SWD6: The Rancid Putrefaction of a Cosmic Caterwauling Cabal

30 July 2011 | Hisham | | Artwork, GOKL Actual Play, RPG Actual Play, Role Playing Games, Star Wars
 

Last Sunday, I ran a Star Wars RPG D6 game for the GOKL group. It started out as a one-shot, but who knows; the tale might continue another time.

The Rancid Putrefaction of a Cosmic Caterwauling Cabal

Episode 312: All Heaven Broke Loose

Long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, aboard the space station Kwenn that served as deep space commerce and transport hub, there was a Rebel cell, who sat all day for days in a spacer's cantina named The Drunken Dewback, waiting for their first mission. Then one day the young bartender gestured them to the bar. She told them to go to Anchorhead on Tatooine where they will be given an important mission briefing.

Chapter One - We're So Starving

The Rebel cell consisted of Avril Mantessa, Pew Pew and Tyvokka.

Avril was a young Jedi who had been cloistered away and trained by her Jedi parents in secret after the Jedi Purge. She has yet to use her lightsabre in combat. Pew Pew was a short furry Ewok gunslinger who wore a wide-brimmed sombrero, a poncho and a pair of blaster pistols. No one knew where he came from. And finally, Tyvokka was a Wookiee who owed a life debt to a pirate who died recently. Finding himself without an aim in life, he signed up with a group of rebels.

A view from the gm screen

Lompy watches as Tyvokka the Wookiee mulls over his next step with Pew Pew the Ewok strapped to his chest baby pouch.

The trio headed down to the spaceport levels and entered a bay filled with light freighters and transports.

 

The Zombie Apocalypse with Microlite20

19 November 2010 | Hisham | | Role Playing Games, RPG Actual Play, RPG Irfan Plays, TV
 

After three episodes of The Walking Dead on AMC, I thought I'd try a zombie game scenario with Irfan. I was itching to try out the free Microlite20 system, so I adapted it the M20 Modern plug-in to come up with a simple zombie apocalypse scenario.

M20 Pocketmods!

Irfan wanted to play a sheriff, he rolled up his three characteristics, chose a Smart Hero class (which gives him +1 to Knowledge) and took a Law Enforcement starting occupation (which gives him another +1 to Knowledge and a +1 to Physical). The game began with Irfan coming back to town from a three-day campout in the woods. He had with him a sniper rifle.

As he walked up the road to town, he spotted a car at the roadside. Upon a closer look, he noticed a figure slumped back in the seat.

 

Adventures In Time, Space and Victorian London

16 May 2010 | Hisham | | GOKL Actual Play, RPG Actual Play, Role Playing Games
 

Player sheet and sketch
On Sunday I played in Cubicle 7's Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space role-playing game. Usually Doug GMs, but Kai guest-GMed the game I was in.

Kai deliberately GMed the session rules lite and with a more freeform style which allowed for cinematic fast play.

You have Attributes and Skills which allow you to do pretty much everything with an allocated number from 0-5 or above, 5 being a something you're exceptionaly good at. To perform a task, a player rolls 2d6 + the appropriate Attribute + the appropriate Skill. You roll against a target number. The harder the task, the higher the target number.

You also have Traits, giving you some special abilities or bonuses to your rolls. Traits can be good or bad, with names that range from the simple Attractive, Brave and Charming to the more esoteric Time Traveller and Run for your Life!

If you opt to take Bad Traits, such as Clumsy, Cowardly and Phobia, you gain extra points to put into more Good Traits or into your Attributes and Skills.

Those are the basic rules.

 

Irfan's Player Character Saves The Day

01 May 2010 | Hisham | | Family Pics, Role Playing Games, RPG Actual Play, RPG Irfan Plays, Star Wars
 

Irfan played his first complete Star Wars Role-Playing Game adventure today, as everyone's favourite intrepid astromech droid Artoo-Detoo. He was awesome at figuring out solutions to simple problems that were presented in the scenario that I cooked up. He even role-played Artoo well by having in-character conversations in regular robotic beeps. 

We played on the living room carpet and I used the gamemaster (GM) screen for the first time ever, with the D6 rules and stats inserts I made. My coterie of white D6 were arrayed on the floor, while the singe red D6 served as a Wild Die. 

The scenario was designed to be short and with minimal story twists.

Shortly after the Battle of Hypori that, Artoo-Detoo, the lone player character (PC), was sent by Clone Commander Cody for a mission. Orbiting the planet, say for story's sake, Eiattu 6, Artoo's task was to be flown from the Venator-class Star Destroyer Resolute to the surface of Eiattu.

There, Artoo will need to sneak into a Separatist safehouse containing a redundant tactical computer databank and hack into it to determine the position of Count Dooku and his fleet.

Artoo faces off a B1 battle  droid

Artoo was supposed to be flown within a short distance of the safehouse in the hills, but the LAAT gunship he was in was shot by a ground-based missile. Before the gunship smashed into the landscape, I thought Irfan was going to get Artoo to attempt a controlled landing, but instead he did something I didn't count on. He jumped.

However, he failed his rocket operations roll and slammed down hard into a sand dune. Thankfully his Strength roll's Wild Die came up 6 twice! So Artoo shrugged off the damage which I attributed to sand absorbing the impact. 

Using his sensors, he tried to get a fix on the location of the hill and the safehouse. But this time his Wild Die turned up a 1. I ruled that he knows the direction of the safehouse - which is south - but he doesn't know how far it is. And it's all desert as far as he can see.

 

A Robot Rescue - Bad Example, Episode 4

23 March 2010 | Hisham | | Bad Example, GOKL Actual Play, RPG Actual Play, Role Playing Games, Star Wars
 

Bad Example of a logoLast Sunday, the GOKL gang continued the role-playing adventures of Star Wars: A Bad Example in the Spacelanes.

Two new players, Nigel of Singapore who played Bob the Wookiee, and Razzman who played Reelo Jackson the Rodian bounty hunter, joined the party as they embarked on a mission to retrieve their kidnapped crewmates, beginning with Weapon X the HK-78 assassin droid.

The previous episode can be found here.

Episode 4: Our Droid Is Not Open-Sourced

Long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...

Upon exposing a traitor Starson O'Kreem in the mobile asteroid pirate stronghold Irontooth Station, pirate lord Slaughter Maelstrom has confirmed a truce with the crew of the Bad Example. After returning to Sriluur to pick up Tickley, the crew sets off to recovered their captured droid companion Weapon X.

Using the data taken from O'Kreem's datapad, they attempt to discover Weapon X's location and soon track him to a warehouse in the Rodian district on Coruscant.

 

Pirate Politics - Bad Example, Episode 3

22 March 2010 | Hisham | | Bad Example, GOKL Actual Play, RPG Actual Play, Role Playing Games, Star Wars
 

Bad Example of a logoAbout six months ago, I ran the third Star Wars D6 game with the GOKL crew, which continued from Episode 2. But I was a bad GM then and did not take notes (mentally and on paper) of what occured. Here is a rundown of the lost Episode 3 of Star Wars: A Bad Example in the Spacelanes.

Details such as combat and NPC names were lost. New NPC names are fabricated for the purpose of continuity in the adventure and will be considered official for upcoming games.

Episode 3: Piracy, Treachery and Kidnappings

The crew of the Bad Example, Hunter Maelstrom the freighter captain, Nek'Koh'Moo'Su'May a.k.a Annie the Trianii, Ssssawar the Trandoshan chef and the clone Adenuneasily enjoyed the dinner set out for them by The Five Skulls Brigands. Weapon X, the HK-57 droid, just sat and made small talk. The pirate leader Lord Irontooth had earlier revealed himself as Slaughter Maelstrom, Hunter's brother. Sitting beside him were his two lieutenants: the suave, young Starson O'Kreem who smiled graciously at the newcomers, and the bald, older Yoat Jumpo who appeared to regard them with distrust.

 

Whatever Happened to Ahmir Sektioui?

15 March 2010 | Hisham | | Eclipse Phase, GOKL Actual Play, RPG Actual Play, Role Playing Games
 

So, in part two of the Eclipse Phase quickstart demo scenario, Ahmir discovers that his knowledge on Mars - or anywhere other than the Outer Planers, the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud - is worth zero.

Ahmir's player - me - discovers that his Gamescience dice is trying to kill him.

Tachikomaaaaa!!!
Subtext!!! Ivan's book for atmosphere

A much friendler d10
 

Early on, I took these photos of the Tachikoma figure we used to represent Ahmir after he was resleeved following the previous episode's nuke encounter. I forgot to snap more because the encounters were exciting. Action movie exciting.

Also, they were somewhat hilarious thanks to some hilariously bad dice rolls. Kinetic weapons jamming. Beam weapons overheating. Parkour attempts that were... less than stellar.  But there were some spectacular heroic acts as well, such as Zora shooting a bad guy through the neck to destroy his cortical stack embedded at his cervical vertebrae*.

We finished the adventure with a 20-kilometre radius, devastating anti-matter explosion that scooped out a whole lot of dirt - as well as deadly TITAN artifacts and bad guys' corpses - off the Martian landscape.

Thanks to Ivan the GM, Ivan the player, Keh Win and Kai for a great game. And Doug and Adrian for their input and chuckles from the peanut gallery.

* In hindsight, I believe that to shoot a person's C1 "Atlas" vertebra successfully from the front and at a high angle, you have to shoot him through the face with an AP round instead of the neck.

 

I Rolled an 99 and Lived

01 March 2010 | Hisham | | Eclipse Phase, GOKL Actual Play, RPG Actual Play, Role Playing Games
 

Sunday was gaming day with GOKL and this time Ivan ran Eclipse Phase, the science fiction role-playing game with intriguing and extensive post-singularity and transhumanist ideas. Even running through the demo scenario in the free quick-start pdf, a lot of these high concepts shone through to us newbie players of the game, making the game even a more unique experience. (To be fair, I haven't played GURPS Transhuman Space before to make a proper comparison, and the technology application in Eclipse Phase is much more high-concept than Shadowrun or Cyberpunk 2020.)

Nothing but d10s used
 

A Dwarf, An Elf and a Human Walk Into Mage Cafe

21 February 2010 | Hisham | | GOKL Actual Play, RPG Actual Play, Role Playing Games
 

This afternoon I had the pleasure of gaming at Mage Cafe with the GOKL gang. Ivan was gamemastering Warhammer Fantasty Role Playing 3rd Edition, using the introductory adventure Fantasy Flight Games put up on their website, A Day Late, A Shilling Short. Here is a close up of the dice we used: red Reckless dice, green Conservative dice, white Fortune dice and black Misfortune dice. The Characteristic dice and the Expertise dice and the Challenge dice (blue, yellow and purple respectively) are located just away from the camera's POV:

Funky dice with no numbers, but they work

You roll the Dice Pool based on your character's stats and tally them up. Some dice cancel other dice out, like Fudge dice. Then you determine the outcome with the remaining dice.

 

Hunting Pirates - Bad Example, Episode 2 Part 2

03 June 2009 | Hisham | | Bad Example, GOKL Actual Play, RPG Actual Play, Role Playing Games, Star Wars
 

Episode 2: Crab Meat Beach Party

IV

Continued from Part 1A lone vanx

Ever the diplomat and unable to shoot from the back of the column, Hunter climbed up the nearest tree to get a clear shot as well as yell, "Don't shoot! It might be friendly." Annie brandished her talons and attempted to perform an acrobatic leap over Weapon-X and Ssssawar to get to Aden. Unfortunately, she slipped and fell facedown in the dirt.

Weapon-X was still trying to bear his blaster rifle on the creature, but Aden's military skills prevailed. His DC-15 rifle was up and he fired, but the bolt slightly grazed the side of the creature's head.

 

Shooting Zebras - Bad Example, Episode 2 Part 1

02 June 2009 | Hisham | | Bad Example, GOKL Actual Play, RPG Actual Play, Role Playing Games, Star Wars
 

Bad Example In The SpacelanesI ran the second episode of Star Wars: A Bad Example In The Spacelanes last weekend with the GOKL crew. Without Adrian, Tickley the Jawa Jedi would be relegated to behind-the-scenes NPC while the rest of the crew did their thing.

In Bad Example In The Spacelanes Episode 1: Pilot, Or Lack Thereof, some stuff happened which you can read here.

Here follows the story of the game that was ran:

Episode 2: Crab Meat Beach Party

Long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...

The shipping line to the mining community of Port Barrow on the planet Sriluur was under constant raid from pirates. Because Port Barrow was being developed and industrialized by the outlander human Tam Gromer, it was relatively shunned by the rest of the planet. However, after the arrival of the crew of the yacht Bad Example, three pirate YT-1760 freighters had been taken out of commission. Two had been captured and one destroyed.

Fearing a retaliation from the Five Skulls Pirates, the crew of the Bad Example planned take down the pirates at their base.

I

The drum-beat strains of the night remain in the rhythm of the newborn day. The captured pirate YT-1760, still stinking of garbage, and the battered Luxury 3000 yacht Bad Example sat side-by-side upon Port Barrow's landing field. Several kilometres into the city a column of smoke drifted upwards from the town's junk yard since the previous afternoon where the other YT-1760 crashed. The junk yard owners had been celebrating all night for their glorious bounty that had literally fallen from of the sky.

 

A Bad Example In The Spacelanes, Part 2

05 May 2009 | Hisham | | Bad Example, GOKL Actual Play, RPG Actual Play, Role Playing Games, Star Wars
 

Continuing the adventures of the crew of the Bad Example on Sriluur...

III

Meanwhile, Aden, Ssssawar and Annie crossed a bridge over the river that led to the waterfall only several metres due west. Their destination, Spacer's Bistro, was on the other side of the river. Port Barrow had the expected large percentage of Weequay population in the streets, they saw. But there were also other species, including humans, several Rodians here, a few Duros over there. The Bistro was a domed building overlooking the cliff. There was a large window pane which allowed for spectacular view of the canyon and other mountains in the range.

It was still early, so there were not many patrons in the Bistro. A green and black clad human was drinking alone in a table. There was a Weequay passed out, presumably drunk at another table. A Rodian was at a table near the window downing shots of some kind of drink. The crewmates were largely ignored by the bartender who continued cleaning his glasses without skipping a beat when they walked through the door.

 

A Bad Example In The Spacelanes, Part 1

04 May 2009 | Hisham | | Bad Example, GOKL Actual Play, RPG Actual Play, Role Playing Games, Star Wars
 

This will be the title card on our movie adaptation! Last Sunday I ran my first face-to-face, over-the-table Star Wars RPG game since 1999, with the GoKL crew. It was a tramp freighter campaign, set in the Rebellion Era, using classic D6 rules. I was quite anxious about it seeing it's been a while since I was in practice - discounting the IRC chat-based Sabredart and Chronicles of the Wild Gundark campaigns I had several years ago.

There were seven of us. I was gamemaster and there were six players. We rolled 6-sided dice to detemine the outcome of our actions, and the players decided what to do based on the scenarios and encounters I described to them over the game. It was fantastic collaborative storytelling.

Ultimately, this was the story that came out at the end of the game:

Episode 1: Pilot, or Lack Thereof

Long time ago in a galaxy far, far away... the galaxy is in turmoil. An Empire tightens its iron grip upon a million worlds. A rebellion arises to topple the corrupt government. But for quadrillions of beings, life goes on as usual. Demand exists. Supply is required.

With their cargo of machine parts, the crew of the Bad Example, a converted star yacht, arrives at its destination: The planet Sriluur and the township of Port Barrow.

 

Chronicles of the Wild Gundark Part III

02 January 2006 | Hisham | | RPG Actual Play, Role Playing Games, Star Wars, Wild Gundark
 

Concluding the saga of the Wild Gundark crew:

Quickly, the person on the other side of the comm told Nisa to meet them in Landing Bay 239 back at Medeus. “We'll be waiting there at noon local time tomorrow.”

Then the Fifth House woman cut off the transmission abruptly.

The confused N4 remarked, “Could someone please explain the situation to me? Who is this 'Duke' and who was that organic who ceased functioning outside the ship just now?”

Ignoring the newcomer droid, the worried Groo asked, “You think that communiqué was really bad for our health?”

A grinning Similiv replied, “Probably, Greenskin... but we wouldn't want our lives to be boring now would we?”

Finally after much contemplation, Nisa grimly said, “OK! We have a meet, but get ready for anything this time. We have about 12 hours till the meet, and I want to be alive for it.”

And now the conclusion:

Chronicles of the Wild Gundark

The world was known as Daver Kuat, third planet from its sun, a standard terrestrial life-bearing world. Unlike its sister world Kuat, which was a great big mess of thousands of ships surrounding it, orbital traffic here was light. On the farthest side of the planet from the sun, there was an island. Upon the island was a mountain. At the side of the mountain, there was a cave, spewing fiery smoke from it. Right outside the cave on flat ground was a YZ-900 light freighter. Six beings within this ship were considering their next move, now that the passenger who promised to pay them for passage had disappeared.

And they seemed to be right smack in the middle of the local politics of the Noble Houses of Kuat, which was known to be pretty deadly.

 

Chronicles of the Wild Gundark Part II

18 November 2005 | Hisham | | RPG Actual Play, Role Playing Games, Star Wars, Wild Gundark
 

Continuing the saga of the Wild Gundark crew:

Chronicles of the Wild Gundark


Nisa pulled on her control yoke and told her passenger (and her wary crew), "Let's get to work." Similiv turned to the comm board as the ship's nose turned the way Nisa directed it.

And she discovered that a colossal object blocked her entire forward viewport. Something gray. Something wedged shaped. Something over a kilometer and a half in length. Something ominous.

It seemed to them that the ship's cabin temperature dropped several dozen degrees.

"An Imperial Star Destroyer!"

And now the continuation of the story based on the Star Wars RPG campaign:

 

Chronicles of the Wild Gundark Part I

25 October 2005 | Hisham | | RPG Actual Play, Role Playing Games, Star Wars, Wild Gundark
 
Chronicles of the Wild Gundark

A Star Wars fiction, based on the Chronicles of Wild Gundark RPG campaign.

It all began when the crew of the Wild Gundark was commissioned to deliver twenty tons of bantha milk to the backwater town of Prosperity on the cold tundra of the planet Dellalt. The job went without a hitch, apart from the little tussle with the crew of an Imperial customs corvette (the two-pronged, sleek affair that many tramp freighter captains love to hate) in the Vaxal system. Unfortunately, the result of the little encounter was the spillage of approximately half of the delicious blue milk because of gravity plate failure. Things could have turned out real bad for them, but instead their contact, a imposing and tattooed Herglic named Dapp only paid them fairly in half and left peacefully.

There was only one thing known to them as they left Dellalt: They had taken on a passenger, Tell Sabarin, a stately and noble-looking person, who paid them a huge sum of twenty thousand credits to convey himself and his cargo, a cryogenic bio-containment crate, all the way to his homeworld of Kuat in the Core Worlds.

***

But there were two things unbeknown to them.

One: While they were away from the ship bargaining with Sabarin for the transportation fee in town, a shadowy figure slipped quietly into their ship followed by a shuffling metallic figure. Five minutes later, the shadowy figure slipped out alone and disappeared.

Two: A few minutes later, two more shadowy figures sneaked onto their ship.

And never came back out.

***