Get Awesome!
Posted by Joshua on Mar 4, 2009
Awesome! The Storytelling Game is now available as a PDF or Open Office file. There’s also character sheets.
Download it and give it a whirl!
Mucho thanks to Mike DeSanto, who took the original blog post and turned it into a nifty brochure. Truly Awesome indeed!
Tunnels & Trolls: Monsters
Posted by Joshua on Mar 4, 2009
Here’s a stat-block for a monster from Tunnels & Trolls:
Basilisk MR 78
Here’s the same monster, with the initial Combat Adds prefigured:
Basilisk MR 78 Adds 8d6+39
Here’s a Basilisk with special damage:
Basilisk MR 78 Adds 8d6+39
4/Medusa
4/Medusa means that any turn when it rolls four 6′s in its damage it also uses its gaze to turn someone to stone (as if it had cast the 9th level spell Medusa, though costing no WIZ to invoke). As far as I can tell, there’s no save…the only thing protecting adventurers from the gaze is the monster needs to roll well in order to use it.
And with some more special abilities:
Basilisk MR 78 Adds 8d6+39
4/Medusa
Healing Feeling (self only), immunity to poisons
Partially Statted:
Basilisk MR 78 Adds 8d6+39
4/Medusa
Healing Feeling (self only), immunity to poisons
INT 27 WIZ 19
Fully Statted:
Gidorah the Basilisk
Basilisk MR 78 Adds 8d6+39
4/Medusa
Healing Feeling (self only), immunity to poisons
STR 18 DEX 32 CON 78 SPD 14 LK 20 INT 27 WIZ 30 CHR 14
I think you get the picture. Monsters can be described in a single number, or be as elaborate as a player character (not that PCs are all that elaborate), or anything in between as is convenient for the GM and suitable for the adventure.
Run of the mill monsters generally have only one attribute: Monster Rating. From their Monster Rating you derive their CON (HP) (same as MR), their Combat Adds (MR/10 d6 + MR/2), and their WIZ (MR/10 round up). As they take damage, their MR drops as do the pluses they get to their Attack, though not the dice rolled. Unlike adventurers, that means that monsters do have a “death-spiral”–the more you damage them, the weaker their attack becomes.
They can also have additional special abilities to spice things up, like armor, spells, gaze weapons, and so forth. Armor is usually constant, but other special abilities generally trigger when a certain amount of spite has been generated (e.g. the basilisk being able to use its petrifying gaze whenever it rolled 4 or more 6′s on its 8d6 attack).
T&T has a simple rule of thumb for balancing combats… a fair fight is one where the monsters have about the same number of dice of damage as the adventurers. That might be one monster, or ten.
T&T gets another A from me for the way it handles monsters. Who needs to “shemp” when you can describe a monster in as little as a single number, or give it a bunch of special abilities, name and personality in one or two lines of text? For that matter, who needs rules for ganging up, swarms, or over-bearing when a hundred MR 10 goblins are mechanically almost as dangerous as an MR 1000 Titan?
It’s Raining RPG Soup!
Posted by Joshua on Mar 4, 2009
So what are you waiting for? Grab your bowl!
Stargazer’s World » Dungeonslayers: The deed is done!
This marvellous tome is based on the 3rd Edition of the original German Dungeonslayers rulebook and already includes the latest errata. The PDF document which can be downloaded for free contains all the rules you need to play Dungeonslayers including the introductory adventure “Lord of the rats”!
I haven’t had a chance to do more than glance at it yet, but it looks interesting. Seriously, the care and professionalism of the free RPGs available continues to ramp up. This is the stuff that makes me excited to be part of this hobby, not news about Hasbro’s latest quarterly reports and lawyerly parsing of either licenses or rules.
So many games, so little time!
Hot Off the Presses
Posted by Joshua on Mar 4, 2009
And just in time to run a memorial game on the anniversary of Gary Gygax’s death one year ago:
RetroRoleplaying: The Blog: Microlite74 Version 2.0 Now Available
Microlite Version 2.0 is now available for free download. Over 2000 copies of Microlite74 version 1.1 have been downloaded since its release on October 6th last year. Microlite74 is dedicated to the memory of E. Gary Gygax and Version 2.0, which is even closer to that the very first edition of the world’s most popular fantasy roleplaying game he co-authored over 30 years ago, is being released on the first anniversary of his passing.
Plus, if you look on the very last page, you’ll see I got an acknowledgement (under my nom de comment jamused) for help in proofreading. And if that’s not a reason to download it, I don’t know what is!
Seriously, though, Microlite74 is a solid rule-light approach to Old School RPGs in the spirit of the old D&D boxed set (0e) for those who think even retro-clones like Swords & Wizardry are too crunchy. It’s intended more as a guide for those are familiar with D&D3 and d20 and want to try a simplified rule set that has more of the feel of the original D&D than a complete introduction to role-playing for the novice. Check it out!
Social Stuff
Posted by Joshua on Mar 4, 2009
At the suggestion of one of my commenters, I tried adding some social stuff to the blog so that people could submit posts to Digg, Reddit, and so forth. Since I don’t use any of those, I don’t really know how valuable they are… but I ended up turning off the Digg button for now, since their site seems to be down and that prevents my site from loading their button properly. I might add it back in later if they fix whatever’s ailing them…
Also, I’ve enabled caching on the blog, hoping to speed things up further. Let me know if you see anything broken or working funny. Installing it was more of a chore than I had hoped…
update: now they’re back, so I’m re-enabling it… humph. We’ll see if this is worth it.