Of late I have been watching a lot of whimsical anime along with a lot of modern magic stuff and once again I’m stuck thinking about folklore and fairy tales and how they could make great settings. Now I know that there is loads of stuff out there already with these kinds of settings but I think there’s a lot of room for great storytelling to be done. As always my mind is abuzz with…
Hit Points Hit points in this setting do not go up with levels, they are set from the begining and can only go up via extraordinary circumstances or by using feats. As such it is based off of the characters constitution statistics.The lowest starting hit point value for a player character is four. The idea behind this change is to get around how characters become progressively more “bullet spongy” as time goes on, going from…
There was a time where I would not have wished the pain of slow agonising death on anyone, where the thought of wishing another to feel their innards rot away, the ability to smell and taste their own rotting flesh forever, was unthinkable. Hoping to inflict the sense of maggots burrowing through their soft belly or worms squriming through ones skull, slithering down your neck, such hopes would have seemed monstrous. But now, having lived…
“No! Hitting him repeatedly on the head is not an interrogation Constable Tomato!” Seargent Campbell yelled at his young watchman. “Well, sir, he wasn’t telling me what I wanted” the young chap muttered gesturing at the door behind him. “That doesn’t mean you can just bash him with you truncheon!” “I wasn’t using my truncheon, I was using that chair.” Tomato corrected. “That doesn’t make a difference!” “Really? Oh… well still, I know he has…
Creating Good Characters Goal What’s your character attempting to achieve in life, what’s their end goal? It should be hard to achieve but possible, though maybe unlikely. Think about what you’d want to be able to achieve in a similar situation, time period and setting. Some examples. “I want to become King.” “I want to own my own starship.” “I want to build a legacy.” “I want to be the greatest merchant in…
Let’s go through the character creation process for Zweihander and throw together an NPC or two. Excerpt from the book. I’ll go through these in stages. So Step 1, Begin basic tier Okay, this just seems to be an overview of the process. Spend points, get prizes. Step 2 Primary Attributes So Combat Bonus, Brawn Bonus, Agility Bonus, Perception Bonus, Intelligence Bonus, is the bonus bit really required? Willpower Bonus, Fellowship Bonus, oh right it’s a…
Now I know that tri-stat was a system back in the day but well as a name it describes what I always have in mind and that being a game with three core statistics that nicely describe all the most important things about a character without becoming horribly specific. Those stats are Body, Mind and, Spirit, I tend to think that these cover more or less everything you’ll ever need to know about a character. Other…
So the characters are convicts so the first thing they need to do is come up with their crimes and background, here are some examples I was thinking about. Many characters will be significantly older than the normal starting areas, it’s likely they have children, wives, families and colleagues in many cases. It’s important to remember that all the characters have an immensly strong drive to survive. Booster gang enforcer, you grew up on the…
Background work for Cyberpunk 2020 campaign. Listen up chumps you think Night City is where the bad boys are? Well you ain’t seen nothin’ Neo London makes it look like a holiday park space mountain included. It’s bad enough you got Euro Peace Corp boys fighting it out with the English Liberation Front on a daily basis the cities got the badest maddest bosters going and outside the city limits nothing but a radioactive waste land…
The core idea for the game world is a classic/dark fantasy setting where the mortals overthrew and killed the realms gods. It can be assumed that the pantheon of gods that had been in charge were mostly corrupt and evil at least in the eyes of the mortals too busy with their petty games to recognise the risks. This raises another concern as to how were the mortals able to kill the gods? Some form…