Burstback: the Return of Manaburst

ByDankelzahn

The members of my Saturday gaming group are all adults with busy lives so it’s no surprise that most Saturdays at least one person winds up being late for our weekly session. Instead of starting our sessions early and having to catch people up, we’ve recently started breaking out some Magic decks and playing a few games to pass the time.

During one of our games a player mentioned that he thought a role-playing game set in a heavily Magic-inspired setting would be a lot of fun, but that playing beings like planeswalkers didn’t seem like it would work. He was surprised when I replied that not only did I think it would work fine, I had done it before.

I’m not about to usurp the Earthdawn game we have running – I enjoy it too much. But with the interested around the table it seems like it might be time to break out my Manaburst notes and look at making some revisions.  I’ve already started getting ideas on how to improve over our first attempt.

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Adjusting Earthdawn’s Strain Mechanic

ByDankelzahn

RedBrick Limited‘s third edition of Earthdawn has been a big hit so far with my Saturday gaming group. The system is providing us with a solid internal consistency through which we can interact with the rich setting.

But like most groups, we’ve come up with a few tweaks to the system to make it better fit with what we want out of our game.  The biggest is that we’ve decided to try a slight re-working to how strain is handled.

The concept of strain is that it is a key balancing feature to the game – there are a vast number of talents, skills, and maneuvers which include a strain cost to use them.  The disconnect for many members of my group is that this is basically taking hit point damage any time they want to do something.

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Revolving Door Villains

ByDankelzahn
"That will be 25,000 gp worth of diamonds, please."
"That will be 25,000 gp in diamonds, please."

There’s a running joke that in high-magic fantasy games, death is naught but a revolving door and the party cleric is the doorman.   I haven’t played much 4e myself, but I’ve heard many of the epic-level abilities start out “Once per day, when you die…”   If there’s a bigger way to hang the “death doesn’t matter” out for everyone to see, I haven’t found it yet.

What about villains, though?   Unless everyone is playing a pulp-style adventure, having the villain inexplicably escape every time he’s encountered can seem contrived and simple GM-fiat, but can the revolving door be used as a plot device to present the players with a unique challenge?

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Earthdawn 3e: Character Generation

ByDankelzahn

earthdawn At the last session with my group, we came up with character concepts and had decided to do the actual generation this week. I wanted to get it taken care on my end prior, so that I could both familiarize myself with the changes to 3e character generation enough to answer questions and be available to do so instead of needing to work on my own character.   So earlier last week I finished up my human warrior.

If you’re like me, one of your initial reactions to that last sentence is “a race and a discipline isn’t a character concept,” and you’d be right.   However, for this post I want to specifically talk about some of the changes to Earthdawn from a character generation standpoint.   So while a character back-story and personality are crucial to a good character, they’re going to be outside the scope of this discussion.

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Earthdawn 3rd Edition: Initial Paces

ByDankelzahn

ed3rdI finally got a chance to try out the Earthdawn Third Edition rules last Saturday when a friend ran Misguided Ambitions, the demo adventure available on the Earthdawn home page.   Though there were some obvious tweaks and mods to the Step System to help streamline play, the game still feels very much like Earthdawn.   Considering how much I enjoy the Eartdawn game – both the system and the setting – that’s about the highest “initial impression” I can offer.

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BACKSTAB! +4, x5

ByDankelzahn

Sometimes getting a group of characters emotionally invested in their adversaries can be tricky.   There are tried and true methods like having the adversary take something (or someone) of value from the characters but if done poorly it can come off as an uncreative cookie-cutter set up.   Not only can it fail to get the players invested, it can actually divest them from the plot as well.

wizThere’s also the issue of the omnipotent adversary.   Inexperienced gamemasters can fall into the trap of giving their adversaries full knowledge of the party’s actions even if said adversary lacked a sufficient means to gain such information (by spying, scrying, etc).   But again you can run into the trap of the cookie-cutter with things like the traditional wizard with a crystal ball.

When my turn to gamemaster came around in our current game, I decided to use a little trick to get the party invested in one of their adversaries as well as explain why the characters had been oiled in their recent attempts to accomplish their goal.   Unbeknownst to the players, I made one of their characters the adversary.

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Refreshed by the Rotating Gamemaster Campaign

ByDankelzahn

I feel that my last few stints in the gamemaster’s chair have been less than successful.   There was something that happened in each campaign that made the game unsatisfying to me.   So when it came to  my turn  gamemastering in our current rotating gamemaster-style campaign, I was pretty nervous.   Turns out, though, that this particular format bypassed some of my biggest weaknesses as a gamemaster.

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Earthdawn Third Edition

ByDankelzahn

ed3rd

I’ve said before that Earthdawn has been my favorite roleplaying game for some time.   I don’t get to play too often because it’s not exactly the best fit for my current gaming group (which includes one player who hates fantasy roleplaying games in general) but I still am a big fan of the game.   I used to follow Earthdawn more closely but I drifted away for a while so was a little late to see the release date finally put to Earthdawn Third Edition.

RedBrick Limited, the current publishers of Earthdawn, signed an agreement with Mongoose Publishing in March to have Mongoose handle the printing, marketing, sales, and distribution of Earthdawn products under their Flaming Cobra brand.   It appears RedBrick will retain all creative control while leveraging Mongoose’s brand to move away from the print on demand model and into an actual product that will be available at game stores across the country in July.

I have seen very little of this new Third Edition ruleset other than the implication that it will be a simplified version of the Step System common to Earthdawn and Earthdawn Classic.   Between a simplified ruleset and the increase in exposure that a physical product to sell in game stores provides, I look forward to seeing what impact this will have on the game.   Maybe I’ll be able to get it back on my gaming table.

Earthdawn – Savaged: Season 1

ByDankelzahn

A month or so ago my Earthdawn: Savaged campaign wound up to a close. The early summer/late fall months brought a rash of player absences and missed sessions which seemed to sap everyone’s motivation. So although I very much enjoyed returning to the Earthdawn world our game ended rather anticlimactically.

At least I was able to do the experimentation with Savage Worlds that I wanted to. I learned a number of valuable lessons about the system from behind the GM’s screen. I plan on going into more detail about what modifications I plan on making to Savage Worlds in a short series of articles but I wanted to take this opportunity to summarize our campaign and my thoughts on it.

Our small group consisted of a few adepts who had banded together in defense of a Rex, a small village in the hinterlands north of Bartertown, and forged their group in tribute to the dwarven weaponsmith who had brought them together and gave his life in defense of the innocent. Thus The Hounds of Askari were born.

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Earthdawn – The Legend Begins

ByDankelzahn

Session 1 – March 30th, 2008

GM: Dave
Players: Luke, Chad, Dan, Josh, Pat

The scene opened on the town or Rex, a battered and broken village in the hinterlands of Barsaive. The townspeople had fought a daily struggle to eek a meager living out of the dried and broken land, and just as their efforts began to pay off they became the target of a band of ork scorchers. Frequent raids kept the town on the brink of collapse but the orks were smart enough to always leave the town in good enough shape that it could recover… and be raided all over again.

Rex’s headwoman, an elf by the name of Emberica, was finally fed up with the cycle of destruction and called in some old favors which led Askari, a dwarven weaponsmith, to bring his small band of adepts to aid the town. The orks were not expecting any resistance, let alone a band of adepts, and a cunning trap sealed their doom. However they were not go quietly. Many good townsfolk lost their lives in the orks’ death rage, as did Askari himself.

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