Greed of the Cabal Campaign Setup

Greed of the Cabal A Champions! Campaign  Inspiration comes from the strangest places, and this is the second time I ended up creating a character based off BlazBlue. If you haven’t heard of it, BlazBlue is a fighting game with the most absurdly intricate and nonsensical backstory the Land of Anime can produce. They also [...]

Exalted – Twilight Voyages and the Reborn

The “Reborn” got mentioned in the Chronicles – so a little bit of explaining is in order… What is Death? “You cannot resurrect the dead” is one of the common mantras of Exalted. Yet even mere Thaumaturgy can transmigrate human souls into animal bodies, granting an extension of life even in nonhuman form (The North, [...]

Yggdrasil, the Tree of Worlds (Wood Manse *****)

From far enough away, Yggdrasil is just a big tree – mildly impressive, yes, but nothing more. It’s only when you get up close that it’s tremendous width really becomes apparent – and it’s only when you look straight up along the trunk that you can see that the trunk continues up for what may [...]

The Chronicles of Heavenly Artifice LXIX – Where Have All The Flowers Gone?

The footpath around the village was lovely, and displayed an immense variety of rare plants and beauties – grottoes and trickling streams, sites where you could look into the negative curvature of Aden or out over the village nestled in it’s dale – and numerous other paths leading away. (Matthew) “Hey, what is this stuff? [...]

Death in Absentia: Characters and the Law

As with so many things, when you’re looking at how you handle malefactors in role-playing games, it’s often wise to look back at the beginning… Once upon a time there were wargamers, and they had little cards for units that might look something like this: Class-A Tank (d6 Generic Wargame): Move 5. No Swamp or [...]

Exalted – Quick Gods

Our current Exalted game involves rather a lot of gods, demons, and other spirits – as friends, allies, companions, creations, and devas. Unfortunately, the rules for generating them are kind of convoluted. Ergo, here’s a considerably quicker method of building them; just use the chart rather than messing about with all those formulas… Demons and [...]

Exalted – The Roanapur Manse, the Black Lagoon, and Ruki, Chosen of Battles

Roanapur is a city of crime, and mysteries, and villainy. You do not, however, usually find the scum of the earth in it; to survive in Roanapur you must either be carefully beneath notice, be reasonably sophisticated in your villainy, or work for someone who is… This is no accident. At the hidden core of [...]

Pen and Paradise Episode 2: Skyrim Continued

Pen and Paradise Episode 2: Skyrim Continued   Allow me to explain a little more about what I have in mind for the thieving model. Right now, stealing is no challenge. Anything people don’t see it instantly up for grabs. You can steal battleaxes, statues, and full plate armor as long as everyone’s backs are [...]

Exalted – Let’s Take This Elsewhere!

At least in our Exalted game the question of “How secure is Elsewhere” is coming up. To answer that, the first place to look is in the basic book, where “Elsewhere” is introduced. Charm Concept: Elsewhere Elsewhere is a place where things exist but do not interact or decay. Things that characters store Elsewhere are [...]

Pen n’ Paradise 1 – Skyrim

Pen n’ Paradise 1 – Skyrim Welcome to the first episode of Pen n’ Paradise. Before we go any further, understand I’m not pleased with the audio quality and wish to pick up a new microphone. If anyone can reccomend a reliable model, feel free to do so in the comments. This experimental series will [...]

Young Wizards Beta!

Young Wizards goes Beta! Tell your friends.   Yes, Young Wizards is now in the playable Beta version. This edition still lacks a few of the fancy details we mighty like, but it’s a working rulesset, with every spell ready for play. You can take a character through five full years or schooling and adventure. [...]

The Chronicles of Heavenly Artifice XXXI – The Bicyclist of the Unpocalypse

Now that Aden was more or less fully landscaped, it seemed a pity that there was hardly anyone there to enjoy it… Well… There were Yu-Shan gates all over the globe – including in a lot of troubled areas and places with natural disasters… Right then! He did have some contacts with the pattern spiders; [...]

Champions of the Gods

Champions of the Gods Sometimes, you need more than a character. You need a Champion, a hero for the ages. And as promised, here are a few select alternatives for the great and powerful, at least equal to Spellfire.   Descendant of Deities In ages past, Gods had a habit of enjoying the company of [...]

L5R Dark Dawn Campaign

Legend of the Five Rings -Darkest Dawn Campaign- This is just a simple xeplanation of changes in the base settings. Players should consult a book, or at least the generic information on Wikipedia and elsewhere online. Yes, you can ask to borrow the base book if desired. Rokugan is a heavily Japan-themed fantasy setting. All characters [...]

Star Wars – Twilight Seekers Campaign Index

Spellweaver 81 – Kira Keldav’s player – has been compiling an index of the material for the Twilight Seekers Star Wars Game. Given that time problems have left my indexing well behind, he’s kindly allowed me to repost that index here… Campaign Background: Scale of the Galaxy: Or why anyone can find anything despite it [...]

Federation-Apocalypse Session 192a – A Dragon Born

Raphael quieted… Something large, and powerful, was pulling at him – insistently drawing his attention. The room faded in around him in a sensory overload. EVERYTHING was broader-ranged, and more acute, than normal – and he… had senses that his mind had never been designed to handle, burning through unfamiliar channels in his local brain. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Begging the Question; What do we mean by “Magic,” anyhow?

Begging the Question What do we mean by “Magic,” anyhow? Recently Thoth put up a post which more or less pointed out that no, there’s no such thing as reliable magic (and obviously there’s no point in asking how it works unless you have a specific fictional universe in mind). We might have hoped people [...]

Reality Check – Magic into Science

Thanks to some more inquiries as to “how some magic was absorbed into science”, here we have some quick history. It may be relevant to gaming if you happen to using a historical setting. Before you had “science” humans had a great mass of learned behaviors – also known as rituals. Some worked, some did [...]