StrangeThing

Tales from the Golden Dragon  started out as some useful Fate rules I wanted to share with the community. After trying to run it with my gamer friends, who hadn't played Fate before, I realized there was a real need for a Fate book intended for new players. It's not the mechanics that they had trouble with, as much as the shift in play styles.  If you've been in the TTRPG scene, you probably know what I'm talking about. There's a spectrum of play styles. On one end, there is the old school, with roots in war gaming, and on the other end, the new school, where games start to resemble improv acting more than any sort of traditional game. Any game can be played in any style, but the unspoken assumptions of a play style are reflected in the text.  So how do you introduce someone to a new style of play? It's hard to even describe a style of play. We lack a common vocabulary. The new school vs old school rubric I'm using is barely adequate.  At first, I thought it...

I updated Tales from the Golden Dragon . Click the link to check it out!  The game has an actual setting now, even if it's fairly minimal. The real fun is the system for collaborative campaign creation. It's actually cut down from the springboard I mentioned previously. It turned into such a big project that I had to break it into pieces.  If you're stuck for an idea, there are lots of tables to roll on. You can even roll for your role now!  Let me know what you think, either here or on Itch.  

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.

Many powers let you act on a super powered scale. What does that mean?  The Gift normally only uses two scales: normal and super. Occasionally you might see a scale above super, usually called cosmic. Rarely, you might need an ad-hoc scale for sub-human power, like if a super villain hits you with a shrink ray.  When you take super scale action against super scale resistance, you don’t need to do anything special. Scale only needs rules when acting across scales.  Most of the time, a super powered character acting against normal resistance automatically succeeds. Don’t bother to roll in most cases. In an action scene, it doesn’t even need an action. If you do roll for such an action, roll with a +4 bonus.  If you've read Dresden Accelerated, that number will seem very high. It's the level described as "godlike" in that game. A smaller value would make for a more forgiving game. But it breaks suspension of disbelief if someone can lift 50 tons, and then lose a wrestli...

 I ended my last post with the list of mantles from my draft document. (Thank you blogger for making that image the thumbnail for that post. 🙄) You may have noticed some of the names are a bit overwrought, like they could be infinity stones or something. The language felt appropriate for a supers game.  In the setting, the term mantle, and many of their names, come from a super with psychic powers. He was one of the first to write about how the gift works, and his grandiose terminology stuck. So what's a mantle? It's a themed collection of powers that gives you a ready-to-play super hero in one step. Think of it as a template. Each one comes with lots of suggestions on how to customize it to fit your concept. I intend to make a section on making your own mantle, and character creation is essentially point-based. But it is very useful to me as a designer to have a list of character types that the game needs to support. Creating the mantles without a power list was actually eas...

The big setting post is in progress. In the meantime, lets talk about character creation.  The Gift uses Fate: Accelerated Edition. I toyed with renaming the five approaches, but decided against it.  My first version of this game used Fate Core, but I didn't like how powers made certain skills useless. There's no point in taking physique if you're not super strong, or Athletics if you're not super quick, and so on. The FAE approaches don't have that problem, because super strength isn't the same as being "super forceful." 

More about my super hero RPG project, The Gift . Lets talk about the setting. Like the rules, the setting has been designed to be playable, rather than try to encompass everything seen in the comics. The typical super hero setting is a ridiculous everything-goes mashup. I love the sort of weirdness that type of setting enables. But I like to work out how society would react to weird stuff. Ponder the consequences. So I decided to keep it simple. All people with powers get them from the Gift. They are a bit like Marvel's mutants, but with a few little quirks.

The Gift is my game in progress about superheroes, powered by Fate Accelerated Edition . I have two main design goals: Simple character creation, and giving players a real sense of power. Most supers games have complex character creation to accommodate the weirdness of comic book characters. The inevitable result is a complex system that requires a great deal of system mastery. Rather than grapple with that complexity, Fate Supers uses templates called Mantles of Power . A term I swear I did not steal from Dresden Files Accelerated. A mantle gives you a well-rounded package of powers. You can add more powers and stunts to customize your character to your liking. It seems almost blasphemous to make a supers game that isn't designed to give the players maximum flexibility for building their characters. But why? Are weird characters really essential to the genre? Why not sacrifice flexibility for clarity? As for the sense of power, that's pretty straightforward. There are onl...

  Shadow of the Century introduced the idea of roles as a way to make characters. I was ambivalent about the system when I read it, but then I tried implementing it in my eternally incomplete Fate Fantasy game. Looking at the role system from a designer's perspective was a revelation. It's such a great way to show your players what types of characters you can play. And since you choose three roles for your character, it's so much more flexible than a template system. (To say nothing of a class system.) So here is my Fate Fantasy character creation system. I'm eager to hear people's opinions.  This is designed to work with Quick & Dirty Magic . Magic Finesse is the same as Spell Casting. I took a stab at doing the same thing for Star Wars . It's not as well made, but there's no magic system to muddy the waters.

Fate Core's Resources skill doesn't feel right for adventurers. I want to create the feeling of limited supplies slowly depleting over time. The wealth track from the Fate SRD is a good start, but still didn't fit quite right.  Here's my alternate wealth system for the ever-fluctuating wealth of adventuring characters.  

I wrote my earlier guide to Mastodon when I was just a beginner myself, eager to share my latest discovery. Here are some more useful tips and tricks for new Mastodon users.

I made the Quick and Dirty Magic system, and realized that it needs a lot of examples to really work.  So here we have the Quick and Dirty Spellbook, a selection of excellent spells for you to tweak and customize for your own use. Then I got a little carried away, so now I have to split it into two parts. 

This is the magic system I invented for my perpetually-in-progress fantasy RPG. My goal was a system that could roughly approximate the feel of D&D magic, but with no bookkeeping. I also wanted to stick closely to established elements of Fate Core. So no spell points or other innovations.

 Mastodon! I dig it! It may be the future of the internet. But it's kind of intimidating.  Step One: Find a Server / Instance Don't do the obvious thing and go to mastodon.social! It's over-crowded and under-moderated.  Check the directory at Fedi.Garden or Join Mastodon and find one that feels like it has people that you can relate to. I am on dice.camp , a server for fans of table top role playing games. Read the server rules, and make sure there's nothing there you can't live with.  Some servers have open sign up, others may have a waiting list, and some are only open with an invite. If your first choice isn't open, it's good to have a second choice. This is pretty normal for non-corporate internet. Running a server is a lot of work, and it doesn't make any money.  Step Two: Follow Some People So how do you follow someone who isn't on your server?  Say you want to follow the Hourly Cat Bot . Since you aren't on the botsin.space server, you c...