Far Away Land RPG Creature Cards: Series 1

These arrived in the mail today!

And they are splendid!  Everything about them from the artwork to the presentation is fantastic.  They will make setting up encounters even easier than it is now.  Just the other day, I picked up the three adversary decks for FFG's Star Wars game, and the these cards for Far Away Land are by far and away a superior product.  Also, I love the orange skull motif around the border.  Well done!

Weird Adventure Idea Wednesday: Today in color!

It's Weird Adventure Idea Wednesday again with another adventure idea to hopefully spur your imagination!  Man these things just keep happening, and this one happened in color.  This week's adventure idea requires a perilous crossing to a rather curious sounding place.

Adventure Idea:

On a steamy evening you run across a raving swordsman on a forgotten trail.  The swordsman loudly declares to you that 2 weeks travel to the north, across the Gorge of the Eyeless Serpents, was built the Throbbing Sepulcher of Mysteries.  It is whispered that there can be found the Harrowing Steel Arrows of Blinding.  But beware, for the swordsman cautions you that it is reputed the Revolting Colossus of Darkness haunts that place!

If you enjoy Weird Adventure Wednesday, be sure to check out these:

1,001 Weird and Wacky Adventure Ideas

and

1,001 More Weird and Wacky Adventure Ideas

Also, if you prefer the black and white artwork, I'm including that as well.

Iron Kingdoms Campaign Update

To keep Dan in the loop. :-)

     So when last I left off, our intrepid band had just captured the prime suspect in the warehouse break-ins and had been promised by our friend Sgt. Hill that we could question him at the jail when he regained consciousness.
     Voldrag the Doom Reaver was late in arriving at the jail (I missed last week), and when he got there, he was greeted with a scene of tremendous carnage.  Five grey cloaked individuals lay dead, and the prisoner was holding his leg, having had the tendons cut during some torturing by the party...  Additionally, two of the party's elves had vanished, and the gobber had gone off to buy some coal for his steamjack at some point.  We have also acquired an alchemist named Trayjo.  Voldrag was sad at having missed such an epic battle, as he's always one for a good fight.
     The prisoner, who is named Davin revealed that he was hired by a woman named Tyla Helden to search for a necromatic relic, and that she was currently staying at the Smoke and Stack Inn.  Davin the prisoner asked to be freed, or at least provided with a weapon to defend himself as the grey cloaked guys had been sent to kill him.  Instead, Mallik the gun guy inexplicably shot Davin in his other leg, the one that hadn't had its tendons cut during torture.  The Doom Reaver was pretty weirded out by this, and he's a Doom Reaver...
     The party returns to the headquarters of the Illustrious Brass Anchor Trading Company to speak with Diera, our employer.  While selling the goods acquired from killing the grey cloaked assassins, we learned that one of them was none other than the renowned rifle guy Thurston Sale.  No way that one will come back to bite us.  No way.
     The party journeys onward to the Smoke and Stack Inn, where we meet up with our old friend Rel Venik, the manager of one of the robbed warehouses.  Rel seems pretty disturbed and took the party to a back room where he revealed that it is him that Tyla Helden was seeking.  He then proceeded to relate to the party a wild story that involved The Five Fingers, a group called the Black Guards, a place called the Shatter Stones, some undead, some caverns, and a mysterious priest who gave him his wild tattoos.  Now all of this had Voldrag thinking, "I've got to check this place out!"  Alas Voldrag's adventurous musings were cut short, for during Rel's tale, an evil curse was activated that began closing up his eyes, nose and mouth threatening to suffocate him!  It was super creepy, and despite the party's best attempts to save him, Rel sadly expired, but he did leave a note.

     Upon inspecting Rel's body, the party discovered that parts of a map were tattooed on him in various places.  The party copied down the map, then left the Smoke and Stack with his body, by pretending that he was drunk.  We ditched his body and returned to the Smoke and Stack Inn to search a room that we had the key from, having relieved one of the dead grey cloaked assassins of it.  The room turned out to have nothing of interest, so we returned to the bar where while chatting with the bartender, the party revealed that they were seeking Tyla Helden and were in the employ of the Illustrious Brass Anchor Trading Company.   No way that one will come back to bite us.  No way.

Free Map: Colorful Caves

     Here is a small map that I drew on a rainy day several months back for use in a game that I still haven't gotten around to running.  Originally, it was a black and white map on graph paper.  I've since taken the time to color it, and am pretty happy with how it turned out.  It's got some standard cavern things, stalagmites, an underground stream, a waterfall, a fountain with an eerie green obelisk, and of course some giant mushrooms. :-)  
     Fell free to take it, use it as is, or change it however you see fit.  Stock it with monsters, treasure, and nefarious traps, or stock it with unicorns, rainbows, and spun sugar.  Whatever you fee like.  So break out your favorite roleplaying game rules, whether it'sTunnels and Trolls, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Far Away Land or anything else you're in to.  If anyone does use it to create ann adventure, please feel free to link to your creation in the comments area, I'd love to see your work.

If you enjoy this may, feel free to check out the rest of my blog for more stuff:  

Miniatures Monday

In this week's Miniatures Monday, we see a fellow standing outside of a stone cottage, but why is he there?  Is he a harmless peasant on his way to a day of labor, or is he perhaps a brigand waiting to waylay the unsuspecting dwellers within?  I'm going with brigand, what do you think?

Weird Adventure Wednesday Redux (An experiment with color)

In glorious color

Cleaned up

Original Scanned image

I decided to give color a try in my Weird Adventure Wednesday illustrations, so I loaded one into Gimp and played around a bit.  I cleaned up the graph paper lines from the original hand drawn image, then colored it in.  I did it quickly, and I missed a few spots, but overall I'm rather happy with the results.  I think that the color adds to the cartoony feel that I'm going for.  I'm not sure that I'll be doing color illustrations regularly going forward, but I'll probably slip one in from time to time.  So what does everyone think?  Do you prefer color or black and white?

Free Map Friday (on Saturday)

I had this set to post, but forgot to actually schedule it, so Free Map Friday is now Slightly Delayed Free Map Saturday.  I was going through my old papers and came across this outdoor map for one of my Castles & Crusades campaign from many years ago.  Sadly, it's not nearly as entertaining as the player made dungeon maps from the same campaign. :-)

The map isn't complete, as my intent was to add cities and adventure sites as we went.  I've done some maps recently with Campaign Cartographer, and while it produces very nice results, I'm still a fan of hand drawn maps.

Weird Adventure Wednesday

Weird Adventure Wednesday has rolled around once more.  This week's installment takes place in that time honored trope of fantasy, the maze.  I'm not sure whether the goal of the adventure should be to strike the gong, or not though.  I'll leave the decision up to you.   ;-)

Weird Adventure Idea:

On a misty day you have a chance meeting with a morose beggar near a rushing river.  The beggar recounts to you an ancient legend that 2 weeks journey to the south, within the Harrowing Chasm of the Doomed Mage, stands the Maze of the Sorcerous Cosmos.  It is believed that there is hidden the Bewitched Gong of Contamination.  But beware, for the beggar cautions you that it is alleged the Sighing Scaly Horror of Skulls feasts upon all who go there!

If you enjoy Weird Adventure Wednesday, be sure to check out:

1,001 Weird and Wacky Adventure Ideas

and

1,001 More Weird and Wacky Adventure Ideas

Miniatures Monday

This week's Miniatures Monday has an evil warrior bent on slaughter, charging from the concealment of the forest!

The miniature is a Black Legionnaire  #02465 from Reaper Miniatures.

Fantasy Hero Complete

The new Fantasy Hero Complete

The week before last, my Kickstarter reward for the Fantasy Hero Complete Kickstarter arrived in the mail.  Ive got to say that I was pretty happy to see it as I have some very fond memories of Fantasy Hero.  My first introduction to Fantasy Hero, and to Hero Games was...yikes! 27 years ago in college when it looked like this:

The original Fantasy Hero

I still remember my first character.  He was a thief armed only with a stiletto, which only did 1/2 d6 damage, although that damage was armor piercing.  He set of a trap involving a statue holding 2 dice that ignited a bunch of oil in a crypt we were exploring.  Fortunately, he managed to avoid taking any damage...the rest of the party was not so lucky.  I seem to recall that the troll warrior took the brunt of the damage.  :-(

The new edition (available for $10 in PDF form from rpgnow.com) follows the trend of the previous Champions Complete, by including everything that you need in one book, removing the need for the mammoth two volume set of Hero System 6th Edition.  Everything old is new again I guess, as back in the day, Hero games published complete rule sets for each of the genre's that they supported.  We had Champions for superheroes, Justice Inc. for 20s and 30s pulp, Danger International for modern spy games,  Star Hero for science fiction, and of course Fantasy Hero for Fantasy.  Hero Games eventually merged everything into the Hero System, and put out this lovely tome:

Champions Deluxe

Sadly, the original printing had a tendency to fall apart, so most everyone needed to hole drill their pages and put them in a binder, but the game was great, and did a nice job of merging the enhancement that had appeared in each of the stand-alone games.  A number of sourcebooks were published for the Hero System, and eventually (and much to my surprise), we got my favorite version of the game, Hero System 5th Edition.  Essentially, 5th edition merged and cleaned up a lot of the material from the previous edition sourcebooks and gave them a home between two wonderful black covers.

The lovely 5th Edition

5th Edition got a revised and expanded hardcover which added a lot more material, but eventually, Steven Long, who was now the caretaker of the Hero System  decided that it was time for a 6th Edition.  6th Edition made some changes that not everyone was fond of, principally the removal of figured characteristics.  While I wasn't fond of losing figured characteristics, I think that I missed the black book cover more.  Electric blue just isn't really my speed.  Also, renaming Disadvantages to Complications seemed rather unnecessary In any case 6th Edition published a gorgeous Fantasy Hero supplement, but the books that you needed to carry back and forth to a gaming session were now rather backbreaking.

Hero System 6th Edition

So now we have Fantasy Hero Complete which slims things down to 262 pages.  It provides a good treatment of character creation and combat, but doesn't provide much in the way of spell examples.  I suspect that we will see a spell supplement much like we saw the Champions Powers supplement to Champions Complete.  Of course you could use Champions Powers with Fantasy Hero as well. The artwork is sparse, but decent.  Overall I think that the book falls somewhere in between an introductory book for Fantasy Hero, and a book for Fantasy Hero Veterans who don't want to lug around a ton of books.  If you are a complete Hero System newbie, you may be better off picking up a copy of the Hero System Basic Rulebook, which I think is a great starting point.  If you're a Hero System veteran, or if you're looking for more examples, you may be better served by sticking with the full-bore 6th edition and the original 6th Edition Fantasy Hero supplement in  PDF (available at rpgnow.com) .  This isn't to say that it's not a good book, just that I think it falls into a bit of a middle ground in terms of who it's good for.

6th Edition Fantasy Hero Supplement

I'm happy with the book and very happy to have supported the Kickstarter, but will I play it?  Alas, probably not as a regular campaign.  These days gaming time is precious and it's hard to justify the time spent creating characters when we only have maybe three hours a week to game.  Rules light rules the day nowadays with less reading and more playing.  I can see running a one-shot game with pre-generated characters though.  It's good to see Hero still around after all of these years.  Happy adventuring!

Fantasy RPG Heartbreakers - Everybody's got one, even me

     About eight years ago, when it seemed like everyone was doing their own retro clone or home-brew RPG, I decided that it might be a good idea to write one too.  There may have been some gin or bourbon involved in this decision, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.  I wrote the first draft and then lost interest.  In truth, I lost the files too, except for the PDF that I had for some reason uploaded to my Google Drive account.  A few weeks ago, I came across that file buried in a long forgotten directory, and had a good chuckle while reading through it.
     Now, I'll be the first to say that I've never been a "rules guy".  I don't really have much of an appreciation for a well crafted set of rules, or for cleverly designed mechanics.  I'm more interested in an interesting setting and just having fun.  If it's a good story and someone tells me roll high for something good to happen and roll low for something bad to happen, I'm generally OK with that. :-)  Having said that, my game has no setting information at all. It's just the rules, and it clocks in at a whopping 19 pages including character generation, combat, spells and a handy character sheet.
     I've never even play-tested this thing, and I don't expect that I ever will, as I own quite a number RPGs that are actually both good and playable.  The game has little practical application beyond perhaps what not to do in RPG design, but I had fun writing it, and figured that I would throw it out as a cautionary tale to other would be game designers.
     Without further ado, I present to you the 2008 version of Crossbows and Codpieces.  It's a 2d6 system, and the spells were inspired by the wacky spell names from Jack Vance's Dying Earth.  I just really hope that nobody ever casts Alem's Unsightly Canker on me. ;-)
     So, who else has one languishing in some long forgotten folder that they would like to share?

PS:  I actually forgot to include a codpiece on the equipment list too. :-(

R.I.P. Terry Pratchett

So far with Leonard Nimoy, and now Terry Pratchett, it's not shaping up to be a good year for fantasy and sci-fi. :-(

Weird Adventure Wednesday

On a bleak evening you cross paths with an unassuming rat catcher in the trade district.  The rat catcher tells you a rumor that 21 days journey to the east, beyond the Foul Pools of Perversion, lay the Fiery Boneyard of the Soul Hunters.  It is whispered that buried there is the Disintegrating Blade of Endless Pollution.  But beware, for the rat catcher tells you that it is believed the Immortal Knight of Loathing enslaves all who dare enter that place!

In Honor of Chuck Norris's 75th Birthday

Far Away Land Premium

The premium edition of Far Away Land has arrived, and it is gorgeous!