Chimerical Realm

  New Year, New Character   Day 22    Pendragon  Pendragon is a game where players take on the roles of knights in Arthurian Britain. That's it. There's no rogues or wizards or priests. Oh, sure, those folks are around , but they're not the PC's. The game is laser-focused on recreating the stories of knights like Lancelot, Gawain, and Perceval. And it does this spectacularly. Mechanically, it has a number of things going on which can be slightly overwhelming at first, but almost everything is resolved with a d20 roll. It uses a "Price is Right" style system, where you want to role as high as you can without going over the Trait you are rolling against. So, if Character A has a 14 and Character B has a 12, A would win if they both rolled a 13, while B would win if they both rolled a 12 (as that is exactly the number he needs to roll). A 1, while a success, is always the weakest possible one.  While it has Attributes and Skills of various sorts, Pendrago...

 New Year, New Character  Day 31   Rifts   Rifts is everything. If you took every single game I've made a character for so far in this series , added a couple dozen more, and threw them all into one bit pot, you'd have Rifts .  And I don't mean that in a "generic game" kind of way. Sure, you can use GURPS , or D20, or Heroes System, or RISUS, or FATE, or whatever to play "any game you want." I mean in Rifts you can take any concept you might have, find a Character Class that fits it, and they all exist in the same world. You want cyberpunk? There's Street Rats and Operators running dirty job in massive arcologies and hacking mainframes. You want fantasy? There's wizards and dragons and elves and goblins. You want horror? There's zombies and vampires and Lovecraftian monsters. You want mecha? The 50' tall mechs, power armor, and everything in between. This is a game were one player is a card-sharp cowboy and the other is the child of gods ...

  New Year, New Character   Day 30   Dresden Files  Dresden Files is a game of pulp supernatural mystery mixed with "urban fantasy." Based on the best selling series of books by Jim Butcher, Dresden Files  uses the generic FATE system. In it, players take on the roles of wizards, vampires, lycanthropes and mortals in the modern day, dealing with murder, mystery, and intrigue among not only the supernatural, but the mundane world itself.  Dresden is another of those "games I've never gotten to play." I came across its base system around the same time I stumbled on Legend , when I was looking for something different than the games I had been playing. The base concepts of FATE were quite interesting, with its focus on group storytelling, simplified die rolls (using the, to me, odd FUDGE Dice ), and focused Character Creation.  Like almost all the games I came across, I could never get a group together to actually play it. Though, oddly enough, a num...

  New Year, New Character   Day 29   Dungeons & Dragons   (Rules Cyclopedia) Dungeons & Dragons  has been the great, hidden presence throughout this series. Palladium started off as a series of House Rules for a game of D&D, and that system begat Heroes Unlimited and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles . Advanced Dungeons & Dragons is, directly, a successor game. Pathfinder and Starfinder are both based on the third edition of D&D. And the Sine Nomine games of Silent Legions , Stars Without Number , and Wolves of God are all based on off D&D. I often described things like "the classic six attributes"--and by "classic" I just meant "the things that Dungeons & Dragons" used.  This isn't really all that surprising. D&D was the first, and remains the most popular, role-playing game. I suppose one could cite Blackmoor , but let's be honest-- Mike Pondsmoth wasn't thinking about Blackmoor when he wrote Cyberpunk . As I...

  New Year, New Character   Day 28   Pathfinder (2nd Edition)  Pathfinder (2nd Ed) is the latest version of not only the best selling Pathfinder  RPG, but the now venerable D20 system. Pathfinder  has an interesting history, being an almost rebellious response to the then upcoming 4th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons. It was extremely successful, particularly for a roleplaying not put out by Wizards of the Coast. But what really attracted me to the game were the top notch modules and adventures. Especially their Adventure Paths. The desire for "pre-written campaigns" has been around for a while, but few companies have ever done them justice. Sure, there were plenty of antecedents for what Paizo did with Pathfinder -- Call of Cthulhu had such epics as Masks of Nyarlathotep  and Beyond the Mountains of Madness . Even Dungeons & Dragons  had boxed sets like Night Below , but few companies put out the sheer volume that Paizo did for Pa...

 New Year, New Character  Day 27    Star Wars (D20) During the D20 boom in the early 2000's, Wizards of the Coast landed the rights to the Star Wars RPG. I wasn't terribly aware of what had happened with West End Games, or why Wizards got this license. All that mattered was that, since my group at the time was enamored with the then new D20-system, I could actually play some Star Wars , rather than having to cajole folks into letting me run a game.  I'm not sure how well D20 actually served Star Wars . On the surface, it seems like a natural fit. Star Wars was always more "fantasy in space" than "science-fiction" and D20 was built for Dungeons & Dragons  and fantasy adventures. But it could also get bogged down in minutiae--do we really care about five-foot steps in a running blaster fight to escape the villains lair? That's not to say it wasn't a good game. In fact, it was fun as hell. Some of the tweaks they made to the rules really helped ...

  New Year, New Character   Day 26  Cyberpunk 2020  Cyberpunk 2020  (CP2020) is the "roleplaying game of the grim future." It paints a bleak vision of the far off year of 2020. A future filled with ecological collapse, near constant wars, overwhelming corporate power, and a divide between the small number of elites who control the wealth of the world, and the vast majority of humanity ground beneath their greed. As the masses are fed a constant diet of fake food and faker entertainment, the true power and decisions are happening in corporate towers and backroom alleys. An incredible imaginary world, indeed. Ok, so, they got some things right. Others they got wrong--did anyone besides hipsters still listen to tapes  in 2020? Is "protest rock" even remotely a "thing," let alone the voice of mass movements? Any "near future" work is going to be eclipsed sooner rather than later, and CP2020 was always on the tail end of the literary movement anyway. ...

 New Year, New Character   Day 25    Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness  In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness  (TMNT), one is not required to play a teenager, a ninja, or even a turtle. You do, however, end up playing a mutant. An animal who, through some manner, has been altered and changed and turned into something resembling a human. Resembling, but not quite.  Though there is a bias towards learning ninjitsu, because this was the published in the '80's and ninjas were just the shit back then. The game is, obviously, a licensed property. But one based on the Eastman & Laird comic books, rather than the animated show that really made the Turtles a "thing." As such, the game is much more brutal and violent than one might expect from the title alone. In fact, the "kiddiefication" is allegedly why Palladium end up dropping the game back in 2000, and so this is not only an old game, but a long out of print on...

  New Year, New Character   Day 24    Wolves of God  Wolves of God is a stripped down, OSR-influences game of adventure and survival in Anglo-Saxon England. While placed in an historical time and place, much like Ars Magica this is a "fantasy" version of the real world, with ancient magic buried in Roman ruins, and the potential of supernatural monsters lurking amongst the bogs and fens of the wild.  Despite the fantastic elements, Wolves of God  is hyper focused in creating the society and world of the time. The most obvious comparison, for me, is with Pendragon, another game that sets the characters firmly in the historical world of post-Roman Britain. But despite using the real world to fill in the gaps of the sagas, Pendragon was always more focused on recreating the characters of the legendarium. Wolves of God  attempts the opposite, to include the legends, but also to tell adventures of something like a real person of the time and pla...

  New Year, New Character  Day 23   Aberrant  Aberrant was White Wolf's take on the comic book/super-hero genre. It was the 2nd game in their "Aeonverse" trilogy, which reimaged a new "pulp" history for our world. In this world, a disaster on a research space station led to a dousing of the world with radiation, and the people began to change , and to exhibit strange, superhuman powers. While still relatively rare, the presence of these "Novas" fundamentally altered the world.  Unlike traditional comic books, or those games that seek to emulate the like Mutants & Masterminds or Heroes Unlimited ,  Aberrant  is an attempt to explore "what would really happen." There are few, to almost no, "supervillains." Sure, there are super criminals, but they don't dress up in gaudy outfits and rob banks--they control or are top-enforcers for crime syndicates and cartels. Those that do dress up in gaudy outfits are more likely to be hire...

  New Year, New Character   Day 21    Shadowrun  Of all the games from my initial list, Shadowrun was the one I was most dreading. I've never actually made a proper character for the game. The only GM I've ever played it under is an expert in the game and world, not only running it for decades, but he even wrote a few source books as a freelancer. For my first character, he worked closely with me, and we used an auto-calculating spread sheet. Subsequent characters were "pre-generated" by the GM, using Hero Lab.  So, this will be my first attempt to make a real character, by the book, with no help. It's rather intimidating. Even separate from Character Creation, Shadowrun is an intimidating game. Its a mix of cyberpunk and fantasy, melding together over the top action, cyborg super soldiers, magic of various type, netrunning...there are just so many sub-rules covering all of these "types." And the world is just as complex, being gripped in decades chaos...

  New Year, New Character   Day 20   Legend  Legend is a semi-generic fantasy RPG from Mongoose, based on the classic game Runequest II. Now, I've never played Runequest II. Heck, I haven't played Runequest I, or III or...you know, I know nothing about Runequest, except that it had some really awesome looking books back in the day. But it was never a game that had a presence in my gaming circles, so it just sort of lurked at the edge of my awareness. I didn't buy Legend  due to its legacy, but rather what it promised. About a decade ago, I was getting rather burned out by Dungeons & Dragons . 3rd Ed, Pathfinder, 4th Ed--none of them were all that much fun anymore. Still enjoying the tropes of fantasy gaming, I sought out something else. Of the games I checked out around that time, Legend  stood out the most.  I'm not sure I "get" Legend , as to this day I haven't had a chance to run or even play it. It seems mainly driven by percentile s...

  New Year, New Character   Day 19   Traveler: The New Era  I'm not sure, but I think I got conned when I purchased Traveler: The New Era (TNE). As a young gamer, I had heard of Traveler , of course. It was famous for its rock hard Sci-Fi setting, it's long history, and its notorious "you can die in character creation." Despite the hushed whispers and gossip, though, none of my friends actually had a copy of it, nor had ever actually played it.  I was at my very first convention, and talking to one of the vendors when, somehow, the topic of Traveler  came up. He immediately pressed into my hands a copy TNE. Maybe he was a fan of the New Era, maybe it was just the "new" one at the time, but I had no idea I was getting something...different from the Traveler  I had heard about.  TNE was a "reboot" of the setting, taking place centuries later than the "classic" era of the game, after the iconic Empire of the setting had fallen into chaos. ...

  New Year, New Character   Day 18   Vampire: The Dark Ages  The first proper "sequel" to Vampire: The Masquerade, Vampire: The Dark Ages sends the players back a thousand years to when vampires ruled the night as lords and masters, before the internecine war known as the Anarch Revolt and before humans rose against them in the form of the Inquisition. Rather than skulking about in alley ways and cheap bars, vampires in Dark Ages  exist more or less openly. Their battles are fought just as fiercely, but with fang and sword rather than false promises and gossip. It is an age of war and adventure.  To be honest, I've never been a huge fan Dark Ages. I've played, and run, a few Chronicles for this game, and they've been enjoyable. I guess it's just not what I wanted when the game first came out. The few hints we had of this time in the original book made it seem...quieter. Smaller. A time of ignorance, isolation, and overwhelming personal ties. An e...

  New Year, New Character   Day 17   Call of Cthulhu  Call of Cthulhu (CoC) is one of oldest, most famous, and venerable RPG's out there.  Even if you haven't played it, you know about it. Inspired by the writings of horror author H.P. Lovecraft, CoC takes the players into the world of weird horror. They play investigators of the mysterious, bizarre, and unknown. While horror has always been one of the keystones of RPG's--even Blackmoor had "Sir Fang," the vampire--few tackled with anything resembling the care and precision of CoC. This was no casual horror adventure, where the monster was slain and the heroes moved on.  Rather, battling the "Cthulhu mythos" would cost the PC's their lives, their careers, and even their sanity.  To some, it can come across as overly dark and nihilistic. Why bother finding out what the mysterious statue represents, or what happened to the eccentric artist cousin of yours, if all you were going to find was death an...

New Day, New Character  Day 16  Star Wars  I'm not sure I can give the West End Games version of Star Wars  a proper introduction. Others have written about its influence not only on RPG's, but in a perhaps unique occurrence, influence on the original IP itself.  In any case, I'm certainly not qualified to speak of the game in terms of its "greater impact," only in terms of my history with gaming.  This version of Star Wars  was the first licensed RPG I ever played, and my first experience delving into a world I had already "played" in, even if that play was classic make believe of running around with friends and having "lightsaber" battles with flashlights, or smashing our toys together in pretend battles for the fate of the galaxy. Being able to combine my love for the movies with my love of RPG's was absolutely amazing! Even if the first games I played tended to focus a lot of time on smuggling "spice" under the watchful glare ...

New Year, New Character  Day 15  CAPERS CAPERS (yup, all caps), is a superhero RPG by Craig Campbell, with two unique twists. First, in 1920's America, at the height of Prohibition. Rather than "fighting crime," the default PC is  a criminal, running alcohol and protection rackets. They're not super-villain's but rather, well, super-criminals. There's the option of playing super G-men as well, but the thrill of the game is to play proper 1920's gangster with super-powers.  It also has, for me at least, a unique resolution system, driven by drawing playing cards. Ones value in any given statistic indicates how many cards one can potentially draw to resolve any issue. Obviously, the card value is a key component, indicating success or failure. The suit of the card determines the quality  of the success or failure, with clubs being the lowest and spades the best possible. Thus, the PC's not only gamble with their life and freedom to find a place in the wo...

New Year, New Character Day 14 Werewolf: The Apocalypse Werewolf: The Apocalypse was the second in White Wolf's "World of Darkness" lines, a "storytelling game of savage horror." It followed Vampire: The Masquerade and was in turn followed by Mage: The Ascension . In it, players take on the role of, well, werewolves in the modern day. Your kind once stood as proud, spiritual protectors of the Earth, guarding it against the deprivations of the all consuming and destroying Wyrm. The tools of the Wyrm range from raw demonic minions to the corruption of humanity, leading to violence, vice, pollution, environmental devastation, and the slow poisoning and death of the world. To put it simply and overly glibly, you are huge monstrous eco-terrorists fighting a tragic and loosing battle against destruction.  While Vampire was my first love , I played Werewolf far more when I was younger. Its combination of tragic heroism, brutal violence, splatterpunk, and adventure ...

 New Year, New Character  Day 13  Heroes Unlimited  Heroes Unlimited  is Palladium Books take on the Super-Hero genre. It's a "universal" toolkit to make a variety of types of heroes, though not quite as universal as it likes to pretend. Each hero is based on a specific "category" of archetypes ranging from Alien visitors to Mutants to Robots to hyper-trained Super Spies. Each has their own distinct rules, and little effort is made to "balance" the various characters. Instead, the intent is to create a distinctive character, with, much like a comic book, the balance coming from what happens in the story, rather than any sort of mechanical enforcement.  Like the rest of Palladium's books, Heroes Unlimited  (HU) is derived from their Palladium Fantasy game, and follows much of the same rules. There are obvious additions, of course, through super powers, psychic abilities, alien life forms, and complicated cyborg and robotic creation rules.  Perhaps...

New Year, New Character  Day 12  Stars Without Number  Today marks something of a landmark for my take on the " New Year, New Character " challenge. When I started, I created a list of 31 different games I wanted to make a character for. I thought of sorting them by system or theme or age or something like that, but decided to go random. Given the odd numbers involved, I had been using Wizard of the Coast's old online dice roller . I simply add in however many systems were left as a custom die and "rolled" that. I've now completed 11 of these, meaning I have 20 left. Which means I actually got to roll an actual, physical d20. I did, and got a 4 giving Stars Without Number. Stars Without Number (SWN) is a fairly "hard" Sci-Fi game, in the tradition of Traveler . Players take the roles of mercenaries, traders, and explorers in the far future. A few hundred year prior to where the game begins, a massive catastrophe devastated all of settled space. The...