Last week, I described using the conspiracy pyramid (or conspyramid) from Night’s Black Agents to make your Eclipse Phase game more spy-heavy. It’s an excellent organizational framework but it’s also a great tool for GMs to use for enhancing their campaigns. One of the best ways to do that is through the threats outlined in the “vampyramid,” the ways that the vampire conspiracies respond to meddling PCs in Night’s Black Agents.
Tomorrow is the opening day for X-Men: Apocalypse, the latest of Fox’s X-Men movie franchise. After some missteps with X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men Origins: Wolverine I’m really liking this series of movies again and looking forward to seeing Apocalypse come to the big screen. In celebration, I’ve put together some resources for playing a scenario in this alternate timeline using Marvel Heroic Roleplaying.
The default campaign model for Eclipse Phase is agents of Firewall, a clandestine, illegal, international conspiracy that seeks out existential threats to transhumanity. That’s a tall order and it’s a pretty different model than crashing through dungeons or searching libraries for eldritch secrets. The result can be overwhelming for both players and GMs but there are other resources out there to draw from, the most impressive being the vampiric conspiracy game Night’s Black Agents.
The published version of the Star Trek RPG is pretty great (even though I’ve spent some time thinking about alternatives) and if you’re like me then having a neat electronic version of game resources is great. Here’s a fillable (and semi-automated) character sheet for your enjoyment.
Download a Fillable Version of Patrick Goodman’s Sheet
If you’re interested in trying out the Star Trek RPG (known around the web as the “Dechiper version” or the “CODA version”) I really recommend checking it out. It’s much like a d20 game except that it involves a 2d6 instead. There are tons of resources too, so have fun!
The last post about Mouse Guard for the FATE system concentrated on making characters. This time I’m focusing on the other inhabitants of the Mouse Territories: wild animals.
First, though, I want to present my list of skills for Mouse Guard FATE. It’s mostly the same as in the FATE core rulebook but with a few adjustments, including a new stunt that’s flexible for any skill.
I’m a big fan of Star Trek and have been looking for a while for an RPG version that would be easy to pull off. This is actually a similar situation to my Mouse Guard search: there’s already a perfectly good RPG that I really like, but it’s a new system and I don’t necessarily like that. Today I though I’d try out a great RPG that might work well as a conversion/skeleton: Stars Without Number.
When I was a kid I read through the Redwall books obsessively. The peril of mice trying to defend their land against outsiders seems like it would be a silly endeavor but it’s really compelling. In the same vein, the Mouse Guard series is a knighthood of mice defending their Territories against predators but it has the advantage of being a graphic novel series as well. If you don’t know it, definitely check it out.
So today I’m trying out one of the latest Shadowrun sourcebooks for the game’s fifth edition. Rigger 5.0 is a rules expansion for one of my favorite archetypes in the game: a tech who controls vehicles and drones with his mental cyberware. Some of them specialize in becoming one with their vehicles but I always prefer the swarm of drones surrounding a badass runner.
Onyx Path, the current publishers of the World of Darkness lines, have been doing a lot lately to come up with material for historical settings. White Wolf did their share with Requiem for Rome, the vampire setting in the Roman Empire, and Mage Noir, a much thinner book about mages in World War II and after. Onyx Path continued with Victorian Lost, a changeling sourcebook for 19th-century England, and then decided to make a sourcebook with just a bunch of different historical settings, a book called Dark Eras that they would Kickstart.
Then things exploded.
Mephit James Blog 