Talk about a blast from the past. I recently came across a copy of FASA's 1990 Shadowrun Promo video. I never realized that FASA had ever done anything like this. In some ways it is much better than the current WotC ads for the "Red Box".

It features everything I'd expect from Shadowrun, and all with that old school late 80s amateur look to the sets. I was impressed by the fact that they actually did have some 3D animation in the video, but, as expected, it was very low polygons (just a few boxes with very few textures or shaders to their surfaces).

I got a chance to sit down with a group this past weekend and run through an adventure using the FantasyCraft system from Crafty Games. The adventure was a simple one with pregenerated characters. With 6 player we had a nice mix of classes to fill out the party.

"Tired from a long adventure the party sought refuge in a fortified inn along the road to their next destination. You enter into a smokey, crowded room with a buxom serving wench dodging grabbing hands while serving drinks. There's a table in the corner she says as she bustles past"... Yep, a nice quiet place to rest... And so the adventure began.

An interesting idea was brought up on the Savage Worlds forum about the possibility of adjusting the system so that instead of wild card characters rolling a d6 as the wild die, what if the wild die was the same as the trait die being rolled. This got me thinking, and since I'd already done up the chart and tables for rolling the normal way, how hard could this be.
Turns out, not hard at all. About 15 minutes with excel and voila, here is the chart.

I've been playing in a Warhammer Fantasy 2nd Edition game with a group of friends and decided to take the Excel character sheet that we've been using and add it to this site's collection for other to use. It handles a lot of the calculations for improving the character as well as replicating that information to the other sheets. To help see it in use I've also added some of the characters that are in the two campaigns that are being run concurrently. The sheets should open in Excel 2003 with the 2007 compatibility pack.

Updated January 10th

"A shattered world. A thousand floating islands. A constant glow of madness. Sundered Skies begins where every other world ends.

The people of the Skies survive, tested by an unimaginable apocalypse, struggling daily against ravenous beasts, sky pirates, and the effects of the inescapable voidglow! But the fate of the Skies is in danger! The magic of the glow is not the only taint in this unforgiving realm. Dark forces conspire to bring the Skies to the brink of an even greater catastrophe. Can you survive long enough to discover the secrets of Sundered Skies?"

So, this problem keeps coming up again and again in various forums dealing with the loved and, for the most part, forgotten system from West End Games, D6 System. The problem is the presence of the "Wild Die" that was introduced in Star Wars 2nd Edition. As usual, there isn't a whole lot of grey space in this debate... or shall we more accurately say "Love/Hate".

I created a small perl script that takes in the number of iterations and the number of dice that are part of the roll and outputs the list of target numbers that were rolled, how many times they were rolled and what % of the rolls do they represent. The script takes into account the result of the Wild Die. I settled on 1,000,000 iterations as it seemed to give a consistent sample response when run several times.

The year is 2060. Welcome to the Shadows. Corporations are now extraterritorial nations in their own right. Deniable assets are the name of the game as corporations lie, cheat and steal from each other in games of oneupmanship. Magic has returned to the world and with it, chaos. Magic's return has reawakened many things, including trolls, orcs, elves and dwarves from amongst the normal humans.

I’m standing on the edge. The brink of eternity, staring out at the vast nothing that is before me and the long and distant nothing of the landscape that extends off to nowhere behind me. I’ve been here before many times, but something about this time feels different. Just one small step forward is all it would take to go from standing on the edge to plunging down into the nothing that yawns open before me. Turning around again, careful not to lean too far in any direction I stare back at the landscape behind me that led to this place. The reddish-tan ground is covered in random patches of low, dry scrub, struggling to eek out an existence in a place that receives little water.

This weekend I got a chance to play in a demo of a new RPG game, Houses of the Blooded. What makes this RPG different from most others on the market is that it is a cooperative narrative RPG with the mechanics designed specifically to allow the players to directly add or alter the game world. That's right, the players can actually narrate a change to the story that the GM can just roll into the game.

Updated October 18 I wanted to get a dice tower/dice boot for use in at least one of my current RPGs (1st Sunday of the month Shadowrun 4th Ed Missions), but I couldn't find one at my FLGS as the item was apparently out of production. I started to dig around on the Net and found a few places that either had instructions for modifying the Chessex Dice Boot (covering the acrylic with felt) or making one from various kinds of wood that one can find at hobby stores like Michael's.