The Core Worlds

My name is David, and I’m an addict. Exalted just does something special for me. It has a rich and detailed background that is so much spicier then the traditional fantasy setting, coupled with characters capable of doing some serious ass prodding (which is when you try to get a donkey to go back down the stairs and out of the tower).

My regular group has picked up the game for a month before our premier Exalted GM goes off to get married and honeymoon, and after the last session I found myself idling on the train looking for something to do and started typing.

The sun rose over The Lap, a city still showing the scars of the battle that never happened. Some of those instrumental in saving it are still within the city, recovering, training, and helping with the rebuilding efforts.

On the road to the city, Lotus of the Solar Light, loyal worshiper of The Unconquered Sun and member of the rare race know as The Dragon Kings had travelled south from the Blessed Isle, a sense of unease growing within him at the sight of a massive convoy of mechanical vessels taking the opposite route.

You can read the rest on the group’s website under Exalted Series 13.

As for our GM – Ant, I wish you and Ada every happiness.

Forbidden Planet recently turned 30 and gave away some nice big 30% discounts, I couldn’t resist and picked up a copy of Spycraft 2.0.

This is a scary book, it has 500 pages and I can’t find any fluff in it. Most of it is rules, but there is a little bit of advice for GMs thrown in. It does cover everything, and, unlike most games, doesn’t dramatically downplay everything except combat.

The rules for a chase sequence, for instance, involve a series of opposed rolls and an abstract distance between the participents. Each turn the two sides pick a strategy, which modifies their skill roll and provides a number of possible outcomes (such as changing the distance between the two parties, forcing the opponent to drive through dangerous terrain (or loose ground) or giving a bonus to attacks – yes, gunfire can be exchanged during a chase). The winner picks the outcome they want from the strategy they chose (and if they won by a lot, they get to pick multiple outcomes).

Complicated? It looks that way, but I like the look of it, and am looking forward to giving it a try.

As it happens, a couple of friends have moved back to the area recently (from exciting locales such as ‘the wrong side of London’ and ‘Uganda’) which gives me a suitable pool of victims to try it out on. We’ve been tossing around ideas and it looks like we’ll have:

• The tech guy (“Flinkman? No, not Flickman. Like the tech guy from Alias.” “That’s Flinkman.”)
• The martial artist driver
• The stealthy killer
• and one other

It is early days and we just have broad strokes from a couple of emails so far, but it looks like the concept is shaping up nicely.

As a D20 based (in the loosest possible sense) game, Spycraft is almost certainly going to benefit from a battlemat so I think I’m going to have to invest in some more miniatures from the Street Violence range (I’ll take any excuse to buy them, the sets have some really nice figures in them, I just need to find time to attack the ones I have already with paint brushes).

Tiny Adventures has been keeping some people rather busy on Facebook lately, but there is tiny, and there is tiny, and I think I might be partially to blame for the latter.

As far as I can tell (any errors are my own, feel free to send me corrections), the time line went something like this:

It all started last night during a game of 4e when the resident Dwarf Fighter swung his warhammer at a goblin and hit the wall instead. (Or, in mechanical terms, when Jim rolled a 1). It wasn’t surprising that he was a little unhappy about this, and exclaimed:

Stupid short things

… which I found amusing enough to repeat in public.

Despite the lack of context, someone enjoyed it enough to respond, and then had an idea.

@chattydm Did you see what @dorward said? Could you not oh great DM come up with a twitteresque world for us to game in?

… and after a little more discussion — he does. I’ll be watching with interest.

(On an entirely seperate note, this is my inaugural post to RPG Bloggers, so thanks for welcoming me to the community!)