Star Trek Adventures Phaser to a Singularity Fight This Sunday afternoon, I thought we would just test out Star Trek Adventures. I did not even prepare a scenario. I started with the first encounter and it just snowballed onward from there. And yes, I just saw “The Enemy” several days earlier. In Medias Res Commander Lenaris Los, a Bajoran and an executive officer of Starfleet. (We never did decide which starship he was an XO of.) Commander Lenaris was in the midst of investigating the tunnels of a deserted asteroid station when he came upon a locked door. (Rolling Control+Engineering,) the good commander was able to unlock the door. It whooshed open, revealing something unexpected within: a Romulan Centurion – pointed ears and all. The startled Centurion went for the disruptor pistol on his belt, but (with a successful Daring+Security while securing a couple of Momentum for later used) Lenaris […]
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25 Years of Star Wars RPG (2014)
Every tabletop RPG blog post ever written and published on this blog. Some RPG actual play reports, some RPG thoughts, some RPG artwork.
Note: All posts herein are arrayed latest first and earliest last.
And A Dice Tray Too
Yesterday, another package came in the mail all the way from China. It was the order for my first ever dice tray. Before the days of Lazada, the cheapest dice tray (only found on Etsy) would set me back for hundreds of Malaysian Ringgits (MYR). This one cost me just under MYR20. No fancy designs, but affordable. Here are photos the item in question: Now perhaps dice would not bounce off tables and disappear under the surrounding furniture.
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TeeKay-421 Comp Copy
Today I received a pair of complementary copies of a magazine. Issue 89 of Teekay-421, the official Belgian Star Wars fan club magazine, sports my cover art of Sabine Wren rolling some dice in front of a faux-Edge of the Empire gamemaster screen! The magazine itself is fully printed in Belgian Dutch, so I am unable to read it. Even so, it does look like it has a lot of great features that I would enjoy reading. The theme of the issue is Mandalorians, so the magazine features write-ups of Mandalorians in canon and Legends; even their vehicles and in-universe art! Of course The Mandalorian TV series starring Pedro Pascal and run by Jon Favreau is featured prominently. Someday I might even write about the show on this blog. There are reviews of the latest Star Wars novels, books, comics and games throughout the magazine, making it an important resource […]
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ART: Cyndril Critters
Here’s another round of artwork commissioned for The Secret DM, who is developing the setting known as Cyndril. Here follows two creatures from the milieux: a skywhale, with a bunch of whalers hanging on to it for dear life, as the the whale flies through a crimson storm; and a sapient caterpillar species that might have a connection to the Illadons of Issyka.
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Risus RPG: Perchance To Dream
Risus RPG One Shot Perchance to Dream This was a Risus the Anything one-shot game that I ran for my Master’s Degree supervisor Prof Harshita and my colleague Asha who was along for the fun of it all. I thought Risus would be a great way to introduce them to RPGs as a language learning tool because of the versatility of the Risus’ clichés. It went smoothly, and I can see how the characters could develop new clichés as the story went on. Dramatis Personae General Desi – a retired military general Ms. Bong – a rich entrepreneur The retired General Desi and entrepreneur Ms. Bong were travelling through the tall grass and rolling fields of the land they called New Perlis. Desi needed a walking stick as at her old age she was Easily Tired (1). Above them, two suns blazed in a cloudless noon sky. The land rose […]
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TeeKay-421 Cover Art
Yesterday, TeeKay-421 the official Belgian Star Wars fan club magazine revealed their cover for their upcoming issue 89. The cover was illustrated by me. Check it out below: The theme was Mandalorians. I could draw a number of famous Mandalorians played by Ray Stevenson or Jon Favreau or Katee Sackoff or Pedro Pascal. Then I thought Tiya Sircar missed out on playing Edge of the Empire with her castmates on GEGG Wars. I decided to have Sabine Wren roll some Fantasy Flight Games dice with a custom GM screen for the cover of issue 89. The original tweet is displayed below: Preview: TeeKay-421 Magazine 89 @TeeKay421be ! Art by @hishgraphics 🙂 pic.twitter.com/KpH4iYFtwq — Sompeetalay (@Sompeetalay) August 2, 2019
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A Podcast Guest at RPGA Film Studies
Yesterday, Kalum from The Rolistes Podcast released an episode of RPGA Film Studies. Kalum’s guests this episode were Senda Linaugh of She’s A Super Geek Podcast and I! We discuss The NeverEnding Story, the 1984 film directed by Wolfgang Petersen. After talking (and laughing) about the movie, we also discuss RPG systems that would be perfect to adapt for The NeverEnding Story. Finally we also exchange stories and tips on how to run RPG sessions for little kids. I also talk a bit about running games for Irfan. Click on the image below to go to the episode podcast. The episode length is 1:06:03. Note: The episode was recorded months and months before Stranger Things season 3 made this the talk of the town again.
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Star Trek Adventures RPG
Once upon a time I had a couple of Star Trek RPG books published by FASA. They were both destroyed by termites. They were the Federation Sourcebook I got from The Mind Shop maybe 25 years ago, and the Star Trek The Next Generation First Season Sourcebook. Since then, the Star Trek RPG licence had moved on from FASA to Last Unicorn Games to Decipher and currently it is with Modiphius. Earlier, the core rulebook for Star Trek Adventures arrived by mail, presumably because their transporters were malfunctioning. The book is fully painted. Like the Expanse RPG, there is not one frame from any of the live action media. No complaints from me because the artwork is well-illustrated throughout the book. The inner covers, first and final page of the book is a four-page map of the Alpha and the Beta quadrant. The image above shows only a small part […]
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The Expanse RPG
Something which I have never talked about in the last four years or so is my love for The Expanse novels by James S.A. Corey which I first read even before I left the city. Afterwards, the novels were adapted into a television series. From the articles I read, The Expanse also used to be a play-by-post (PbP) role-playing game (RPG) setting which was played using the d20 Modern rules back in the day by one of the two authors that make up James S.A. Corey. They have come to a full circle, as it were, and the setting has been converted into an official RPG product by Green Ronin, using their AGE System. The rulebook arrived from Book Depository yesterday. It is gorgeous. The book allows gamemasters (GMs) and players to run a game set between the first novel (Leviathan’s Wake) and the second (Caliban’s War) in the 23rd […]
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ART: Bonespur Glacier
Back in 2014, I made these artwork for a charity project in the tabletop RPG community: Double Feature Charity Module: Erik Jensen’s Bonespur Glacier and Jason Paul McCartan’s The Tomb of Bashyr. It was published by InfiniBadger Press.The two adventures in the book was designed to be used with OSRIC rules, but with modification, it can be played with any old school D&D edition. I helped draw some art for Bonespur Glacier that took place in the ice. Five of them can be found below. Click here to grab it from DriveThruRPG.
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Star Wars RPG 30 Year Anniversary
Five years ago I wrote this article. Today, it’s time for a new anniversary image based on the game session I ran yesterday. Note: Although the upper image above was taken in 1989 it was not of our first game. I believe it was of the session in the same campaign entitled “The Yesterday Man” which some day I will write about.
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SWD6: Community Rejuvenation Jailbreak
Episode 01 Community Rejuvenation Jailbreak Last night, I ran my 30th anniversary Star Wars RPG session, as in April 2019 is the 30 years to the month (can’t remember the date) of the first time I GMed my first game. I think. I don’t really recall the date. According to the note Atok wrote on the book, I received in late April. 30 years ago, after reading the rules, I corralled my first player: Sila. We played a simple scenario then, set on a space station orbiting Mon Calamari 30 years later, she returned to play via Skype whilst living on another continent. Also attending was Irfan (who’s been playing for some years now) and Alya (who’s playing for the first time). At this point little Rafe was an observer when he was in the vicinity. We began a brand new campaign, which we hoped would continue over time… Dramatis […]
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Aliens Without Number
I met the acquaintance of one Nik May in my time on Google Plus. Recently he commissioned me to draw three alien species for his Stars Without Number role-playing game campaign. Here are the three creatures for your viewing pleasure, made with Krita and cleaned up in GIMP:
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ART: Skip Junkies Meat Runners
Last couple of months I was commissioned to create several artwork for Chris Mennell’s science fiction role-playing game project Skip Junkies Meat Runners. Here are three of the illustrations I produced:
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DnD: Five Sessions in Five Classes
Another first for me this entire week is the fact that I ran RPG sessions for every one of my English classes, using Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition. The students used Level 2 pre-generated characters downloaded from the DnD official site. I wish I was able to plan for more weeks, using the game to improve their speaking and writing skills, but c’est la vie. Here are capsule actual play write ups for each session that I ran. The names and details of the characters in each session can be read in the accompanying photos. The theme of the week was Arts and Culture. NOTE: The students who wrote these play reports speak nor write English as a first language. They did the best they could in light of other more pressing courses and assignments. Grammatical and spelling errors have been left in the text for research purposes, so do […]
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Posthuman Pals
POSTHUMAN PALS RPG IDEA This article was first written and published on my Google Plus account on Jan 27, 2012. Once upon a time, humans flourished on this planet Earth. They found newer and faster ways of doing things and moving information around. They developed not only computers, but computers that could think, speak, communicate and observe like a human. They developed ways of duplicating an individual human’s memories and thought patterns and transfer them into machines, as well as transferring artificial intelligence entities into cloned human bodies. For many centuries, humans and machines lived together peacefully. Then one day, for some now-forgotten reason, humans and machines began to believe themselves superior to the other and a war broke out, beginning with the deaths of organic minds in machine bodies and machine minds in organic bodies. Then they started tossing nukes at each other. Billions died every night. Some servers […]
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