Last night, Doug came over to run a game for Irfan and I before he had to move, and it would be more difficult to meet up at nights regularly. We played Golden Sky Stories for the first time. Set in rural Japanese township (not unlike a films like Tonari No Totoro) Golden Sky Stories is a tabletop roleplaying game where players take the role of magical animals called henge who are able to change into human form. It’s a great game to be played with children because there’s not a single iota of violence, or situations that put the player characters in dire peril. It’s all to do with making friends with other henge or little children in a small township in a rural Japanese countryside. In fact, if you can grasp the situations in Tonari no Totoro where characters experience wonder and express their likes and dislike in […]
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Mini-Six at the workplace
Actual play reports of at most two continuing RPG sessions. But most likely, a report of a single, stand alone game. Some of these are sessions that belonged in longer campaigns in which I did not participate as a regular player.
Warbirds RPG: East or West, Bombs are Best
I played for the first time in GOKL’s still-new Warbirds RPG campaign yesterday. Warbirds is a dieselpunk role-playing game where players are mercenary pilots who fly alternate-universe versions of circa-1940 combat fighters among the Caribbean Islands. But this version of the Caribbean Islands – including the parts of the Yucatan and Florida – were enveloped by a strange devastating storm in 1807. When the storm abated, the islands found themselves floating in mid-air over a sea of murky clouds. At night, the stars are different than the ones the survivors are used to on Earth. The world was called Azure. After more than a century, the islands have formed new nations and new alliances. Using local exotic material known as floatstones, hovering ships were created as vehicles to travel between the islands. A mercenary group known as the Esteemed Guild of Combat Aviators was formed to fight to gain fortune among […]
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Robotech RPG: The Sinkhole Situation
Irfan began a playing a new game today: Palladium’s Robotech RPG. Sila had a copy back in our teenage years. I played less than her friends and her did because I was away from home for most of the time. We were totally into Robotech. Sila taped every episode for me to watch when I’m back from boarding school. We bought and read as many of the Jack McKinney novelizations as we could. And 25 years later Irfan is now playing it. I’m running it. I admit I was curious to see how the system feels like when I’m now 40 years old. He rolled up an RDF Veritech pilot named John Barnes. Actual play report follows: January 7, 2009 RDF Nouakchott Base Flight officer Barnes was an F-22 fighter pilot, assigned to the Robotech Defense Force base outside Nouakchott, the capital city of Mauritania. His usual missions were flying patrol […]
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Doctor Who AITAS: The Flames of Salem
Doug ran a great Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space RPG session just in time for Halloween! Continuing the previous session Feet of Flesh, Feet of Steel! After discovering that the blue box that the Doctor and Cindy brought them into was bigger on the inside, Max Fox the amnesiac robot engineer from the year 3027 and Doctor Olujimi the Kenyan country doctor from 1975 were ready to leave the planet Klaris. At the control room, the Doctor – looking bewildered – asked if they smelled something cooking. Max and Olujimi did. They followed the Doctor who ran through a doorway that brought them even deeper into the TARDIS. Ultimately, they halted in a room full of pipes. There was a heavily-built man, blonde and barrel-chested with thick arms wearing a grimy apron and a chef’s hat. He was frying a kipper while singing The Turkish Song of the […]
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Doctor Who AITAS: Feet of Flesh, Feet of Steel
Doug GMed Cubicle 7‘s Doctor Who Adventures in Time and Space RPG for Irfan and I for the first time and it was an enjoyable night. For Irfan this was the first time someone other than me was the gamemaster. We played Fox and Olujimi just as they were stranded on the planet Klaris in the far future after hunting and failing to detain the big game hunter Breybrooke who was driven insane, corrupted by alien technology he had unearthed in Kenya in the year 1977. Episode 01 Klaris The game began as the duo was dining with their impromptu host Hermis, a Klarisian who served them haphis, a floating and slowly-spinning ball of edible mass that replenished itself as it was being scooped by cutlery. Olujimi thought it would taste more like cheese but it did not. Fox just ate away in silence. Stranded on Klaris City guards knocked […]
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Savage Worlds: Weekend Warriors Playtest
Jerry Blakemore came over to the house all the way from Texas to playtest 12 to Midnight‘s new Savage Worlds game Weekend Warriors! (Not really, he was on vacation, and I just happened to be in his path.) Although I’ve bought the Savage Worlds Explorer Edition from Amazon.com seven thousand years ago, I’ve never had the opportunity to run or play any games with it. So, this was my first time rolling dice for Savage Worlds. After picking Jerry up at his hotel, we then headed back to Pandan Indah to Irfan’s school extraction. Then, we had lunch at Galaxy Ampang where many different types of nasi goreng died for us. In the meantime, we regaled each other with a myriad of gaming war stories. And then it’s off to the dinner table at home for some gaming. The scenario is titled New Year’s Day. It’s close to midnight on […]
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Trail of Cthulhu: The Watchers In The Sky
And so it came to pass Kai attempted to run Trail of Cthulhu role-playing game which he bought at DriveThruRPG. For a demo run, he also purchased The Watchers In the Sky scenario. All he needed were volunteers to run through the scenario who would sacrifice their sanity for the game. There emerged seven ill-fated volunteers. The Troublesome and Terrible Trail Trail of Cthulhu allows player to create characters that investigate mysteries that is usually caused by Things Man Was Not To Be Known, based on the horror stories by H.P. Lovecraft set in the 1930s. Cults that worship unspeakable horrors from ancient past hide under the thin veneer of civilisation. Also, creatures with unholy and incomprehensible minds beset the earth from the space beyond, working strange designs and experiments that might signal the end of humanity. Your characters are compelled to investigate to uncover the truth behind strange happenings […]
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SWD6: The Rancid Putrefaction of a Cosmic Caterwauling Cabal
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 […]
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The Zombie Apocalypse with Microlite20
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. 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 camp-out 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. It was a corpse, dead for perhaps a day or two. […]
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Irfan’s Player Character Saves The Day
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 […]
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Whatever Happened to Ahmir Sektioui?
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. 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 […]
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I Rolled an 99 and Lived
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.) An “eclipse phase” is the period of time between when a cell is infected by a virus and when a virus appears in a cell and transforms it. During this period the cell does not appear to be infected, but it is. The Eclipse Phase world is set in a future where advanced technologies exist that would awe you […]
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A Dwarf, An Elf and a Human Walk Into Mage Cafe
This afternoon I had the pleasure of gaming at Mage Cafe with the GOKL gang. Ivan was gamemastering Warhammer Fantasy 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: 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. Here’s my player character, Birgitta Tageslicht, the Roadwarden chick whose father was recently slain by beastmen in the woods. I played this woman as one who’s reckless into battle […]
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