Review: Neon Lords of the Toxic Wasteland

NEON LORDS OF THE TOXIC WASTELAND

Words by Brian Shutter

Art by Mustafa Bekir

Published by Super Savage Systems

“BAD DUDES DUKE IT OUT
IN RAD ADVENTURES IN A FORGOTTEN FUTURE
DO YOU HAVE WHAT IT TAKES TO BE A BAD DUDE?“
Page 2

Two words describe this game.

fuck.

yeah.

I got lucky and was sent a preview copy of Neon Lords of the Toxic Wasteland to review before it goes up on Kickstarter.

This is the goddamn PREFACE!!!

“Neon Lords of the Toxic Wasteland can be summed up as HE-MAN escaping from New York in a post-apocalyptic vehicle blasting heavy metal while his wizard pal spews the most unholy evil spells from the passenger side window at a horde of mutants. It is an ultra-violent and style matters rpg set in the far future, after the neon wars of 1992. Half Medieval Fantasy, half Sci-Fi, all Gonzo. Neon Lords of the Toxic Wasteland stemmed out of my love for 80’s and 90’s action, horror, sci-fi, and pop culture. It’s a pen and paper rpg mix-tape of all the radness that came from those decades.”

The Rules

Neon Lords is based on B/X Dungeons and Dragons (the Basic/Expert edition from the early 80s, if you’re a noob), so the game play is simple, familiar, and easy to pick up. It uses the standard range of dice, but the names of stats have been changed to better fit the setting. This is a great idea that more OSR games should do.

The differences between Neon Lords and B/X are conveniently listed on the first page;

• CORE MECHANICS BASED ON THE B/X RULES
• 9 CLASSES: DEATH BRINGER, WAR WIZARD, COSMIC BARBARIAN, DWARFLING, STAR SPAWN, HOLY SMITER, CYBERSKIN, SKULL JAMMER, AND NIGHT STALKER
• RACE AS CLASS
• PROWESS, AND FORTUNE
• CLASS-SPECIFIC ABILITY SCORE
• ROLLED ABILITY SCORES AND HP
• ASCENDING AC
• NO SKILLS / SMART PLAYERS
• SPELL CHECK / TO HIT MAGIC SYSTEM
• POINTS BASED CLASS ABILITY SYSTEM
• SPELL MISFIRE CHART
• CRITICAL FAILURE AND SUCCESS CHARTS
• SLOT ENCUMBRANCE SYSTEM
• SLOWER, WEAKER REST AND HEALING
• HIRELINGS AND REACTIONS
• SAVING THROWS: GRIT, AGILITY, RESOLVE, AND DEATH

The ATTITUDE of this game is off the fucking charts. It’s obnoxious, loud, brutally honest, and in your face. The writing and artwork both enforce this.

Still on the first page and Brian Shutter writes the following;

“Death is right around the corner. One slip up could end in a new character.”

“Characters die every day. They are not special, and neither are you!”

Neon Lords includes a mechanic called the Neon Blast Roll, which is an exploding die when rolling for damage. Why exploding dice when rolling damage? BECAUSE THIS GAME IS HARDCORE

The game uses Fumble and To the Max! charts. To the Max is the name for a natural 20 critical hit. I wish Fumbles had a cool nickname, but whatever. I love rolling on charts and tables no matter what they are called.

The saving throws are more akin to modern D&D, with Grit (Fortitude), Agility (Reflex), and Resolve (Willpower). There is a fourth saving throw, though; DEATH. Death saves kind of take a little bit from the other three saves and represent the really bad shit that you would need a lot of luck to survive against.

A really cool thing that I don’t recall seeing in other games is that in Neon Lords of the Toxic Wasteland, you can Fumble or take it To the Max! on saving throws. Which is an awesome idea, and without giving everything away, I’ll just say DON’T fumble on a save!

Another thing I haven’t seen before is critical successes on percentile dice rolls. That’s pretty nifty and I wish I had thought of it 20 years ago when I played Rifts.

Character Creation

Hit Points

I’m going to take a moment to talk about Hit Points. I’ve never really understood why many games give your character a number of hit points, but you really have more hit points than that because you don’t die until you go into NEGATIVE hit points. Like, why not just add more hit points and die at zero?

Neon Lords of the Toxic Wasteland does hit points right; at zero, you’re dead. Well, you’re dead unless you succeed on your Death save.

Ability Scores

Neon Lords uses its own ability scores, rather than the old B/X abilities. This is a great thing, because it really enforces the attitude of the setting.

Burliness: equivalent to Strength. Score high enough and you also get a bonus to your Attitude score!

Prowess: equivalent to Dexterity

Endurance: equivalent to Constitution, but with an added bonus if you score really high.

Attitude: equivalent to Charisma, but if you score high enough you can start the game with a meat shield minion!

Brains: equivalent to Intelligence.

Sleaze: Sleaze is sort of the oposite of Attitude. A character with a high Attitude score and a low Sleaze score is considered charismatic in the human dominated areas, but seen with suspicion in the wastelands. There are some specific examples given of when and where to use Sleaze and the Sleaze modifier. It’s an interesting mechanic and makes sense to have when you consider that in normal D&D, an elf with a high Charisma is going to be hated by the monster races. So an ability that is sort of at the other end of that is welcome.

Fortune: Fortune is a point pool that can be spent to affect certain rolls. It’s essentially Luck points and works basically the same way. However, if your character ever runs out of Fortune (Fortune doesn’t regenerate) you have to roll on a Bad Luck table at the end of EVERY long rest! Most of the items on the table are bad, but not seriously bad. Some are even beneficial!

There are also Class Abilities that have their own scores, charts, and consequences.

After rolling up you Ability scores, the next (and vitally important) thing to do is determine your Hair Style. Everything from the classic Mullet, to the Prince Adam, to the Devil Lock. Not only does this add some flavor to your character, but each hair style also has a special and unique power!

Classes

Rather than have the tried and true (and boring) Fighter, Wizard, Cleric, Thief classes, Neon Lords of the Toxic Wasteland uses nine basic classes. While some of them are basically stand-ins for the classic classes, others are cool and new and all of them have a unique flavor.

For example, the Death Bringer is a re-skinned Fighter. But it also has a special ability that allows it to regain hit points if it “kills and opponent… may bask in the slaughter and drink the lifeblood of his fallen enemy.” Metal.

The War Wizard is a cranked up version of the classic Wizard that, get this… gets an armor class bonus based on their Brains modifier! They also start with a skull that has its own random table to determine whose skull it is. War Wizards have a class ability called Chaos points that they can use to do a variety of powerful shit.

The Cosmic Barbarian is a cocaine (I mean, “space dust”) addled badass who starts the game with a pair of Sick Shades and a fanny pack. They have a special attack called, You Sonofabitch which is when two Cosmic Barbarians high five during battle (like in Predator), it creates a huge blast!

Equipment

Remember those Sick Shades and Fanny Pack I mentioned as the starting equipment for the Cosmic Barbarian? Yeah, those have full descriptions AND special abilities!

Mercenaries

Neon Lords has a series of tables to quickly create Mercenary hirelings, if the PCs want to hire them. In just three rolls you can have a mercenary that is a mutant who is annoyed with taking the job, and has an out of control mechanical arm.

Magic

Spell magic works similar to the classic style, with some differences. Each spell slinging class has Spell Dice. Spell Dice sort of work like a dice pool; roll a bunch of dice, any that come up 4 or higher are good. When spellcasters are at rest and working out which spells to memorize for the next day, they roll the spell dice and the successes equates to the number of spells they can memorize; 4 successes equals 4 spells available.

Neon Lords also uses Spell Checks for spells that rely on a target rolling a saving throw. d20 compared to a DC. Magic classes can spend their Class Ability points to alter this roll.

A roll of natural 1 is a fumble on the spell check and means Spell Misfire and bad shit happens. Roll on the misfire table!

My copy of Neon Lords of the Toxic Wasteland has only spells for level 1 for War Wizards, Holy Smiters, and Star Spawn. Some notable spells are Dub Step Thunder (horrible sound that hurts enemies), Necrotic Regurgitation (acid puke that causes others to puke), and Shield (has a mini table to roll on to determine what the manifestation of the shield is; flesh, slime, etc).

Adventuring

The adventuring section is mostly what you would expect from every role playing game, with some cool additions like different types of unnatural sight (Infravision, Smell-o-vision, Truesight) and a table for Breaking Down Doors based on Class. Intimidation has a cool write-up and works with Fortune and Sleaze to get a Reaction.

Experience Points

Neon Lords uses XP from gold and from killing shit. All the XP gathered from this is put into a pool that the Players then decide how to split. If this turns the session into an argument between the players, the Neon Lord (DM) can decide to take all the XP away and no one gets anything!

Encumbrance

Encumbrance in interesting in that each class has a number of slots they can use for equipment before needing to get a backpack or some other thing to carry stuff. War Wizards and Star Spawn get the most equipment slots, as they can utilize pocket dimensions for stuff.

Combat

Combat works like every other game, except a neat little chart is provided that gives the order for combat. This would probably be really helpful for noobs, and even includes separate sections for single handed and two handed weapons. Good stuff.

There is a Firearms Fumble Chart with results ranging from Nothing happens, to Shooting Yourself in the Foot. Non-firearm attacks get a much larger Fumble Chart.

Critical Hit tables (To the Max!) are specific to each class, which is cool.

Neon Lord’s Section

This part of the book is for the Neon Lord (DM) and players ain’t supposed to look in here.

There is a Fear Table, that PC’s roll against when they could get scared. The die they roll changes as they go up in level, decreasing the chances of being really scared. It’s a cool mechanic that more games should look into using.

Included is a Loot the Dead Dude table, which is always helpful. Other tables include Drug Effects and Minor Mutations.

Next is the Bestiary with such monsters as the Barf Bag; irradiated vomit causes mutation and damage, and the Drool-Aid Man; who is filled with acidic liquid and shatters when damaged, drenching everyone around with flesh dissolving gore!

All of the monsters have simple To the Max! tables for the Neon Lord to roll on. Most of these have an Instant Death option, like the Mutant Brawler who is unimpressive overall, but on a 20+ on their To the Max! roll, punches a hole through your chest!

Monsters also have a Fumble Table, because its only fair, right?

Rad Treasure

In the Wastelands, the goblinoids and mutants use human teeth as currency. These are worthless in civilized areas and are not transferable to gold.

We’re given a lot of special, alien, ancient, and magical items in this section. Energy drinks that restore HP, Leopard print spandex briefs that allow you to communicate with Lord Randy (of course the Macho Man is a god in this world!), and the Fanny Pack of Eternity!

Sample Adventure!

The Last Outpost on the Left

Some force has taken over an outpost and the PCs have been hired to see what happened, rescue any survivors, and wipe out the mutant freaks who did the vile deed.

This adventure introduces something called Nightmare Mode, which is like an Expert level version of the game. This increases the deadliness of the adventure but also doubles the XP.

I don’t want to give too much away about the adventure, but it certainly looks fun, the descriptions are all like that of an 80’s action movie, and the final boss is awesome.

Optional Rules

Including the aforementioned Nightmare Mode, there is also Saturday Morning Mode, which makes it super easy for wimpy PCs, and ULTRA-NIGHTMARE MODE! “For the true sadist only!“

And finally, a table for Lasting Injuries and their effects.

Conclusion

Neon Lords of the Toxic Wasteland is… well, its fucking badass and awesome. That’s pretty much it. I can’t wait for the finished version. I reccommend buying into the kickstarter, cause this thing is going to be epic.

Kickstarter happening November 1st

Check out the DrivethruRPG

Sweet Merch at TeePublic

Review: A Guide to Thieves’ Guilds by Third Kingdom Games

A Guide to Thieves Guilds

By Todd Leback (Patreon page); Editing by Brian Johnson; Layout by Tim Bannock; Cover art by Jen Drummond; Interior art by Daniel Comerci, Chad Dickhaut, Rick Hershey/Fat Goblin Games, Jeshields, Patrick E Pullen, Dean Spencer

43 pages including cover and OGL page

Written for use with Necrotic Gnome’s Old School Essentials, but definitely useful for most fantasy role playing games.

This book is a guide for both GM and player on how to create and run a thieves guild. Much of it is geared toward the player side; high level player characters gain followers and are able to start and lead their own guild. To use this book, you also need the Domain Building book.

Chapter 1: A Guide to Thieves’ Guilds

We begin with the basics of the guild. Remember in the Domain Building review when I said that Market Class is extremely important? This is why. Market Class determines the number of guilds an urban center can support without conflict, guides the type of activities a thieves’ guild can pursue, and limits the number of guild members. We’re also given a brief synopsis of the various types of guilds, like assassins, beggars, con men, spies, etc. There will be MUCH more about them later on.

Chapter 2: Guild Traits & Operations

This chapter describes the structure of the guild and profits and losses. The first section describes Guild Structures by breaking down the membership into a flow chart.

There is also a section dealing with player-characters who are guildmasters as well as adventurers. PCs are not going to want to sit around and deal with day to day business of the guild instead of adventuring. So Leback has provided some easy to follow rules and guidelines on how to incorporate these conflicts into your game.

Revenue and Expenses is a longer section with a number of charts. Once again, Market Class shows up as the Market Class determines the maximum amount of possible revenue per month. Revenue is modified by a number of factors including the type of guild, the number and class of guild members, boons, banes, morale, and conflicts. This gets you the gross profits. Then you work on the expenses which include bribes to authorities, pay outs to members, and maintenance on the guildhouse/hideout.

The next section is Guild Focuses, and deals with the various different types of Thieves’ Guilds. The types are as follows; Assassins, Beggars, Burglars, Con Artists, Fences, Smugglers, Spies, and Thugs. Each type has a description of what they do and any modifiers to the standard guild stuff (for example, a Beggars guild have a larger maximum membership than other types, and the guildhouse/hideout costs less), as well as tables showing the amount of monthly revenue that type provides, a table for boons specific to that type (good stuff that happens every month) and banes (bad stuff that happens). While this section is very long, a player is only going to have one or two pages to look at dealing with the type of guild their character runs. The tables are also concise and easy to use.

At the end of the chapter is a nice example of a Burglars’ Guild that breaks down membership, profit, and loss.

Chapter 3: Conflicts

Here we have descriptions of two types of conflicts that affect Thieves’ Guilds; External and Internal. External conflict describes what happens when there are too many guilds or thieves in a settlement. Internal conflicts are those that happen inside the guild itself; membership exceeds Market Class limits, failed morale checks, etc).

Something cool about these rules is that the player character’s thief skills are used to resolve a lot of the conflicts in ways that make sense.

The first section details External Conflicts; a d100 table is consulted whenever one of more items on a list is triggered. Results can range from a street fight between your gang and a rival or an all out assassination attempt against all of your guild leadership!

The next section examines Internal Conflicts. Like the External conflicts, Internal conflicts are triggered when a particular event happens. When that occurs, you roll on a d100 table. Results range from dissension in the ranks that leads to low morale (which can snowball into further conflict later on) all the way to an assassination attempt against the player character!

The last section in this chapter is Mass Conflict, which occurs when two or more guilds fight or a guild splinters and fights itself. These rules are simple and straightforward and would probably work with little variation for any kind of mass combat.

Chapter 4: Running a Guild

Morale is the first section here and it measures the happiness and loyalty of the guild members. If morale gets too low, you’re looking at mutiny. There are a number of modifiers that affect the Morale Score, and the Morale Score affects guild revenue and Internal Conflicts.

The next section is Experience and Gaining Levels. While running a guild does provide a character with experience points, it doesn’t provide that much which means the character must still adventure. However, the various NPC members of the guild also gain experience and can level up over time, which improves revenue.

Franchising is the title of the next section and details an option you can use when your guild has grown to maximum capacity in the settlement it started in. You can franchise your guild to another settlement! This has benefits and drawbacks but overall seems like a good idea and a fun part of this whole mini-game.

The last section of this chapter is a summary entitled, Order of Operations. Essentially, running a guild requires you to do certain things at the beginning of the month, and certain other things at the end of the month. So, at the beginning of every month, you pay your expenses, recruit new members, roll for banes and boons, and roll for Conflicts. At the end of the month, you collect revenue, pay recruiting costs, add/subtract members, roll for Morale changes.

Chapter 5: Guilds and the Referee

This final chapter uses the previous material to show what a game master can do to easily create and run thieves’ guilds in cities the player characters may visit, and how those guilds interact with the player characters. It’s also useful because just creating these NPC guilds can create conflicts that can be exploited to add depth to the city location or even make the basis for adventures for the player characters.

Conclusion

Overall, this is a wonderful game supplement. It is highly useful and utilitarian, easy to read and comprehend, with clean layout, non-distracting art, and rules that don’t get in the way of the game. In fact, the rules here form a mini game that you and your players can break into while playing your normal session. Keep in mind, you do need the previous supplement, Domain Building, as well as Hexcrawl Basics.

Review: Domain Building by Third Kingdom Games

Domain Building

By Todd Leback (Patreon Page), Cover Art by Jen Drummond, Cartography by Todd Leback, Interior Art by Patrick E Pullen, Dyson Logos, Rick Hershey, David Lewis Johnson, and Miguel Santos

49 pages including Cover and OGL thing

Designed specifically for use with Old School Essentials by Necrotic Gnome, but useful for virtually all fantasy role playing games.

The book is divided into chapters which I will break down here. I won’t go into too much detail, as a lot of work went into making this product and I think you should purchase a copy.

Introduction

These mechanics are an exploration of higher level domain building for the Fighter class. Other classes will have their own higher level activities described in future supplements.

There is a helpful glossary for specific terms used throughout the text; Civilization Rating, Domain, Garrison, Infrastructure (important because this improves value and ultimately Market Class see: below) Land Value, Market Class (this is perhaps the most important to game-y stuff as it determines the availability of goods and services and population size), Resources, Resource Step, Retainers, and Urban Center.

Chapter 1: Retainers

Retainers, henchmen, minions, etc are vitally important to building up hexes and protecting domains. While the player character is off doing high level adventures adventuring, their trusted and loyal Lieutenants are protecting their domain, clearing nearby hexes of low level dangers, and managing various other things on the player’s behalf. This chapter explains how to recruit retainers with a thorough but elegant system, then shows you how to keep your retainers happy.

Chapter 2: Domains

Characters at this point should have already cleared the hex they wish to build a domain in, using the mechanics described in the previous volume; Hexcrawl Basics. Now, the character(s) must do additional things/meet requirements before the domain can actually happen. These include creating a garrison to protect the hex and people and building or taking over a stronghold.

Chapter 3: Developing your Domain

Once your domain is founded its time to acquire money and power! This chapter contains rules for populating your domain hex, growing and improving it over time, details about the very important Market Class, and growth of your domain’s borders.

Chapter 4: Maintaining your Domain

The chapter title summarizes what’s in this chapter pretty well. It contains detailed systems for determining land value and extracting value from the hex, like mining or livestock. Gaining wonderful income from the hex. Then Leback hits us with the dreaded expenses and bills!

This chapter also details and explains how to create and build up Urban Centers; the villages, towns, and cities of your domain. There are even rules for gaining Experience Points just from building and maintaining your domain, albeit much slower than going off on adventures.

Chapter 5: Domain Supplemental

This chapter has some more rules to consider for morale of your people/subjects, the size of your domain, and trade. The trade section makes a good point separating trade the player-characters conduct themselves on a first person basis, versus the abstract mass trading that goes on within a domain or with other domains. Leback has really mastered the skill of taking complex ideas and gracefully explaining easy to use mechanics for addressing those ideas.

Chapter 6: Domain Building Extended Example

Here Leback takes us through, step by step, the building of a domain using all the rules in the previous chapters.

Each of the previous chapters had numerous detailed examples already, but this one puts everything together. Even though each of the individual rules in the previous chapters were clearly explained, it is extremely helpful to have a full example where everything is put on the proverbial table for all to see.

The Extended Example takes the domain from humble beginnings as a wilderness hex, 150 miles from the closest civilization, to a two-hex domain with a thriving village, within a year of game time.

The extended example really showcases the almost mini-game aspect of domain building.

Conclusion

I’ve found this document to be very well written, concise, and informative. It seems very game-able to me, and in fact almost like a mini-game, making domain management much more fun than it felt with the dry descriptions from old school DnD/AD&D.

I’d also like to add that I REALLY like the cover art for these Third Kingdom Games products.

Review: Hexcrawl Basics

Hexcrawl Basics by Todd Leback (Patreon page), editing by Tim Bannock, Cover art by Jen Drummond, Interior art by Bruno Balixa, Dean Spencer, Rick Hershey, Jack Holliday, Matt Forsyth, Matthew Richmond

Published by Third Kingdom Games

Hexcrawl Basics is written for use with Old School Essentials by Necrotic Gnome.

26 pages including the cover and OGL license info

As the Introduction by Todd Leback states, “There’s a ton of literature out there – both published and on the internet – dealing with hexcrawling. But there is precious little information on how to mechanically run a hexcrawl.”

I couldn’t agree more!

The book is divided into 6 Chapters. I’ll give a brief synopsis of each.

Chapter 1: Hexes

Hexes themselves are defined as being 6 miles from face to face, with sub-hexes (smaller hexes within the hex) being 1.2 miles from face to face. A six mile hex is standard as far as I’ve ever known, but Leback takes the time to give a brief explanation as to why that is the standard and why this is useful to the game master.

There is a difference between travelling through a hex and travelling within a hex. The next section describes these differences and provides useful information like how to determine distances using hex features. Lots of maps are used to illustrate the information as provided examples.

Travelling through one hex to another is pretty straightforward and Leback shows how to have the player-characters do this by following terrain features.

Travel and exploration within a hex is next described and provides, to me, great info right off the bat with a breakdown of the time it takes to explore a hex depending on the terrain, if an aerial spotter is present (which is a GREAT idea that I have overlooked in the past), and how many sub-hexes can be explored in that time frame.

Next is a section detailing more on actual exploration, such as movement rate, noticing tracks, encounter frequency, how long an encounter takes to resolve and how that effects the time it takes to explore the hex, and camping.

Chapter 2: Random Encounters

This chapter begins with Leback explaining the ranges of monsters; the range is the amount of space (number of hexes) a monster needs to do its monstering. Larger monsters generally need more space to get the resources they need to survive. Leback provides ingenious rules that use the monster descriptions from B/X or Old School Essentials or AD&D.

Random encounter tables are explained based on what creatures have lairs in that hex.

Restocking lairs is an oft overlooked or forgotten aspect of hex crawling. If the player-characters explore a hex, wipe out the goblin tribe operating out of the cave they found, and then move on. What happens to the cave? Someone else is going to move in, that’s what! Leback once again provides simple and easy to implement rules for doing this, and includes some optional ways of handling random tables as well.

Chapter 3: Features and Lairs

Leback begins this chapter by defining the number of features and lairs each 6 mile hex will have, and then defining the terms of Features and Lairs. It is another simple and useful idea that is often overlooked.

Leback doesn’t spend a lot of space talking about features, which is fine. Most of this chapter is about Lairs; the difference between a lair and a dungeon, how to determine if the lair is defended or not, what it really means if the monster is determined to not be in its lair when the player-character’s discover it, and rules for monster types and how they relate to their lairs.

Chapter 4: Getting Lost

This chapter provides handy rules for when player-characters are exploring within a hex and lose their way. It also makes the distinction between getting lost and being delayed. Even an experienced team of explorers with aerial support and local trackers can be delayed, no matter how unlikely it is that they would get lost.

It’s also important to note that the Referee rolls to determine if the party is lost or delayed. The party doesn’t realize they are lost until they succeed on a roll or come across a landmark they’ve already seen – just like in real life.

Chapter 5: Random Weather

This chapter has simple rules for determining the day’s weather and how it affects the player characters. This is four step process utilizing easy to use random tables. Daily Outlook, Chance of Precipitation, Precipitation Severity, and Unusual Weather.

Leback notes that there is another publication called Random Weather Generation that has more complex rules that can be used for those that want a bit more detail.

Chapter 6: Hexcrawling in Action

This chapter brings all of the previous chapters together and explains how to use all of the information together in just a few steps in order to flesh out a hex. Each of the previous chapters has examples within it, but this is a massive example that brings it all together to show you, the reader, how it all works.

Conclusion

Hexcrawling has long been of interest to me in a sort of long distance, abstract way. Like, I knew it existed, and it sounded cool, but I never experienced it first hand nor had any idea how to run it myself. I’ve read lots of blog posts by various people extolling the wonder and glory of the hexcrawl, but like Leback says in the intro, there has never really been any mechanical means of conducting a hexcrawl campaign until now.

If you want to conduct an overland wilderness campaign, I think Hexcrawl Basics is definitely something you should check out. In fact, I’m planning on using it to sketch out a Dungeon Crawl Classics campaign setting.

Roll20 Review

As I’m writing this, I’m playing in a game of Savage Worlds using Roll20.

Having a way to game during Covid quarantine has been nice, although to me, online RPGs pale in comparison to in-person gaming.

Like, I actually kind of hate playing on Roll20.

I think this is for the following reasons;

The audio on Roll20 just goes out at random times, requiring a reload of the page and logging back in again.
Many people who use Roll20, turn off the audio and use Discord for audio instead. Which is fucking ridiculous that you need two different applications to do something that should be simple.
For Savage Worlds, there are a lot of exploding dice that need to be rolled. This can get VERY tiresome when you have to type /roll+1d10!+1d6!+2+1d8! and if you forget to put in one of those ! then you’re fucked and have to do it again. It really removes any semblance of immersion.
Some rolls are easily included as a simple button on your character sheet. This is a nice feature.
To get to your character sheet, though, you have to switch away from the chat/dice rolling feed, then you have to switch back to see the result of your roll. Which is annoying.
My character is always twice as large as everyone else and has to be resized at the start of each session by the Referee because I apparently have no power to do that.
In Savage Worlds, having minions, henchmen, and “extras,” is a part of the game. Unfortunately, they don’t have character sheets. So you’re back to writing out long strings of exploding dice rolls.

Now, most of these issues are minor or just annoying. The shit is free for fuck’s sake so I shouldn’t be complaining, right?

Well, voting is free and I complain about that shit as well, so…

Anyway

We’ve been playing this campaign on and off for a decade. The setting is Sundered Skies, which is a lot like the first world in The Death Gate Cycle; floating islands in a sky realm with magical ships sailing between islands.

It’s a rad setting and it’s been a great campaign.

Plus it’s always nice to be a player instead of a Judge/Referee/DM/GM, ya know?

Like I said, I’m writing this as we are playing. The Ref just described an elf with a bronze cock that shoots fiery comets that turn into elementals when he strokes it.

Total Party Kill

Art by Paul Bonner

For the second adventure in Hubris, I chose the DCC RPG zero level funnel, Sailors on the Starless Sea.

I chose this one because there were only two level 1 characters left from the last adventure, and I’ve never gotten to run what many consider to be the “classic” DCC funnel.

Since we’re playing in Hubris, though, I had to change some things.

While planning/prepping, I determined that the main bad guys I was going to work with were the Murder Machines, Black Queen, and Floating Island of Terror.

So I changed all of the beastmen from the original adventure into Murder Machines. To do this, I simply upped their AC by 2 and decreased their Hit Points.

I took out the vine-horror monsters entirely.

The final battle on the island within the Starless Sea was changed too. The Murder Machines were taking the kidnapped villagers to the island and throwing them (under the direction of a priest/artificer and his acolytes) into a machine that was powered by magma and magic. This machine converted the villagers into Murder Machines. The idea being that the Black Queen was creating these seeding operations all over the place to cause mayhem.

The high priest/artificer had another trick up his sleeve, though; the Mega Murder Machine! Five victims were transformed into a single gigantic murder machine with a cannon arm.

The two leveled characters were a Cleric of the God of the Terrible Whisper and a regular DCC Wizard.

The rest were zeroes created using the Crawler Companion app.

The players decided to scale the rubble outside the castle rather than go in the front entrance. This led to the first death as the rubble gave way and crushed a zero. They then found the entrance to the cursed tomb of the warlord (being from the area, they knew the story of the warlords of chaos from ancient times. I used it as a red herring) where they slipped and slid and almost died from freezing to death. Eventually they made it back to surface inside the castle. They ignored the stone, the wizard discovered the bonus magical effect of the well.

The burnt church scared them so much they didn’t want to check it out at first but eventually figured out the connection between the incense and the ooze monster. They took the incense with them.

They attempted to leave the castle through the front gate but the murder machines above dropped the portcullis, narrowly missing one of them. The wizard cast a spell that made one of the zeroes gigantic, and they lifted the portcullis up, then kicked in the door to the tower, and clobbered the murder machines running across the top of the wall. The other characters entered the tower and were ambushed by more murder machines who killed several of the characters.

After defeating the monsters, they found the bodies of dozens of villagers and even some left alive. Those living villagers joined their ranks as additional zeroes.

They found the skulls in the pool and took some of those with them as they descended down to the starless sea.

Most of them went insane from trying to read the ziggurat, but after being beaten senseless, they summoned the boat and went aboard.

The kraken attacked as they ignored numerous clues I gave them about the incense or sacrificing a victim, etc. Couple more were killed before they did enough damage for the kraken to retreat.

When they made it to the island they were down to the two level ones and three zeroes.

The original adventure has the final battle consist of 20 beastmen, three priests, and a demon. That wasn’t going to work here. I dropped the number of baddies to 5 murder machines, a priest, 2 acolytes, and a MEGA Murder Machine.

The PCs managed to get a surprise attack in before the bad guys knew what was going on. After the battle started, things did not go well for the characters. Their zeroes all died almost immediately. Some of the captive villagers got some courage and fought back against the bad guys (two more zeroes for the PCs) but were killed.

Finally, after defeating all of the Murder Machines, the Mega Murder Machine, and the Acolytes, all the player characters were dead except for the Cleric and the Wizard, but the Wizard was unconscious. The Cleric faced off against the evil Priest of the Floating Island of Terror. The priest had already used his black powder pistol and was down to a dagger. The Cleric had a sickle. They both sucked at attack rolls.

Eventually, though, the evil priest hit and killed the Cleric.

The end.

Total Party Kill.

My first TPK in 25 years of gaming.

The interesting thing about it was that the players didn’t really mind. They thought the adventure was fantastic and want to play it again!

Hubris DCC RPG funnel play report

So I ran the zero-level funnel included with the Hubris setting book with three players.

Out of 19 characters, only two survived.

One of those two started with a different player then it ended up with. One player ran out of guys just before they ran into the big boss. So another player with multiple characters left “gave” the character to the other play to use. Then, in the final battle, the generous player lost his remaining characters.

I figure they can work out whose character it is on their own. They’re adults.

I don’t really want to give away too much of the adventure for those who have yet to play it.

My players had a blast and want to play again, so Hubris gets my ringing endorsement.

Since only two characters survived to become level 1 classes. I think I’m going to run another funnel, probably Sailors on the Starless Sea, and allow those level ones to play as well. Surviving zeroes will get to be level one, while if the level ones survive, they still won’t have enough XP to go to level 2 yet.

Hubris – a setting for Dungeon Crawl Classics

I’ve decided that the next game I run will be DCC using the Hubris setting.
To start with, I’m just going to use the funnel adventure in the Hubris book, of which I have the softcover version. Looking forward to running it in the next 2 to 3 weeks.

I asked Mike Evans, creator of Hubris, for some clarification/guidance on some issues I had with character creation and he was nice enough to give me some pointers.

I’m still playing in a Savage Worlds game set in the Sundered Skies that has gone on for half a dozen years now. It’s a great campaign that will be concluding soon. My character is a drakin, basically a humanoid dragon baby, who is on a quest to become a real deal gigantic dragon with a huge treasure horde!

The growing into a dragon part is going well, but the treasure horde part has so far escaped me.

On Tuesday’s we have been recording ourselves playing Magic the Gathering. We play Commander/EDH format, which is new to me having been out of the Magic scene for a decade, and then only briefly. I still have all my old cards from High School (3rd edition, The Dark, and Fallen Empires, mostly) and most of those are GREATLY outclassed by the cards nowadays.

Those bastards at WotC really know how to squeeze their audience for cash.

Anyway, I am currently using “Moldrotha, the Gravetide” as my commander. It’s the first deck that I’ve won with since I started playing again back in November. The last game I played it saw me using a Nevinyrral’s Disk to board wipe everything except lands, then used Torment of Hailfire like 12 times (it has an X cost) to do 36 damage to the last remaining opponent; Chuckleberry Finn.

It was a good win.

The more we record, the better the recordings get. We hope to get a podcast up and running very soon. It is tentatively titled, “Timmy and the Kid”

The podcast will be centered on gaming. Witty banter while playing a game, and actual-play broadcasts of RPG sessions. Edited and formatted to be informative and fun for the listener.

I know I sure as hell skip the 4 plus hour podcasts that consist of a bunch of nerds giggling at Princess Bride quotes. Ugh. No thank you.

So I’m Timmy, and Mike is The Kid, and sometimes we have special guests who we interview while we game.

Wizard Spells in Dungeon Crawl Classics

I’m really trying not to mod the shit out of DCC, which is hard because I love tinkering with rules (which should be obvious from reading this blog or any of my previous blogs).

However, a particular aspect of the magic system rubs me the wrong way and it has to go.

Wizards in DCC have a very limited number of spells they are allowed to know. As in, a level one Wizard could have books with 500 spells in them, but can only cast four of them. Not four in a day and the next day can study and switch them out. No, they know the same four spells forever, unchanging. Those other 496 spells collect dust, never to be used.

How does that make sense? How does that go with Appendix N which DCC constantly trumpets the virtues of?

Screw all that. It isn’t fun. The Wizard already has a pretty crappy lot in life; spells have a good chance of hurting them (temporarily or permanently), patron bonding is arguably more hurtful than helpful, they have few hit points and armor makes it harder to cast spells. On top of all that, they can never learn new spells?

It’s almost like the rule is a mistake, but apparently it’s made it through four printings and the official DCC forums say it’s for real.

Furthermore, the rules say a Wizard can not cast spells higher than their level chart indicates. So a level one or two Wizard can not cast spells higher than level 1. A level three Wizard can not cast spells higher than level 2.

But later on in the magic section it says spells of higher level CAN be cast, but it is more dangerous. It doesn’t say exactly how or why it’s more dangerous, but I have to assume it’s because the Spell Check is higher and the Wizard being of lower level doesn’t have as good of a bonus to cast as a higher level Wizard would.

Not only that, but non-magic characters can cast magic, albeit with mandatory Luck burning, but still. If a Warrior can cast a spell at all, then a first level Wizard should be able to cast a 5th level spell (with all the associated penalties).

So, here is my very simple rule change.

A Wizard character can know any number of spells. The number they can memorize is equal to the number indicated on the Wizard chart in the class description. So a level one Wizard can memorize four spells, regardless of the level of those spells. A level two Wizard can memorize 5 spells, and so on.

Spells that are available to be memorized must be researched and a check roll must be made, as is written in the rules. A character isn’t just automatically going to have access to a spell just because they have a grimoire or scroll in their possession.

When a Wizard character successfully checks to learn a spell that is in their possession, it goes into their pool of available spells to choose from. If the check fails, they must wait until they reach the next level of experience before attempting to learn the spell again.

Example:

So a level one Wizard has their normal four starting spells from level 1. In the course of an adventure they find a spell book with two level 2 spells in it. For brevity, we’ll assume that the adventure ends with the Wizard making it to a town or other safe area to rest for an indefinite amount of time. During this down time, the Wizard studies the spell book and attempts to learn the two spells contained within. The fail the attempt at learning the first spell, but succeed in learning the second spell.

Now, the first level Wizard can memorize a total of four spells per day, but has five spells to choose from. The fifth spell being a level two spell means it is more difficult to cast, and therefore more dangerous to the Wizard, but gives them another spell casting option.

Man, I think that is a simple rule change. Yeah, it’s more like DnD, but it also makes sense.

Strathos map using Hex Kit

The new DCC campaign (campaign in the loose sense of the term) now has a map!

I made it using Hex Kit. After spending about a year looking at various map creation tools like Hexographer, Campaign Cartographer, and others, I found Hex Kit and it makes the most sense for me and what I want to do.

I can easily make a map, I can make it abstract, I can add to it later, I can make it in layers, I can add labels and Fog of War, it’s super cost effective, and it looks good! This image was exported as a .png, then I added a filter to make it look grittier, and turned it into a jpeg. Normally, it would be more brighter without the filter.

The village is where the player’s Zero level characters are from. The Telescope Tower is the location of their first adventure (Tower of the Stargazer by Lamentations of the Flame Princess, with a play report here), and the Portal is the location of their next adventure (Portal Under the Stars by Goodman Games, in case you’re wondering).