StrangeThing

The public playtest of Tales from the Golden Dragon  is now live on Itch.io! It's a free download, so grab it and take a look.  This is my Fate Fantasy stuff, developed into an actual game world, instead of a collection of notes and house rules. I'm using Fate Condensed as the core rules, so you will need that handy. I may end up re-writing them, but not yet.  Formatting is a pain. I think I need to cut some stunts in the character creation chapter. The book looks best with one role per page, but some have more stunts than others. I had too much fun writing stunts for the warrior, rogue, and scoundrel.  If all goes well, the next update will include the springboard , a session zero tool to jumpstart a new campaign. 

So I've been on a miniature wargames kick. Since my last blog update, I've delved into One Page Rules and The Doomed . I had a month-long delusion that I could make my own minis game, which I might post about later.  I think my wargame obsession is mostly over. The magical post-apocalyptic setting of the wargame project reminded me of my other magical post-apocalyptic setting, an RPG project called Dragons vs Robots . I resolved to focus on that, and put aside the minis game for the time being.  Predictably, my ADHD riddled brain latched onto my Fate Fantasy project instead. I still might post about DvR at some point, but it's fantasy for the time being. That project has been wavering between being a specific setting and a more general fantasy toolkit.  So it occurred to me that I could do both. Present the bare-bones setting as a jumping-off point for making your own world. Start with the player characters, and build outward from there. Here's the starting point: ...

Today we look at Games Workshop's weirdest attempt to adjust their dark military science-fantasy setting: the Tau. This essay doesn't exactly tie into my last Warhammer 40k essay. More of a tangent. I do have a direct follow up to Is Warhammer Satire  in progress.   The Tau were introduced in 2001 , to a sharply divided reaction from the game's fan base. There are four main criticisms of the faction, which tend to bleed into each other.  First off, Tau crisis suits were crazy strong when they were first introduced. They had a shoot-move-shoot ability that was obnoxiously difficult to play against. This has since been fixed, but it made a lasting impression on the player base. As I mentioned, the various criticisms against the Tau frequently get mixed up. Second, they looked and played very different from very other faction. Tau are very technology focused, with no trace of the mysticism that the other factions have. Tau are the lone atheists, in a universe full of g...

 For those that don't know, the Warhammer 40,000 setting was created by Games Workshop. It's a famously bleak space fantasy setting, summed up by the tag line, "In the grim darkness of the 41st millennium, there is only war." 

The epic battle between light and darkness! So many fantasy stories have revolved around this idea it hardly needs explanation. Light has the traditional aesthetics of the good guys. White and gold are the symbolic colors. It's the side that feels like home.  The Dark side is all black and red. The rituals of the dark gods are carried out in the dead of night, out of sight of decent people.  Sometimes the two sides are called Order and Chaos, or Good and Evil. Is Light always Good, and Dark always Evil? That's up to the table to decide. Mortals can always be  It may be that even the gods are capable of error. This is a style of Quick and Dirty magic. A tweak to default options of that magic system, to represent a character whose power comes from the Divine Light.  The table can decide what styles of magic are available in your game. A game world can have one or more styles of magic. The secular magic described in the original Q&D article can exist alongside th...

It's been a minute since I blogged here. In the past few months, I've run a Fate Star Wars game, flew to Minnesota for my grandmother's funeral, and dealt with the fallout of the election. I'm not sure which was the most emotional for me. That Star Wars game was a real learning experience. The game fell apart because of expectation miss-match. I was thinking Andor , they just wanted to shoot storm troopers. So we're talking about a new game, using the fantasy ideas I've been noodling on. Expect to see more fantasy stuff here soon. I definitely need to work on my GM skills. More details and atmosphere. More funny voices!  BTW: I'm on Bluesky and Mastodon if you want to follow me.

Long ago, I was talking about superheroes and games with a friend. He mentioned how superhero comics tend to make their popular characters immortal. If only for commercial reasons. We wondered what it would be like if it worked the opposite way, with supers burning out and dying young. In an RPG, you could give the PCs an overcharge mode, a sort of instant win button, but with an increasing risk of death each time you use it. I was struck by how that could give a game a strong theme of self-sacrifice. Then I forgot about it, until I got to a certain point working on my Fate supers game, the Gift. I call it Ultimate Effort.