Castle Death! A Dead Simple RPG for Kids and Parents, Part 2
In Part 1, I described how I sat down with my 10 y.o. son Nico and prepared, in mere minutes, a RPG session using a very simple game mechanic:
Whenever you wish to perform a task whose outcome is uncertain, Roll a d6. On a 6 you succeed with great success, on a 1 you fail horribly. All intermediate results are interpreted based on the ongoing story.
The Adventure Begins
I took my pad of graph paper and flipped to an empty page. On it, I drew a very large rectangle taking about 3/4 of the whole sheet and put a set of double doors on one side. I then added a sinewy path leading from the castle to an out-of-scale village.
Chatty: All right, Bersork makes his way to the Castle’s entry, the huge double door seems to be barred from behind. What do you do?
Nico: Can I force it open?
Sure, roll for it (he rolled a 3), ahhh I’m sorry but it apprears you aren’t strong enough to open it…
I use my axe to break it down. Can I roll again?
Nah, you’ll get the door “open” no problem but you’ll alert the whole place, are you ok with that?
O The Tangled Webs We Weep, When Breathe We Don’t When Go To Sleep
Ever since I was a wee lad, I’ve always had really vivid dreams. On occasion, this translates into really vivid nightmares, which sucks mightily. Usually, though, it just means I’m going to have a good story to tell come the dawn. Well, that is, until I found out I had sleep apnea. Turns out, one of the side effects of stopping to take a break during sleep to not breathe every few minutes is that you never really leave REM sleep — causing incredibly vivid dreams. Getting a machine to help with that provides me with a lot more energy during the day, but I only get a tiny fraction of the WTF I used to reap each night. This week, however, my sinuses have decided to clog up everything, making it really hard for my machine to blow air down my throat to keep me breathing normally. And that meant it was SHOWTIME.
It all started off fairly innocuously. I was at my parents’ house, waiting to go to a weekly board game night at the local community college with my dad. I really wish this existed. It was like a little mini-convention, but everyone there was really laid back and the lights were low and it was really mellow and it made me feel like how adults looked to me when I was a kid. I say this never having gone there in the dream, just remembering it, because my dad was taking forever. I was getting impatient enough to wander around the house, which apparently had become the Christmas village in a department store since I’d moved out. After pacing a few times around a few snowy gumdrops, my dad decided it was finally time to go.
When I was very young, probably 5 or 6, I read an article in Parade magazine called “You Can Control Your Dreams”. I didn’t really understand what it was trying to tell me to do at the time, but the concept that I could take a bad dream and decide to take it in a much better direction was extremely appealing to a little boy who would sometimes wake up terrified in his parents’ bed not knowing how he got there. I tried to control the nightmare I had that very night — Darth Vader had taken over the playground at my school, and several Imperial Stormtroopers had their blaster rifles pointed at me. I made it so their blasters could only fire Finger Pops. I was ecstatic. However, that was about as far as I could take it, and I soon woke up all freaked out as Vader and his men were about to get me.
So it was from then on. I’d get a little nudge, but not full control. I’ve managed to erase tornadoes from nightmares, only to have the storm continue or find another threat emerging. I’ve managed to summon the Sword of Omens to smite my nemesis, only to find it’s made of plastic. Having a useless power is almost worse than being completely helpless.
So it was that my dad was finally ready to go, but instead of going to the Community College Weekly Mellow Game Con, we went to K-Mart. I think we were going to go buy a swingset, and we were in a really bizarre truck that had the engine in the back, no windshield or doors, and pretty much exposed you to all the elements. I think it had seatbelts. I remember being very keen on making sure of that. It was wintertime in the dream, so I wasn’t real happy about riding in this truck to begin with. Fortunately, we somehow found ourselves having the argument about riding to K-Mart in front of said K-Mart, so we just sort of went in. (Arguments as an alternative source of clean transportation energy?)
I can’t tell you what shifted in the dream just then, but I noticed something odd in the dream. I couldn’t put my finger on it. Whatever it was, it shifted everything toward the worse. I became aware of the fact that the FBI was coming for me, because I’d mistakenly hacked into a server somehow and looked at a secret file that I didn’t understand. I remember my conscience being clean, it all being just a big misunderstanding, but knew they wouldn’t see it that way. They were coming for me, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I saw my son happily running around the lumber section of the K-Mart, and I cried knowing I wouldn’t get to see him grow up.
I heard someone pull up outside. For a moment, my heart rose, thinking it was my mom come to pick me up and whisk me away. It was the police, and they had replaced my dad with an agent meant to act in his stead wearing a weird leisure suit. Weird Leisure-Dad explained what was about to happen to me, disingenuously pausing to call me “son” every few seconds, and then a Clearly Evil person in charge showed up. I apologized and cried. He laughed and had me stand on a large couch cushion. “For science”, he said. I didn’t understand. Shaking his head, he declared the experiment a failure, and told me to go sit on a nearby porch swing. I noticed it was rusting and ready to fall apart. ”For science,” he gestured toward the contraption, leering cruelly.
I’ve seldom been happier to wake up.
Even today, I haven’t mastered lucid dreaming. On the rare occasion that I realize I’m dreaming, I’ve usually got about 15 seconds before I wake. I’ve had people suggest looking upward and spinning, scrambling the dream somehow and putting you in control. That makes me dizzy and in a dark, dangerous place. I used to try pushing my temples in to wake up. That was a nice thought, and it got me dream-killed a couple times.
The other fun part of sleep apnea? Sometimes it comes with sleep paralysis. That’s when you wake up (or think you do), and you can’t move, and you can’t breathe. Sometimes, your brain is still in dream-mode, and the stuff my subconscious makes when I’m scared ain’t nice. I’ve dreamt or hallucinated so many ghosts, serial killers, monsters, and packs of ravenous wolves coming to claim my paralyzed body that I feel like I’ve really stimulated the supernatural economy over the years.
I had a really mild bout of sleep paralysis that night, as well:
I felt like the bed was at a 45 degree angle, and I was slowly sliding off, only it never stopped. I figured out I was dreaming and calmed down a little when the aliens from They Live were holding a potpourri party.
Shortly thereafter, I drifted back to sleep to find myself in a world under attack by aliens. Or tornadoes. Or energy trees. This part was extremely chaotic. It was like watching a sci-fi movie where I really had no control over what was going on, and I wasn’t entirely sure if I was there or watching it. What I do remember is a bunch of guys dressed like the Ghostbusters giving each other high fives like they’d saved everyone and a bunch of government types sneering at them and calling them losers.
Then, I felt it again. The same shift I’d felt before, only less subtle. More deliberate. I saw something gold skitter past the corner of my vision, but then it was gone.
The shift wasn’t quite as traumatic this time out. Well, for me anyway. Suddenly the tone of the dream is pretty mellow and most everything is rebuilt. I’m driving around my small town making sure every building and structure has a colorful kite or enormous hair tie stuck to it. Apparently, this was how the aliens were defeated. The scene cuts to a ruined house, where one of the Ghostbuster-type guys is milling about when he finds one of the female scientists featured prominently in the earlier movie-action part. Then he says “so when did you find out you were pregnant?” and then her belly suddenly goes from zero to “we better go shopping at Target right now“. This didn’t seem particularly unusual to either of them, but as a father I wondered where they would find a duffel bag to hurriedly pack with a bunch of things they will be completely wrong about needing at the hospital later.
Then, I feel that weird shift again. Then, I see a gnome in full plate mail, gold and glittering, drop from the sky to land right in front of me. He hands me something purple. Then I wake up.
I woke up knowing full well what the gnome had given me.
He was an agent of the GM running my dream. He gave me a plot point. Apparently, my subconscious runs Cortex+.
I’d like to think this was all an elaborate night-long multi-dream joke my subconscious played on me, but more likely it just sort of progressively interpreted some earlier stuff into the golden plot-gnome. Either way, my son looked very strangely at me when I woke up laughing.
Photo Credit
Review: “Marvel Heroic Roleplaying”
(Editor’s note: as regular readers may know, several of the Critical Hits staff worked on or playtested Marvel Heroic Roleplaying by Margaret Weis Productions. Obviously none of us could make something resembling an impartial review, so we turned to our staff reviewer Wyatt to give it a read, as he was in no way involved in its creation. So enjoy this review from that perspective.)
Life has taken me on a divergent path than a lot of gamers I know. At the ripe young age when people seem to go into comics, I got into Pokemon, and then I watched exactly a million anime shows and read probably twice as many manga. As a child when a Limewire or Kazaa download purporting to be a fansubbed episode of Yu-Gi-Oh turned out to be porn, I was pretty disappointed.
I don’t really have a lot of experience with comics except that I watched The Death and Return of Superman fan-film (warning for language and things) which is absolutely hilarious, and some Marvel comics Hollywood movies. I have, however, played a lot of RPGs, and in the future Marvel Heroic Roleplaying might go into the rotation, though I doubt I will actually use the Marvel serial numbers in my game since I don’t have much attachment to Marvel. It is an interesting game with a versatile core mechanic that models comic book style adventures quite adequately.
Buckets Full of Dice
I’ve never played Leverage before, which seems like it would be helpful for potential new players, if they have experience with that system, since from what I hear Marvel takes after that game. It took me a while to get the hang of Marvel Heroic Roleplaying. The first few chapters lay out the dice system and all the trappings, but on a first read, you might find yourself bombarded with terminology, like Stress and Doom Pools, that the character sheet of Captain America can’t explain on its own. If you’re not an experienced RPG player, who can find analogues to these things in other games; it can be confusing to take in the casual mention of them until they’re fully explained. The glossary is at the back of the book – I think it would’ve been better if the glossary was right up front like the old White Wolf books, which also had this kind of problem. I have to admit I found it difficult to get through the mechanical sections of the book – it took me a while to work through the fairly dry explanations and examples. I think a more informal, hammy style of writing could’ve helped the book out. [Read the rest of this article]
Critical Bits for the week ending 2012-03-04
- Dungeons & Trolls: D&D-style magnetic word set, perfect for adventures on your refrigerator: http://t.co/z1sijHsZ #
- March Fo(u)rth for GM's Day sale begins at @DriveThruRPG, thousands of titles discounted: http://t.co/VUhF5t9u #
- “@SlyFlourish: Fascinated by this excellent analysis of damage per level and what it SHOULD be: http://t.co/CzRVDks5 #dnd #
- “@Official_PAX: BEHOLD the PAX East 2012 panel schedule is live! http://t.co/eOyRMJeu” #
Pain of Publication: Writing to Revise
Previously I’ve talked about my previous novel attempts, difficult revisions and cutting, actually getting work done, reviewed Low Town and Alloy of Law.
Having written three novels to completion, and having none of them published, provides ample opportunity for self-reflection. One thing that consistently impresses me is how bad my first drafts are. There is a startling lack of crispness and terrible sagging portions of the book that really don’t tie together. Even though revisions are a pain in the ass, there’s a feeling of wizardry when you combine two throwaway characters into one quirky minor character or change a few proper nouns around to create foreshadowing. It almost feels like cheating. Knowing that revisions will be made should inform how you write a draft. I have learned to prioritize certain aspects of writing in my first draft and give other considerations lower priority.
Characterization
Don’t expect every character to be fully defined from the moment they walk into your story, but as you go forward, develop a feel for each character. Get comfortable stepping into their skin, internalizing their values, and understanding their point of view. Ideally, as the plot moves forward, you want to be able to look through each character’s lens and judge events. The plot is not monolithic and you may find the the character you have crafted does not fit as neatly into the story as you had expected. If you recognize this as you are writing, adjust the character’s role in the plot accordingly, but more importantly, by the time you have a draft you should have mastered the character. Pay attention to make sure that each character behaves appropriately throughout the story. Ultimately, if you throw tough situations and drama at well-developed characters you will gain an understanding on how they would react. Well-developed protagonists will begin to move the plot along seemingly of their own volition as you intuitively know what they would do given the trouble you have cooked up for them. It’s this internal sense when cultivated in a draft which shine through on later revisions. [Read the rest of this article]
Learning to Play “Marvel Heroic Roleplaying”
Now that Marvel Heroic Roleplaying has been released in PDF, you may be itching to start playing.
I came in late in the playtesting cycle and just last Friday ran my first MHR session as a warmup for the launch party at my FLGS this Friday. So I haven’t exactly played this game a lot. It was also the first time I’d had to teach some players a new game since I introduced my group to Torg in the early 90s.
Although I have read through the Smallville and Leverage RPGs, I had yet to actually run a Cortex Plus game. It was a learning experience. So, I figure that other people would be interested in my experiences at teaching the game to my players and that I could provide some tips and warn about some pitfalls in introducing the game to your players.
Don’t Force Feed Them the Rules
Unless your players have played Leverage or Smallville, there is a lot to absorb all at once. There is the core mechanic, plot point usage, actions, complications, stress, and milestones. Instead I recommend starting with going over the datasheets and how you build your dice pool. Mention that the players have Plot Points that they can use to manipulate the dice pool via different methods and SFX on their datasheet, but don’t go into all the various ways they can do so. Finally mention that you, as the Watcher, have the Doom Pool that acts not only as a supply for extra dice for Watcher characters (much like Plot Points are for the players) but also as an an opposition pool for actions that aren’t directed at a specific Watcher character.
Then throw them straight into the action.
Some points that you may want to emphasize to your players:
- The importance of the effect die is the actual die it is, not the number that is showing on the die. This is quite different than other games, and it took some time for my players to wrap their head around it.
- Rolling a one on a die is not necessarily a bad thing! Yes, this will cause the Doom Pool to grow, but it also means that the players get Plot Points! This is important because…
- Plot Points are PLOT FUEL! Players will want to have a nice supply of Plot Points later in the Act when the Doom Pool is larger and with bigger dice. Player’s shouldn’t be afraid to add a d4 to their dice pool (and get a Plot Point) instead of adding a d8 when including a Distinction in their dice pool.
Subtle Rules
As expected, I made several errors in my first session. Most of these errors I either discovered on re-reading the Operations Manual or through discussions online. To help you avoid those little mistakes here is a list of the ones that I made:
- In order for the reaction roll to prevent the action from succeeding, the total needs to be greater than the action roll.
- If the effect die from the reaction roll is higher than the effect die from the action roll, the effect die for the action roll is stepped back by -1.
- Distinctions must have some association with the action or reaction you are attempting. If you can’t come up with one (and for some of the villains it might be tough), consider using a Scene Distinction instead.
- If the Watcher rolls an opportunity (ie. rolls a 1), that opportunity can be activated by the player immedately, and the push or stunt die added to the next roll, including the reaction roll to the action that provided the opportunity.
- Although you cannot use multiple effect dice to inflict the same type of stress on a single character, you can do so with mobs. So if you use one of the Area Attack SFXes, and have effect dice on a 5d6 mob of d10, d8, d6, d6, you can take out three dice from that mob (as you can’t have 2d6 stress).
- When you get to the end of a round, the last character gets to choose anyone to go next, including himself! This is why a player might want to choose a Watcher character instead of a Hero to go next, as explained by Fred Hicks.
Cool Stuff to Do
One of the great things about MHR is that it gives you mechanics to do cool stuff. Here are a couple of things you can do to complicate matters for your players:
- Mess with their Affiliations. Unlike many other games, MHR actually encourages you to split the party. By spending a die from the Doom Pool you can force the heroes to join up or split apart, which will improve (or degrade) their performance by changing which of their Affiliation traits is applicable. Wolverine is going to attack that villain? Spend a die from the Doom Pool and send them crashing down into the lower levels of the complex, separating Wolverine from his friends (and making the player happy). Want to make things challenging for Cyclops? Do the same thing. On the other hand, combining separate groups can be just as rewarding.
- Scene Distinctions (eg. It’s Pitch Black or Collapsing Building) are great for providing an alternative Distinction for players to use rather than the ones listed on their character sheet, especially if it’s difficult to apply them to the current situation. They also provide excellent mood and atmosphere.
Above all, the point is to make cool stories and have fun!
Castle Death! A Dead Simple RPG for Kids and Parents, Part 1
Yay, time for another “Gaming with Nico” story. I haven’t done one of these in forever and it so happens that an occasion presented itself last week.
Ensnaring the Unwary
Nico: I’m bored, I wanna play something.
Chatty: Do you want to play World of Warcraft? Some Magic Commander? How about some Poker?
Nico: Hmmmm, I don’t know…
Chatty: Okay, join me in at the kitchen table then, I’ll teach you a new game.
Nico (wary, as always when I get all mysterious): What kinda game?
An adventure game. Trust me you’re going to LOVE this one.
Oh, what’s it called?
Hmmm… it’s called CASTLE DEATH!
Oh cool! How does it play?
(Hook line and sinker!) [Read the rest of this article]
It’s OK To Talk To Yourself, As Long As Someone Answers
I’ve been playing a lot of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning lately. I’m convinced the entire game is nothing but a plot by R.A. Salvatore to convince the world that faeries aren’t actually lame after all. The jury is still out. At the very least, the Summer Fae in the game give me a headache with their stubbornness, their cryptic words and their being “stuck in time in a condescending way”. To be honest, they remind me of a lot of certain people that used to call in when I was still doing Internet tech support. That being said, I find myself trying to put myself in their shoes. Maybe it’s because I find people less annoying when I empathize with them. Everyone has their own unique point of view. Even if it’s annoying.
Questioning The People You See Before You
Since I started being a DM for our group, I don’t get to roleplay as much as I did as a player. At least, not as deeply as I might with a PC I play for weeks on end. My primary sense of satisfaction when DMing comes from when I can get a good old fashioned par-lay going.
I usually try to roleplay NPCs as I think they would act in a given situation (with perhaps a bullet point or two they need to cover somewhere in there). The problem is, sometimes putting yourself in someone else’s shoes is difficult if they’re the size of your house. Or if that individual doesn’t have feet. Or metaphors. Point is, the people and creatures you put in your PCs’ way are very likely going to come from a much different place (in several senses of the word) than the party. Figuring out what those places are can be a big step toward making memorable encounters.
With an NPC that’s a playable PC race (human, elf, dwarf, what have you), figuring this out takes a few layers of thinking, but it’s generally mostly palatable to most brains – especially in established or popular settings. If you want to paint with an easy, broad brush, you can go with a well-known stereotype. You know dwarves don’t like elves or magic very much. You know elves are aloof and kind of condescending. You probably also know (or can easily discover) the locations you can find the type of people you want to use for an NPC. That probably also means you can read up on the culture of the place. You don’t need to go all Tolkien and be able to recite the lineage of the Kings of Cormyr, but ask yourself if the people have known hardship and hunger. Is their government is kind to them? Some cultures like strangers better than others. What about this one?
Based on all these factors, how will they feel when a bunch of people armed to the teeth and covered in monster blood show up?
And if that’s not enough, in many cases the PCs will be there in a time of crisis. Emotions are high, fear is running wild. How would a villager react? A town guardsman? The mayor?
Frequently, I find that a good way to generate a concept for almost anything is to start with a vague idea and keep asking myself questions until I get an interesting answer. The 6 W’s (who, what, when, where, why, and how) are your bestest friend here. Who are these people? What is the major industry in the town? Where is the town located? Sooner or later, you start asking more specific questions. What kind of person is the mayor? How large is the town’s militia? Eventually, you’re going to get a sense for the people of the area.
If you’re building an NPC, and you get to know his people, you can judge better what his reactions might be to the strange things happening around him. Most NPCs I make will have a personality of some kind and might not be an exact cookie cutter of every other person in a community, but I have a base to fall back on if the two or three bullet points I had written down for a particular guy aren’t sufficient. In addition to giving the NPC more flavor, this kind of information is very useful when my players throw me a curveball. I might not have an detailed response right off the cuff, but the more at ease with the character’s background I am, the less likely it is that my players are going to know that I’m making things up as I go along. Just remember to write this stuff down. Your players will be.
Questioning The Events Happening Before Your Eyes
You can also ask yourself questions to generate encounters or even entire adventures. If you know your setting, you will know what will really ruin its inhabitants’ day. Conflict has a way of making story ideas sprout, and sometimes it’s easier to go from effect to cause if you want to make a story. What would happen if [INSERT UNFORTUNATE CIRCUMSTANCE HERE]? Did the town’s water supply get cut off? What’s that, Lassie? Demons are eating everyone? It really sucks to be this town. Then I can decide who or what is causing the ruckus — did some kid stumble on an unfortunate magical artifact, or does an angry wizard wants to annex their land for real estate purposes, or — well, you get the idea.
You’ve got the idea for your adventure now, so you can populate it with all the poor bastards you mean to inflict this stuff upon. Put yourself in their shoes. Were they pretty comfortable before, and now they’re worried about their next meal or seeing another sunrise? Do they know what’s happening? Are they going to collectively be more prone to call for help or shun outsiders?
Here’s where you throw the PC’s in. Once you answer all these questions, now ask yourself how these people are going to react to the aforementioned bunch of teeth-armed adventurers tromping in looking for wine, food, and/or premium sexual companionship. You may find the answer is more complicated than you expected. Which is awesome.
Questioning Your Very Surroundings
Sure, this takes a little work, but you don’t have to write a novel to get a good concept. Here’s an example of how to make up a small setting for adventures using similar methods as above.
Some people, myself included, get a little restless among more conventional fantasy settings, so sometimes it’s good to change a variable around here and there. You could go completely opposite and have cave-dwelling elves that dig stonework, and tree-hugger dwarves that try desperately to figure out how their inability to be knocked prone factors in to vine-swinging.
Sometimes, though, you want to nudge something just enough where it’s interesting. What if your dwarf NPC came from a tribe of druids? A dwarven druid isn’t unheard of, but a community of them might furrow a few thoughtful brows at the gaming table. They could have some more traditionally dwarf-y traits than a tribe of druidic humans or elves might. I see a place like this being founded a few generations back by a dwarf who, for reasons unknown, liked the forest better than the mountain and talked some friends and family into coming along. They’d be recognizable, but a diversion from the old “works stone, hoards gold” model. I’d imagine their hobbit holes would be of superior quality. Another good question is “what kind of druids are these dwarves”? I think in this case, maybe not the kind of druids who use magic, people with that title are just leaders.
These folks are just living their normal, everyday lives in harmony with nature. Or, rather, trying to – maybe something has gone wrong. I don’t know yet, and maybe they don’t either. What makes them think something is wrong? Evidence of gruesome, even unnatural attacks by what may be animals? Withering plant life? OK, both of those. Now there’s a bunch of scared people. Some of them might want to reach out to civilization (maybe their mountainous brethren) for help. Others might want to trust only in what they know — and want to shut all outsiders out. Now would be a good time to figure out the pros and cons for these choices, and that involves filling in some more blanks. Is this tribe peaceful or warlike? Did the tribe leave the mountains, or were they exiled? Do they have relationships with nearby communities, and if so how peaceful are they? Are they nomads?
Questioning Why You Just Read This Article?
Of course, I’m just firing off ideas. Just in a couple paragraphs I’ve laid enough seeds to come up with enough for several nights of adventuring and I don’t even have a solid plot yet. The point is, you can also ask yourself “what’s different” and “what’s the same” relative to an existing group and then expand there with more questions until it feels interesting to you. Or, you can come up with something completely different and ask yourself questions about that — about anything from a single NPC all the way up to your game world itself.
Imagination is a wonderful tool, and it works even better when you give it some tools to work with too. If you have any, please share!
Photo Credit
Review: “Deathwatch: Mark of the Xenos”
One of the major issues I had with Fantasy Flight Games’ Warhammer 40,000 RPG systems was that there seemed to be a dearth of “monster books.” There were a lot of written adversaries but they were scattered around a lot of books, since there are four different game lines now each with different, specific focuses that required different presentation. In the Dark Heresy core book you can get some heretics and things of that nature, there’s some pirates, aliens and Eldar in Rogue Trader. Creatures Anathema added a lot of content for Dark Heresy, with Orkz and other aliens aplenty, but when Deathwatch came around, FFG shone a huge spotlight on the hitherto under-represented Tyranid and Tau. The need was really felt for a new compendium of creatures that could challenge a bunch of Space Marines, rather than a bunch of Adepts.
And like a Krootox rampaging across your gaming table, came Mark of the Xenos for Deathwatch. Mark of the Xenos is a “monster book” for Deathwatch, containing all the creatures found in Jericho Reach, giving the Achillus Crusade a hard time.
Up front, I will state my only grievance with the book. It is, of course, very focused on a certain region of the Imperium. There are no Eldar in the Jericho Reach for example, so there’s no Eldar in this book. To get my Eldar-killing on, I’d have to buy a module that features them, and get their stats there. Lure of the Expanse, for example, has a Pathfinder, Farseer, Warlock and Wraithguard fully written up. That’s a Rogue Trader book though. Dark Eldar you can find a lot of in Purge the Unclean, a Dark Heresy module. You’d have to put in a little homebrew time to get those Deathwatch-ready.
I would really like a book that just has every alien species and insane cultist archetype that the Imperium carves up on a regular basis, but Mark of the Xenos is nonetheless a very nice book with a hell of a lot of adversaries.
The book is divided into four fairly simple chapters: Aliens, Renegades, Chaos and a section for the Game Master. The aliens section is the most expansive, because there are a lot of aliens, and the Deathwatch is pretty primarily concerned with killing aliens. They are equal opportunity purgers, but they work for the Ordo Xenos primarily. [Read the rest of this article]
Critical Bits for the week ending 2012-02-26
- “@AllenVarney: Kickstarter interviews Rich Burlew about his $1M Order of the Stick fundraiser – much wisdom: http://t.co/igGWHc4F” #
- Results from last week's L&L poll show that Critical Hits is the most desired feature of D&D. If only they meant us! http://t.co/9WeBV9zx #
- HOWTO make a stained-glass D20: http://t.co/rJJP4HBO via @BoingBoing #
- Marvel Heroic Roleplaying Basic Book PDF now up at @DriveThruRPG http://t.co/acd704Pm #
- “@Philgamer: [Review] Marvel Heroic Roleplaying Game by Margaret Weis Productions http://t.co/YtM7ybRE” #
- “@Wizards_DnD: February's #DDI update is complete. Check the link for the full info: http://t.co/mPL31HPd” #
- “@saveversusdeath: Revenge of the Iron Lich: Anniversary Edition. http://t.co/nH3cg3L6 #fourthcore #dnd #4e ?? #
- “@therobotviking: Now’s Your Chance to Reshape the Marvel Universe with the New Marvel RPG. http://t.co/DsIAn68V #rpg ?? #
- “@fredhicks: New on Deadly Fredly: Accidentally Designing Marvel's Action Order System http://t.co/NQK1CSXw” #
- Official #dnd Pax East schedule released: http://t.co/sVgjrNcE #
