Spes Magna Games

Back in 2016, I released my own superhero game, The Four Color Hack (TFCH). To date, it’s my only product available print-on-demand. It was mostly well-received. Since it’s release, I’ve netted a bit more than $200 from its sales, which for Spes Magna Games is a lot of money. Unfortunately, I sort of ran out of steam for its continued support, which is a shame. I think it’s a pretty good game.

Which brings me to Prowlers & Paragons Ultimate Edition (PPUE) from Evil Beagle Games. PPUE is a new, improved version of Prowlers & Paragons (PP) by Lakeside Games. PP was released about three years before I released TFCH, which is a game I wrote because I wanted to see what a superhero game might look like if it was written specifically for me.

(N.B. The PPUE and PP links are affiliate links. If you click and purchase, I get a few coppers.)

I’ve read in recent days both PPUE and PP. The latter is a good game. The former is a great game. And while neither was written by me specifically for me, they punch a lot of the same jaws that I was aiming for with TFCH. What’s more, PPUE is undoubtedly a better game than TFCH.

Heck, it might very well be the best superhero game on the market today. Seriously. It’s that good.

So, what’s so good about PPUE? Here’s a short but not exhaustive list:

1. PPUE has a unified task resolution mechanic that is easy to grok and is designed to assist the narrative. Everything is rated as X number of dice. You roll the dice, and you count 2s and 4s as one success and 6s as two successes. Subtract the target number from the total number of successes to determine the degree of narrative control the dice roller gets over the action’s results.

2. PPUE respects the genre. Color me pleased that PP and PPUE use comic book terms to describe the flow of action. A page is a round, for example. This sort of terminology found its way into TFCH, proving great minds think alike. The emphasis is on the action, but the comic book melodrama is not ignored. Instead, it’s built right into character creation in the form of Perks and Flaws.

3. PPUE can handle multiple power levels and comic book subgenres. Want to play star-spanning cosmic champions that fight planet-destroying threats? You can do that. Want to play gritty do-gooders who get knocked around in barfights? You can do that too. World War II heroes? Check. Swords and sorcery barbarians fighting evil wizards? Check. Angsty teenagers at an elite prep school for mutants? Yes, that’s possible as well.

4. PPUE has point-based hero creation, but with an emphasis on basic arithmetic. On the other side of the law, the GM can use the point system to make up villains, but that’s not a requirement. PPUE understands that it is not necessary for the enemies faced by the PCs to be made with the same rules as the PCs. Character creation rules are primarily intended to ensure that the PCs are relatively balanced against each other. The NPCs get to do things the PCs don’t get to do, and whinging that this is unfair is beside the point. (If things were fair, there’d be no need for heroes.)

As mentioned in a previous post, I return to campus this week. The students return some time after, and I hope to get my story game club up and running again. PPUE is a strong contender for the first system that I’ll teach the students who participate.

Also, I’ve made up three characters using PPUE. One of them is a hero suitable for play. The other two are villains. The last link is for a villain made using TFCH, just in case you want to do a little compare-constrat. Each link opens a PDF.

Enjoy!

Baron Samedi, a PPUE Villain.

The Galveston Giant, a PPUE Villain.

The Villain, a PPUE Villain. Duh.

Brutacles, a TFCH Villain.

Tags: Prowlers & Paragons, reviews, superhero games, TFCH

Well, once again, it’s been way too long since my last post. Pretend I’ve explained the usual excuses in the remainder of this paragraph.

Now check out the picture. Click to embiggen if you want.

That’s me gazing down in glee at my 386-page hardback copy of Black Blade Publishing‘s OSRIC, which stands for Old School Reference and Index Compilation. For the unwashed, OSRIC is 1E AD&D. Those 386 pages include 1E AD&D’s Player’s Handbook, Monster Manual, and Dungeon Master’s Guide reborn as an Old School ruleset that’s been cleaned up, clarified, and presented anew.

There’s a lot of nifty stuff in OSRIC. For example, consider OSRIC’s take on infravision:

“Infravision is the ability to see in the dark and is common to almost all subterranean creatures.”

Notice what infravision is not: It’s not the ability to detect gradations of heat. Notice also that in dungeons and caverns, infravision is pretty much ubiquitous among the monsters the heroes will encounter. Sound great if you’re a subterranean creature, but infravision has its limits:

“Infravision cannot be used within the ambit of any light source.”

I love that it says “within the ambit”. It’s not often a gamebook sends me toward a dictionary. I know enough Latin to recognize that “ambit” is almost certainly a Latin verb, and etymonline.com confirms my thoughts. “Ambit” derives from ambire, meaning “to go around, go about”. Its modern meaning tends toward “the bounds or limits of a place or district”.

In addition to a range limit (usually 60 feet), “Infravision does not detect colours and is of little help while searching or making minute examinations, so sapient creatures such as orcs may well prefer torchlight even if they possess infravision.”

On the run from orcs through a subterranean fungus forest? Well, if the orcs are tracking you, the orcs need torchlight. Searching for traps on that sarcophagus or reading your spellbook? You need torchlight as well.

One of the unfortunate consequences of the more recent idea related to infravision as darkvision is that torchlight, et cetera, becomes unnecessary for most non-human creatures. For humans especially, the lack of darkvision turns into a huge liability as the light sources necessary for exploring otherwise lightless caverns turns into a huge warning signal for any enemies the humans might approach.

OSRIC’s simple description of infravision ameliorates that issue as well as disposing on one of my 1E AD&D pet peeves, namely players and DMs wrangling over gradations of heat and what is visible versus invisible as a result. If I never hear another discussion about whether or not lurking zombies are the same temperature as their surroundings and, therefore, invisible to infravision….

I’m still digesting OSRIC, biting off a bit here and there. So far, I really like it. It stays true to its 1E AD&D roots while at the same time appearing fresh, as if it were very much its own thing. I have a feeling running OSRIC waits somewhere in the near future, especially since the school year ends this coming Friday.

Ah, blessed summer vacation!

Tags: 1E AD&D, OSRIC, reviews

I recently blogged about prizes I’d won by entering Benchleydale and Beyond contests. Since then, I’ve received the prizes. I’ve also helped a nephew, my sister, my wife, and my son fight ghosts and hunt for treasures. I do live an exciting life, don’t I?

First up: Ghost Fightin’ Treasure Hunters! from Mattel Games. I learned about this great family game from The Tabletop Bellhop. The bellhop Moe T. writes about this boardgame on his blog. You can read his words right here. Before I talk a bit about the game, let’s look at a picture.

Nota Bene: All of the pics in this post embiggen if you click them.

In short: Ghost Fightin’ Treasure Hunters! is a hoot. When we first set it up to play, we had fun sticking the ghosts on our fingers and noticing the functional backpacks on the player pieces. At first, we were a bit skeptical about the game play. It just seemed too easy to roll the dice, move to the rooms, retrieve the treasures, and escape the haunted house unscathed. You can fight the ghosts, but the ghosts can’t fight you. But here’s the rub: Each player turn, a card gets turned up, which almost always adds another ghost to one of the rooms in the haunted house.

(A quick aside about the cards: They’re delightful; details on the cards sync up with little details on the gameboard.)

But back to the increasing number of ghosts. When a room gets its third ghost, the ghosts turn into a red and scary haunt. It takes two players working together to defeat a haunt, and if the house ends up with six haunts, that’s it. Game over. Everyone at the table loses, and the undead win. Ooh, spooky.

Ghost Fightin’ Treasure Hunters! was great fun, and we just played the basic game. The advanced game ups the difficulty. This is one of funner so-called kids’ games I’ve played. If you’d like to buy your own Ghost Fightin’ Treasure Hunters!, click over to Moe T.’s blogpost and use his affiliate link. Moe T. does great work with The Tabletop Bellhop, and his affiliate links help him ensure the great work continues.

A set of Atmar’s Cardography cards from Norse Foundry was among the prizes I won via the aforementioned Benchleydale contests. The cards come in a standard playing card sized box, and the cards themselves are sturdy and a bit glossy, just like I expect a new deck of cards to be. Take a gander at the pic below.

On a whim, I shuffled the deck and dealt out the top nine cards, which I then assembled into a mini-dungeon.

Note the numbers on the cards. The deck comes with a quad-fold mini-document that briefly describes each numbered map location. If you look at the mini-dungeon pic, you’ll see location 27. According to the key, location 27 has “Many fires with large cauldrons simmering and boiling.” Down in the southeast corner, that blurry 44 means a “Dining hall filled with fur tapestries. Magic torch in the center of the main table.”

(Another Nota Bene: It can be annoying how my hands shake.)

My Atmar’s Cardography deck is neat. Good production values, clever concept, and Norse Foundry has written downloadable modules based on the cards. The modules are available on their website, and are written for Fate and 5E D&D. I don’t how much I’d stick to the deck’s in-box location key, but I can see me dealing out the cards to create random dungeons. Between the number of cards in the deck and the various ways the orientations for card placement, the deck has the potential to generate quite a large number of dungeon maps.

Tags: reviews

Merry Christmas!

A few weeks ago I asked the Interwebz if there were any retro-clones of 2E AD&D. After weeding through the answers that didn’t go with my question, I discovered For Gold & Glory (FG&G hereafter) from God Emperor Games. I downloaded the PDF for the most reasonable price of $0. I’ve not given it a detailed read yet, but I like what I’ve skimmed.

FG&G is recognizably 2E AD&D, but it’s been streamlined, condensed a bit, and clarified. If your curious, click over via the link above. (Nota Bene: That link is an affiliate link.) There’s a 20-page preview available. The rules cover character creation and advancement, combat (including THAC0), skills (the FG&G term for proficiencies), and other player topics.

There are also sections for the DM covering magic items and monsters. The bestiary starts with aerial servant and ends with zombie. Along the way, you meet some familiar faces with new names: the corpse ravager (carrion crawler), gazer (beholder), and tunnel lurk (umber hulk). The PDF comes in at 384 pages from virtual cover to virtual cover with art drawn from public domain sources, mostly paintings that one might find hanging in museums.

If I were to start up a 2E AD&D campaign, each player having a copy of FG&G would suffice quite well. One can get the PDF and a black-and-white softcover book for about $11, or $15 for the hardcover. That’s a good price. Books with color art cost more, of course, depending on whether the color is standard or premium (whatever that means).

From what I’ve read, FG&G conforms so closely to 2E AD&D that all of my 2E AD&D stuff would work quite well with FG&G without modification. Since 2E AD&D was pretty close to 1E AD&D, that opens up a lot more of my old stuff for use as well.

I opened up another drawer in that virtual treasure chest of stock art from Aegis Studios that I purchased. Today’s monster is written up for FG&G with another piece of art by Jack Badashski, found in Necrobyss Stock Art #1. (Nota Bene: That’s also an affiliate link.)

Xinjirow

Climate/Terrain: Tropical land
Frequency: Rare
Number Appearing: 2d4
Organization: Nest
Activity Cycle: Night
Intelligence: 3-5
Treasure: B
Alignment: Neutral evil

Armor Class: 2 body, 7 eye
Movement: 9, burrow 6
Hit Dice: 8 (36 hp)
THACO: 11
Attack: 3 claws 2d6
Saving Throws: Fighter 8
Special Traits: Eye blast, surprise
Magic Resistance: None
Size: Huge (about 20′ long)
Morale: 12
Experience: 2,000

With its chitinous plates, spines, three segmented appendages ending in bony claws, and single massive eye, the xinjirow looks as if it squirmed from a nightmare into the waking world. The xinjirow burrows through the rich soil of tropical lands, using its spines to detect vibrations as well as to push it through the earth. When it detects possible prey, the xinjirow bursts from the ground and attacks.

Xinjirows live in subterranean nests. They drag unconscious or dead prey back to the nest in order to feed in the dark. The xinjirow has infravision with a range of 60 feet.

Combat: Xinjirows are intelligent enough to coordinate their attacks. When ambushing prey, the xinjirow imposes a -5 penalty to their foes’ surprise rolls. This monster burrows even through solid stone. It moves through soft earth at a movement rate of 6. Solid stone slows the xinjirow to half its burrow speed.

It attacks with its bony claws, but its first attack is with its fearsome eyeblast, which is 5′ wide and up to 100′ long. The searing heat of the eyeblast inflicts 6d8+6 points of damage, but a creature may save versus breath weapon to take half damage.

The xinjirow’s single eye can be targeted separately from its body, and the eye has 4d8 hit points. Damage inflicted to the eye does not count toward the damage needed to kill the xinjirow.

Tags: AD&D, For Gold & Glory, monsters, reviews

A couple of blogposts ago, I briefly mentioned Dungeon Master’s Book of Cartography (DMBoC hereafter), which is available over at Amazon for $7.99. Matt Jackson is a talented fantasy map-maker. I’ve used several of his maps, most recently this past Sunday as part of the 5E D&D game I’m DMing.

DMBoC includes several maps, each one facing a lined page on which notes about the map can be written. The maps include a variety of dungeon and wilderness locations. None of the locations are particularly large, making them suitable for short, site-based adventures. As always with Matt, the maps are clean and clear, and they have character. These are not cookie-cutter, computer-generated maps. The last several pages of DMBoC are mapless, featuring a sheet of graph paper with a facing page for notes, encouraging me to add my own cartographical efforts to the collection.

All in all, I’m digging DMBoC. It’s a fine addition to my collection of gaming books, and I’m looking forward to Volume Two, which I assume must be in the works since DMBoC is subtitled as “volume one”. I know the maps in DMBoC will get used, even though I doubt I’ll ever write in the book. Maybe I’ll add some maps of my own on those graph paper pages, but filling in the lines with dungeon details? Probably not. I work better with a word processor than with a pen.

Good job, Matt! Now get volume two done.

Tags: maps, Matt Jackson, reviews