Silent Legions Kickstarter In Its End Times...

While I usually try to keep ahead of such things, I confess that this one nearly slipped under my radar. I only fond out yesterday that Kevin Crawford over at Sine Nomine Publishing was working on Silent Legions, a modern day Lovecraftian horror game using familiar OSR mechanics. Their latest Kickstarter is fully funded in its final stretch. To quote the KS site:

Silent Legions is a modern-day Lovecraftian role-playing game, one built to support a sandbox style of gaming and the creation of your own diabolical Mythos. While compatible with the Stars Without Number game system and many other classic old-school games, Silent Legions is built to stand alone and provide you with everything you need to develop a grim world of unspeakable occult secrets and mad, sorcerous scheming. 

Silent Legions is 160+ pages of specially-designed material to help a game master create their own cosmic evils and mysterious alien powers. Rather than simply recycle the traditional Cthulhu Mythos baddies, Silent Legions gives you the tools and techniques to make your own, the better to shock and dismay your players with fresh horrors that haven't already been wrung dry by familiarity. The creatures and cults the game helps you build are also fully compatible with most classic OSR games, allowing you to export them to other settings or mix and match with material you've drawn in from your other games.

As a perk for donating, you get a peek at the playtest rules, and, as the blurb states, it's very similar and compatible to Sine Nomine's other OSR offerings like Stars Without Number and Spears At Dawn. Also, as stated, you won't find its bestiary stuffed full of familiar monstrosities like Mi-Go, Deep Ones, and Star-Spawn of Cthulhu. Instead, it allows you to create your own original degenerate-cult-worsphipped horrors to throw at your hapless investigators as they plunge into worlds of madness and elder chaos.

The campaign ends Thursday, December 18, at 6:42 pm CST. Donate today, before it is doomed forever!

2015: The Year Of Tekumel

Next year will mark the 40th anniversary of the publication of the late Professor M.A.R. Barker's Empire of the Petal Throne, which introduced us to his world of Tekumel. Veteran Tekumel-gamer Brett Slocum, suggests that we celebrate by declaring 2015 "The Year of Tekumel." I wholeheartedly agree. Which is why I'm going to dedicate a huge chunk of this upcoming year's blog activity to that effort.

Along with my usual fare, I'll be posting characters, magical items, creature conversions to Savage Worlds and 5th Ed, after action reports from any games I run or participate in, and any other Tekumel-related coolness I can devise. I also suggest that if you've got a gaming blog that you join in on the fun. The more the merrier.

I think we'll need a logo.

It's time to clean up my act.

You may have noticed that I removed the adult content warning from this site. I also took down a previous post that featured a model in a state of undress. After careful consideration, I came to the conclusion that using such material was both unprofessional and not at all welcoming for female readers. It's one thing to have a liberated attitude about sex, it's quite another to be an ass about it.

To all those whom I offended, I am sorry.

(SW) First Nova Praxis PC: Janus

As the Kickstarter goodies for Nova Praxis: Savage Worlds Edition keep rolling in, I tried my hand at creating my first PC for this transhumanist sci-fi setting. It could be a very involved process depending on what sort of character you want to create, perhaps more so than creating a PC for Interface Zero 2.0. You get to create your PC au naturel then, depending on the character's "state" (i.e. Pure, Sleeved, or Sim) you then get to upgrade your body accordingly and there are a lot of great augmentations you can use to customize your PC's "sleeve." I decided to create a sleeved Coalition spy/assassin uploaded into a totally synthetic "cybersleeve." 

As usual, thanks go out to the folks behind HeroMachine 3.0 for helping me compensate for my lack of artistic talent.

Note: all stats in parenthesis are for the PC's sleeve.

"Janus:"

State: Sleeved
Rank: Novice

Bennies: 2

Attributes: Agility d8 (d8), Smarts: d6, Strength d6 (d6), Spirit: d6,Vigor: d6 (d6)

Charisma: -4; Cohesion: -3; Pace: 6; Parry: 5 (6); Toughness: 12 (6)

Skills: Athletics: d6, Fighting d6, Knowledge (Politics) d4 (d6), Knowledge (Security) d4 (d6), Investigation d8 (d10 with Agent Bonus), Notice d4+1, Persuasion d6, Shooting: d6, Streetwise d4, Stealth d8

Edges: Assassin, Scion of House Kimura

Hindrances: Habit, VR Pornography (Major), Malware Afflicted, Mean. 

Rep: 4, 1d4, Bump 6
Assets: 3, 1d4-1, Bump 4

Augmentations:

Sleeve: Alpha Cybersleeve Cost 5 (6 -1 for Scion of House Kimura Edge)
Customization: +1 Cost, Removed sleeve's Dubious Construction Hindrance

Hindrances Outsider

Apotheosis (Comes with Mindset, Mnemonic Core, Data Jack)

Agent (Beta) Grants Skill Increases in Knowledge (Politics) and Knowledge (Security)

Fully Synthetic: +1 Toughness, Ignore 1 Wound Penalty, Synthetic Biology, -1 Benny
Performance Enhanced (Agility)

Hidden Weapon System (Monoblade Dagger "Claws")

Gear: Beta Agent, Light Battle Armor, Light Coil PDW, Light Rail Pistol, Spider Gear Kit, Plasti-Rope Dispenser, ARID Tag

Whoever he or she was before hir Apotheosis, "Janus" is a mystery. This newly appeared contract killer prefers to keep their nearly all aspects of hir identity a secret. Janus prefers the anonymity of cybersleeves, even going so far as to adjust hir sleeve's vocoder to produce an entirely androgynous voice. Janus approaches hir profession with ruthless efficiency making hir not the most friendly of companions. To help compensate for the muted existence of life in a cybersleeve, Janus indulges in promiscuous virtual sex during hir downtime. Keeping to hir sexually ambiguous nature, Janus will often alter gender and and orientation; male or female, hetero or homosexual, it doesn't matter. Unfortunately, Janus menomic core has picked up a few annoying trojans and viruses during hir VR trysts, but, so far, nothing serious.

UPDATE: Realized I miscalculated on the skills and had to lose the Licensed edge to increase my Spirit, which meant I had to rethink my Gear and my sleeve's augments. Then I updated my picture.

And we're back...

Sorry for long the unannounced silence folks, but I haven't been feeling very chatty or creative lately. The last few months have been draining: work pressures picked up,; I got slapped with another bout of depression; my mother lost her house, had to move to an senior apartment, AND had get her shoulder replaced; been trying (largely unsuccessfully) to restart my  local OSR group; and I was told by my doctor that if I didn't started losing some weight I would end up with Type II Diabetes and a liver that's turned into foie gras. So after several months of putting up with the drudge of a thankless job (more on that in a bit), hiking large heavy boxes of junk from place to place, sitting in a crowed game store full of 5e players trying to run B/X game that virtually no one pays attention to, and doing all this on half-rations while counting every single calorie that passes my lips, I 'm ready to start posting again.

Gaming In The Latter Times.

Richard Hescox's awesome cover art from my
favorite Barker novel: Flamesong

Brett Slocum recently blogged about his intention of running a campaign set in "The Time of No Kings," the period of Tékumelyáni history between the fall of Éngsvan hla Gánga the rise of Tsolyánu and the other "Modern" empires that we all know and love. I also have an interest in exploring other eras of Professor Barker's universe. While I already have some experience role-playing in the Humanspace Era (sniff, sob... DRUNE! WHERE ARE YOU DRUNE!?!?), I'd like to try playing in the mysterous Latter Times, the barbaric, post-apocalyptic period just after Tékumel was thrust into the béthorm (i.e. pocket universe) that imprisons the planet and its peoples:

Small empires and city-states came and went, and over time the various sentient species began to isolate themselves into their own enclaves and in environments that suited them best. This period became known as the Latter Times. It was during this age that some unknown scholar discovered that the mind alone could be trained as a tool. On Tékumel, magic is the skilled use of extra-planar power and it is possible because of the peculiar characteristics of the pocket dimension. The walls between the planes are thin here and with the right talent that energy can be shaped by the power of a human will. It is during this period of declining technology and increasing magic that some of the most exotic artefacts on Tékumel were created. Tékumel’s more outlandish species (for example, Rényu and Voródla) were created during the Latter Times. 

-Tékumel: Empire Of The Petal Throne, pg 145

To start, I pulled out my copy of the late Guardians Of Order's Tékumel: Empire Of The Petal Throne which has a section on playing in earlier time periods. It says the following about gaming in the Latter Times:

A game set in this period will be radically different from a modern era Tékumel game; even the positions of the landmasses will be different. This is when the first powerful magicians appear as they begin to explore and exploit the new potential of other planar power to affect reality. This is combined with the survival of considerable technological understanding and significant stockpiles of Humanspace-era equipment. This is a Tékumel where the new upstart magicians successfully challenge the old technological order for the first time and weird combinations of magic and science become almost commonplace. 

-Tékumel: Empire Of The Petal Throne, pg 224

Reminds me of another infamous piece of Sword & Sorcery fiction:

Know, O prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars... 

-Robert E. Howard,
The Pheonix on the Sword

Or perhaps this:

(Can't you imagine the Adventures of Thún'dar and his companions: the sensual sorceress Arél and Uk-Lah the Shén? I can.)

Eitherway, the Latter Times sounds like a time of mighy-thewed, coppery-hued barbarians wielding Chlén-hide swords (or uncommon, but not yet rare, steel) wandering the wastes between tiny empires and city-states in search of adventure. Where hordes of Ssú and Hlüss have broken loose from their ancient prisons to raid and destroy the alien interlopers who took their planet many millenia before. Meanwhile, insane scholars, flanked by ornate Ru'un bodygurads and kept entertained by a harem of Yéleth concubines, craft the first Eyes, search for stashes of Humanspace techonolgies, experiment with newly discovered "magics," and make horrific pacts with the Pariah Gods and their inhuman servants.

Sounds exciting? It sure does, but what rules do you use?

Of course, there is always one of the many Tékumel-based RPGs that are still available (and soon to be joined by Jeff Dee's Béthrom, still in development). The GoO rules suggest keeping magical powers restricted to Universal spells and making tem more difficult to learn/cast, while "special items" (i.e. "technological") are more common. With some minor tweeking of the treasure charts and magician/priest skills table, you can do this quite easily.

There are other options of course. You can always start with your favorite verson of the original game or OSR engine (Swords & Wizardry, Labyrinth Lord, LotFP, etc) and borrow what you need from the original Empire of the Petal Throne. As what amounts to a "post-apocalyptic" game you could use Gamma World or Mutant Future, stripped of mutations and associated powers and replaced with Tékumelyáni aliens and monsters. The magic rules in Crypts & Things (aka Akrasia's Sword & Sorcery rules) might be a better fit for Tékumel's non-Vancian spellcasting. I've heard tell that there is this new "Sword & Planet" RPG that might be useful.

There is nothing wrong with a good rules mash-up so long as it works and everyone has fun!

As usual, discussion welcome below.

Warriors of the Red Planet: It's HERE! It's HERE! (at least the beta)

Yesterday, I was so busy spending the day red-faced, screaming, and pounding any available table over the Supreme Court's moronic Hobby Lobby decision, I failed to notice Thomas Denmark's announcement that after years of waiting...


WARRIORS OF THE RED PLANET IS AVAILABLE!!!

Right now the document is a perfect-bound paperback print "Beta" edition available at Lulu.com. The doucment reportedly needs still needs a little and polish but, it should be quite playable. While I while certainly be picking up the print edition, I did wish they had a .PDF we could download right away. I suppose Thomas and Al want to keep control of the document for the time being rather than seeing it plastered on every RPG website.