Good Monday, Gamer!
Well, well, well! Congrats to the folks over at Two Little Mice on their Kickstarter for Adventures in the Household. I’m a fan of the OG rules, but I can see the 5E appeal! There are ten days left on this; I nearly missed it. I’m in for the OR (original) tier just because I dig the game like that. We’ve played some small get-to-know-the-game sessions here at the house. It’s on my run IRL list for cons this season.
Our latest Edge of the Empire session, The ORB E07: Everything but the Refugees. The PCs make their move to rescue the refugees, and we've got ourselves in a classic Star Wars situation. Kanjiklub swoop bikes blasting at an airspeeder bus full of refugees and the crew of the Gozanti blasting back. Moves were made and a heavily damaged airspeeder bus is flown into a vertical dive. We were talking this week in the IGRC Slack a bit about GM hard moves, it's one thing to say don't be a ass. It's another as GM to be looking at a destiny pool of 0 light side points and four dark side points, knowing if you don't spend those dark side points, the players never get light side points back, and spending those dark side points means making tests harder for PCs, and the PCs are already in a tight spot! If there's a Do Hard Actions currency, I would like it to be visible and articulate what they can be spent on. We can extrapolate those costs if needs be, but I also feel less of an A-hole about using the currency. Cortex Prime's Doom Pool option is the best! Everyone at the table can see that dice pool grow, and if they do nothing when it has two D12s in it, I can shut the scene down and narrate bad endings. GM hard moves are hard.
The Coriolis: The Great Dark Quickstart has dropped, and I like what I'm reading. It's got the familiar Year Zero Engine D6 pools of stats + gear modified by Talents, which I'm also digging. These are descriptive 'stats' that modify your dice pool in specific situations. Sharpshooter gives you bonus dice with Rifles. The premise I'm 100% here for. Great expeditions into forgotten dangerous, weird spaces...but sci-fi vs magic fantasy. I went bonkers on the Kickstarter -you should, too! I'm running Quickstart online very soon. I'll keep you posted.
Speaking of weird spaces, the Skeleton Code Machine has a very nice piece about Procedural depth crawls. Right on cue for my IRL open table game and debt punk work-in-progress thing I'm toying with. Give it a gander.
Prep continues for IRL Twilight: 2000. I've got a DIY one-shot called Heavy is the Crown. I'll debut it in two weeks for our local game day event. The prep work is its own post. Online prep is different and maybe easier than IRL prep. I think I like the IRL stuff better!!
Here at the house we got a few rounds of Scythe in. My kid is still enamored by this board game. I might start looking for expansions. Let me know if you've got some favorites.