Relic – The Lives of the Saints

They are written on crumbling rolls of parchment, scraped into the hard stone of prison walls, painstakingly illuminated by novices, and passed on in secret under the eyes of persecutors. Each such account is an enduring testimony to faith, hope, and endurance, and a way to inspire those same qualities in others. The contents vary [...]

Minidrakes and Eclipse

Today it’s using Eclipse to create variant beasties… Minidrakes are small, winged, snakes that – thanks to a bit of inherent magic – can spit elemental energy instead of venom. While fragile, a group of them can actually inflict quite a bit of damage – enough to bring down prey larger than they can actually [...]

Federation-Apocalypse Session 187 – The Vengeance of the Demon God

Meanwhile, something had occurred to Kevin; perhaps Mr Anvari had another kid or two in the right age range! That wasn’t terribly unlikely on a colony planet and it would help explain part of that vehemence! If he did, and if he could catch him or her too, it would really rub it in! He [...]

Federation-Apocalypse Session 186b – A Fire Upon The Deep

In the morning, the caravan was up before dawn, loading up on the barges to set forth into the marsh. Fortunately, passengers did not have to show up quite so early. (Marty) “Ah, from one kind of boat to another. Better than slogging through the mud, at any rate!” Kevin was along, bright, early, and [...]

Young Wizards pre-production

Today we bring you a work in progress, made up jsut for fun. I started this a while back after reading Wizards’ A practical Guide to Wizardry. It’s a fun little book and quite inexpensive if you want a copy. It’s more or less a cute Harry-Potter-meets-DnD book. So I decided to set about building [...]

Federation-Apocalypse Session 186a – The Wailing of the Damned Bagpipes

With their business in Ratsurmer mostly in the hands of Thralls and the locals – it WAS only a bit of normal trade after all – they looked into heading out into the marshes / rain forests. Well, Marty looked into it. Kevin was too distracted playing with his new pets – although he did [...]

Federation-Apocalypse Session 185b – Orders and Laws

Marty was impressed with the sales-pitch – and the selection – as well. The man should be up pitching to the local rulers, not down in the marketplace acting like one of the munitions salesmen on the office shopping channel! Ensouled too. Of course, an awful lot (80%+) of the locals were too* – but [...]

Eclipse and Old Sarge – Small Unit Tactics Style

The conceit is fairly common; an old, grizzled, sergeant-type takes charge of a group of green newbies and turns them into an effective fighting unit. Quite often it’s in live combat; while the newbies have refused to listen before, as things get desperate the newbies do exactly what the old sergeant says – and he [...]

Federation-Apocalypse Session 185a – The Power of the Flowers

With Raphael analyzing and storing assorted mushroom, plant, and weird-organism samples with an eye on possible commercial applications, Marty watched for a minute or two, and Kevin for perhaps twenty – and then they got bored. Kevin was in his private quarters, passing the time with his playthings, while he actually focused on Shayhian, back [...]

Federation-Apocalypse Session 184b – The Return of Ruthless Ruth

Ruth Gelman was back in Kadia, visiting her parents and celebrating something of a victory; she’d broken up enough of Dr Brenner’s little parasitic Kevin-cults to bring in the authorities – and gotten Kevin’s rescue-recruiting on a semi-official basis; the authorities were now well aware of where all those illegal and refugee kids were going, [...]

Federation-Apocalypse Session 184a – Vampires or Lawyers? Vampires please!

Off in Star Wars: Galactica*, yet another group had taken entirely the wrong turn, and were calling for rescue. The realm they’d fallen into had all too many gates – but they all seemed to lead to more variations on the same realm! Even worse, it seemed that the casualty rates were likely to far [...]

The Life Cycle of the Couch Tiger

The cubs start out as simple footstools, and typically hide in the corners, waiting to be fed with wood, and bits of metal, and fiber. If no more substantial furniture is available, they will graze on carpets and plant fibers – which is better than nothing. Still, too much of such junk food and they [...]

Federation-Apocalypse Session 183b – With an Order of Mushrooms

The seas were otherwise calm, and the wind was blowing in a favorable quarter – but about six hours into the journey it seemed that one of the crewman had fallen overboard. He was still visible at least – but he was… swimming off into the distance? That was STUPID! (Kevin, to the Thralls) “Fish [...]

Federation-Apocalypse Session 183a – A Darkness Upon The Deep

Raphael was wondering… He’d never thought of Santa Claus as a Lord of Darkness before – but giving people whatever they asked for… People so rarely considered whether getting what they asked for would actually be good for them! There was a reason why stories of twisted wishes, evil Jinn, and monkey’s paws persisted – [...]

The Myth of the Monomyth

A lot of people – including many writers and game masters – take the idea of the “Monomyth” or “The Heroes Journey” fairly seriously. That’s a bad idea. Fundamentally, the “Monomyth” is so generic that it can pretty well be applied to ANY human activity. That’s a large part of what makes the idea appealing [...]

Law, Disorder, and Player Characters

Originally “Law” came down to a simple idea; if you upset the rest of the tribe too much, you’d better hope you were faster than a spear AND that you could get along on your own. Underlying that were a couple of other assumptions – that a normal member of the tribe COULD keep track [...]

More Indexing – Spellweaver81

Here we have some more catching up on the cross-indexing; Spellweaver plays in the Star Wars game – usually as Kira Keldav. He turns out the Kira-focused versions of the logs, which I then go through to insert what all the other characters were up to. Unfortunately, for the last couple of months I haven’t [...]

Exalted – Aden, The Lost World, and Mardi Gras

Specific areas within Aden include… The Lost World: This high plateau contains ten waypoints (slightly more than 7000 square miles), is surrounded by virtually unscalable cliffs (Charles would suggest taking the underground monorail network if you want to visit the area instead), and is broken up by several additional natural barriers (dramatic chasms, rivers of [...]

Exalted: Aden, the World-Body

Aden is Charles’s semi-private internal world – a realm which currently consists of 98 Waypoints or nearly 70,000 square miles of territory. That’s still actually a relatively small world – about the size of Ireland or of a middle-of-the-run US State – but it’s still six times the size of Hawaii and could (with his [...]

Exalted – Charmed Lives and Constitutional Religions

OK, this notion was just too amusing to resist… These probably aren’t the best-balanced of all charms, but they don’t seem particularly likely to destroy the game. I’m not entirely sure if any keywords fit either though. For the most part, it won’t matter anyway. PETITION FOR REDRESS (2/2) THE RIGHT OF PEACEABLE ASSEMBLY (3/2) [...]