10 Magical Weapons

 Just dump 'em in your setting. Careful: A magical weapon is both a curse and a boon. And a pretty great one of each.

1. The Original Weapon

What it looks like:

A rock, flint, a bit larger than a fist. One side is rounded. The other side has been chipped into a basic sharp edge. There is blood on it that never seems to wash off or dry out.

How it was made:

It was the first weapon crafted with the intent to murder another human being. Kain slew Abel with it. Romulus his brother Remus. It is murder incarnate.

What it wants:

It wants to murder. Not kill, it is not a weapon for combat. It is a tool for murdering. Those who trust you. Those who won't fight back.

What it does:

Any attack on a trusting target will always hit and will always kill. If you were to wield it in battle, you could only use it to hit your friends in the back of the head, not the enemy. For such purposes, it is absolutely deadly though. The only way to make sure this weapon cannot kill you is to never really trust anyone.

2. The Great Khan's Blood Blade

What it looks like:

A sabre of the type that the nomad warriors of the steppe wield as side weapons when riding into battle. The grip is made from human bone, wrapped in human leather. The blade is dark steel.

How it was made:

The Great Khan wanted to make a weapon from the pain of all who opposed him. It took the blood of nearly a quarter million people to extract enough iron for the weapon. In the end, it killed him.

What it wants:

Vengeance and pain are what it revels in. The anguish off all those who died in the process of making it will never rest and the blade wants to spread their misery.

What it does:

Hit a living thing and it will utterly desintegrate. Any small cut will suffice to turn an enemy into red mist. The weapon is also as sharp as a blade made from steel can get and remains indestructible to a degree that also prevents it from ever blunting.

3. The Chaos Flayer

What it looks like:

A Macuahuitl but grotesquely alive: There is an eye on the side near the tip, the whole thing is made from bone and the grip has living skin. Along the edges, human-looking teeth are gnashing.

How it was made:

The famous chaos wizard Tristram prayed to the Beings Beyond for his son to be the deadliest warrior to have ever lived. When the child was born, it looked normal but upon puberty, the boy developed a hunchback. In the end, a teratome or devoured twin grew out of his back, separating, killing the boy. This was the Chaos Flayer, a living weapon.

What it wants:

It wants to kill more people than anyone ever did. That's a lot (see the Great Khan's Blood Blade) but the weapon is alive and immortal and has all the time in the world. Also, as it needs human blood for nourishment, it needs to kill at least one person per day.

What it does:

It quadruples the strength of its wearer and will easily rip through anything that isn't harder than human teeth. Also, the effect of its cutting is identical to that of a chainsaw, ripping, rending, being generally very messy.

4. Natnarin's Boomerang

What it looks like:

A boomerang, carved from a material that is light as wood but harder than most ceramics while being slightly flexible. There is text etched into its surface besinging the Great Huntress of the North.

How it was made:

A craftsman who was in love with the legendary huntress got a hold of the tooth of a wyrm she had slain. For twenty years he toiled, grinding the material into the perfect throwing weapon. When he presented it to her, both of them old and worn by years, she granted him a kiss on the cheek as a token of gratitude. He commited suicide immedeatly afterwards as he didn't want to lose the feeling of her lips on his skin.

What it wants:

It wants to hunt, preferably rare monsters that are difficult to kill and are a threat not only to the hunter but to people in general.

What it does:

When thrown by a skilled hunter, this weapon will always return to them, even after hitting. It is effectively indestructable and the sharpened edge can slice through anything softer than wyrm enamel, which includes steel. It doesn't miss unless there is a good reason for it to want to miss.

5. Saint Helena's Hammer

What it looks like:

A full steel warhammer that culminates in a hand that holds a stake, all made from steel. It contains the actual bones of the right forearm and hand of Saint Helena, the patron saint of those who hunt witches, undead, demons and unholy monsters.

How it was made:

After Saint Helena died, the weapon was forged by the church as both a relinquiary and a weapon. While the rest of her body was interred in a cathedral in the Holy Capital, this weapon was made to continue her mission to cleanse the world from supernatural evil.

What it wants:

To cleanse the world from supernatural evil. In fact, the wielder won't be able to do anything else with it and it would probably punish them for attempting to do so.

What it does:

It starts to shiver whenever supernatural evil is around. It gives off a faint, silvery glow in the darkness - enough to use as a low-end light source. It will destroy any evil it hits, whether that be corporeal or incorporeal. If the metal stake is slammed through something and into a surface, it can be used to hold to question even incorporeal demons. You can perform an exorcism with it, by staking the victim through the hand, driving the demon from the body whilst trapping it.

6. Shiftblade

What it looks like:

It comes in a variety of shapes and forms but all in all it is always fully made out of silver- or mercury-looking metal. It has a total Mass of three pounds, which doesn't change. Other than that in between a rapier, a spear, a thin but strong metal shield, a flail or whatever you can think of, the weapon can be whatever the wearer wants it to be.

How it was made:

The soul of an innocent child that was murdered by his own mother was captured and bound into a vial of mercury by an evil alchaemist. This is how a shiftblade is created – after the first wielder forces their will unto that poor, tortured soul.

What it wants:

Actually it wants its suffering to end. If the wielder ever slips in their dominance of the blade, the Shiftblade will betray them, hoping for a release when their tormentor dies. It is, after all, an innocent soul held hostage by a violent individual.

What it does:

When someone picks up the Shiftblade, they must assert mental dominance over it in order to use it. Once that is done, it can be used in battle - taking any shape that the wielder wants in a flow that takes less time than the blink of an eye. Of course, blocking a blow with a shield that then becomes a spear to stab with and then a blade to deflect a counter attack is extremely effective - if you know what you're doing. Thus this weapon multiplies the base fighting ability of its wielder, making a skilled warrior profit far more than a clumsy beginner.

7. Twin Succubus Daggers

What it looks like:

Two curved daggers, the handles, made out of a light and smooth stone, carved into naked women. Surprisingly ergonomic though. The two weapons are connected by their pommels with a length of indestructible chain about one meter long so they must always be wielded together.

How it was made:

Someone sacrificed their soul to bind two succubi into an ordinary pair of weapons, which could have started out as something as mundane as butter knives. Then a blacksmith forged them into these weapons while the succubi were still bound, which must have taken some more sacrifices of human souls to accomplish.

What it wants:

Sex and murder, preferrably a combination of both. This is a weapon to bind and rape and kill someone with. Yet all parties involved will feel pleasure from whatever combination of sexual debauchery, sex crime and violence/combat is had with the weapon. Do involve the chain for some breath-play.

What it does:

It makes the wielder into a sexual combatant with lightning-quick reflexes and an appetite for both slaughter and sex. Effectively tripling the speed at which you can act. In anything like sex or combat it makes you a terrible monster to encounter. You will only remember things as a haze of red but at that point your soul is probably already on its way to hell.

8. Meteoric Khriss

What it looks like:

A snaking blade made from a dark steel. The grip is wooden and has a finely decorated pommel. It comes with a wooden sheath that has a protective metal bar by its opening and doubles as a smallish war hammer if you need a secondary weapon. The blade is about a foot long. It is of the hardest conceivable steel.

How it was made:

A prince of the island kingdoms long a go witnessed the fall of a meteor. As it was in an age before the advent of steel, the gift from the gods was forged into this very weapon with the express purpose of being able to combat not only human enemies but also supernatural beings.

What it wants:

It wants to help bring balance to the universe. Whenever evil is in the advantage, it will want to slice that to bits. But once the tide of a battle is turning, so will its loyalties.

What it does:

Cuts anything - even souls. If two people are bound by a link of souls it can slice through that if you can guesstimate where their connection runs through the aether. Cuts made by the curved blade will also heal very slowly.

9. Leech Dagger

What it looks like:

A roundish, hollow tube with a sharp point like a very large but a bit stubby hypodermic needle. It appears to be made from silvery copper. From the base of the blade, there are six curved metal pipes about the thickness of straws that wind around and end in sharpened points where the wielder will have their hand and wrist. The grip is spiralled with orichalcum, mythril and amber.

How it was made:

The Master Alchaemist's second apprentice, the one who turned evil, forged this weapon in order to give it to his lover, Shireigh the Assassin. He had hoped that the infused essences would keep her as beautiful and deadly as in her prime. In the end, it would be the blade that killed him and, much later, her as well.

What it wants:

Drink blood and infuse its wearer with it.

What it does:

Equipping it will immedeatly hurt you. Stab someone with it and it sucks out far more of their blood than they would normally lose and infuses it into you, whilst magically cleansing it and making it compatible with your body. It steals life force but that also contains parts of your victim's soul. Do it often and you will lose yourself in a sea of inner voices.

10. Rock Bian of Heavenly Justice

What it looks like:

A ridged, straight rod with a grip, all carved from a bone-coloured stone. It is ridged to look a bit like a human spine. Between the lowest ridge and the grip there is a ring of symbols that can be rotated around the shaft, although it was made from the same rock. Spinning it emits a very high pitched whine as long as it keeps turning, which can be up to half a minute.

How it was made:

It was carved out of bedrock from mount meru by a demon tasked to do so by a long forgotten emperor. Said emperor wanted a weapon that could smash but not cut as he had been prophesied to die by beheading with his own blade. The legend has it that it is one of the very rare intances where fate was actually averted: The emperor died of a stroke in his bath.

What it wants:

Smash the forces of chaos and disorder in the world. It does not care if you are good or bad, only if you obey a very hierarchical world view and know your place in it.

What it does:

While the lowest ring segment is spinning, hitting hard things with this will break and shatter them: The bone in your arm will break much easier than normally, it rips open armour and splits rocks. Swords connecting with it will splinter into pieces.

Re-Release: Midnight at Halcyon's Coven

 I'm re-releasing my one-page-dungeon Midnight at Halcyon's Coven again, this time in order for it to be on my itch-site. It's part of my pledge to release something on there every month of 2023 – but I'll only make it something new every other month because let's face it: I'm not that productive. Anyhow, if you like paranormal investigation, go and check it out!

10 Sapient Aliens

Dan over at Throne of Salt posted 10 sapient aliens for Mothership. I figured, I'd join the fun. Some of these I have actually used in roleplaying, others are brand new.

Note that in my games, the word "alien" is derogatory when talking about a sentient being. Aliens are animals. People are Xenos.

My son as a game master

As a gift for Easter, I produced a Heroica Fanfiction Audioplay for my older son. Fifty minutes of fantasy-action, just for him, including the bosses and monsters he and I made up. I even gave his favorite characters the best moments. This, after repeated listenings over the holidays, inspired a creative frenzy in my son. While I was doing things like household chores, he was upstairs in his room, labouring away with the boxes of Legos that he inherited from me. Then he presented me with an adventure of his own making. He'd play the bad guys, I'd play the heroes. He was going to be my game master (although he doesn't know the term, this has happened totally organically).

His idea of a great adventure was that the Goblin Kings (The Twins, we usually call them, as we have two of them and they together form a boss encounter) have gathered all the monsters in their keep. Except for the Spitting Snake and the Giant Spider, all bosses are there as well. The goblin fortress is seperated from the human village by the bridge. In it there is the main hall full of horrors and troops, as well as three side wings. In one there is first the Kraken, then the Hydra, its den serving as a treasure chamber full of gold, potions, and a key. One is the throne room with the two Goblin Kings. The last one is another side wing. It features two hidden keys and a secret door that leads to another land.

That other land is the goal of the quest, as my son informed me. The kidnapped king of Heroica, father to Prince Alrik, leader of the heroes, is held there – but the heroes don't know that yet. I was allowed to have four active heroes at the time, the other four waiting as backup at the village tavern.

Mathematically, my team was very unlikely to defeat the massed foes in the main hall. My first strike team consisted of the Prince, the Knight, the Priest and the Thief. I had a plan: The team would head straight for the treasure chamber, where the Knight would hold the monsters from the hall off while the other three dealt with the Kraken and the Hydra. Then everyone would retreat with the loot to the village, where the treasure would allow them to heal and gear up.

The plan went reasonably well. While I lost the Knight and the Thief, the Priest and the Prince got out with the treasures. I filled the ranks with the Archer and the Druid and started back to the Goblin Fortress. That's when things got even more RPGish.

My son had used the turns I had spent buying stuff in the village: He had set an ambush with werewolves on the bridge. That failed to stop my heroes. When a single Level 1 goblin came out of the fortress, I decided to negotiate. I told it/my son that he didn't have a chance as a single goblin against four heavily armed heroes. My son conceided. The goblin decided to become a good citizen and went onto the big ship to take a nap. Later, while my heroes were entering the fortress again, he would go to the village oak to nibble on its big branch. As my son explained, goblins love meat and wood. He was the smartest of the goblins and thus decided to be a good guy.

Inside the fortress, my heroes encountered another wave of enemies in the form of miscelaneous smallish monsters and the Dark Druid. Then the remaining goblin forces surrendered – under the condition that my heroes leave the throne room and their kings alone. I decided that these were acceptable terms for Prince Alrik, after he had learned that the goblins didn't have his dad. The heroes went into the wing with the magic door undisturbed and we decided to call it a night and continue the adventure/campaign in my son's other land another day.

It was only half way through that game of Heroica that I realized that I was in fact playing a roleplaying campaign designed by my son. He is only five and can't read or write but the graspable little character sheets made from Lego combined with the simple tactics of the dice rolls and loot system enabled him to become a game master. I am astonished and proud that he put thought into things.

He even heeded my advice from an earlier game and gave me a good reason to go into a dead end full of boss monsters (all the treasure and a mission-relevant key). During my last assault he even realized that his guys should try to kill my healer (the Priest) but after that failed, he figured the smart thing for the goblins would be to give up. I'm glad he isn't one of the bloodthirsty kids that assume that murder is the only way to play this. And I'm very very curious what the land beyond the magical door has in store for my quartet of heroes.

Free Release: Midnight at Halcyon's Coven 2016

After the One Page Dungeon Contest 2016 is over it's time to revisit my first foray into that competition: Midnight at Halcyon's Coven was a mess so I decided to re-make it. Using all I have learned about making One Page Dungeons, I cleaned it up. Let me elaborate.

The original had three specific problems: Problem 1 was way too much work I put into the 3D-rendering of the bunker and its furniture. Hours upon hours went into coffee-mugs and desk lamps that would be invisible in the finished product. That work however, has been done and this is not a problem for the reader - so nothing's to be done about that.

Problem 2 is that ugly frame. It was supposed to make the whole page look more professionally lay-outed but it makes large swaths of text harder to read. While the new version looks a bit less stylish without it as I have not found a good replacement, having no frame is better than that one.

Problem 3 is the most glaring one: Way, way too much text. I left nothing to the imagination of whoever is running this adventure and that was very foolish. The large amount of text gives unnecessary details and forces the font to a tiny size that's a terrible chore to read. I cut it back to the bare necessity. So, I hereby proudly present to you:

Midnight at Halcyon's Coven 2016

Results!

So, after the release of The Lair of the Voidbeast comes the results of the One Page Dungeon Contest. I made it into the Penultimate Winners Circle, which I am somewhat proud of. You should all definetly check out the contest entries, as they are all diverse and interesting.

In other news, a YouTuber named Jupiter Hadley (if that's her real name, her parents are incredibly cool!) has tasked herself with playing ALL the entries of the Low Res Jam 2016. In episode 22 she gets around playing a minute of our offering, Low Res Dungeoneer.


I might enter a nice press snippet with

"I wish I knew what I was doing" - Jupiter Hadley

on the itch.io-page. Cheers!

Bacon Game Jam: GunMaker 4: Gold Edition

So, hi blog, long time no see... I've been part of a team of guys participating in the Bacon Game Jam over the weekend. The result of our work is GunMaker 4: Gold Edition, a title that I am proud to announce is totally overselling the finished product. But finish we did and the result can also be a fun tool to create weapons for any cyberpunk-RPG. I even released the graphics as CC3.0 so you can do pretty much whatever with them, as long as you mention me. Check it out and come back to read about my experience with this particular game jam after the jump.

When you only have 48 hours, cloning graphics is your best friend...

Pen & Paper: Action Set Pieces

I somewhere read that an action sequence needs more than just a static battleground. This is as true for an RPG as it is for any movie - you better have something going on around you, surroundings influencing things, hazards, all that jazz. So this week, I had my players fight - in a pit.

Good action movies know that the set is as important as the action that takes place in it. Take anything Jackie Chan does, for example. The sets and props really take center stage. If he could get a hovercraft for a day, you better believe that there will be a way to integrate it into the plot. The best action scenes are running gun-battles or fighting on a moving train or scenery falling down around the characters, threatening to crush either combatant at any moment. This is something where computer RPGs often fail - and so does traditional gridmap DnD.

You CAN put rules into the game that make things more interesting. Say, this and that hex/square/area spout hot steam every X turns, doing damage. Often this just creates no-go zones for PCs and enemies. If you present an enemy stupid enough to run into danger face-first, the battle threatens to become a riddle. Where do you need to place yourself in order to lure the monster into X? That's why I prefer freeform storytelling in battles, sprinkled with some dice-rolls to keep things unpredictable to both the players and myself as the game master.

The two surviving PCs of a small foray into ancient underground ruins were fleeing. Their friend lay dead, killed by their own bullets, in a crypt behind them. The monsters were chasing. The underground complex terminated in a huge drill-shaft. To get back topside, they would have to climb - there were rusted metal bars forming a ladder, alongside which a steel cable was hanging. The group had used the cable to secure themselves when they were climbing down. So one of them took to the ladder, the other tried climbing the cable, when the praying mantis-like aliens emerged from the tunnel right beneath their feet.

The battle was a vertical chase between the PCs, armed with firearms with little or no ammo, and the aliens that were limited to their raptorial legs. It was tossing down empty guns onto the following monsters, rolling for stamina to stay ahead, rolling acrobatics to swing over to the ladder etc. In a desperate last-ditch, one of the two, the teams socialistic terrorist bomb builder, hung herself upside down by her injured legs to fight one of the monster hand-to-hand - and won. The interesting part was the verticality: You could lose your grip and fall, and there was no regular trading of blows with something that is hacking at your legs.

Thanks to some astronomic luck in dice-rolls, both PCs got out of the hole alive, although said revolutionary almost bled to death on the way up. I really liked the vertical battle and will implement such features more often n the future. Tactical inequality is always nice. The only thing the whole thing was missing was moving parts, like enormous drill looming above coming to life or something but the industrial plant on that planet had been left alone for eight decades. I couldn't imagine it still working, as scavengers had picked over it and ripped out all useful parts. Well - next time.

Pen & Paper: I died last night

So, last night in one of my pen & paper campaigns, my character died. Now I've had characters die before, usually towards the end of a campaign, as was the case here, but this death was somewhat unspectacular and anticlimactic. It also totally blindsided me and came right after a first for me in an RPG. Let me tell you about Dr. Hong-Owen and his not-so gallant death.

Dr. Tyson Hong-Owen (extra-points for anyone who gets the reference to my favorite body of sci-fi works) was a space-archaeologist. Space Indiana-Jonesing was the pitch that our GM had baited me in with so that was the profession I chose for my character. A young, vigorous man in the process of discovering Space-Mayan artifacts and working with passion on discovering their secrets. So when, during the course of the campaign living Space-Mayas showed up, he was on the forefront of first contact with them. And it cost him his life.

Pen & Paper: Sandbox or Railroad Campaign?

So, I've been GMing an RPG set in space recently. The group took the first part of the campaign to escape from an interstellar prison-planet (yes, it's Butcher Bay. I know). Some characters died during a prison-riot that the group had started in order to form a distraction, but most of the group succeeded in escaping, forming bonds in the process, being cool and all.

Playing a campaign in prison had some advantages for me as a game master. The environment was limited, so were the NPCs to interact with - I made an exhaustive list of them and how they were grouped and what they were like. I had no plan how the group would escape the prison. They would have to figure one out themselves. It was a small-scale sandbox for my group to play in. Now, for what we call our second season, we have some new characters, some old ones, and the whole thing is set on a small ship escaping from the law. We basically went from Butcher Bay to Firefly. Which is nice. But entirely different in structure.

Thoughts on Pen & Paper: Player Interactions

One of my players in our sci-fi pen & paper campaign complained that there wasn't enough player-interaction going on in the game. Being as he was the pilot, that was true. Being a fair GM, I thought I needed to change that. Being also a somewhat rough GM that I am, things went bad quickly. Well, the goal is for everyone at the table to have fun. Most things did work out. Read on to find out how things went!

Some people say that the pilot of a sci-fi campaign should better be an NPC, as all they have to do is fly everyone else from A to B and whenever they get action, everyone else is just strapped into their seats anyways. I usually try to levie that by having the others busy with quick-repairs and fending off boarders forming from the very walls of their own ship. Yeah, it's a rather high-tech setting. Now over the past few sessions, there really wasn't much dangerous piloting or space-combat to be done, just exploring an ancient tunnel system in a planet/optical computer/religious site. And they always left the pilot behind so yes, he got bored.

So I started with, when the rest of the crew returned to the ship and they started loading up loot into their cargo-bay, having the pilot see different stuff than everyone else. The implications were clear, as the pilot spent most of his time linked to the ships computer he would be the first target to any sort of cyber-attack. As the crew spend most of their free time in a VR simulation of whatever they like, the rest would fall too but they hadn't had a break for a while. So the pilot is going crazy, seeing an intruder who, after some testing by the chief of security, isn't there although she ship does react as if they were. The result is that the pilot gets knocked out with a phaser and restrained in the med-bay, where he spends the rest of the session, while the rest of the crew shuts down the computer core and fights the two escaped prisoners whom they had brought from another system.

I do agree that I kind of pushed my pilot into open rebellion against his comrades. He got phasered and forced to inactivity for most of the session, which was a bummer for him as a player but at least everyone else got to interact a lot with all the suspicion, threats, pulling of rank and discussion appropriate for the tense situation of being in a ship with a computer compromised by a vastly superior enemy.

I will have to find ways of doing this without the group restraining each other or going all-out PvP in the future. After all, we're all at the table to enjoy ourselves.

Free Release! One Page Dungeon! 100th Post! 1 Year Blogiversary!

Well well well, it's been one year with this blog now, coinciding with my 100th post. Putting out something that's been in the works for quite a while this is a good point to get back a bit to role-playing, which has come a little short during the current Kerbal-streak I'm on.

So here (a bit more info after the jump) it is, intended to be entered into this years One Page Dungeon Contest: Midnight at Halcyons Coven:

One Page Dungeon Project 1 - a sneak peak

I have decided to participate in the next One Page Dungeon Contest, which is still a few months away but who knows how long I'll take to actually get this thing done? Might as well use that creative energy of mine now.

So here's what I intend to do: I've made this vertical dungeon (in a broad sense), a bunker situated in an abandoned missile silo from the cold war era. I made the graphics with Google SketchUp and then edited them with Gimp because I couldn't draw if my life depended on it. Now the idea is that, while my One Page Dungeon will have an urban fantasy theme with a satanic cult and vampires and all that, the graphics can be used to interpret them as pretty much any scenario that sensibly could take place in a private or governmental bunker. I mean, people can actually buy these things today...

So here I present a small glimpse at my current state of graphical representation, the dungeon-map so to speak, although the full version is, of course, much larger and more detailed:

As you can see here, there is a house topside and the missile silo itself has been fitted with floors, making it a vertical dungeon with quite a few floors to cover. I'll post more whenever this thing grows beyond the preliminary state - I'm currently writing descriptions on everything, giving the whole thing story, theme and antagonists.

Character Progress in Games - some thoughts

Whilst playing Kerbal Space Program recently, I've been thinking about the different types of progress characters in games, in both video- and pen & paper RPG, make towards overcoming challenges set by the game or a game master better. Here's what I've come up with regarding character growth in games.

Three types of character growth, actually, if you completely disregard story, lore, context and all these things that get in the way of talking about pure game-mechanics. Of these three types of growth, only one is immanent in the game itself, which is the first I'll talk about here: Character growth.

Zombies in Hamburg: A little thought experiment part 2

In the last post I started the little Gedankenspiel on how a supernatural reanimation of corpses to zombies here in my home-city of Hamburg would play out, which can be useful as a backdrop for a role-playing campaign. Let's keep this show going by moving on to the next stage of the infestation of the now spreading Z and the finally reacting government agencies from outside the city.


So, let's see of things are going to turn out...

Zombies in Hamburg: A little thought experiment part 1

A few years ago, I hosted an roleplaying one-shot session for a few friends of mine with a simple conceit: You're playing realistic characters in a zombie apocalypse here in our home city of Hamburg, Germany. The second largest city in the country, we have the Bernhardt-Nocht-Institute for tropical diseases so there we would have the cause for the zombie-outbreak. I excessively used google maps and our own knowledge of the city for the campaign, which had three random survivors simply trying to reach the central police station from a southern part of the city, having to cross the port and the river in the process.

Now if you're going to play in the current day, why not take a place everyone at the table knows and can relate to? Where all you need maps-wise is available on line? Exactly. This has lead me to a new thought experiment though: How would a zombie-infestation in my city actually turn out? Let's find out!

Another Artemis Play Session

So, the bi-weekly bunch of Artemis-players met up again the other week to play the game once again. And we decided to get the difficulty to max. Well we did have a Dreadnought. And basically expected to die. What followed was some of the most epic and intense role-playing/video-gaming experiences I have ever had...

So difficulty ten. Space to "interesting" (as "very interesting" tends to litter enough black holes and mine-fields as to seriously obstruct the AI invasion). We in the mightiest of the ships that players can have, the intimidating Dreadnought-class. We had enough people for all stations. And I was the captain. I didn't really expect us to get far. Difficulty 8 had killed us quickly enough before. It was just a matter of doing things with our backs against the wall.

We came into the battle guns/nuclear torpedoes blazing, quickly wiping out the first few of the vast waves of enemy ships. Docking with one of the stations, we re-supplied. Looking at the incredible number of enemy fleets on the long-range scanner, I decided that we couldn't defend all of the stations and would concentrate on one of them, in order to keep things going for as long as possible. Having stocked up on ammunition and fuel, we engaged the nearest waves of enemy ships.

The first one went well, as we used ECMs to take out shields and then followed up with nukes, pelting the flottilla with heavy fire-power until it was over. The second wave got us without heavy weaponry though and the station was too close to the battle to be docked with. Well, the Dreadnaught does have its main beam weapon, a powerful ray-cannon taking out smaller ships with ease. At this point we had a wholly different problem: We were running out of energy. To conserve fuel, I ordered the shield shut down and all sytems lowered as far as possible and then drag the ship back to the station. That was when the Bird of Prey Skaraan Enforcer uncloaked and opened fire.

Pen & Paper: Some actual play part 2

The party is still split, with one of them stuck in the city in the middle of riots protesting the recend draft for the civil war that is about to ravage the Empire again. Our main host of characters couldn't care less though, as they are stuck with their leader badly wounded in an improvised shelter in the mountains and a group of elite head-hunters with them, suspecting that it is indeed them they're looking for...

The session starts off with a rainstorm pelting down on the mountain-shelter the group has built for themselves (one of them is a carpenter so they're good at things like that). The group-internal animosities have somewhat cooled down and the team of mercs is out hunting so the players decide it's time to talk through what to do about the whole situation. There is a lot of arguing back and forth whom to put the blame on that kids death on once the mercs come back. Should they sacrifice the badly wounded group leader? Should they blame the actual killer, their scout who is currently gone with most of the groups money to get help? Will he even return and come back for them or will he simply spend the money and make himself a nice life for a few months?

Pen & Paper: Some Actual Play part 1

So, the bi-weekly gaming-group I have designed that world for and which is now my group of testing guinea pigs with regards to the injury chart I made has played again the other week and I thought I'd share what happened during the session (and before it, to bring you up to speed).


So, the group happens to be in deep shit. They had, tasked by the lord their apprentice-knight-leader, left the safe ground of the Empire, crossing the river into the territories of the barbarian tribes of the North, to aid a local king in a matter that needed intervention by foreigners. Now, Northern Barbarians do sound more terrible than they actually are, being mostly peasant-warriors minding their own business and/or carrying around wooden idols to worship their strange pantheon of gods but neighboring their lands are the swamps and moors inhabited by the Naga Queendoms, of which the entire party was rightfully afraid (except for the animal-trainer-chick from the Kalifate - she'd immediately hatched a plan to get a hold of a Naga egg to start breeding them or something...). After some back and forth the party managed to more or less accidentally escalate the situation between the Nagas, who had captured the local kings son and wanted to trade him for land, and the local king and his men, who had rushed out after the party had returned only with the childs hand (as they had only brought part of the silver intended to pay off the Nagas, the Nagas had only brought part of the prince - Nagas have no concept of respecting health and/or life of humans). The whole thing went terribly wrong with the king and his men and the party of adventurers fighting off one of the Naga Queens and her warrior escort. As the group was well prepared because their alchemist, having let herself into the house of the local barbarian scientist-guy, had developed a skin-effective poison that would hurt Nagas but not humans - bottles were thrown, chemical warfare was invented and the Nagas driven off eventually.

Pen & Paper: Full Injury Chart

So, like I said in the last post: Every injury in a gritty RPG should have some sort of flavor. If you, as the GM, don't want the players to accuse you of being too mean or too easy-going on specific players, push the responsibility over to the dice. That's what I'm doing from now on so I made this set of charts. To adapt them to the game-system you're using, consider what in the context of that game would consider a light injury that needs no real treating, a major injury that needs medical attention and a horrible injury that is likely fatal if not immedeatly treated and will leave some permanent damage if you survive.


In my system, where human beings have in between 2 and 10 LP, 1-2 points of damage constitute a light injury, 3-4 is heavy and 5+ is horrible. If your flavor doesn't include where the person was hit, roll a D6 and go 1: left leg, 2: right leg, 3: left arm, 4: right arm, 5: torso, 6: head. Then check what kind of wound is sustained by seeing how much damage was done. Then roll another D6 on the appropriate one of the following charts and interpret the damage according to the type of attack that was sustained: