It has been a very long time since I’ve been able to run it (so long that one of my players has forgotten about the interesting dice in the game), and I’m really looking forward to getting my GMs hat on tonight.

I’ve been lifting large chunks from a prewritten adventure, but the third act never really sat well with me. So I decided to rewrite it, less than 24 hours before I ran it. Aren’t I clever? Still, I think my efforts last night were worth it, I got rid of annoying sequence of repeated “Look here, fooled you! Look here instead!” scenes, and added an Indy reference (along with a few things that I’d better not talk about before they come out in play).

The classic system is 4dF. A dF is a FUDGE die and has six faces representing the numbers -1, 0 and 1 twice over. It is a d3-2.

Starblazer Adventures uses a different approach and rolls d6-d6. This has the advantage that you don’t need to run out and buy dice that are so specialised that your friendly neighourhood gaming store doesn’t sell them.

This morning I decided to invest a few minutes into doing some analysis and comparison of the two systems (no doubt duplicating other people’s work, but entertaining myself in the process).

I generated all possible results that each of the two systems could provide, and converted them into percentages and then charted them.

There isn’t much to choose between the results, although the FUDGE dice give slightly less variance and are more likely to hit closer to zero.

I have found my notes and all the character sheets from the last couple of times I have run the game — both one off sessions — and will be volunteering to run the game every Tuesday night for six weeks. Gulp.

I might even find time to write up the last session. I think I can remember most of what happened.

I haven’t been about to give it much of an outing yet — I had a weekend full of friends visiting, movie watching, Dragonmeet attendance, and GMing of Fantasy Craft — but I did manage to squeeze in a couple of games last night.

I started out attempting the tutorials, but they seemed geared up more to teach Blood Bowl then the control system the game uses, which I felt left to figure out for myself (possibly I just wasn’t looking in the right places).

Once you get the hang of it, the controls are pretty easy. Point to where you want the action to happen, click, and the system figures it out. So click on a square to run to it, a teammate to pass, an opponent to block or blitz and so on. Just don’t get scared off by the range finder when you have the ball, clicking an empty square will still move to it.

So, with the controls figured out, what next?

The AI seems pretty easy, but that could be a combination of using the default settings, having played the boardgame version before and possibly finding “my team”.

I’ve never given Chaos an outing before, but they have a nice balance of stomp and speed. We’ll have to see how they handle themselves if they come up against a Dwarf team (who are as stomping as you can get but about as fast as an injured snail).

The fluff is good too. It has nice graphics and amusing commentary.

Overall? I’m looking forward to getting into it a bit more, and then venturing out onto XBox Live to see how I handle myself against intelligence that isn’t artificial.

Q-workshop present dice set for the third part of series released by Paizo Publishing – Pathfinder Chronicles: Second Darkness. Dice in our new colour scheme – purple & silver – vividly reflect the devious nature of Dark Elves, their cunning, secrecy and

… but, for whatever reason, trail off.

I wonder how that sentence is supposed to end?

Having given it some thought, I suspect it should be: squinty eyes that are cursed to suffer reading spidery script in low light conditions. (I confess, I like to be able to read my dice).

Can you do better?

In the meantime, however, I present:

If two players get the same result — reroll.

List of named NPCs via Wikipedia.

Two sessions in (not counting The Day Of Character Generation, in which everyone fought over a single PDF and tried to build characters for a very different take of D20 fantasy) and everybody appears to be having a good time (myself included).

The system is a lot of fun to run, and the rules for standard characters (who get damage saves instead of wounds and vitality) and mooks (who just die when sneezed upon) make it a breeze to GM.

I have players who have written up nice, detailed backgrounds (which are already getting tied into the plot) and who can be bribed with in-game rewards to write up the adventure.

On that subject, I’m keeping the Campaign Log over at Obsidian Portal as an experiment. The site was pointed out after I made a previous blog post seeking information about online gaming.

It seems to be working well, and lets the players contribute content without me having to give them all access to this blog. It also structures the information in a format better suited to a campaign than I could achieve here.

On the subject of rewards, I’m offering bonus reputation. This is a part of Fantasy Craft that I like a lot, at least in theory, it is too early to see how it plays out in practice. Essentially, it is a representation of how much kudos you have earned and controls your Renown (how much sway you have with a given demographic, such as the military or the common people), Favours, Contacts, Base, Magical Shiny, and so on. There is something that just feels right about giving extra renown to players who shout about how great their characters are on the Internet!

It is a very nice concert of classical music, accompanied by stunning visuals, with half a good science fiction film in the middle of it. I heartily recommend taking a look if you haven’t seen it already.

It has left me wondering what it was that I was watching, and I’ve had a few details filled in by friends, but I have ordered the book in an attempt to get the full story.

The event is geared around four types of gaming.

• Video games (not what I expected and disappointing enough to not mention further… except that I’ve just found a photo that suggests there was more to it then I managed to find)
• Wargames (a fair amount going on, but a distinct lack of Epic — my current obsession
• RPGs — lots to see here. I managed to get a game of Paranoia in, and picked up copies of Savage Worlds and Starblazer Adventures. Savage worlds was cheap with a couple of fluff books that appealed to my desire to run Pulp games, while Starblazer takes my current favourite game system (FATE) and applies a space opera setting to it. Now I have many more games I wish to run.
• Boardgames…

Boardgames were the biggy here. I entered the Settlers of Catan competition and surprised myself by coming second. Meanwhile Declan won (no surprise there) but also pulled off first place at On the Underground and took the overall prize. Jim won Puerto Rico, and come top five in the Settlers and overall (he was the top player not to play in all three tournaments). My excuse for not doing well overall is that I only entered Settlers (quite a good excuse in my opinion), but next year I think I’ll take a punt at three.

This result means that the group of people that I play boardgames with most often were victorious at the majority of the tournaments, and took away over half the price money (or vouchers), which is impressive, but suggests we spend too much of our time doing this sort of thing.

Still, it gave me a change to pick up Days of Steam, a big collection of expansions for Zooloretto and Twilight Imperium.

With a weekend of boardgaming coming up in two weeks time (did I mention we spend too much time doing this?) I might be able to break some of them out and see how they play.

A few weeks later?

No? Oh well, time to upgrade then. The Core Worlds is now on Wordpress 2.7 (my main site is still sitting around on sBuilder since I’m not finding a lot of time to work on Axford).

I’ve also switched in a new theme since the width of the old one was annoying me every time I wanted to pretty up a post with a graphic. Plugins have recieved a bit of maintainence too.

OK, end of boring technical post. Normal service resumes now.