Posts

Stunts

Stunts? Okay, I feel like I owe you all an apology. I have not been posting for several months, and that is a pretty big failure on my part. In my defence, I have had a health scare of a larger than I like to find at the same time as I started a new job, and I will be honest and say those things don't work well together. I looked back at some of the drafts I wrote in the last few months, and they were frankly gibberish. Or more gibberish than usual. So, stunts. I make no bones about the fact that I am much more of a trad gamer than a lot of big fate fans. I mean, I love fate, and I recognise that aspects are pretty much its unique selling point, but I also like that it takes that story game sort of feeling and puts it with a normal old-fashioned RPG. I think that if you are playing fate, then a lot of the interest and uniqueness of your pc are going to come from your stunts. They are a big part of how they mechanically define your pc and their abilities that are different fr

Scenes to keep in my back pocket.

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So, you need a fight/action scene in a hurry and you are not sure what to do about it. Something has happened that was not in your plans as such, and you need some way to suddenly bluster out a conflict which is fun and engaging. Maybe you are running an action adventure game and it is suddenly time to bust up some faces. Either way, it’s a fight, you have not had time to do something clever for it, and your players are expecting you to get to it now. So, it’s good to have some basic fight structures in your back pocket that you can bust out at an appropriate moment. I design these in an essentially modular way, which means I can reskin them to be interesting in the fight I am about to have and also click together to make a full fight scene. So elements for fate I tend to keep ready to run whenever I need them, starting with the opposition: You are gonna want some advantage when tangling with a big guy Puzzle boss monster. This one is easy. If there is a big thing for

Fight scenes

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First, apologies for the break in publishing. I have been on strong painkillers for the last few weeks, and if I am honest all the drafts I had written in this time have been gibberish. I think I am better now, so I am hoping this one is not. Okay, this is a big topic, and this is not going to be my definitional take on it. I have this sneaking suspicion that I might return to the topic of fight scenes again in the future, because if we are honest a reasonable proportion of what happens at most rpg tables will include fight scenes. I hope I have weasel worded enough to not get people suggesting I think all rpgs and certainly not all fate games are fight simulators. Okay, so, to begin. One of the objections one of my various gaming groups had to fate when I suggested it for the first time was that fight scenes in fate were boring. As they said it (it was wisdom they had got from the internet) I was baffled. See, I am probably a little odd in that I came to fate via spirit of the cen

Members of the rebellion

So, if I am going to be writing a game which is *punk (I think thaumopunk, but am willing to be convinced I have the wrong name), the bad guys of the piece need to be in some way The Man. To be able to enjoy the cyberpunk's lineage, then my characters should be outcasts and fringers who are rebelling against authority and tradition. As such the PCs in my game come from the Rebellion (title is to be changed when I come up with a better name). The Rebellion is a group of different rebels, outcasts and dissidents which has core together only because of the threat of the Peerage. As the Peerage plan their assault on heaven, and to become gods and exarchs themselves, the rebellion fights back. So, who has formed the rebellion? I am currently thinking of having several groups who are an uneasy alliance, who the pcs can call upon and that the pcs come form: The Enchanters: The enchanters are the apprentices and heirs to the first of the aetheric engineers. After she disc