, but also Star Frontiers, Shatterzone and Star Wars. These books are…
From: Gypsy Knights Games Reviewed by: Ron McClung Clement Sector Player’s Guide is a RPG Supplement from Gypsy Knights Games. The Clement sector setting continues to be supported by the fine group of people at Gypsy Knights and I have been really impressed with this settings resilience as well as the writers’ dedication to the…
From: Hogshead Publishing/Greywood PublishingReviewed by: Ron McClung Fright Night: Ghost Ship is a d20 RPG Adventure from Hogshead Publishing/Greywood Publishing. This review is going to be a little different in that it is about an adventure I found, changed and ran. So I am going to not only write about the adventure, I am going to write…
Dawn Adventures 1: The Subterranean Oceans of Argos Prime is a new RPG Adventure from Gypsy Knights Games . The Dawn Subsector is the frontier of the frontier; the fringe of the Clement Sector which has had only a few hundred years to develop. There is a lot of mystery that surrounds what lies in the Tranquility Sector and any adventure based in it needs to have that feel. Dawn Adventures 1, as the name implies, is the first adventure based in the new subsector from Gypsy Knights Games. If adventuring in the politically charged worlds of the Clement Sector is not enough, this is where players go to escape all that and find new ways to adventure.
Even with the new incarnation of Traveller published by Mongoose in 2008, players of the game never really had options to truly flesh out their characters. There was no real character advancement system in Mongoose Traveller and the careers seemed cookie cutter, in many ways. It gets even more difficult if you design your own setting, like the Clement sector as many of the careers have to be re-tooled to apply.
I asked John Watts once what TV show he would relate his setting to. I predicted correctly that he feels it was most like Firefly. In many ways, it really has that feel – the grittiness, and the feeling of being a western in space. However, at the same time, it addresses a lot of the things that Firefly and the subsequent RPGs ignored – the realism, the vastness of space and the isolation one planet can feel. It keep a lot of the adventure local, instead of planet hopping across the universe. It is that sense that makes it attractive to me.
The Rapture has been the subject of various books and movies and all have approached it from a similar fashion – portraying it as something in the near and foreseeable future. No one that I have seen before this game has ventured out and asked the question “What if it happens way far in the future after man has found ways off this world?” Rapture: The End of Days is a game about that very thing.