Giwoitis lizard folk women

The giwoitis are lizard folk women who take care of the abandoned goats and cattle from the cursed farmlands. They enchant them and offer their milk to lawful and neutral adventurers who can find their enchanted barn.

This is how I like to use alignments in my sandbox games: I assign alignment and different alignment reaction to my special unique encounter. So the interesting parts of the sandbox react differently to lawful, neutral or chaotic characters. (oh yeah, the milk have strange effects on chaotic characters.)

Witch grave ossuary

One of the witch graves ossuary from my Labyrinth Lord campaign.

...

Alternative larger version:

Playing Stars Without Number

I am playing in my friend Dominic's campaign of Stars Without Number.

I enjoy the group, the game, the system and the campaign a lot. :)

The game's OSR system is neat, I like having only 3 classes, the simple skill system and all the other tweaks.

(check out the Grognardia review)

Creating your character is fun: you choose one of the 3 classes (expert, warrior or psychic), a background and a class training that both determine your starting skills.

Simple, quick and colorful.

My character is Danielle Ros, a biotech crew space marine.

So she is a spacer, she worked for a biotech corporation in a space emergency respond squad.

I established that the biotech corporation went bankrupt after a bio-contamination disaster or scandal. (Think Umbrella corporation). Her squad was disbanded and now she is a adventurer.

I was not super lucky with my attribute rolls, I only rolled a bonus in wisdom, and I got one in dexterity by placing a 14 in one of my class main attributes. But this is fine with me, I like playing characters who only have a few small edges that define them.

We started playing on Priam, a major world. Since we had no ship and we had to write a goal on our character sheet I ended up playing Danielle as a disgruntled marine hating being stuck on the ground and being ready to do anything to go back in space.

As I played her I discovered during our first session that she cared about people, I guess this come from her emergency aid background. During the second session I discovered she missed being in space so much that she now take pills of a drug that provide a zero gravity feeling. During our third session I discovered that she have a weak spot for the mysterious assassin Eliot and Indrani, a resourceful NPC. This is what she is for now.

Here, my friend D•Miranda made a drawing of my character taking her dose of Zero-G drug:

(check out his blog: Jaguar Combat :)

The group is composed of 6 players (2 female & 4 male players playing 2 female & 4 male characters):

- Drake the born noble commando.

- Danielle the biotech crew space marine.

- Eliot the security crew assassin.

- James Flanagan, adventurer and criminal

- Griff the technician pilot

- Constance the rogue psychic priestess

In 3 sessions we had two characters reduced to zero hit point, but we had no casualty thanks to the 6 rounds we have to stabilize them. With the XP we gained at the end of the third session all the characters will able to reach level two at the start of our next session.

This is the first time I have a great time playing in such a large group. The session are very packed, we often hesitate at the start as people figure out what they want to do, but once we choose the action move quickly and a lot of stuff happen. The referee never use "no" on failed skill tests, he always use "no but..." I like it, this work well for a 6 players group as it keep things moving. We play one session missions, which is great since we feel that we accomplish something each time we play. For now we miss a little bit of time at the end of the session to wrap things up. I wish we had the time to play a few follow up scene with NPC and other PC. But this is ok.

During session 2 we were able to steal a transport ship that a faction planned to sabotage. Now we have to find a way to repair it jump drive. Earning the ship was really fun. I admit that at first I was a little bit worried that it could take us a lot of time before we could able to buy our own ship to explore the space sand-box.

Doing missions on the starting planet is fun, but what really interest us all is exploring the sandbox and having galactic adventures. I din't read the whole SWN PDF, but I wonder if there is advice or guide lines about how to get the group in space to let them explore the starmap sandbox on their own. That said, I think it was well and fairly handled in our campaign.

Next session we are probably going to explore a derelict spaceship that crashed in the rock desert in hope of salvaging tech to repair our own ship.

Halflings receiving the bishop fish's communion

Taking a break.

Tonight session din't go very well.

I am closing down my LotFP campaign and taking a break from being the referee.

(but I will be a player in a Stars Without Number campaign)

I will also take a break from this blog to focus more on my personal drawings

But I will still visit your blogs. It was very interesting to read you all.

Wanting to create my own adventure locations for campaign play.

I am thinking of writing my own adventure locations instead of using or tweaking published one's.

Making somebody else work your own can be fun, interesting and formative, but still I think it bring some complications.

I like reading and playing published modules, but I am discovering that I prefer to use my own creations for campaign play.

Mainly simply because it fun to create adventure locations.

Also I think I have reach a point were I have discovered what I like and don't like in modules, and now I want to try to create adventure locations that support what I enjoy in location design and gameplay.

I also want to feel more at home with my campaign settup, with a net of adventure location of my own creation, I think I will feel more confident to improvise while playing.

Traps & Challenges

I want to expand a little on my comment about traps & challenges.

It seem important to give the players information or ways to distinct between traps & challenges.

• Trap = danger with no reward at the end.
• Challenge = danger with a reward at the end.

(reward = treasure, clues, new area to explore, etc)

Also:

• Trap = something to identify and to avoid.
• Challenge = choosing to take risks to get a reward or to unlock content.

So, in a sense:

• Avoiding to interact with a trap = good move or tactic.
• Avoiding to interact with a challenge = avoiding to play the game.

(well naturally challenges are also about choice, so choosing not to face a challenge for a good reason is playing the game. This is different from avoiding interacting with something just because you are too prudent or careful and don't want to face risk & challenge.)

When players can't distinct traps from challenges, they will probably deal with challenges as if they were traps: they will avoid interacting with them. (because avoiding interacting with a trap that is just a trap is a good move).

So I guess it important to make it clear that traps are traps and challenges are challenges. Or to give means and ways to distinct each one.

It important that players know that a part of the gameplay is to distinct traps from challenges. So they will try to identify what is just a trap and what is a challenge.

Naturally the distinction between traps and challenges is not always clear. Sometime they overlap. For example tricks like drinking pools and magical mirror that randomly give boon or curses.

I agree that sometime it is interesting that the distinction is not clear cut. But I think that for a introducing adventure, it is good to make the distinction clear to avoid ending up with players confusing trap & challenges who mix them up together and end up fearing & avoiding them all.

Now I want to read all your blog posts about trap crafting. ;-)

The Prince of Crows

The prince who reign over one of the old watchtowers (for my Labyrinth Lord campaign).

Post-apocalyptic car-god

Busy today, a repost from my old blog. Somekind of car-god apparition that I had drawn for Apocalypse World (but I never actually used it since our AW campaign was very short-lived):