Tabletop Shop Talk

Jeff & Jen (JnJ as the bar tab refers to them) are just a couple of happily married tabletop gamers, comic book enthusiasts, and all-around charming folk.

[tabletopshoptalk-blog]

New Blog

Hey y’all!

So I’ve started a new blog for the podcast. You can find it at http://partyofonepodcast.tumblr.com/. A lot of the stuff I post there--prep work for new episodes, inspiration images, that kind of stuff--will be stuff I used to post onto this blog. I’d change the name of this blog, but because it’s a Secondary Tumblr and not a Primary, it lacks some of the social interaction features I want. So I’m making a new blog.

I don’t know that I’ll post here much moving forward (but I hadn’t posted here in awhile anyway, so that’s probably not surprising for you?)--I might still sometimes, but I dunno. But I’m going to leave TTS up, and probably link to it in the future. I like a lot of the stuff on here, the September of Short Adventure Archives in particular. I love this blog, and I’m proud of it, and you are all cool friends with good taste and I like you.

Anyway, you should follow @partyofonepodcast if you want to keep up with what I’m doing game-wise. Particularly because I’m looking for tabletop blogs to follow on the new account.

[thydungeongal]

So I’m currently thinking of a Strike! campaign heavily inspired by Earthbound where the characters are a bunch of kids in a weird psychotronic pop-culture America fighting against eldritch monstrosities, and to enforce the gamey feel of its main inspiration I want there to be minigames, namely as a means for the characters to replenish their lost resources (resources in this campaign are going to represent the characters’ allowance and there’s no money to be gained from looting fallen enemies).

Basically, I want the characters to be able to work part-time jobs and play little minigames inspired by said jobs to get some moneys. I’ve got two ideas thus far:

The paper route that goes horribly wrong when the neighborhood dog starts chasing you and you have to pedal like hell to shake it, using the normal Chase rules from Strike!

Pizza delivery: this pizza’s got to be delivered in 30 minutes or it’s free. Could be either done as a series of linked skill rolls with the outcome of the final roll determining whether you made it in time, or as a Chase where you’re literally racing the clock (wait, in this case is the character chasing the clock or is the clock chasing the character?)

I could use more ideas, so, uh, help?

[tabletopshoptalk-blog]

Taking a queue from FlatPack: Fix the Future, particularly the Book of Puzzles, you could consider just playing kid’s games! It pushes the theme of heroes-as-kids and provides a change of pace from the standard adventure. For instance:

I.T. Internship: It’s your job to ask people who call in if their computer is plugged in, or if the device is turned on--to solve basic issues before Chip from I.T. has to go visit their desk. If you can solve their issue in, say, 20 Questions, you get a nice tip and your boss looks the other way. Otherwise, you don’t.

Pizza Delivery: You’ve got to get a pizza to the customer in 30 minutes. It’s tricky, though--this city can be a real maze! (Cue the maze and a 60-second timer).

Barista: You’ve got to manage people’s complex orders, to make sure you don’t give someone a Tall Grande, Iced, Sugar-Free, Vanilla Latte With Soy Milk when they ordered a Grande, Iced, Sugar-Free, Vanilla Latte With Half-and-Half. Any memory game would work well here.

[swordandbackpack]

COMING SOON!

HALLOWEEN KNIGHTS, a new, spooky RPG from Rothbard & Gazpus based on the same Almanac System that powers Sword & Backpack! Totally kid-friendly and fun, HALLOWEEN KNIGHTS is the RPG for you if you want to celebrate Halloween all year and love monster kid stuff like The Halloween Tree, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Costume Quest, B.P.R.D., The Monster Squad, and It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. More details to come very soon, including a HALLOWEEN KNIGHTS MIXTAPE!

[Halloween Knights badge logo by the great Sam Mameli, aka @milkinajar. He rules.]

[tabletopshoptalk-blog]

YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

[tabletopshoptalk-blog]

01 - Fate Accelerated With Noah Houlihan

In the depths of Cosmo City, an evil stalks the noble gladiators of the squared circle. Can Slimy McHeelberg, the lyingest, cheatingest rudo to ever lace up a pair of wrestling boots, unravel the disa

SO I DID A THING.

I started an RPG podcast, focused on single-player games, and the first episode is live!

Go listen to me play a Luchariffic game of Fate Accelerated with Noah Houlihan of the Plus Two Comedy Podcast.

(Fun Fact: The adventure we play started out as one of my September mini-adventures! I was really happy with how it turned out.)

[thydungeongal]

I'm a fairly veteran GM of a variety of systems, but my boyfriend really wants to play d&d and is a total newbie I said for his birthday I'd run an adventure just for him but then I thought about it.... and honestly I have no idea how to run a game for just one person. All my groups have always had at least 4 people in them. Any tips?

Well, I know for a fact that there’s a publisher out there that has released a number of solitaire adventures for D&D, 3.5 to be specific.

Another idea I thought of would be to have them play an entire group of characters. However, since they’re a complete newbie this would be really intensive on the mechanical side, but if you use one of the simpler editions like B/X it shouldn’t be too bad.

Also, now that I think about it, there’s a retroclone called Scarlet Heroes that is specifically geared towards solo play. It has a more of a wuxia feel to it than traditional D&D fantasy, but word is it’s really good. As far as I know, you can use it to run pretty much any old-school D&D adventure as a solo game, because individual characters are on the stronger side in that game.

But this is putting the cart before the horse: what particular aspect of making a solo adventure are you struggling with?

[tabletopshoptalk-blog]

Scarlet Heroes is great, and the publisher actually offers a free supplement which explains the hacks they made to the core D&D to support solo character play. That said, Scarlet Heroes itself is a must-have, if only for the wealth of story-centric tables and oracles in the back of the book.

[unpossiblelabs-deactivated20180]

There’s a new new Traveller on the horizon, which is not new news, but is new news to me.

Traveller is the original sci-fi RPG. It first appeared in 1977, and since then has gone through one of the weirdest licensing and publication paths imaginable. This one looks like a rather extensive overhaul, so it’ll be interesting to see where Mongoose takes it.

[tabletopshoptalk-blog]

Aww yes, this is exciting news! I’ve been getting into MongTrav in a big way recently. I think this is a definite purchase for me.

[tabletopshoptalk-blog]

I've been thinking about an idea for a game today--a tabletop RPG/LARP type game built around the world of Pro Wrestling Commentary. (I guess it'd be a LARP because it'd be more focused on performance and inhabiting a character, but it'd also be literally played at a table so I dunno.)

It'd be for 2-4 players. One player would be Creative. They'd come up with a series of matches, results, times, and storyline beats to address/advance during the show. The other players would be the commentary team (a mix of play-by-play, color, and guest commentators), and have to collaboratively commentate this fictional wrestling event.

Creative would be the only one with a match list in front of them, so they'd be "directing" the show remotely, telling players when things occur (in the same way that, say, Vince McMahon directs commentary from the headsets on RAW).

Then--to simulate the chaos in the ring, and also different commentators sitting in on different creative meetings--there'd be Chaos Cards. Each player writes down a random event--a set of moves, an unexpected twist, something going wrong, etc.--on an index card. Once per minute Creative draws a card and reads it aloud. So every commentator knows SOME of the things that will occur, but not ALL of them. So there's always someone prepared, & someone surprised. The idea here is to reflect JR & Jerry Lawler's style of commentary--where one person knew the storylines and one person was completely surprised.

It's not all fleshed out yet, but I think there's something there I'm going to have to keep fiddling with.

[negative-cone]

so anti gen con is an online diy rpg convention. I didn’t do it last year because I didn’t know about it last year. don’t be a dingus like I was a dingus.

it is done through google plus. if you’re into RPGs, adventuring, swashbuckling or any kind of pen and paper fun but you aren’t on g+ then you are still being a dingus.

the thing is put together by Jez Gordon, known for his work on death frost doom, and a red & pleasant land. he is so good that I didn’t capitalize any other proper nouns but his name.

at any rate, I am going to take the helm and likely run a game of Sword & Backpack sunday august the second. (again, proper noun capitalizations are indicative of goodness) no promises.

share this post, would you? i have like 6 followers on tumblr so if all 6 of you share it and get the word out, then anti gen con might be the coolest thing you do all summer.

[swordandbackpack]

WOW.

[tabletopshoptalk-blog]

Yeah ok

This sounds pretty rad

[tabletopshoptalk-blog]

You ever solo play a tabletop RPG, then write yourself into a moral quandary that you absolutely cannot think your way out of?

No? Just me?

Sidenote: Scarlet Heroes is GREAT.

[tabletopshoptalk-blog]

unpossiblelabs answered:

I can’t speak to its awesomeness or lack thereof, but you may want to investigate [Sprit of 77](drivethrurpg.com/product…)

I forgot about Spirit of ‘77! I saw the KickStarter awhile back. I haven’t checked out the rules yet either, but it was definitely written with that kind of movie in mind, so it might be just what I was looking for. And it’s Driven By The Apocalypse, so I’m already partial to it, based on Dungeon World.

Also, the supplement, Wide World of ‘77, apparently includes a Story called “The Nature Boy,” and a specialty role called “King of the Ring,” which, yeah, alright, let’s do this.

Or rather, LET’S. DO. THIS?

[tabletopshoptalk-blog]

Here’s a question to the crowd

is there an RPG out there that simulates, for lack of a better word, 70s trucker flicks? Smoky and the Bandit, Hooper, Convoy, Cannonball Run, etc.?

Atomic Highway, kinda (Road Warrior shares a lot of DNA with that genre of film, after all)--anything else?

[unpossiblelabs-deactivated20180]

Four more makes 44 games to discover at Learn Tabletop RPGs.

[tabletopshoptalk-blog]

FLATPACK!

[eeeaab]

Hey its Goblin Week!!! My favorite week. Here is a breed of goblin that will be part of a ‘zine’ thing I’m working on of blank trading cards/unheard of monster stats that the owner of the zine can fill out/use in RPGs/use in homemade trading card games/color in and then pull out of the zine and use/send back to me so I can compile an even cooler zine of user-made monster stats. Will be finished some day sooooon!

[tabletopshoptalk-blog]

omg I love this!

[tabletopshoptalk-blog]

hey, my friends just asked me to DM a game of something! but we haven't decided what system or setting or anything. What are you recommendations for something 1. playable over skype/online 2. lightweight and 3. good for a beginner DM?

Those three things are almost always what I want in a game, so you're in luck! I would really recommend one of two games--coincidentally, probably my two favorite RPGs.

Dungeon World - Dungeon World fits all three criteria to a tee. It's very lightweight by design. Everything you need to know as a player is listed in your playbook, almost everything is based on the same mechanic (2d6+Stat, 10+ is a success, 7-9 is a partial success, and something happens on a 6-, not necessarily a failure). It doesn't use minis, grids, or anything like that, making it a great online game. And it is PACKED with some of the best DMing advice you'll find--I learned a ton from it, as someone who had DMed for years before reading it. Seriously, I'd recommend reading it whether or not you end up playing (which is easy, since the whole thing was released under Creative Commons) just for its DMing advice.

Fate Core (or Fate Accelerated) - My favorite RPG of all time, full stop. Fate Accelerated is a little easier to teach than Fate Core, since the rulebook is 40 pages, but they're both really great reads (I like Evil Hat's description of the two as "FAE gives you the rules in as little space/time as possible. Fate Core takes more time to read, but it gives you the why BEHIND the rules). A little tougher to do over Skype, because of how Aspects work (it helps to see them laid out in front of you--which you could easily do via Google Hangouts or Roll20), but it's still really lightweight, and intuitive, and easy to pick up as a DM (like Dungeon World, it's all built on the same set of mechanics--an idea they call the Fate Fractal, or Bronze Rule.) Fate is also available as a (really-nicely laid out) SRD, and is also a Pay What You Want PDF. Added bonus, Fate has, as my brother once described it, "the best character generation [he] ever took part in."

Those are my two initial recommendations. I'd say look those over, see if they feel "right" to you. If not, let me know what turns up your nose at them, and I can probably throw out some other recommendations.

And if so, I wish you happy gaming!

(wow that turned into a wall of text didn't it)

[corruptionpoints]

Tonight’s Game - Atomic Robo RPG!

[tabletopshoptalk-blog]

I gotta buckle down and buy the AARPG eventually.

FATE is my favorite RPG of all time, and AA is one of my favorite comics ever.

[goblin-grog]

“The Nine Forms of the Five Room Dungeon" by Matthew Neagley

I’m going to be running a bunch of roleplaying first timers through their first game of Dungeon World… so I’ve been looking over the Five Room Dungeon model again, trying to give myself plenty of ideas for adventure seeds. 

This is a very helpful visual.

[tabletopshoptalk-blog]

idea:

a D&D campaign made up entirely of simpsons references

invasions from the Land of Wind and Ghosts

The Realm of the Mole People

The Queen of the Harpies (yes i know that's technically a Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? reference get off my back dad i'm an adult)