SO Dead

He's here he's here in my room I'm staring hat him cant look away can't blink mustn't blink blink and your dead yes joekes that's the one gotta keep positive even though I'm about to be BRUTALLY MURDERED in my beroom yes he's herea nd I cant look away becaues i fI look away he can move. that's how i tgoes right? I just keep staring an dhe can't get me?

fuck

The Rules

Right. Enough with the panicking. Apparently there's an eldrich horror on my tail that wants me to start doing... things for him. I have news for him. I'm not going. I don't hurt people and I don't help other people hurt them either. I'm not going.

In the spirit of that, I'm going to put up some rules of horror to remind myself and enlighten you all. Maybe taking some control of the situation will make the whispering GO AWAY.


First. Avoid basements, cornfields, small towns in the middle of nowhere that you've never been to before, creepy woods, and abandoned houses. If you MUST go to any of these places, make sure to bring friends, stay close together, and don't stay after dark for any reason. Particularly relevant to this is the small town and woods section of this. I don't want to run into any slendycults.

Second. While it is tempting to allow the situation to distance you from friends, family, and the rest of humanity, either make it a clean break and get the fuck out of there or stay close. Emotional distance without physical distance just puts them in more danger-because then you have the heartbreaking 'I never got to tell them I loved them' situation.

Third. Don't tempt fate. Seriously. Don't be that guy. You know the one. Don't say 'surely we must be safe HERE' or 'We can hold out till morning' or anything similar. The shit hits the fan immediately afterward. And everyone hates that guy for starting it.

Fourth. Remember. This is an eldrich horror. Do not be the idiot who rushes it with a sword. That always ends badly-for the swordsman.There is no fighting, hiding is iffy at best, you have to run. And keep running. Slendy doesn't give up the hunt.


...I'm going to start getting stuff together to run. I'm glad I have some money put away from working all year.

Real

Oh shit.

He's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's realHe's real

I'm Completely Mad

He's fricken everywhere. I keep seeing him. In the park, outside my window, in the corner of my eye when I'm at the store... I'm losing my mind.

I'm having a psychotic break. He's everywhere, and the whispers... Oh god, the whispers. I never... I'd read about them, but...cripes this is bad. This is really bad. The things that they want me to do...

No. This is crap. I've got to just be going nuts. I need to just ignore it, it will go away. It WILL. It HAS to.

Because right now the voice sounds so good....

What the Crap?

Starting to think one of my friends is playing a prank on me. No review today, too busy freaking out over the tall guy in a suit that is standing outside my window. That's got to be pantyhose or something over his head, right? He can't ACTUALLY not have a face...

DnD Week!: 4.0

Fourth edition has been highly debated since it came out, in the grand tradition of DnD fanboys and girls everywhere. Every edition isn't as good as the one which came before-especially for the first year or two.

hespeakstome






What fourth edition is best at is random encounters. It's a system that's MADE for one shots and minis-style battles, whatever it lacks in the rest of it's gameplay. If you're looking for good fighting fun, 4th edition might be just the system for you. If not, I'd give it a pass.

DnD Week!: 3.5

DnD week!: ADnD/2.0

Think back to the old cliches of unwashed teenaged boys playing DnD in their basement with vague costumes. This was back in the days where DnD was still complicated and confusing enough to feel like an exclusive club.
Back when THACO was the order of the day and you couldn't play monsters.

This, ladies and gents, is exactly what they would have been playing. ADnD has survived to this day as a game people play, despite three editions afterward-an honor which First ed and third ed never achieved. It's got a different feel to it,

Custom Systems

Today I'm going to talk to you about something a little bit special. No specific system is being reviewed today. Instead, we're going to deal with some of the high and low points of designing your own. It's a hobby of mine, and as it's currently what I'm completely preoccupied with, instead of missing a post I thought I'd share some thoughts.

People are generally kind of scared of making new systems-it seems like there's so much a system requires, making rules and figuring out if and what kinds of classes and skills and everything you're going to use. It gets complicated fast.

But it doesn't have to.

Figure out what the system needs. Figure out what you want it to do and move from there-you're not selling books you don't NEED several hundred pages of stuff. One of the best homebrew systems I've ever had the good fortune of seeing is Risus, which has a book that's less than fifty pages and that's ALL you'll EVER need to run the game(Though to make a profit and do a couple cool side things there is an extra book you can buy).

Don't get fancy unless your game needs it. Your players will thank you

Forum Games

For a slight change of pace, and also because I've almost missed my update again and I don't have time to make this a normal critique, I want to talk to you about forum roleplaying. The kind where there's no dice, just a bunch of people writing characters together on forums. I have a great love for this type of roleplaying, I've honestly been doing it for half my life and I love seeing a story come together.

Reading the blogs made me start thinking about it, as the blogs are a very similar type of thing in that you make a character and interact with others IC. It's just a bit bigger, with the blogging and the email and the commenting and sometimes even IMs and such.

But I'm not talking about the blogs here, that's not what I'm here to do at all, no matter how fun they are. I'm here to talk about Forum Roleplaying. Just a few things a tabletop roleplayer needs to know if they want to try it out.

First, fights. As a tabletop gamer, mostly combat is something you expect on a regular basis-though how often that is depends on a lot of things. Many a tabletop gamer has crossed to forum land and been thrown by the lack of combat. Forum RPing, unless otherwise stated, tends to avoid combat because it's messy to deal with via writing and honestly the majority of forum RPs are in settings where fighting would be rare anyway.
If you DO get into a fight, be courteous. Do not assume your strikes hit, and do not dodge everything they throw your way. Just because there's no dice being rolled does not make you an unstoppable god at combat. Unless you have a really good reason for completely trouncing someone, you probably won't, so take that into consideration.

Secondly, sex. Depending on the forum, there's a chance you can sleep with other characters. If this is a mature forum, you might even be able to play out an explicit sex scene. Don't be a dick who just goes around looking for sex. Seriously. Just like in the real world, if you just walk around wanting to bang, no one will want  to have anything to do with you.

Thirdly, interactions. I don't know your tabletop style, but what I do know is that there are a surprisingly large number of tabletop players that get by on glaring about and looking mysterious, occasionally offering threats or suggestions. DO NOT DO THIS ON A FORUM. You need a solid, three dimensional character. One that will interact with other players, and do so in a way that adds something to the story.

Fourth, and this would be first if I didn't have the vain hope that you would all already know this one, grammar. If you cannot write using the basics of good spelling and grammar, get the heck off of the internet and go back to third grade. Seriously, guys. My little cousin writes better than some of these idiots. And she's twelve.  If you need to, run it through a spell checker before you post. It's easy and makes a huge difference.

As a side note, and this is just me ranting, not part of the critique, but I'm getting kind of irritated with how jumpy I've gotten reading this Slenderman stuff. I'm going to start laying off, I think, see if it helps. I don't like losing sleep over this.

Back on Friday, with another, hopefully more normal update.

Slender Man

So I missed doing yesterday's review. I got a little distracted. I confess. Instead of spending my afternoon writing up a proper review of Mutants and Masterminds, I spent it reading. I was doing some research for that Scion game that I'm currently running, looking for interesting monsters to throw at my party, when I found something fascinating.

Slenderman.

Some of you theoretical readers might already know about him. He's apparently something of an internet phenomenon, ever since Something Awful came up with him a couple years back. Tall, faceless, wears a suit, he's a simple, primal image that is all too easy to start seeing in the shadows at night. So of course I decided I wanted to make a Slendy arc for my players. Pants shittingly terrifying is totally fair game for a SRS BZNS Scion game where they're in the process of changing all the rules and challenging divinity itself, right?

It is now. But I wanted to do my research first. So I started reading. Seeking Truth, Dreams in Darkness, A Really Bad Joke, Records of an Impossibility... You should see my favorites folder for this stuff-it's HUGE. Apparently they've made this an ARG? I'm amazed at how much work these guys put into this stuff, it's incredible. Maybe once I've run out of systems to review I'll look at starting a blog of my own. 

For now, I apologize for the delay, I'll try to get back to my normal routine tomorrow. Not sure what I'm reviewing yet, but I'll tear myself away from the blogs long enough to do it

Scion

Continuing my reviews with another White Wolf system, Scion. Mechanically it has a decent bit in common with WoD, it is also a d10 system, with many of the same stats and a similar looking character sheet. In Scion, however, you're playing the children of various gods. The main book includes the Loa, the Egyptians, the Norse, the Greek, the Japanese and an invented Atlantaen pantheon, where expansions add China, the South Pacific, the Celts, and an invented 'American' pantheon.
It has rules for artifacts and for powers, as well as more passive supernatural effects you'd get from being super smart or fast or charismatic or whatever that are called 'knacks'. Mechanically, you have Hero, which is the lowest powered, then Demigod, and then God.

It's a system I've played in extensively and ran once, and I'm remarkably fond of it.

On the positive end, Scion, like all White Wolf games is very story-centric, designed to make the storytelling flow and non-combat activities feel just as important as combat. It does this very well, the Skills/Knacks/Boons system makes it easy to choose things that are useful on and off the battlefield, and to use them in either place effectively. There is a wide assortment of power trees to choose from and the system doesn't penalize you for mixing and matching.
The system of Birthrights-gifts given to you by your divine parent, is an interesting and mostly well made one. You have the choice of artifacts, followers, creatures, or mentors, and all have distinct advantages and disadvantages that are pretty well balanced.
Combat in Scion is a little more polished than in WoD, possibly because in Scion it is expected that combat will happen, whereas WoD is in a large part designed to eliminate the need for it.

On the negative end, the actual treatment of the deities in the books are pretty bad. Some are oversimplified, some are flat out changed for convenience, some are even alignment shifted for fuck's sake. The God/Titan breakdown means that in some pantheons beings that were considered forces for good are now firmly relegated to the villain side(though this is easy to ignore for one's own story).
In addition, the creature rankings are TERRIBLE and badly balanced with each other-though they still balance alright with everything else.
The Atlantaen pantheon is just weird and unnecessary. Again, easily ignored and as a supplement I would've had no problem, but they put it in the main book. There's a lot of perfectly good pantheons in the world that people actually care about, use one of them?


Overall, though, I am quite fond of Scion-though I do have a system of house rules my group plays with to make it a little more manageable. I would still very much recommend it to anyone who loves mythology in any form.

New World of Darkness

World of Darkness was the first setting I ever played, so it's got a bit of a special place in my heart, it always has. It only seemed fitting that it should be the first system I review on here.  Never fear though, I refuse to let nostalgia get in the way of a fair review.

First off, a bit of background about the system. World of Darkness is kind of an oversystem/setting for a group of supernatural type systems. You have Vampire the Requiem, Mage the Awakening, Changeling the Lost, Werewolf the Forsaken, Promethean the Created, Hunter the Vigil, and Mortals. All of these coexist in the same setting, and all of them, even mortals, can be deadly dangerous.

In theory, parties can mix and match character types to have a party comprised of all different types-though mostly races keep to themselves unless given a good reason to do otherwise. In practice, an unwary DM can find mixed parties an absolute clusterfuck that interferes with each other and/or actively tries to kill each other.

The good news

The setting is beautifully done and immensely detailed, each race has enough options for the diversity a true race needs. Each individual race's system is big enough to easily run in without bringing in other races or indeed needing to know anything about their rules or setting. The storytelling focus of the system means that character interactions are brought to the forefront and are just as smooth to play out as combat.
Character creation is quick and easy, a player familiar with the system can easily make a detailed character sheet in five-ten minutes
The books themselves are the most fun of any of the manuals I've ever read to just sit down and read-the story seeds scattered throughout are thought provoking and entertaining. Even the published adventures are open ended, offering a specific setting, NPCs and a hook without railroading you or your players into taking a certain path. If you are a creative GM, this system is exactly what you need to get going.

The Bad News

A side effect of the storytelling focus is a preoccupation with the politics of each group . It's good that there's a detailed society for everyone, it's bad when following it to the letter means spending a lot of your players' time dealing with racial politics instead of getting on with the story.
The systems do not fit together as well as they are supposed to, and without watching very carefully you may find that some party members are way overpowering others and have to be balanced for. In addition, all of the races are built to more or less hate each other on sight-which isn't unrealistic, but is somewhat of a pain to deal with.
The books are beautifully written but White Wolf is NOTORIOUSLY BAD at indexing, which makes finding anything specific in the books a huge headache.
The open endedness of the system is great if you're a creative DM who likes doing everything by hand. If you're not as creatively inclined, running WoD is a headache and a half. In addition, without mad improv skills running last minute one shots or having to run with something unexpected your characters have just done is a nightmare.

Really, though, NWoD has it's problems, but it's a great system for roleplay lovers. This is my go to system for new campaigns or convention games.

Hi, Welcome to the Blog

Hi, my name is Jessie. I'm a sci-fi/fantasy nerd and a tabletop gamer. I'm starting this blog out of the singularly egotistical belief that perhaps someone on the internet would care what I think about the latter. VIDEO GAME review blogs and video series are really popular these days, so why not a tabletop reviewer?

And why not me? I've been gaming for seven years-a third of my life, in fact. Well, a little less than that, but still. I've played with a lot of systems, and I've run some damn good games, if I do say so myself. Pretty much any system I've run I've worked with from both sides of the table and I feel pretty good about my ability to discuss them intelligently.

In any case, it'll make a good summer project. It's dull being back in Tampa for the summer. My first review, tentatively planned for the New World of Darkness,  will go up Wednesday. Stay tuned, guys!