Today I realized that I hadn't typed up my builds of ghouls and super mutants (from the Fallout series) for Savage Worlds Deluxe. Since the original index card I wrote it on is currently missing in action, I'll do my best to recreate them here.
Showing posts with label Savage Worlds. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Savage Worlds. Show all posts
Thursday, January 11, 2024
Sunday, June 5, 2022
House Rules: Satyrs and Trolls for Savage Worlds Deluxe
Been a while... again... Sadly our gaming situation hasn't improved, although if the pandemic ever ends that might (might) change. In the meantime, I wanted to at least put something out there that other people can use. Here are my builds for the Satyr and Troll (aka Ogre) species in Savage Worlds; they're meant for the Deluxe edition (and built using those rules), but probably will work fine in the new Adventurer's Edition as well.
| It's all Faun and games until someone gets drunk... |
Saturday, March 19, 2016
Something very cool
So, last Friday, I attended my friend's game session, expecting to experience Savage Worlds again (as it was his week, which he alternates with the person running D&D 5). My friend did not run Savage Worlds. Instead, he ran something which he was literally coming up with off the top of his head, taking an occasional two-minute break to create a simple table.
I won't detail what it was exactly, but it was awesome, and one of the other players has tentatively enlisted me as an editor if the two of them decide to organize and possibly publish this brand-new game. All I'm going to say at this point is that it is not a medieval fantasy game, and it's similar in concept (if much cooler in execution) than a highly-anticipated video game from eight to ten years ago. If it does get into the planning stage, I might write a quick preview of it here.
Sorry if this post seems like a bait and switch. I'll be sure to write a better post later this week.
I won't detail what it was exactly, but it was awesome, and one of the other players has tentatively enlisted me as an editor if the two of them decide to organize and possibly publish this brand-new game. All I'm going to say at this point is that it is not a medieval fantasy game, and it's similar in concept (if much cooler in execution) than a highly-anticipated video game from eight to ten years ago. If it does get into the planning stage, I might write a quick preview of it here.
Sorry if this post seems like a bait and switch. I'll be sure to write a better post later this week.
Saturday, February 27, 2016
"You owe us money."
"You owe us money."
In many ways, it was through those four simple words that our shakedown mission got a lot more complicated...
So, as you might recall from my previous post, I was part of a Savage Worlds game a while ago. My character, a mutant with transparent skin and hair who can pull out bones to use as weapons (think Ransik from Power Rangers Time Force), is named Remini. The other party members were, as Remini came to learn, a detective/professor (the only "normal" human in the group); a bone golem armed with a cannon; a crab person; a subtly racist ghost, who repeatedly called Remini "Skinny"; and a person who was constantly uttering oaths to Thor. We were employed as low-level enforcers for a mafia family run by Top Hat Thomas, in the futuristic year of 192X.
Our first mission (which would end up being the only one we accomplished for that session) was to collect some debts from a man living in a run-down residential area. I had the highest driving skill in the party (d6, on a scale of d4 to d12... and my character was the best driver out of six people). As such, I drove them to the house, using some cream makeup and sunglasses to hide my rather frightening appearance, and tagging along in the back when the party walked up to the door. The bone golem knocked, and the door opened; just the man we were looking for.
"You owe us money," said the bone golem.
The man immediately closed the door and locked it. This made the bone golem very unhappy... to the point that he (it?) pulled out the aforementioned cannon, and blasted the door down. The cannonball tore through the house, splintering several pieces of furniture and finally embedding itself in the entryway floor. Some of the party entered the house, and found the man hurriedly loading a rifle; he attempted to shoot the golem, but didn't even cause a scratch.
While this was going on, the detective/professor was busy sneaking upstairs, checking for any sign that our debtor had some of his funds stashed in the house. She succeeded only in finding a piggy bank with about $30 in cash.
Meanwhile, the man fled through the rear door into the back yard. As he raced through his neighbor's yard, the ghost summoned a spectral steed and gave chase; I hopped on the horse's back behind him. The jockey, however, had failed to make either himself or his horse visible, so to all outside observers I looked like I was floating through the air, bow-legged. We caught up to the man, and I hit him in the back with a sword pulled from my leg; the blow would have killed him violently (at 5d6 damage, with exploding dice!) if I hadn't spent a Bennie to change it into a non-lethal blow. Our quarry was knocked out, and the ghost took the opportunity to possess him and dig through his mind.
There, he found the man's bank account information, and learned that said account contained at least twice the amount that he owed Top Hat Thomas. Unfortunately, the police were on their way, as we inferred from the distant sound of sirens. The devotee of Thor started praying, and a storm started brewing that delayed the cops; he was nowhere to be found when we were hurriedly trying to eliminate the evidence of our assault on the house. I hopped into the driver's seat of the car, and everyone except for the ghost (who was still possessing the man) piled in as we quickly drove away, narrowly avoiding the arrival of the police.
The ghost stayed behind, and repeatedly failed to convince the police that the loud gunfire was the result of an accident while cleaning his rifle. They took him away in the squad car, where the man succeeded in ejecting his ethereal guest from his body, and began freaking out when he realized that he was in the back of a police interceptor. Worried that he might talk, the ghost made a last desperate shot with a spectral pistol... and succeeded. The man's head exploded, along with the rear windshield, and the neighbors were too frightened to say anything about what they saw. (It also helped that said debtor was not well liked by his neighbors in the first place.)
Needless to say, a grand time was had by all. And all of the players and the GM involved did a great job of including me, and my first time playing in about two years went very smoothly.
(Note: I'll be going back and adding some tags to all of my past blog posts, and I'll be using them going forward.)
In many ways, it was through those four simple words that our shakedown mission got a lot more complicated...
So, as you might recall from my previous post, I was part of a Savage Worlds game a while ago. My character, a mutant with transparent skin and hair who can pull out bones to use as weapons (think Ransik from Power Rangers Time Force), is named Remini. The other party members were, as Remini came to learn, a detective/professor (the only "normal" human in the group); a bone golem armed with a cannon; a crab person; a subtly racist ghost, who repeatedly called Remini "Skinny"; and a person who was constantly uttering oaths to Thor. We were employed as low-level enforcers for a mafia family run by Top Hat Thomas, in the futuristic year of 192X.
Our first mission (which would end up being the only one we accomplished for that session) was to collect some debts from a man living in a run-down residential area. I had the highest driving skill in the party (d6, on a scale of d4 to d12... and my character was the best driver out of six people). As such, I drove them to the house, using some cream makeup and sunglasses to hide my rather frightening appearance, and tagging along in the back when the party walked up to the door. The bone golem knocked, and the door opened; just the man we were looking for.
"You owe us money," said the bone golem.
The man immediately closed the door and locked it. This made the bone golem very unhappy... to the point that he (it?) pulled out the aforementioned cannon, and blasted the door down. The cannonball tore through the house, splintering several pieces of furniture and finally embedding itself in the entryway floor. Some of the party entered the house, and found the man hurriedly loading a rifle; he attempted to shoot the golem, but didn't even cause a scratch.
While this was going on, the detective/professor was busy sneaking upstairs, checking for any sign that our debtor had some of his funds stashed in the house. She succeeded only in finding a piggy bank with about $30 in cash.
Meanwhile, the man fled through the rear door into the back yard. As he raced through his neighbor's yard, the ghost summoned a spectral steed and gave chase; I hopped on the horse's back behind him. The jockey, however, had failed to make either himself or his horse visible, so to all outside observers I looked like I was floating through the air, bow-legged. We caught up to the man, and I hit him in the back with a sword pulled from my leg; the blow would have killed him violently (at 5d6 damage, with exploding dice!) if I hadn't spent a Bennie to change it into a non-lethal blow. Our quarry was knocked out, and the ghost took the opportunity to possess him and dig through his mind.
There, he found the man's bank account information, and learned that said account contained at least twice the amount that he owed Top Hat Thomas. Unfortunately, the police were on their way, as we inferred from the distant sound of sirens. The devotee of Thor started praying, and a storm started brewing that delayed the cops; he was nowhere to be found when we were hurriedly trying to eliminate the evidence of our assault on the house. I hopped into the driver's seat of the car, and everyone except for the ghost (who was still possessing the man) piled in as we quickly drove away, narrowly avoiding the arrival of the police.
The ghost stayed behind, and repeatedly failed to convince the police that the loud gunfire was the result of an accident while cleaning his rifle. They took him away in the squad car, where the man succeeded in ejecting his ethereal guest from his body, and began freaking out when he realized that he was in the back of a police interceptor. Worried that he might talk, the ghost made a last desperate shot with a spectral pistol... and succeeded. The man's head exploded, along with the rear windshield, and the neighbors were too frightened to say anything about what they saw. (It also helped that said debtor was not well liked by his neighbors in the first place.)
Needless to say, a grand time was had by all. And all of the players and the GM involved did a great job of including me, and my first time playing in about two years went very smoothly.
(Note: I'll be going back and adding some tags to all of my past blog posts, and I'll be using them going forward.)
Tuesday, February 16, 2016
Savage Worlds is pretty damned cool
So, this past Friday I had the chance to play in a Savage Worlds game. This was a lot of firsts for me; not only was it the first time I have gotten to play (rather than referee) in years, it was my first time playing a tabletop RPG that uses a point-buy system for character generation; my first go-round with a multi-genre system; and my first time playing in a group that was already well-established.
Fortunately, all of these went well; the point-buy system wasn't too hard to figure out with help from the GM (even if I do tend to be paralyzed by unlimited choice - and I do mean unlimited, since the GM had the superhero and Western books), the characters worked well together, and the group was fairly welcoming and willing to forgive my lack of SW experience. I played a mutant with transparent skin and hair, who has only one (extremely near-sighted) eye, and can pull out bones from the body which transform into bladed weapons.
I might write more about how this session went, in a later post, but right now I'm very excited by two other role-playing opportunities I have. The first is a possible spot as a player in an upcoming D&D 5th Edition game, which I also intend to write about if it does in fact happen. I'll leave the second for a slightly later post.
Fortunately, all of these went well; the point-buy system wasn't too hard to figure out with help from the GM (even if I do tend to be paralyzed by unlimited choice - and I do mean unlimited, since the GM had the superhero and Western books), the characters worked well together, and the group was fairly welcoming and willing to forgive my lack of SW experience. I played a mutant with transparent skin and hair, who has only one (extremely near-sighted) eye, and can pull out bones from the body which transform into bladed weapons.
I might write more about how this session went, in a later post, but right now I'm very excited by two other role-playing opportunities I have. The first is a possible spot as a player in an upcoming D&D 5th Edition game, which I also intend to write about if it does in fact happen. I'll leave the second for a slightly later post.
Saturday, February 13, 2016
The Least Serious Game
Lately, I've been contemplating rebooting my entire D&D campaign. Why?
Well, I've been gradually shifting some of the world's events in a dark direction. There are horror elements - more Gothic than anything else, although I have had a couple of body-horror ideas to make my players' skin crawl - which culminated in a near-death at the hands of what two of the players hypothesized is some kind of eldritch god. (I'm not telling.) In fact, now that we've tentatively switched to AD&D2, I've had half a mind to cough up ten bucks for the nice PDFs of some Ravenloft books.
And who is running in this campaign at the moment? A cleric named Thebabicus, a druid named Steve (whose player has, so far, shown up to two of the last five sessions), and - until recently - a B/X elf named Boss Awesome. This group of mountebanks have dubbed themselves Team Awesomesauce. Pretty hard to take things seriously when everyone treats it like a joke.
Given this, I'm tempted to just have a Poison Rain Vornado come and sweep the party off to a faraway land that's almost as goofy as they are.
The other reason I want to reboot is that I finally bought the Cook/Marsh Expert Rulebook, and it's pretty cool. I've actually started on a little project which I hope to write more about soon, which this acquisition has finally made possible. For a while, I was thinking of running a game using Basic Fantasy. Pros: Good rules, easy to run, free to download (and print, at my university), and I already have a paperback copy. Cons: Some of the rules aren't to my liking. I realize that house-rules are easy to implement with this and other OSR games, but I have this feeling like it's not worth my time to modify the rules too much. If I have to change a bunch of the rules, why not just play a game that has those rules the way I like it?
Which is why I'll probably go with B/X if I reboot my campaign. I'm debating who to invite back. I feel like having a break where we play video games for a while will ease the frustration they might feel at switching systems again, much less back to the one we started with! The slowly forming "core" group has three good players who (from what I gather) would be fine with a serious game if it was presented to a fresh audience, and one player who has a great deal of rules mastery (having spent years running the Rules Cyclopedia) but a tendency to make a joke out of things. I've started sketching out a less serious campaign, and I might invite him back to that one; alternatively, I might try out one of his own gonzo campaigns, and play for a while.
Speaking of me playing: that's another reason to use B/X. If B did want to be the Dungeon Master for a while, the Basic Rulebook would be a hell of a lot easier to learn from than AD&D2 (the latter of which has, at least in the DMG, some pretty bad advice in it).
On the other hand, I've recently started talking to a guy I've known tangentially for a few years, who has a good deal of experience running various editions of D&D (including 5e, for which I might join his campaign if he gets one going), as well as Savage Worlds. I'd certainly like to have a good number of people available for a B/X game. Plus, one of J's friends came last time, and did a pretty good job. The more the merrier... especially since I'm planning to use B/X by the book for the Less Serious Game.
That's right! Uniform weapon damage! No negative hit points! (Maybe maximum HP at 1st level, but that's it.) Ha-HA!!
I feel like this is how Barry Sonnenfeld would do it if he was a DM: darkly funny and often absurd, but very deadly to the unwary (or unlucky).
Well, it's 1:21 AM as I finish up this post. Sorry if it's a little disorganized and weird... but for those of you who play OD&D on the reg', that shouldn't be a problem, should it? :D
Well, I've been gradually shifting some of the world's events in a dark direction. There are horror elements - more Gothic than anything else, although I have had a couple of body-horror ideas to make my players' skin crawl - which culminated in a near-death at the hands of what two of the players hypothesized is some kind of eldritch god. (I'm not telling.) In fact, now that we've tentatively switched to AD&D2, I've had half a mind to cough up ten bucks for the nice PDFs of some Ravenloft books.
And who is running in this campaign at the moment? A cleric named Thebabicus, a druid named Steve (whose player has, so far, shown up to two of the last five sessions), and - until recently - a B/X elf named Boss Awesome. This group of mountebanks have dubbed themselves Team Awesomesauce. Pretty hard to take things seriously when everyone treats it like a joke.
Given this, I'm tempted to just have a Poison Rain Vornado come and sweep the party off to a faraway land that's almost as goofy as they are.
The other reason I want to reboot is that I finally bought the Cook/Marsh Expert Rulebook, and it's pretty cool. I've actually started on a little project which I hope to write more about soon, which this acquisition has finally made possible. For a while, I was thinking of running a game using Basic Fantasy. Pros: Good rules, easy to run, free to download (and print, at my university), and I already have a paperback copy. Cons: Some of the rules aren't to my liking. I realize that house-rules are easy to implement with this and other OSR games, but I have this feeling like it's not worth my time to modify the rules too much. If I have to change a bunch of the rules, why not just play a game that has those rules the way I like it?
Which is why I'll probably go with B/X if I reboot my campaign. I'm debating who to invite back. I feel like having a break where we play video games for a while will ease the frustration they might feel at switching systems again, much less back to the one we started with! The slowly forming "core" group has three good players who (from what I gather) would be fine with a serious game if it was presented to a fresh audience, and one player who has a great deal of rules mastery (having spent years running the Rules Cyclopedia) but a tendency to make a joke out of things. I've started sketching out a less serious campaign, and I might invite him back to that one; alternatively, I might try out one of his own gonzo campaigns, and play for a while.
Speaking of me playing: that's another reason to use B/X. If B did want to be the Dungeon Master for a while, the Basic Rulebook would be a hell of a lot easier to learn from than AD&D2 (the latter of which has, at least in the DMG, some pretty bad advice in it).
On the other hand, I've recently started talking to a guy I've known tangentially for a few years, who has a good deal of experience running various editions of D&D (including 5e, for which I might join his campaign if he gets one going), as well as Savage Worlds. I'd certainly like to have a good number of people available for a B/X game. Plus, one of J's friends came last time, and did a pretty good job. The more the merrier... especially since I'm planning to use B/X by the book for the Less Serious Game.
That's right! Uniform weapon damage! No negative hit points! (Maybe maximum HP at 1st level, but that's it.) Ha-HA!!
I feel like this is how Barry Sonnenfeld would do it if he was a DM: darkly funny and often absurd, but very deadly to the unwary (or unlucky).
Well, it's 1:21 AM as I finish up this post. Sorry if it's a little disorganized and weird... but for those of you who play OD&D on the reg', that shouldn't be a problem, should it? :D
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