Monday, January 20, 2020

Matt Jackson's CollaboDungeon... Number 1?

Over on MeWe, Matt Jackson kicked off a Dungeon Collaboration. He posted a map over on his blog, MSJx.org and invited us to pick a room to describe. You can follow the conversation over on mewe with the hashtag #collabodungeon and the results on Matt's blog.

Matt declared a free for all while Goblin’s Henchman through out an idea for 300 word description limit, which I ran with.

I picked area 7. Unlucky number 7.


The 300 word description:

Location Seven. The Twins.

There are two women, twins, in the pit. They are identical in all ways save one. One women wears a lead ring. When they become aware of the characters, they will both shout out for help. When the characters look in the pit, they will hear the following orders:

Twin with the ring: "Kill her! She's a demon!"
Twin without the ring: "Kill her! She's an idiot!"

They are both at the bottom of the pit and represent no threat to the characters in this state. They are both bloodied and bruised from the fall and each has a blacken right eye.

If the party rescues them, they will find out the following information. Twin One, the one with the ring is named Meredith. She entered the dungeon with her friends in search of treasure. She found a gold ring in area 8 and after discerning no purpose to it, put it on. She was pushed by a monster into the pit.

Twin Two, without the ring, was a doppelganger hiding in area 8. To take on Meredith's form, she ambushed her by pushing her into the pit. Unfortunately for the monster, Meredith grabbed it's wrist as she fell and both ended up at the bottom. As the doppelganger took her form, Meredith shouted "Begone!" which the ring of wishes interpreted as a command against the monster. Since the doppelganger was in mid-transformation into Meredith, the ring fixed it in that form before turning to lead. The doppelganger is now an exact copy of Meredith.

The twins have found combat against each to be profoundly lethal, as they mirror each other's moves perfectly, hence the matching black eyes. They will not fight each other. They will join the party to escape the dungeon.


I'll probably make up stats for Meredith someday, but she is presented as rule set agnostic here.

No one said anything about a follow up, but I'd love to see #1, #2, #3...

Sunday, January 19, 2020

Strictly (Duke) Springer - Day 019


Emily reporting for duty. 
We get things done quickly today. I make some great rolls and get my Life Support Units and U-Suits by mid-day. Annoyingly, I also get a roll for a ship and a boat again… I can’t afford those. I buy 10 Life Support Units and 5 suits. More than what I need at a price of 60 secs. I have 690 left.

Since it’s mid-day, I am going to take on some financial tasks. I pay the crew for the week early, leaving 620. I also make an early payment on the ship so I have 320 credits left.

If I don’t change things, I will either become wanted for not paying on the ship next week or lose most or all of my crew.

Our assets are:

1 Antelope starship, which I owe 119,300 secs. in principle.
1 Stasis pod 2 CU,
15 Fuel Units,
24 Repair units,
10 Life Support Units
1 U-bot,
2 PS-bots,
6 Skimmers,
1 Damaged Skimmer,
7 U-suit,
and the ship is fully fueled with 6 hypercharges.

I have 320 secs. in my pocket.


OSRx - Take That!

I honestly don't know what OSR stands for. Is it "Revival"? Is it "Renaissance"? I noticed that "Old School Rx" or "OSRx" ends in the abbreviation used by doctors for "Prescription" or more simply, "take that".

You know what you can do for the OSRx?

Right now, you can order order a charity bundle from DriveThruRPG to support those facing the fires in Australia. I've round up all 5 themes, so click away:

Fantasy Core & Settings $19.95
Starships & Posthumanity $29.95
Modern & Urban Horror $19.95
Fantasy Supplements $29.95
Capes, Grit, and Gunsmoke $19.95

EDIT January 22nd, 2020: The folks at DrivethruRPG have added 3 more at $9.99 price point for an even better value. Here is a link to the whole category. I'd also like to thank Jeremy over at Thought Eater Blog, host of The Frothcast podcast and all of the others who reshared this post. What a great community we have.

What if you don't want to do that or don't have ready cash? Linking to or subscribing to a blog could help a lot. The collapse of G+ robbed the community of the means of communication and we scattered. Every blog that shares links is a defense against that sort of collapse. My suggestion is to add those blog rolls, but also sign yourself up for https://campaignwiki.org/osr/. This "blog" serves up dozens if not hundreds of blogs in one feed. It's great. If you already did that, why not check out some of the people who provide content?

As with blogs, podcasts are great. There are so many out there, I don't even know where to begin. You could begin by subscribing to some of the podcast I linked to in the right hand column or share your own favorites in the comments below.

There are all kinds of communities to join, too. I like MeWe best, but there are so many to choose from. Check a few out.

Lastly, and probably most importantly, play a game and do a review. Post it up some place. Without you insight, the community won't know what is good and why. Have an opinion and share it.

Rx... take that.

A little fun, a lot of good for OZ

I was looking for something to buy for my birthday over at DriveThruRPG. Nothing really stood out to me until I logged in to MeWe.

I saw a few people post on some bundles over at DriveThruRPG for the fires down under. 100% of your purchase goes to the following organizations:

Disaster Relief and Recovery - Australia Red Cross
Bushfire Emergency - World Wildlife Fund of Australia

DriveThruRPG and it's publishers have really stepped up, here. There are 5 bundles for every type of interest. I didn't bother to count the number of great titles included with each. All of them appear to gave more than a dozen books each.

Fantasy Core & Settings $19.95
Starships & Posthumanity $29.95
Modern & Urban Horror $19.95
Fantasy Supplements $29.95
Capes, Grit, and Gunsmoke $19.95

Personally, I'm going for the Fantasy and Core Settings bundle. What a great way to celebrate gaming, a birthday or whatever while helping out those in the awesome but beleaguered OZ.

Saturday, January 18, 2020

Strictly (Duke) Springer - Day 018


Today, we will recover the cache. It takes 6 hours. From there, we head to back to the Spaceport to get those U-suits and Life Support Units. I roll a new ship, a new boat twice, and a gunner. No help for it. We need another day.

Sigh.

Such is random luck. 

Our assets are:

1 Antelope starship, which I owe 119,300 secs. in principle.
15 Fuel Units,
1 Stasis pod 2 CU,
24 Repair units.
1 U-bot,
2 PS-bots,
6 Skimmers,
1 Damaged Skimmer,
2 U-suit,
and the ship is fully fueled with 6 hypercharges.

I have 750 secs. in my pocket.

Friday, January 17, 2020

Strictly (Duke) Springer - Day 017

Maybe a U-suit looks like this.

On our second last day in the Ruins of Regari, we located a damaged skimmer and another U-suit.

I think it’s almost time to move on. We are close to playing “Russian Dolls”, here. The ship has 60 cu of space in the main bay and another 40 of the boat’s bay. I have 40 cu of skimmers sitting in both bays, plus 20 repair units and 15 Fuel Units. We have 3 bots and two suits. Plus 6 people. I have suits and units of repair and fuel sitting in the skimmers’ cargo and crew compartments.

Each skimmer can hold 6 cu of equipment in the crew compartment. We can technically take on an additional 44 cu of junk before I have to start stashing stuff in engineering, the crew space, and my six secret compartments.

We need to dump some of this stuff, but not until I get those LU and additional suits.

Our assets are:

1 Antelope starship, which I owe 119,300 secs. in principle.
15 Fuel Units,
1 Stasis pod 2 CU,
20 Repair units.
1 U-bot,
3 Skimmers,
1 Damaged Skimmer
2 U-suit,
and the ship is fully fueled with 6 hypercharges.

I have 650 secs. in my pocket.

In the cache in the Ruins of Regari are:

3 Skimmers,
4 Repair Units,
100 secs.