What has changed since the last time we were here? d30 Table!

I have a bunch of tables and generators, but it's all in Portuguese on my Brazilian blog Pontos de Experiência. I am mainly working on my Adventurers of the Lost World setting book, but I will eventually translate some of my stuff in English to post here, which is exactly what this post is about today.

When running my games I always want to give the feeling of a world in constant motion and change. The characters can start in a settlement, go on an adventure and when they come back, something must have happened. The world continues without them, and they have to notice it somehow. This will give them the impression that the campaign world is real, even when they are not around!

To aid me in this task, I came up with this simple d30 table. It gives you a general idea you can interpret and create more elaborate events in pretty much any kind of settlement. So, whenever you feel like enough time has passed and some sort of change should happen to a place in your campaign world, roll on the table below and adjust the result to the settlement in question!

Road Crew Games at Gen Con 2016 - Part I

It's time for more Road Crew games reports! This time it will be a compilation of 5 Road Crew games reports that happened at Gen Con through August 4th to August 7th! It has been a couple of weeks and I was kinda of sleep deprived during the whole time, so some details might be a little fuzy. But bear with me because we had some pretty awesome time!

Road Crew Game #6 - The Captain's Table - Metamorphosis Alpha 1st Edition

This last Saturday I went to another public gaming event in a local public library here in Rio de Janeiro. This time I took Metamorphosis Alpha first edition for a spin and presented it to local players who, mostly, had never heard of it (we never had it released in Brazil, so that's expected).

I began by presenting the game and it's historical roots, as the first science fiction RPG and the first RPG to refer itself as one. I told how James Ward suggested Gary the creation of a Sci-Fi version of D&D and how Gygax said to him: "why don't you give it a try?". Even though one of the great things about the gameplay is not knowing the players are in a spaceship, I explained them the premise of the setting, and they thought it to be pretty interesting, specially when I talked about the adventure, The Captain's Table and the belief system it implies. The original crew, the Captain, the Engineer, the Geneticist and all others are now the Gods of the their people.

When we started the game, I had 3 players, so I asked them to pick up two characters each, one mutant and one human. Along the game, two more players joined in, so I ended up with a party of 10 characters (so I had plenty of targets to kill along the way). Some of the players were more familiar with modern games and find it strange to play with more than one character at the same time, so I explained them it allows for group splits, more freedom, and the chance to continue playing even if one of their character dies. Since this game was particular deadly, this would be very useful, I assured them.

DCC World Tour Report - Game 5 - The Walking Death

This past Saturday I went to micro-con event here in Rio de Janeiro called RPG na BPE. It's a weekly event in a Public Library where tabletop gamers (specially tabletop RPG players) go to play games, met new people, and get to know new games, be it one from the 1970s or one that was just released. I, as usual, went there to spread the word of our Dark Master, and prepared an special DCC RPG adventure using the Crawling Under a Broken Moon zine from +Reid San Filippo

The idea I had for the adventure was mainly based on an illustration I had recently done for the upcoming issue of CUaBM zine and one of my favorite DCC adventures, Doom of Savage Kings, by +Harley Stroh . The party was a group of adventurers and survivors fleeing venturing to the north in search of a ancient military base, supposedly with still functioning weapons and preserved rations. Basically, I changed the Hound of Hirot for a Cyber-Mutant T-Rex with Lasers and made the sorcerer aiding the Jarl the one behind it and controlling the creature, that most people called the Walking Death. The village witch, however, had been banished by the new Technomances aiding the Jarl and the adventurers would have to explore the Hypnotic Snakes Swamp to find her. So basically the group could deal with the Walking Death in 3 different ways. Finding the lost military base and get a weapon capable of destroying it, seeking the old tecnowitch in the swamp for help draining its powers, or finding out about the technomancer controlling it and stopping him.

My Games at GENCON 2016 and some thoughts on 1930s Fantasy Pulp DCC!

Peter Mullen's artwork showing a
convention of extraplanar monsters

I live in far of Brazil, in a land almost without gaming conventions. GENCON to me, when I went in 2014, was something completely out of my world. I went crazy last year when I couldn't be there. This year I decided to go again and have my shots at judging some tables with the Goodman Games crew. I signed up for 5 games! 4 of those are Dungeon Crawl Classics games, half with published modules adventures, and half of them with adventures of my own making. The last game is going to be a Jim Wampler's adventure for Metamorphosis alpha.

Below you will find the link to the specific events on GENCON website and a brief description of each game.

DCC RPG – The Ball of Lost Souls - Thursday from 9am to 1pm.
This is a level 2 Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG adventure for 5 – 7 characters set in a sword and sorcery setting written by me and that is in the process of being published (well, that's what I hope). The idea is that a group of adventures end up in the ruins of an  old palace, where a people of sorcerers lived, in search of treasure and other valuable things. However, what they find inside the ruins will affect their own existence. The blurb for GENCON is this one:

In search for lost treasures and knowledge rumored to be buried beneath the ruins of an ancient mansion in the Old City, a group of adventures find themselves sent back in time to the very night hell broke lose on earth and demons captured the souls of hundreds of mortals. Will the PCs share the same fate as those in the mansion centuries ago? Or will they find a way to stop the madness and escape their fates?  

Review and World Tour Report - Escape from the Purple Planet

Not only of elves, dwarves, dragons and orcs lives the fantasy RPGs! Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG is a perfect example of that, since it explicitly draws inspiration from various literary sources of the Appendix N of the first edition AD&D DMG (and even other fantasy authors not listed there). In the Purple Planet series of adventures, we can explore a Science Fantasy style of campaign in a decadent dying planet. The influence of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom Series and Robert E. Howard's Almuric is tangible, and very appreciated.

This particular review is about a supplementary module that comes with the Peril on the Purple Planet Boxed Set called Escape from the Purple Planet. This is a zero level funnel adventure written by Harley Stroh where the players take part as prisoners from all around the cosmos that wake up chained together in a dirty and dark cell, with only one key in their reach and a bunch of weapons in the floor. The goal is to escape whatever terrible fate awaits them and in their path. In their path they will face bestial and savage aliens, lost technology, a weird and horrifying monster and a crazy homicidal alien that can actually help them.