Author: Sean Smith

Jason Cordova I was so intrigued by the Anthology idea you guys are doing that I wanted to try to do something with my own table since I live in another state and won’t be able to attend any of your sessions 🙂 Anyway, I read through the Microscope book last night and it sounds quite entertaining and seems like the logical place to start. I have some great ideas on how to fill various other sessions with systems but I am wondering what would make sense to do after Microscope in regards to world building? This is fairly new territory to me. I believe that Kingdom was mentioned as a good fit? I’m interested in any recommendations you might be able to provide. I can easily fill the gaps once the worlds are built but building a suitable base and background is what I want to make sure I do very well if possible. Any and all ideas appreciated.

As a huge fan of Traveller (both classic and the new Mongoose stuff) I’m pretty stoked to see this bundle. I have many of these books in print but they are pretty beat up. It will be well worth it to have this in digital format AND I bet they add quite a few before they are done.

https://www.bundleofholding.com/index/current

I want to use this as an adventure seed. I haven’t quite figured out my angle yet but giant snakes and disappeared adventurers just seems like a setting rife with opportunity. Any thoughts? [namely the section labeled Colonel Fawcett’s Giant Anaconda – Myth and Facts]

http://www.fawcettadventure.com/colonel-fawcett’s-giant-snake.html

Still need a couple more players for an online session of Cosmic Patrol. If you are interested, let me know and I can send you an invite. The game is scheduled for Tuesday 2/18/2014 from 6:30-9pm CST.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/events/c4toqaqnb9gm7s7tg3au5i2d2lo?authkey=COqOqJ7865P7Ug

Thought this might be of interest to you guys. At the bottom of the Pay What You Want page is a link to the bundle for $3. It has the following:

#1 Witness the Murder of Your Father and Be Ashamed, Young Prince

#2 Vesna Thaw

#3 The Death of the Gilded Age

As I know I have seen #1 listed as played, I figured this would be worth a post.

http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/126092/The-Death-of-the-Gilded-Age-%28PWYW%29

Thought some of the players here might be interested. This is an RPG from the guy who made My Life With Master. I’m not sure I’m really impressed with the token mechanic but I figured I would atleast get the PDF and check it out.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/252728880/the-clay-that-woke-an-rpg-about-minotaurs?ref=discovery

So we got to play our first game of Cosmic Patrol today by Catalyst. I have to say, besides a semi-rough start getting the hang of things, it was as good of a time as I expected from reading it! We played the Comet of Mystery which is the one I’m planning to run at the upcoming convention in Rolla. The jist of the adventure is to land on a speeding comet, drill into the surface, determine the source of a strange signal, and escape alive. We used the pregens from the Quick Play sheets available on the website: a robot, a Martian amazon warrior, a Venusian scientist, a brave and charismatic captain, and a rough and tumble marine. Experiencing all kinds of terrible problems as we tried to engage with the comet, we did finally managed to land though taking a HUGE amount of damage. The fun we had with the Plot Points was really the highlight of things in my opinion. Apparently, we ran into carnivorous space monkeys hell bent on our destruction, led by an oversized robotic commander. It would seem that they were able to use their waste as a weapon as it was acidic AND explosive (hey, not my idea). Anyway, we fought through them and found that the robot was actually a suit in which a monkey commander operated. Our trusty scientist elected to blast the surface of the comet with the ship’s weapon systems, though he got more then he bargained for when the surface cracked and ruptured resulting in the ship falling into the comet’s interior. Long story short, we discovered that the comet was actually a ship that the space monkeys were using. With some creative wiring, we rigged things to blow up and narrowly escaped the monkey horde before blasting free of the comet’s core. Overall, it was a super fun time and I am highly eager to play this again. The only down side was one of our players had a hard time being lead narrator and that kinda slowed things down. Otherwise, it was fantastic and highly recommended.

This weekend I finally got around to digging into my +13th Age book (picked it up at Gencon so its pretty overdue) as I have signed up for a game during +ConTessa. Anyway, I didn’t have enough time to read the entire book but I read enough of the character creation process in order to put together a Barbarian (apparently one of the simplest of character types). For my Unique Thing, I went with “A might demon-slaying fire giant shrunk to tiny proportions by a diabolical sorceress”. Essentially I’m using the Halfling template but with a bit of fun reskinning.  I must say that I really dug this element as well as the backgrounds concept. I did find the layout of the book to be a bit disjointed but it was rather fun to look through regardless. I still have MANY unanswered questions but I figure I’ll go with trial-by-fire during the game session and figure it out as I go; always the best way to learn 🙂