Author: HappyMonsterScott
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Third Rail Time – Shaken Rules
On a snowy Saturday afternoon in New England, I decided it was time to tackle one of those third rail rules topics – the revised Shaken rules. In the original printing of Savage Worlds Explorer’s Edition, a character could remove the Shaken condition either by spending a benny or making a Spirit roll on her…
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Review: Ultimate Ground Warfare
The Mass Battle rules in Savage Worlds are a great way of abstracting large-scale battles, allowing the player characters to influence the outcome (albeit at great risk) but also simulating the clash of armies. Unfortunately, they can look a little strange when applied to some of the situations that come up in RPGs, because the…
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Superfight – Round 2
Last night the Roll20 gang and I ran the first playtest of my forthcoming supers setting. As I thought might be the case, the No Power Points rule resulted in a lot of “squib” superpowers, with the players often invoking their abilities and failing completely to achieve anything. One idea I had to mitigate this…
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The Tax Man Cometh
Contrary to internet rumor, the tax reform bill running through Congress right now does NOT eliminate business expenses as an offset to business income. That doesn’t mean, however, that you can’t either help or hurt yourself a LOT when it comes to managing your taxes as a publisher. As a disclaimer, I’m not a CPA or…
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Setting Review: High Space
I’ve dabbed in science fiction settings for Savage Worlds (see my posts on Savage Eclipse Phase for an example), and one of the resources I used was High Space. Both Eclipse Phase and High Space share a post-scarcity economy, in which most resources are much more readily available thanks to nanoscale 3-D printing, allowing most items to…
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Meeting Management for the GM
As noted in my biography, I do have a day job in addition to my role as Chief Monster Officer. As a result, I’ve learned a lot about a lot of different topics, including how to run a meeting. For a maximally productive meeting, it helps to have certain roles filled, and filling these roles around…
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Shelfie- RPG Shelf
I’ve mainly shifted over to digital books for my RPG needs. I was an early adopter of eBooks – I had an electronic ink eReader before the Kindle was a thing. So shifting over to PDF form game books was a natural extension, except for that one company that just doesn’t want to publish in that format. However, I…
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Review: Learn to Paint Kit from Reaper
OK, so let’s say you’ve decided that minis are for you. Next step is to actually procure some. Ebay is a great option for bulk quantities of basic minis, but at some point you might want to have the exact sort of mini to fit your game. This is especially important with Savage Worlds because of…
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Obligatory Year in Review Post
2017 has been an… interesting year for a lot of folks, but it has been a big year for Happy Monster Press – this is our founding year, and the run up to our January 2018 Kickstarter. On the gaming front, this year saw me running ETU and Savage Rifts, improving my Roll20 GM skills,…
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Weapon of Choice: Easy Roller Dice
For the last couple of years, I’ve been running my in-person games using Easy Roller‘s Metal Dice. These are black metal dice with various colored numbers, and are extremely sturdy. They roll with a satisfying thunk, and have nice weight in the hand. Easy Roller runs promotions on a regular basis, and if you want to…