Transitory States
Edward:
David S Leyman:
Hisham:
Luke:
James Kight:
king:
Hisham and Sila has been writing stuff down on this weblog since 2005. Sometimes they post photos of family, sometimes they talk about film, books and music, sometimes there is artwork and stuff about tabletop gaming.
What sort of enemies can you populate your BareBones Covert Ops campaign? What would you model your enemy organisation on? SPECTRE? SMERSH? HYDRA? Cobra? Here's a visual example of enemies you can employ to hinder your heroes in your game.
For International TableTop Day, I thought I'd run another a continuation of BareBones Fantasy RPG campaign for Irfan. Thus, Irfan's Jake Hastur the halfling wizard and my GM-run NPC Finn Riverwyld the warrior-scholar go once more unto the breach in the city of Kingsbridge in the Keranak Kingdoms.
The game began at approximately 1000 hours local time on Saturday morning (+8 hours UTC) and we stopped for lunch at 1200 hours. We thought we could continue later at night, maybe after dinner, but it was not meant to be. We will continue tomorrow.
BareBones Fantasy uses the d00 percentile system, with percentile Ability and Skill rolls, while damages are sum of d10 rolls.
Before we began, Finn bought a new longsword. Jake desired a spear, so Finn gave him his own which he had not enough Warrior (melee) skill to wield properly. Irfan spent his Development Points to bring Jake's Strength from 45 up to 50 so he can use his spear effectively and without any Strength penalty.
The story began with the duo being summoned to the House of Duchess Lyla Keranak at the swanky part of Kingsbridge. The Duchess would pay them 250 gold pieces each (100 in advance) to search for her missing younger brother, the House's captain of the guard Kane Keranak. They are to return Kane back to the House, or if he was dead bring his ring back to her. He was last seen going on an unknown quest to the Isle of Netharak, which Duchess Lyla pointed out to them on the map. When they reach the island, they are to report to a Mr. Bonewall in the fishing village of Dronak, who will report of their arrival to the Duchess via a message hawk, and let them know where Kane Keranak journeyed off to.
After paying the stable 2 gold pieces for taking care of Jack the horse, they both rode for a day westward to the foothills of the mountain range know as the Shielding Wall. Finn's successful Scholar roll revealed that the mining town of Hammerclash was nearby.
Adik is now 15 months old! One and a quarter years old! Since I'm always late with the entries and happily backdating it, I wonder if I should even mention that anymore. Ah well. 
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If you hadn't noticed, the gallery on this site had been out of commission for many, many months. Any links to it, such as the one at the top of the left column of this blog's index page, points to the DeviantArt gallery instead. It died because of my monkeying around with the v2.0 gallery's Coppermine CMS.
I have now rebuilt the gallery using Zenphoto, and have spent all last night and this morning populating gallery. I've also ensured that there are links to released products.
It's not nearly finished. There are some more customers' gallery to set up and populate. Click here to check it out!
What's v1.0 gallery, you ask? It was the one before the Coppermine gallery, which was made from HTML files that I wrote. I remember at the time being sad I did not have any artwork I could post that anyone paid me to draw. I've been moderately busy since, and so I am very grateful that most of the work in v3.0 are all paid work.
Derf requested a pair of Snivvian lovers for his Star Wars RPG campaign. He plays a Snivvian student on Coruscant who has a long-distance relationship with a holodrama scenist back on Cadomai. Painted in monochome digitally with MyPaint, and coloured using GIMP 2.8.
Click here to check out the image (as well as Ryan's "DAWWWW") on DeviantArt.
Here are more interior artwork for DwD Studios's upcoming BareBones Covert Ops RPG. Covert Ops allow players to be part of a crack covert team of agents - military or civilians - and do a bunch of spy stuff. For research, I saw some 007 movies, Mission: Impossible movies, Person of Interest (for the civilian black ops angle) and Archer ("Well there's false flags, dead drops, drop outs, cut outs, active doubles, passive doubles, dangled moles. The often under appreciated honeypot. One of my favorites.") It also helped that I am in the midst of playing a Night's Black Agents campaign. Later, I also realised that Fast Five is a great heist movie that shows player characters as primarily wheel artists.
This batch of art shows activities you can do in the game, such as baking a cake, having a stroll, mowing the lawn, getting a mortgage for your secret island base:
Defeat a tank with a knife:
Get your doctor mad at you for not adhering to your prescribed diet:
Ride on a train:
Yaya is now four months away from her first half decade! 56 months now! Where did all that time go?
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This is not a full actual play report of the recent Night's Black Agents session gamemastered by Kai, but it highlights one of the reasons why I roleplay. One of the many descriptions of a tabletop RPG is a cooperative storytelling game where the gamemaster (GM) sets up a story and referees in-story conflicts and their outcomes. At the same time, players act accordingly as characters in that story and also provide foil for the GM to feed information and story points back at the players in a dramatically satisfactory way, if possible.
In a way, we are reading a spy novel or watching a spy movie as we are developing it together.
Here's what happened which involved me playing the Bosnian wheel artist Zlatan Kljujic:
Here's what happened beforehand during the first three game sessions of the "Eurovision Song Contest Job":
Sami Härkönen obtained two borzoi hounds which he trained and renamed Abraham Van Helsing and Abraham Lincoln.
The agents received information from Rose of the Camon Gang that they'd found a relative of Vin, their Romany hitter who displayed vampiric characteristics. This cousin is one Milla Cesarescu, a singer for a Romany punk band Half Kingdom who would be participating in Eurovision Song Contest 2013 in Malmö. Milla had publicly announced that she was going to unmask racist elements in the Swedish government and upon arriving at Malmö, Jacob, Sami, Abraham van Helsing discovered that a white supremacist terror group had targeted her.
Meanwhile Misha, Abraham Lincoln and a new addition to the company, the cleaner and medical examiner David Verdasco who stayed back in London to monitor the remnants of the Camon Gang witnessed the slaughter of Gary Camon and his men by an unknown group who displayed superhuman strength. The gang's terrified survivors, Rose and Mister Grey, joined up with the agents, informed them that Vin had been taken and wanted their help to leave the country.
Back in Sweden, while Jacob and his media contact Ebba Östberg investigated Milla, discovering that one of the terrorists named Mikko Mikkel-Mikkelsen displayed superhuman strength and limited mind control abilities. Sami and Abraham van Helsing shadowed Mikko while gaining a shadow themselves, one Snorre Dahlquist, a special agent for the Swedish Ministry of Health. Thanks to Sami, Snorre - who had also been investigating the terrorists as well - became an ally.
As Misha and David smuggled Grey and Rose out of England, Snorre, Sami and Zlatan tracked Mikko to a cottage in the woods near Nybro. In the cellar, viewed with a endoscope, Zlatan discovered Nova Lind, the aging mentor of Half Kingdom who disappeared some years ago, strapped to a chair being drained of blood, which is used to give the terrorists the superhuman strength.
Zlatan of course had made his mind up what these creatures are.
So it started snowing the evening of March 5, 2013, and we ended up getting a significant amount (about 5 inches accumulation), and it stuck around for a few days before temperatures rose and everything melted. I, of course, cursed like the dickens, but Yaya was ecstatic and thoroughly enjoyed the snow. She finally got to go out and build a snowman! The other snowfalls this winter had either been too powdery to make snowmen, or too little snow had accumulated for proper snowman building, or we left town before Yaya could build one.
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Issyka is The Secret DM's fantasy setting for a Play-by-Post game engine. Artwork commission for Issyka? Here you go:
There is a hint of planetary romance with swapped gender tropes. Also, who is actually afraid of who in the drawing? The humans or the Illadon? Watch this space for more announcements on Issyka.
This is the second of two blog posts featuring location artwork of cities and prefectures on the planet Westward, where human colonists have been marooned for centuries with only an exotic steam-powered technology to run their machines. Over the years, new politics, allegiances and social dynamics have driven the inhabitants of Westward.
How would you play characters in an alien western steampunk setting?
Look out for the Westward RPG to be released soon!
There's even a sideslicer on the hillside beneath Fort Gowchain there. Click here to see part one of two.
More Westward RPG artwork were commissioned by Wicked North Games, and for this batch they have ordered location artwork of various cities and prefectures on Westward. Here is the first of two posts of the locations on the (mostly) dry and arid planet of Westward!
What adventures can players experience at these places? Check out Westward RPG to be released mid-year by Wicked North Games.
The hardworking guys over at DwD Studios are developing their own espionage, counter-intelligence and paramilitary game using its BareBones roleplaying system.
Here are the artwork for archetypes that can be used either as PCs or NPCs right out of the box. Each and any of these characters can be found in tactical situations requiring them to use their wits as well as their gear to survive and complete their missions.
And here it is not even a third of the way through March and Adik's 14 month entry is here! As always, thanks to the gods of backdated entries!
Adik has at least seven teeth, possibly eight (although the eighth is unconfirmed at this point).
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I gave an interview to Tristan Tarwater of Epic Level Artistry at the Troll in the Corner site.
Here is an excerpt:
Do you find yourself more drawn to drawing locations or people? Do you have them fleshed out before you bring pencil to paper (to use an old idiom) or do the ideas and the image kind of grow side by side?
Thanks to a lot of practice, I’ve done a lot of characters, but I also do a lot of creatures, gear, vehicles, robots as well as scenes. Sometimes I plan it out. Sometimes it just comes to life on paper – or screen – naturally without a lot of thought. More so of the latter when there’s capybara blood mixed with kumquat juice.
Here is part of a large panoramic artwork I made for Kallisti Press's The Vicious Crucible of the Villa Argentate RPG. A bunch of other stuff is occuring in this walled city where the river divides it into the unbelievably rich section, the working class section and the dirt poor section. Meanwhile, an army is camped outside its walls.
You can download for free the first Vicious Crucible game entitled The Vicious Crucible of Verdigris Valley here! (A thumbnail link can be found in the left column under "Complete Tabletop Games".)
And so Yaya is now 55 months old. Five more months before her first half decade!
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I've already run Star Wars Edge of the Empire RPG Beginner Game adventure for Irfan, so now I would see how it would fare with half a dozen experienced tabletop RPGers, namely the guys at GOKL.
From the available pregenerated characters in the adventure Escape from Mos Shuuta, Ivan played 41-VEX as a manumitted medical droid, Razzman played the Twi'lek bounty hunter Oskara, Macx played the Wookiee hired gun Lowhhrick and Doug tweaked Pash the smuggler into Nora Romanova. Darren and Kai jury-rig a character generation using the Beta rule notes found online and became, respectively, Qillian Ryn the Triannii assassin and Darter Kel the Zeltron scout and bush pilot. I might have screwed up the chargen a bit because of lack of complete rules.
The adventure's encounters are designed so GMs and players get the hang of the system. For example, the first encounter teaches us about options on hiding in a cantina. The second encounter takes us through combat with a drift of Gamorreans. The third forces players to interact with NPCs to acquire a gear important to the story.
However, GOKL players being GOKL players, things blew up and died in encounter one.
Nora, Oskara, Lowhhrick, 41-VEX and Qillian had crossed the local crime lord Teemo the Hutt, and Teemo's band of cudgel-bearing Gamorreans were now combing Mos Shuuta for them. The group ducked into the Devaronian's cantina to look for the pilot they hired beforehand, namely Darter, just before Gamorreans spotted them and chased in after them.
Oskara flipped a table. Nora jumped over the bar. Qillian slipped his knuckledusters on and crept into the shadows by the doorway. VEX orders a drink - a pitcher of motor oil. Darter, following the band of newcomers' example bounded to the dance stage where the Twi'lek dancer was dancing by a pole. He immediately tried to charm the pants off her.
As the pig guard burst in, the person with the keenest eye, fastest reflexes and swiftest hand moved first. It was VEX. He cooly downed his drink much to the bartender's slack-jawed surprise. However, the guards saw Oskara who was already behind the flipped table with her blaster rifle ready. She had the advantage and blew a hole in the lead Gamorrean. From the stage, Darter wriggled his butt, reached into his tight pants and a dart gun appeared was in his previously-bare hands. He took a firing stance and shot a dart at another Gamorrean, which sadly bounced off his thick bacon-smelling hide. Nora popped up from behind the bar and fire a wounding shot into his shoulder while Qillian snuck up from behind the Gamorreans and punched one with his knuckleduster, dazing the pig guard. All had fallen but one, who turned to the one who had shot him: Nora. But then VEX drew his blaster, spun and fired. The last thug fell.
Nora introduced Darter, their new pilot, to the group and the horrified Devaronian bartender yelled at them to get out of his bar. Darter explained that he too was in Teemo's bad books for seducing Teemo's daughter. The others would have lost their lunches at his story if they had eaten something for lunch.
When Irfan showed me this clay creature he created, I thought I'd take a photo of it and make up some stats for it.
Slugshark, Amphibious reptilian predator
Scale: Character
Length: 150-200cm.
DEXTERITY 2D
Brawl 3D+2
Constrict 3D+1
PERCEPTION 2D+1
Sneak (only when swimming) 4D
STRENGTH 2D
Swimming 4D+2
Special:
Bite attack damage: 3D
Constrict damage: 1D increments per round (Round 1: 1D, round 2: 2D, etc)
Horn attack damage: Strength+1
Move: 10 (swim) / 8 (slither)
Slugshark [Minion]
Brawn 2
Agility 2
Cunning 1
Intellect 1
Presence 1
Willpower 1
Skill: Brawl 1, Coordination 1, Stealth 1
Talents: None
Soak/Defense: 1/1
Threshold: Wound 12
Abilities: Difficulty to see swimming slugshark Hard (♦ ♦ ♦ )
Silhouette: 1
Equipment:
Horns (Brawl, Damage 4, Crit 4, Range [Engaged])
Teeth (Brawl, Damage 5, Crit 4, Range [Engaged])
Constrict (Coordination, Damage 1 and +1 every round thereafter, Crit 3, Range [Engaged])
Oh hey, my first Edge of the Empire stats.
