Month: December 2017
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Superfight Round 4: Nailed It
After Wednesday’s game, I think I’ve come around to the conclusion that the base No Power Points rule, with a couple of tweaks, will work for my supers setting. Part of the challenge was making sure the players knew all of their options, such as concentrating on a power for a round to reduce the…
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Superfight – Round 3
The second round of playtesting the superhero setting with the core book rules and No Power Points is in, and the idea of rank-based bonuses still flopped badly. The “Flash” type speedster character completely and repeatedly failed to invoke the quickness power, which sort of defeats the purpose, and players opting to just shoot things were generally more effective…
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Christmas Wish List – Savage Settings
OK, Santa – I’ve been hoping for some of my favorite properties to be Savaged, and here’s my wish list. The Vorkosigan Saga: Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga is probably my all-time favorite book series; I’ve been reading it since my days of part-time high school work in the local bookstore. It’s classic space opera, complete with…
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Kickstarter Budgeting
One of the key questions when you set up a Kickstarter is your funding goal. Where do you set it so that you can accomplish what you need to accomplish and bring your product to market? How do you structure the reward levels so that they make sense? I’m deeply indebted to Jamey Stegmaier’s excellent Kickstarter…
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Arisia Schedule Update
At this year’s Arisia convention in Boston, I’ll be running Children of the Apocalypse on Saturday at 5:30 and my upcoming setting, Legion of Liberty, at 4:00 on Sunday. If you’re in the area, Arisia is definitely worth a visit – it’s a great all-purpose geekery convention.
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Review: Space 1889: Red Sands
Red Sands was the first setting I ever ran in Savage Worlds, and the one I’ve run the most often in convention games. The premise is simple; Thomas Edison invents an “Ether Propeller” that allows the 19th century imperial powers to conquer the solar system. The original Space: 1889 setting was steampunk before that was a…
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Children of the Apocalypse Sneak Preview: Bastelin Race
The Bastelin are four-armed masters of artifice. Jonas, God of Tinkers and Scientists, gifted them with exceptional skills at craftsmanship, and their extra arms can also make them formidable warriors. Bastelin tend to be city-dwellers, working on complex mechanisms in manufactories, and also often take up Tinker Magery (Weird Science). Bastelin are also large, averaging…
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Character “Same-y-Ness” Part 2
In my previous post, I talked about selecting Edges to build different kinds of ranged combatants. This time, I’m talking melee. What are some of the classic melee archetypes? You have your martial artist, your fencer, your greatsword fighter, your hammer and shield wielder, and your two-fisted knife fighter. What Edges would suit each of these, on…
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Firing into Melee
Savage Worlds has very little to say on the subject of firing into melee. The only rule is the Innocent Bystander rule – if you roll a 1 (or a 1 or 2 when firing full-auto), you hit someone other than the target. With Bennies in play, this doesn’t happen very often, which means that…
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Character “Same-y-Ness”
I like podcasts to make my commute more entertaining, and one of my favorites is the Secret Cabal Gaming podcast. On a recent episode of their Lords of the Dungeon RPG podcast, they talked about having become tired of Savage Worlds because a combat-optimized character was basically always the same. This is not an original criticism…