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BALTIMORE, MARYLAND – September 10, 2023 – Comic creative professionals, publishers, retailers, and fans came together Saturday night, September 9, 2023 to experience the comic book industry celebrating recognition of their peers,…

Nine hexes northwest, two north of Alakran.

 

Another salty stretch of the desert plain, not very remarkable, but a chance for some meta-mapbuilding comments. The hexcrawl is built with a version of the "nesting hexes" idea first published by Judges Guild in their Campaign Hex system. For us, 1 mile hexes go into 5 mile, go into 25, go into 125. Within the rounded-down 5000 foot mile, we have 1000, 200, and 40 foot hexes, the last one being of a scale to host a battle map.

Terrain features are shown as filling a whole hex, but to create a little bit of realism, they shouldn't extend into all the subhexes, and may poke over into adjacent larger-scale hexes. As an example, this salt pan barely reaches the center of its nominal hex, and extends out into the hexes to north and northwest.

Too much realism? Maybe, but the effect on the one-mile map without borders (only 5 mile hexes shown)  gives just enough feeling of reality, without having true randomness in feature extent and placement. Judge for yourself!

 

Captain Freedom -AC Comics Don Wright, a newspaper publisher who adopted a costumed identity to fight agents of the Axis. He was assisted by Young Defenders, four kids who worked…

The staff of First Comics News wishes everyone a solemn Patriot Day… Alex Wright, Ben Herman, Bill Black, Bob Almond, Dærick Gröss Sr., Kallie Chris, Katie Salidas, Mat Kaufman, Michael…

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 Go to sit in on a Castles & Crusades game of  "The Sinister Stone of Sakkara" & my Dwarvian Priest PC Mikia Mechanicus  got a chance to meet up with the party outside of the Greco Roman style desert fortress of Türos Tem. The regular  merchant caravans from the nearby town of Siadanos have come under attack! And so after doing a bit of recon and shopping. We laid in for the night and got a feel Needleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243274667834930867noreply@blogger.com0

While ORWELL is getting an errata and a pdf release, I'm playing around with a  couple of setting books based on the ORWELL rules I might start developing here on the blog (since I'm taking a close look at those rules again right now) and eventually publish, if they get any traction at all (or it just manifests, as the last game did!). There isn't enough concept work on the blog anymore, and that has always been loads of fun. Lets give it a shot!

Legacy of Gyrthwolden (Pitch)

Betrayal was what had the wardings fail. The whole school rotted from the insides like oil poisons water once the magical protection had been penetrated. They had no chance, but some still had fight left in them. It just made the destruction worse. Demons triumphantly stalked the halls, a whole menagerie of beasts had been unleashed and was spreading terror in the dormitories and the east wing. Students had turned into indescribable horrors, their screams driving others into murdering frenzies and ultimately into madness. The most powerful one ended up building a quivering flesh throne in the Lost Cellars where now the mad and mutilated mimic and pervert the old traditions Gyrthwolden held up until it fell.

And that is not all.

Within the faculty, impartial observers would have found bravery, defeat, cowardice and old grudges turning bloody fast as the end drew near. The arch chancellor had made the most impressive exit, devastatingly altering reality from the Hanging Gardens of your Holy Lady Reneviere to almost the entire Dyrkterwoods in the west. No one knew he still had it in him. Almost brought a turn of events, too, but then a doom engine materialized in his stomach and made itself a new home in his body. Some say his soul is still caught in there, tormented towards eternity. Maybe it's wishful thinking. He wasn't liked much.

Eventually, Gyrthwolden fell. Eventually, the smoldering ruins left behind cooled down and while the rest of the world fell into the darkness unleashed at the school, evil started creeping all over campus, struggling with nature for residency.

There was one area all of that could not penetrate. One last magical stronghold created through the most beautiful improvised ritual in the school's history. Build on a whim, tapping into a not yet corrupted flux of Aether, it bloomed like a flower and enclosed a whole schoolroom, layering the most severe, and costly, layers of protection around it. The teacher who did that had to forfeit her body and burn her soul to weave it strong enough to have a chance. It distorted space and time so elegantly, it stayed untouched by the apocalypse. It wove itself into a future where it persevered. It just cost all within its protective stasis dearly.

In a final effort, as her soul burned through its last milligrams some decades later, Etherina Dinklethorne forced out of stasis among the students she had saved those she thought had the most promise in a desperate and mad gambit to save of the world what may still be saved.

You are those students. You are the Legacy of Gyrthwolden.

This is her last message:

We failed you, my dear children. Our corruption and greed have brought doom to the world you knew. You are save here in this room, but outside these walls, darkness reigns. You have within you what it takes to push back ever so slightly. And if you persist diligently, if you prevail and trust that there still is light and good in the world, you have a chance to overcome this evil curse. I know that in my heart. Go now, my children. I will sacrifice my last energy to extent the wards surrounding you. I know not what will be trapped then with you inside my protective veil, so be careful. Start with freeing the school, building by building. Unlock its secrets and power, everything else will fall into place then. You will see. And never forget ...

But then her voice flattens to a whisper and as it disappears, the mummy of her corpse, trapped in an intricate summoning circle, explodes into a puff of glittering smoke.

IDEA: the students are still connected to the stasis field. When they die, they may feed their souls back into the classroom and awaken another student. No one knows how many and which students Miss Dinklethorne saved. Or what the magic did to them, for that matter, so this can be considered to be an infinite pool of replacement characters (or limited, if the GM feels like making this part of the challenge).

All said and done, it'll be your basic goth horror wizard school versus the apocalypse anime experience. Harry Potter goes Tim Burton and everything died but you ...

The Game (powered by ORWELL)

Basic premise of ORWELL is that character development happens as the character is played (each character can develop up to 10 slots per "Level"). Characters come with a potential, and players activate that potential as the story unfolds. They might create gadgets or skills or contacts, as far as the original game is concerned. Everything else is up to the players. If it fits the genre and the group can agree with it, it is fair play. Want to play a conscious spell that just wants to be human? You can do that. A little Lizard Wizard? Sure ... A sentient rock? If you can make it work. This is about having fun telling stories.

I'd shift those paradigms a bit to fit the story, so players may invent SKILLS, SPELLS or MAGIC ITEMS. While ORWELL would have players now roll to see how well established that power is, LoG might expand on that by making it something that might need to be obtained as well. Basically it'd need two additions:

1) Rules for Rituals that might need to reach a certain level, special items and specific roles for characters to assume. That'd block a slot or two. Rituals will open new areas and solve general problems with the curse.

2) Assuming the students have some idea where is what at that school, it'll need an extension where they manifest the school bit by bit as they talk about and explore it. Some stuff will be provided by the GM, but nothing says it couldn't work like character development does.

It had to be as procedural as ORWELL is, but shifting the focus a bit from having a proper cyberpunk district to where to find crucial quest items and knowledge and what difficulties await a group to their way there.

So they might know that the library would be great to have access to. And it is easy enough to assume that there is one. However, while they know where the library was before the fall, they sure as hell know nothing about what happened to it and how to get there now. So the GM will have tools to create a path of obstacles that fit the story to anything he or the group may come up with ...

There you go ...

I'd have to play around with that for a bit, but that's what a blog is for. Other than that, I'm pretty sure people could work with the premise alone easily. Doesn't even matter that much what system you are using. I guess.

ORWELL will be a great fit for the setting, on the system side of things, and given that the DM part is mostly system agnostic anyway, this should work for all kinds of games, if that's what you'd want to do.

So what do you guys think? Would you play that?

“The Adventures of Simone & Ajax: What’s Black & White and Read All Over?” is a 160-page collection of the early black & white tales of our daring duo. Collected…

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After a devastating tragedy occurs at Logan’s school for mutants, the X-Men are left shaken. Deciding to take matters into his own hands, the Wolverine exacts his vengeance. But revenge…

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Collide Discussion Questions

Decision

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The post Collide – September 10th appeared first on Church of The Rock.

ACTIVITIES FOR THIS LESSON

Worship Video

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The post Elementary – September 10th appeared first on Church of The Rock.

ACTIVITY PAGES TO DOWNLOAD

Worship Video

 

Check out our ongoing resources for each age group:

• Preschool
• Elementary 
• Collide 
• Parents

And don’t forget to follow Kidz Rock on Facebook and Instagram!

   

The post Preschool – September 10th appeared first on Church of The Rock.

Eight hexes northwest, three north of Alakran.

 

The following misfortune is said to have happened to a group of cameleers attempting a short-cut from Eryptos to the Road of Flowers, on a hot afternoon in the month of sometime in the past generation. It would be altogether unfair to spring this event on a group of adventurers with no reason. Nonetheless, these people are always putting themselves in the way of curses, opening ancient tombs, raiding ancient treasures, offending the interests of powerful wizards, reading aloud the names of obscure gods without the proper obsequies, and so on.  

It starts with one person, as the afternoon lengthens. Someone will notice that their shadow is behaving strangely, perhaps a trick of the light -- raising its arm when the originator's arms are lowered, stooping when the originator stands, or the other way around. If the phenomenon is noted, the shadow leaps to attack, drawing shadow versions of whatever the character is carrying, and attacking from the prone position, striking upwards. The shadow is a perfect double of the character with all spells, actions, and abilities, and just the following limitations:

• Its feet are glued to the character's feet, until the character jumps and takes both feet from the ground.
• It can only move in a 90 degree arch between the character and the sun.
• It has +2 hit point per level two hours from sunrise or sunset, -2 hit points per level between one and two hours from noon, and ceases to exist entirely in the two hours surrounding noon.
• If the caster lies prone the shadow's hit points are halved.
  
• It is damaged by light sources, 1d6 per 20' radius of light, but gets a DEX save against DC 13 to take half.
• If anyone other than the shadow's caster attcks it, their own shadow rises up in rebellion.
• If a shadow has 0 hit points or below, it is tamed and will rebel nevermore. 
• If a shadow kills its caster, it also loses its life and becomes a mere absence of light.
  

The post Video of the Day – BBC Radio 1, 2023 appeared first on Blogtor Who.

 Let's pick it up from last Friday's session report on the blog  During this afternoon's game I decided to shove the player's PC's into deeply the alien jungle & then use HOSTILE Situation Report 008 - Life Cycle. The PC's got the assignment of ; " your infantry team to drop into the depths of an alien jungle, avoid enemy patrols, meet up with commandos returning from a long range patrol, and Needleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243274667834930867noreply@blogger.com0

After rolling up some Heroes Unlimited characters and easily converting them to Mercenary’s, Spies, and Private Eyes, I wondered if the Tunnels & Trolls engine would handle Mecha. At first I thought that given that attributes had no limit in T&T, that I could just run Mecha as characters. That may be true, but as I worked towards an initial prototype I departed from that somewhat. I had originally wanted to convert Rifts mecha to T&T, but the 3025 BattleTech lineup is the gold standard in mech concepts. While adapting those mecha, I wanted to convert missiles to be one shot weapons as well in order to better match the original source material. Here is the first pass at these rules after testing it with a battle with an Atlas and an Orion going against a Stalker and a Thunderbolt.

Stat conversions:

Constitution aka Hit Points are equal to BattleTech tonnage

Armor aka Damage Resistance is equal to BattleTech armor factor / 10 and rounded down.

Luck aka Dodge is equal to 7 + BattleTech walking MP’s

Speed aka Move is equal to 5 + BattleTech walking MP’s

Melee Dice = BattleTech tonnage / 10 rounded up (never used this in anger)

SRM’s are single shot and are rated at 2 dice per missile port. They can fire at Point Blank or Close range which is up to one range band away.

LRM’s are single shot and are rated at 1 die per missile port. They can fire at Far or Extreme range, which is two or three range bands away.

Weapons that have a range of 9 in BattleTech can fire at Point Blank or Close Range. They get half their dice in damage rounded down.

Large Lasers can barely fire at Far range. PPC’s would be solid at Far range. Some autocannon will fire at Far range. Give half their damage in dice here, but less for the large lasers which aren’t as good. These weapons can also fire at Close range.

The movement system is very abstract. It comes from the Classic Traveller range band system. The idea was that the chaos and unpredictability of combat would lead to Players declare whether a mech will advance or retreat or stand their ground. Moving mech making a saving roll against their speed attribute. That is, they roll 2s6 with doubles adding and roll over. If the speed attribute plus the die total is greater than or equal to 20, THEN the mecha actually performs its movement. (This creates some interesting situations and feels true to the action even though it may appear to be complete nonsense as an idea.)

Movement actions are declared secretly and simultaneously and then resolved publicly.

After that fire actions are declared secretly and simultaneously.

To-hit targets are 6+ for near, 8+ for far, and 10+ for extreme. To check for to-hit, roll 2d6 with doubles adding and then rolling over. If the total is greater than or equal to the target, then it’s a hit. Special note: each double that is rolled in the to-hit adds a -1 to the target’s dodge roll as does each increment of 5 that the roll is exceeded.

For hits, check to see if the target dodged. This is a saving roll against the mech’s Luck stat. Success means the hit is converted into a miss.

Total the damage done to a mech in a round and subtract the mech’s armor stat from it. This is the amount of points deducted from the mech’s constitution.

If a mech takes 25% or more in damage in one turn, it takes a -1 penalty to its speed saving roll the next turn. If it takes 50% or more in damage in one turn, it will take a -2 penalty instead. (Mechs that take a bunch of damage are more liable to get pinned down and finished off.)

In this first pass conversion, the game is mostly about what happens with the missiles. So much is at stake! After they are all fired it should be obvious who is winning. Note that these base numbers here are VERY stingy and bonuses for good piloting or good gunnery in the +1 to +4 range would be very reasonable.

To view the log of the first playtest, see this thread.

Playtester comments:

“I like the roll to activate movement here. It makes the big guys feel heavy.”

“Missiles being single shot is def more in keeping with the visual inspiration”

I did not necessarily like leaving the vanilla combat system, but Tunnels & Trolls seemed to lack a coherent set of movement rules as far as I could tell. Having a High Guard type abstraction level beyond the PC scale seems to make sense. Though maybe if I drop the commitment to recreating BattleTech I could work something else out. Building on what we have here, a strategic game where two sides attempt to kill the other’s command post is the next logical step– deployed mech would have to return to their cp to get their missiles reloaded.