Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Question for Urdu Players...

More, a series. Please answer, via file or msg, before the end of the weekend preferably.

1) Is your PC from Estavia? If not, do you know anyone there? Would anyone have followed you from home (for good or ill)?

2) Many Gifted families are wealthy; that doesn't mean your branch of the family is. How does your character support themself?

3) What is your characters REAL reason for being here? What is your character running from - or to?

4) How easily does your PC harm others? Kill them? Does it bother you one way or another?

5) Does your PC think they are better than other people?

6) Everyone has a price. What's your characters?

7) Would your character rather be the change they want to see in the world or the trouble they want to see in it?

8) What would your character die for? And, conversely, what do they live for?

9) If you had to choose between betraying your country* and your friend, which would you pick, an why?
*country can be substituted with: Family, Ideals, Honour etc. as suits the PC.

Be as brief or wordy as you like :) Keep in mind that none of this is carved in stone; if you RP the character differently, well, people change and such. It'sm ostly to give me (and hopefully you) some insight into what makes your character tick - or tock.

Monday, November 27, 2006

Are you ready for the Reckoning?

Wednesday nights, ~10pm EST.

Site: Oh, here is good. (NO, it's not finished yet.)

Game begins Wed, Nov. 29th. Finished PCs only (yes, this includes backgrounds).

Currently there are 3 prospective players (and 2 finished characters!). Five will be the maximum, first come first serve basis. See previous post and site link for more information. If a player can't make it, we can establish a waiting list thingy.

This has been a public service announcement. Regular floggings will resume shortly.

Sunday, November 26, 2006

RECKONINGS: an RPG campaign

The world of Urdu is old, the oldest thing in this incarnation of the universe, the point from which all else came into being. For billions of years people have lived and fought and died on it. Mighty empires have rose, fallen, rebuilt themselves, been ground into ashes by those who came after them Over all of this the gods have watched, sometimes playing games, sometimes now, feared and worshipped, they were pieces of the universe given form, powers beyond human ken who built their cities in the heavens from which to watch all that passed below them.

Until the Cataclysm. Until the terrible event over 300 winters ago when the heavens themselves fell down, destroying the entire southern continent, obliterating tracts of land and reshaping the world in a fury of fire and the death screams of the gods. Those who could Channel their power did so, in one last moment as the gods tried to halt their demise and failed. The ancient wizards, whose bargains with Mors and Arth'Ba'Toch failed as Death and Time died, passed on, and most magic in the world was lost or shattered by the loss of the gods.

The world has never recovered, though nothing has risen to replace them, no terrible Power come to claim the world as its own. There is only the loss, and the building of the new world from those terrible moments and the ashes of all that had come before.

Into these times come your characters, drawn to the city of Estavia (one of the few to have grown in strength when all the empires were shattered), a haven of modern alchemy trying to find new ways to do for people what the gods always did. You are, each, the relics of an old age, one of the families of those Gifted with magic who remain in the present age and have not been destroyed by the Hands from Bremen or died out due to inbreeding. Almost the last of those gifted, a three hundred year program to make Gifts strong enough to face down the remaining Wizards, but no one living knows why the Gifted families went this far, nor what was intended....
most believe it is the salvation of the world and the restoration of the gods.

Player info:

I plan to run this game very much in anime style. There should be lots of interpersonal conflicts, there'll be lost of conflict of other types, and PCs should get to do Cool Things.

Risus system, 12 dice. Each PC can have 4 dice (max.) in any cliche. Cliches can be increased from d6 to d8 or d10 via an extra die (said extra die does NOT count towards total dice in cliche). There must be at least 2 dice in a cliche to do this), so a PC could have Singing Gift (3d6), swordsmanship (3d8), Acrobatics (3d6) and Gambling (2d6) as cliches as an example.

A Gift is, basically, a single kind of magic. Fire, Water, Swordsmanship. That sort of thing. The Gifted families (one family, one gift) have been around for a long time, though no one knows how they came about. When a family dies out, their Gift is gone forever. A Gift is kept within a family, so inbreeding among cousins and siblings is the norm, since breeding with outsiders only leads to children with weak (or no) gifts.

Once the gods died, and terrible things like plagues and birth defects came into the world, the gifted have been fighting a long, losing battle. Few of any generation are whole in body and mind; fewer still have powerful gifts. Of your generation, you are one of at best five of your Family with a powerful gift, and have been sent to the city of Estavia and the Inn of the Lost Rainbow because of an agreement so old no one remembers it.


If one player takes a gift, no one else can. All PCs come from different Families. if you wish to play something other than a Gifted (or a Gifted Channeller/Wizard/Alchemist), talk to me. The following Gifts are not available for PCs: Shadow, Death, and Fire.

Other notes: magic can't be used to change people, save for alchemy (and even then, it is very limited in usefulness). There are no transformation gifts, no healing gifts and such. No Wizard spells for such either.


CRUNCHY BITS:
- You CAN adds hooks (2 max; 2 free dice maxiumum). (In fact, the GM encourages it.) A Hook, in this instance, counts as a character flaw (sworn vow, crippling thing etc.) (you get 1 die for every hook you have, 2 if it's a really severe hook.) You CAN get tails, via the risus rules, but only by supplying pic/drawing PC and more background than usual. (Normally, I'd except 1 pqage including bacckground, family the PC left, PCs family life -- did the famiytl breeding for gifts put engenics to shame? etc. -- and anything on PC personality. More would be, well, history of parents, some family lore/secrets or whatever.)
- PCs are human; there's no elves, sentient dogs etc. on this world.
- Think Cliche. That's how Risus works. More dice in a cliche is skill; increasing dicepool size is power. (This is a general rule, not specific)
- Keep in mind that there are items of magic etc. out there to increase power and the like available. PCs tend to be exceptions to rules. (For example, somerone with 2 gifts could be possible.) Invent cool Tricks for the pc.

Monday, November 13, 2006

New Game, Near Future, Nearly Soon

I have expressed interest in running a game of Lacuna. If you're interested in knowing about this, and want to know more about it I have the pdf of the small game book and will be happy to share it with you.

The basic premise behind it is, you're a "Mystery Agent" who goes into the dreamworld, hereafter referred to as the Blue City, where people go when they're sleeping. You are the disinfectent of society and erase the bad thoughts and urges that serial killers and rapists have when they're awake and killing/hurting people.

There are dangers to your job, such as an unwanted meeting with the Spidermen. Tall lumbering humanoid spider creatures that wear a Blok-style garment (think Russian army WWII era). Or going insane or even dying due to a heart attack.

For more, and how to create a character, contact me! You know the channel, I'll be the time!