Charity Auction: Friday, 8 July 2022

Jim Kitchen who will be hosting a charity auction for Aaron Koel via the Goodman Games Twitch Channel. If you have the ability, please consider attending the on-line auction and/or donating. Mr. Kitchen posted the following information (which I’ve cut-and-pasted from Tenkar’s Tavern):

A friend of mine, Aaron Koelman, is currently fighting a battle with Stage IV Pancreatic Cancer. Aaron’s spent most of the last year undergoing grueling chemotherapy sessions and doing his best to win a battle that has some pretty steep odds.

Aaron’s a single dad to an amazing little boy. His son means everything and when Aaron revealed his cancer to me in March one of the things we talked about was fatherhood, particularly in his current circumstances.

Aaron is trying to put together a college fund for his son. To help with that effort I’ve organized a charity auction next week on Friday. It will be a virtual auction on Twitch. Joseph Goodman has been kind enough to donate the space on his companies channel. (As well as some pretty amazing things!)

We will have a lot of RPG items, original art and some great and unique items. I am still working on collating donations but here’s a list of fine people who have already donated:

Michael Badolato/NTRPG
Julian Bernick
Hector Cruz
Jen Brinkman & Bob Brinkman
David Baity
Joseph Goodman
Jon Hershberger
Kenneth Kessenger
Jim Kitchen
Doug Kovacs
Ian McGarty
Peter Mullen
Erol Otus
James Pozenel
Yorkus Rex
James Michael Spahn
Dak J. Ultimak
Loz The-Eye

If I have somehow missed you please send me an email, PM or smoke signal. Work has had me extremely busy and I worry I have missed something somewhere.

If you have zero interest in RPG’s or original artwork then you can still help. Donations can be made via Jon Hershberger’s company Black Blade Publishing. Donations can be sent to tacojohndm@yahoo.com via Paypal.

100% of all monies raised are going directly to Aaron. Winners of auction items will be pay shipping charges but no handling fees or premiums.

If you can skip a few coffees or a lunch for a week please know that it would mean a great deal to me. Aaron is a dear friend.

I don’t know Mr. Koel. I don’t Mr. Kitchen. I do know what it’s like to be a father who’s worried about his children. If you choose to donate via PayPal as described above, please leave a comment on Tenkar’s Tavern at the link above. Tenkar is matching the first $250 donated.

July 5th, 2022  in RPG No Comments »

AS&SH in Foundry VTT

Well, June came, stayed for a bit, and has moved on. It’s July. Pretty much a month went by without me posting a thing.

I acquired the player’s book for the second edition of Astonishing Swordsmen and Sorcerers of Hyperborea. This game has been on my radar for a while. It fits in somewhere between B/X and AD&D in terms of rules, complexity, et cetera, but it is more compatible with the former rather than the latter. I really like AS&SH.

Last week while vacationing in northest Texas, I took my laptop and my AS&SH book. When it was time to relax in the cabin, I entered player character information into Foundry VTT, which does not have an AS&SH game system, but does have Old School Essentials. So many OSR games are so close to each other that it’s possible to run multiple systems at the same time. The areas where AS&SH are not directly compatible with OSE are numerous but also largely insignificant.

Nota Bene: Each pic below embiggens when clicked.

First up, we have the Wavekisser, a two-masted sailing ship on which the PCs have set sail with Captain Three-Pistols and her motley crew.

Next are a couple of sites, the first a jungle camp and the other a mysterious cave. In the first site, Desdemona and Bridger face a giant crab.

In the second site, an incomplete PC fights undead.

Testy fires his bow and scores a natural 20!

The dronis malmorta takes 5 points of damage!

I added the character classes (and their respective class features) as items that can be clicked-and-dragged onto a character sheet. I also programmed an attribute roller that uses a combination of 4d6-drop-the-lowest and 3d6 to roll a PC’s scores.

Where a class feature requires an die roll, that function is included as part of the feature. For example, a 1st-level monk moves silently on a 5 or less on 1d12.

Some class features mimic weapons, such as the cryomancer’s icicle ability. In this case, it is set up as both a melee and a missile weapon.

July 3rd, 2022  in RPG No Comments »

Venusian Amazons Rule the Earth!

The 2021-2022 school year is over. This month, I’m running two one-week summer camps for students. The first starts on 6 June, and the happy campers shall spend 15 hours learning the basics of Latin grammar, some history of the Romans, and the fundamentals of anti-javelin defense. Later in June, I’m looking to spend another 15 hours teaching a group of middle schoolers how to play 5E D&D. Best of all, I get paid for the camps. Huzzah.

A few days before the end of the school year, I killed my Facebook accounts after the fifth time in a month of ending up in Facebook jail. Too often in too short a period of time I was penalized and admonished about violating Facebook’s community standards, which is absurd since Facebook isn’t a community and the enforcement of its “standards” is arbitrary at best.

The first straw was me getting incarcerated for pointing out to another poster that their opinions bore more than a passing resemblance to the eugenic racism and classism of the early 20th century. The final straw was a longer incarceration for commenting in a D&D game forum about how the players’ first response to an encounter often involves violence.

But on to other things!

I at long last purchased Mutant Crawl Classics (MCC) from Goodman Games. I’ve read most of the rulebook. I love this game, and it’s given me an excuse to dust off an idea I had many years ago. That’s right. It’s the return of Venusian Amazons Rule the Earth (VARE).

MCC fits VARE well enough. Both are post-apoc science fantasy inspired in part by TSR’s classic Gamma World (about which I’ve written before). My ideas for VARE also draw on Marvel’s awesome Killraven and DC’s even more awesome Kamandi, as well as Thundarr, the Planet of the Apes films, and a variety of pulp stories, perhaps most especially those involving Buck Rogers and John Carter.

(Nota Bene: Links to DriveThruRPG in this post are affiliate links; if you clink and buy, I get a few pennies.)

Some of MCC’s setting assumptions don’t work with VARE. Most significantly, the heroes of VARE do not live in a quasi-Neolithic world built on the remnants of an ancient civilization that commanded technology so advanced that it blurred the lines between science and magic. When the end that was nigh arrived, it was brought not by nuclear war (for example), but instead arrived when Venusian Amazons left their homeworld to conquer our world.

The Venusians Amazons have established military colonies after subjugating humanity via vastly superior Venusian technology. Massive veneriformers work around the clock to alter Earth’s ecosystems to be more comfortable for the Venusian Amazons. Countless humans and native flora and fauna have died. Others have mutated into new, often frightening forms. Human collaborators live in domed communities, protected from the veneriformers’ effects in exchange for unquestioning loyalty to Earth’s alien conquerors.

When planning how to use MCC as the engine for VARE, the first thing that changes regarding character creation relates to level-zero occupations. VARE’s cultures extend beyond MCC’s default Terra A.D. setting. Therefore, my VARE-friendly version of Table 1-2: Character Occupations:

May 30th, 2022  in RPG, Spes Magna News 2 Comments »

Everyone Kung Fu Fights!

Today I take a break from B/X D&D class creation and leap back over to 5E D&D with an idea about how to introduce some wuxia-inspired martial arts mayhem into the game. Here’re my initial, rough-drafty thoughts.

Step One: Remove the monk as a character class option. No, seriously.

Step Two: Every character class gets proficiency in Strength saving throws and Dexterity saving throws. If a character class already has proficiency in Strength and/or Dexterity saving throws, the character gains Expertise in the saving throw.

Step Three: Choose two skills from Acrobatics, Athletics, History, Insight, Religion, and Stealth. These are additional skills.

Step Four: Add the monk class features listed below to every character class. “I am serious, and don’t call me Shirley.” Each monk class feature is gained at the normal level as if the character were a monk.

  • Unarmored Defense
  • Martial Arts
  • Ki
  • Flurry of Blows
  • Patient Defense
  • Step of the Wind
  • Unarmored Movement
  • Deflect Missiles
  • Slow Fall
  • Extra Attack (unless the character class already has this feature)
  • Stunning Strike
  • Ki-Empowered Strikes
  • Stillness of Mind
  • Evasion (unless the character class already has this feature)
  • Purity of Body
  • Tongue of the Sun and Moon
  • Diamond Soul
  • Timeless Body
  • Empty Body
  • Perfect Soul

Step Five: Classes that get to choose a subclass may choose a monk subclass. I guess you could do this for other classes, replacing, for example, a wizard’s Arcane Tradition with a monk subclass.

Step Six: Add Wuxia Movement to the game.

Wuxia Movement: When you take the Move or Dash action, up to half of your movement (round down to nearest 5 feet) ignores difficult terrain or other obstacles so long as you can describe the cool acrobatic moves you make while moving. You can leap over things (no Strength [Athletics] required), run up walls, skip across water, et cetera. When your movement ends, you suffer any negative effects related to terrain, environment, or gravity deemed appropriate. You may also suffer negative effects for doing things like dancing across lava, et cetera. Your Wuxia Movement does not provoke opportunity attacks when you move out of an enemy’s reach (assuming you describe why).

May 18th, 2022  in RPG No Comments »

Wu Jen Class (B/X D&D)

Back in June 2021, I mused about how to take OSRIC‘s magic-user and tweak it into the wu jen from TSR’s Oriental Adventures. That effort (which you can read here) focused on alternative class features rather than putting in the time needed to create a new list of spells for a new type of magic-user.

Today, I’m once more whipping out Erin D. Smale’s BX Options: Class Builder and crafting an entire wu jen class. Since the wu jen has some quirks that didn’t quite fit the BXO:CB’s parameters, I had to make educated guesses at some of the XP costs for certain class abilities.

Nota Bene: Those previous links are affiliate links. If you click and purchase, I get a few coppers. Also, much of the class description below comes from Oriental Adventures after some minor editing.

Wu Jen

Wu jen are sorcerers, people of mysterious of powers, who command the elemental forces of magic. They seldom live with the rest of human society, preferring to be hermits who live in wild places where they can purify their bodies and minds. Wu jen learn spells from spirits and other supernatural powers.

Requirements: Minimum Intelligence 13, cannot be Lawful
Prime Requisite: INT
Hit Dice: 1d4+1
Maximum Level: 14
Armor and Shields: None
Weapons: Club, blowpipe, dagger, short bow, short sword, shuriken, sling
Languages: Alignment, Oni, Tengu, Trade Tongue

Restrictions

Stronghold: When wu jen reach 11th level, they may build strongholds.

Taboos: Since wu jen draw their power from supernatural sources, they must operate under special taboos which might seem silly to others. These taboos are important to wu jen, for wu jen who violate their taboos (willingly or otherwise) lose the ability to cast the highest level of spell they have access to for each violated taboo. So, a 6th-level wu jen (able to cast up to 3rd-level spells) who violates two taboos can cast only 1st-level spells. The typical period of spell ability loss is one day per violated taboo. A wu jen has one taboo at 1st-level and gains one more taboo at levels 5 and 10. Some possible taboos are suggested below:

  • Cannot eat meat
  • Cannot have more treasure than can be carried
  • Must make a daily offering (of food, flowers, incense, et cetera) to the spirits
  • Cannot bathe
  • Cannot cut one’s hair
  • Cannot drink alcohol
  • Cannot wear a certain color
  • Cannot light a fire
  • Cannot sit facing a particular cardinal direction

Abilities

Combat: Wu jen make attacks and saving throws as magic-users. At 1st level, wu jen select one weapon from the list above. The wu jen gains a +1 “to hit” bonus with the chosen weapon.

Elemental Spells: The elements are earth (including metal), water, fire, air, and wood. A wu jen’s spells do not have defined sources related to their effects. In other words, a magic missile is not “a magical energy dart”. A lightning bolt is not “a bolt of lightning” nor is a stinking cloud “a nauseating cloud of vapors”. Wu jen determine the elemental manifestation of their spells when they casts them. This might modify the effects of the spell, as determined by the DM, but much of the time the effects are cosmetic.

At 1st level, a wu jen selects one element to become keyed with, but he has knowledge of the other four. When wu jen memorize their spells, they assign an element to each spell. This helps determine the effects of the spell when it is cast. Once per day at 1st level, a wu jen may invest a spell with additional power if that spell has a keyed element. Doing so has one of the following effects (chosen by the wu jen):

  • The wu jen may cast the spell without having to speak or gesture.
  • The spell’s range and duration are increased by 25%. This does not apply to a range of 0 or to durations of instantaneous or permanent.
  • Saving throws against the spell are made with a -1 penalty.
  • For effects not related to range and duration, the spell takes effect as if the wu jen’s caster level were one higher.

When wu jen gain access to a new level of spells, they gain another daily use of this keyed element ability. At 3rd, 5th, 8th, and 11th levels, wu jen add another key element to their repretoire. Thus, by 11th level, a wu jen has mastered all five elements.

Ki: Wu jen practice strict mental training. Once per day at 1st level, wu jen may tap into their ki to gain a +3 bonus to initiative. This may be declared after initiative has been rolled. Once per day at 4th level, wu jen may tap into their ki when casting a spell that is three or more levels lower than the wu jen’s level. The wu jen does not lose memorization of the spell after casting it.

Magical Research: Wu jen may research new spells. At 9th level, wu jen may create magic items and research magical effects.

Meditation: Meditation is a deep state of concentration. One hour of uninterrupted meditation is as restful as two hours of sleep. While meditating, wu jen are oblivious to hunger, thirst, and weather. They are still conscious while meditating, aware of their surroundings, and thus are not any easier to surprise or slower to react to danger.

Spell Casting: Wu jen learn and prepare spells like magic-users, to include keeping spellbooks. They have the same spells per day as magic-users.

Unnatural Commerce: Wu jen often have dealings with tengu and oni. They gain a +1 reaction modifier when dealing with such creatures.

May 17th, 2022  in RPG No Comments »