Let's consider how dwarves are portrayed in D&D 4E: Stereotypically short and strong with a penchant for building and craftwork, yet they live above-ground, without any sort of ability to see in the dark, and were once enslaved by the giants. Let's riff off that. Modern dwarves are, in fact, a slave-race bred by giants for manual labor, selecting them for strength, hardiness, and ability to do tedious work (and losing darkvision in the process). They eventually revolted and won their freedom, spreading out into the world.
Mapache's Role-Playing Game Stuff
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Alternate Essence Mechanics: Powering Up
2009-07-29One common complaint about Exalted is that it lacks any sort of mechanical incentive to "power up" and use increasingly powerful charm techniques over the course of a fight, unlike much of the martial arts fiction to which it hearkens. (Well, there's putting up your scene-length charms, but that's not quite the same.) Thus, here's an idea for replacing the current mote economy with a system that encourages ramping up usage while still retaining an element of long-term resource conservation.
Porting the River from Weapons of the Gods to ORE
2007-08-19Weapons of the Gods is an RPG based on a wu-xia comic. Its basic resolution mechanic is very similar to ORE: Roll a variable number of d10s and look for matches. A set of matching dice is converted to a numerical result equal to width*10 + height. Thus, for example, a 3x1 is read as 31. (Sets of only one die are allowed and 10s are read as 0s, so the worst possible result is a 1x0, which is read as 10.)
ORE Character Generator
2007-08-18This is a tool for generating random characters for Reign using the One Roll Engine. It's implemented in JavaScript, and runs entirely in your browser without any need to talk to a server. You can use it here or download it to play around with yourself. (At some point, it broke under IE, but it should work fine on every standards-compliant browser.)
A Partial Sketch of a Magic: the Gathering RPG
2007-06-21My first take on a quick-and-dirty Magic: the Gathering RPG aimed at playing Planeswalkers would be a Nobilis conversion with the five colors as your ability scores. If I deemed the "land generates mana" mechanic of the card game something that should be reflected in the reality of the world, then I'd introduce some kind of mechanics where you need to ritually bind locations to achieve regeneration of miracle points (which would be renamed to Mana).
How do you destroy The Broken Winged Crane?
2007-06-21It is the nature of The Broken-Winged Crane that it never will be written. It is always going to be written. Creation is simply not big enough to contain its blasphemy in the same way that death was insufficient to contain the Primordials. Only the barest glimmers and fractions of it can exist at once, and even then, far apart and away from each other, never to be read in combination—to bring too many of them together would begin the act of its formation, which cannot happen, so it will not happen.
Roman Superheroes
2005-11-24"Zounds, the Visigoth has kidnapped the members of the Senate and is holding them ransom unless we pull out from Gaul! Quick, light the signal pyre to call the Justice League. The Gladiator, the Praetor, the Fascist, and Purple Toga will make short work of this problem!"
Fading Suns Setting Changes
2005-10-06Fading Suns has an interesting setting, but there's several details that range from boring to nonsensical to infuriating. As such, when I ran it, I made several changes as follows:
Languages
According to the book, everyone, on all forty or fifty known worlds, which have only in the past half-century been unified under a common empire, speaks Urthish. This is so far beyond the bounds of credulity as to be impossible. In general, I think the worlds under each house should have a common language, due to common settlement history (though this will vary in cases of conquest and such). While still not that realistic, it's a reasonable balance of flavorful and gameable.
Ships of the Inquisition
2005-10-05The Inquisition utilizes a variety of ships in carrying out their duties. Some of the better known include:
- Needle of Inquiry
- A fast medium-small ship used by groups of Inquisitors to get to destinations quickly and investigate matters.
- Instrument of Correction
- A capital warship used by the Inquisition for both naval engagements and escorting convoys.
- Vessel of Manna
- A heavy cargo ship used to transport supplies.
- Sacrament of Penance
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