Rogue Trader Imagery makes me drool

Just one of many reasons I'd like to run a Rogue Trader game. This is a great image below:

Oh, man... if only my Dragon Warriors game wasn't going so well... How many of you have ever started to run a game, really enjoyed it but then got distracted by something else that got you excited? How many campaigns have suffered because the GM started wetting their pants over something they really wanted to run?

I need to keep my focus on Dragon Warriors. If I become disenfranchised with it now and play it to 'get it out of the way' for another game that excites me then the campaign that I and my players have put so much work and time into will deteriorate. Everyone will lose out.

Rogue Trader/Dark Heresy Resources

Here's a pretty good fan-created unofficial site for players of the WH40K Dark Heresy and Rogue Trader RPGs:

There's plenty of stuff there and, of course, you can use the Dark Heresy stuff in the Rogue Trader game and vice versa.

I also found a Rogue Trader character generator here: http://cbpye.net/rtchargen.php. It's very good and makes life a lot easier, especially if you're looking for an original NPC.

Wormhole EXTREME!

Did I tell you that my son Bruce has joined Stargate Command? It's true. He met his new SG team last Saturday.

It was a long time coming but he got his Cheyenne Mountain and Offworld travel pass, and he goes to planet P65565xc next Tuesday. I drew the line at allowing him a P90, though.

If my son wants to follow in his mommy and daddy's footsteps and get geeky then that's fine by me and I'll nerd him out as he wants. I'm not going to push him and parade him around in costumes. If he goes the whole hog and gets into RPGs then that'll be the icing on the cake.

If he doesn't grow up to be a geek... well, that's unnacceptable. He will bow down to the Nerd God!

Memorabilia Fair Bargains

I'm a regular attendee of the Memorabilia Fair at the NEC in Birmingham (the UK version) as I love checking out the myriad of stands and collections. I don't usually look for roleplaying stuff but sometimes I get lucky, like I did at the last show when I got the hardbacks Codex Arcanis and Accordlands: The Master Codex for three pounds each.

At this show I had bought Strange Frontiers by New World Games for a quid and I was looking at a boardgame stall when I noticed a stack of Games Workshop's White Dwarf issues. I'm not generally interested in the magazine but I was looking for some inspiration for a possible Rogue Trader campaign. In the stack I found a 2000 printing of the Warhammer Fantasy Battle rulebook, the Mordheim book, the Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers Strategy Battle Game rulebook and the Codexes for Space Marines, Dark Angels, Blood Angels, Daemonhunters, Imperial Guard, Assassins, Tyranids, Armageddon, Eldar and Orks. All complete, all in good nick. 'That's interesting,' I thought. 'I have WFB to WFRP conversion rules in my WFRP 1st edition book so I can use these for sourcebooks'. They were mostly in good condition and, even though they were dated from just over a decade ago they were completely usable for what I had in mind.

So, I said to the guy on the stall, 'How much for these?'

He smiled and said, 'I've been trying to shift those for ages, nobody wants them anymore. You can have them.'

'Bwah?'

'They're free.'

'Gah?'

'Just take them!'

'Bweh?'

So I grabbed them and ran like a bastard in case he had made a mistake. Good day out, that.

Dragon Warriors Video Review

Thanks to http://www.youtube.com/ and Sean Connors of TheOutsiders68.

It's a good review of Dragon Warriors and he likes it for a lot of the reasons I do. Easy, simple and old school.

The Gamer

Click this link and read something wonderful from RPG Blog II.

You got the wrong guy, pal

As a sequel to my previous post I found an old post about a test Blade Runner game I ran a while ago. I ran this as a tester with a simple system to see if we could game in the Blade Runner universe.

'I've ran a couple of games and it worked just fine, but it had more to do with the atmosphere, and that's something that the simple rules helped with. There was no stalling over rulings and the players were able to get their teeth into a flowing, emotionally charged adventure.There were three players - one was a Blade Runner, one was a police detective, and the other was a private detective working under contract with the police (a bit of an Adrian Monk character).

The story revolved around a powerful and influential - but very, very lonely - businesswoman in her sixties trying to hide a replicant by pretending it is her long-lost daughter. The London PD (the city was partially flooded so a lot of people got about in motor boats and spinners) knew there was a replicant in her company but, because the woman had contacts in the police (namely the Police Chief) they were limited as to who they could use the Voight-Kampff machine on. The businesswoman kept trying to convince them that the replicant was a boy who worked in the post room, but he failed the Voight-Kampff test because he was partially mentally retarded.

Once the players realised this - after chasing the boy through the building and taking a couple of shots and almost killing him - they had to go after the buisnesswoman. They fought through her heavies (the private investigator was unfortunately killed) and forced the false daughter to take the Voight-Kampff test. She failed after the first ten questions and accepted her fate. The Blade Runner retired her. The police detective tried to arrest the businesswoman but the Police Chief interceded and she got away with it. Now she has sworn revenge on the Blade Runner and the police detective. It was all done with minimal dicerolls (except for the firefight, of course).

The simple rules I used did not slow the game or interrupt the emotionally tense moments, and that was perfect. We agreed that the best way to run a Blade Runner game was with a simple, flexible system that would allow GMs to add their own twists and moral/ethical dilemmas.'

He say you Blade Runner

The more I think about it the more I think that this would make a really good game. Not only do you have the whole of Earth to play with, with the ecological concrete nightmare it has become, you could take the game off-world to the colonies.

The game would be driven by investigation, not just Blade Runner units but maybe normal law enforcement or government/corporation agents. You'd have the normal Replicant-hunting games, chasing after different models for different reasons and all the existensialist and moral dilemmas that incurs, but you could also have investigations into normal, everyday crime, and even tech-crime you find in many cyberpunk-type games. The added bonus is that you have the very definitive atmosphere that Blade Runner offers - you're not trying to emulate it in a Gibson-inspired game but actually live in the world that Blade Runner presents. If you go off world you could even mix the two genres that Ridley Scott helped visualise - what's stopping Weyland-Yutani from the Alien franchise being in it, or at least a version of that company, and the type of interplanetary travel could be Alien/Outland inspired? That way you could keep the dirty, used industrial feel of the original movie and not lose the atmosphere, which is what the original tacked-on studio ending did to the original Blade Runner release (if there were great swathes of forest to escape to, with sunshine and trees, what the hell were people doing living in that crappy crumbling city?)

You'd need basic rules, of course, a detailed description of the setting using stills from the movie, or at least artwork inspired by the movie, and stats for very few extras. Deckard's gun, for one (how cool would it be to pull that baby in the heat of the gaming moment?), the abilities of Replicants (which won't be far removed from standard human stats, anyway, and maybe you could have a random emotional reaction table when something stressful happens to them, which makes them unpredictable - could you imagine playing such a character?), off-world colonies (you don't need hundreds of pages, just enough to let the players know that travelling there is a possibility), spinners (cars that fly - how difficult can it be?) and possibly starships and spacestations and any extras that the setting would require, maybe taking elements from Scott's movie, Dick's original novel and Jeter's sequels.

It'd be an excellent setting. If Cyberpunk 2020 and Shadowrun can produce years of material using the imagery of Blade Runner then I'm sure that Blade Runner itself can do it.

Chicks dig guys with skills, man

What I've done is I've taken 36 skills from the skill list from WHFRP2e (they have them listed at http://www.liberfanatica.net/) and modified them a bit. Now the players of my Dragon Warriors game can choose one of these skills every time they advance a Rank in addition to the skills they already get from their profession.

I just figured I'd cobble together a skill system to see how it panned out. Basically, you roll against the relevant Statistic associated with the skill. I'm also dropping the 2D10 skill roll and going 1D20 for everything in an attempt to streamline things for my players. At the moment the skills and the 1D20 roll has gone down quite well. It's all subject to change, of course, depending on how it handles over long-term play.

If anyone wants a .doc copy of the modified skill list then drop me a line and your email address.

Science Fiction vs. Fantasy - FIGHT!

You know, I like me a bit of science fiction gaming but, in my experience, it's always fantasy that makes for an easier and more enjoyable game to play as far as RPGs are concerned. Why is this?

The only sci-fi game I played for any length of time was D6 Star Wars, but I think this is mainly because we all know Star Wars and the fact that it has a basic grounding in fantasy. It's not hard to imagine what the GM is talking about in Star Wars; lightsabres, star destroyers, stormtroopers, ewoks, it's all very familiar and instantly recognisable.

The same as fantasy games. As most fantasy settings are basically mediaeval-inspired settings it's easy to imagine what things look like. In fact, any historical period and location can be invoked so that the players have a mental image of what is around them.

The same can't be said for science fiction. There are so many design ethics and possible levels of technological advancement that influence the situations the PCs find themselves in that it's incredibly difficult to simply say 'this is where you are' without being inundated with questions about details. Unless the players are as educated about the setting as the GM then making them feel comfortable in the game, to make sure that they know what they can and can't do and what kind of tech is available to them, is going to be difficult.

In fantasy you can picture yourself on a horse in chainmail riding to a castle tower in the rain. That's easy. In science fiction you need a little more detail than that to set a scene.