“Thrad”, by Enmanuel “Lema” Martinez. Now, Thrad wasn’t the type of person that would spring to mind when you heard the term “wizard.” In fact, he never used that word himself. He wasn’t a man of many words, at any rate. Born into a reclusive, wild tribe, in the depths of the jungle, he was a giant even for his kind. From a young age, he honed his muscles and soon became the strongest of them all.
I had the opportunity to sit down with Lamentations of the Flame Princess publisher extraordinaire, James Raggi, at this year’s UK Games Expo. We chatted about Free RPG Day, historical settings, and what’s next for an outfit that has put out the highest production value gaming books for the last few years. All illustrations are copyright Lamentations of the Flame Princess, and used with permission. All photos were swiped from various social media, by photographers of mysterious identity, but I thank them for the contribution.
Today, June 16th, is international Free RPG Day, conceived to bring people into their friendly local game shops with the promise of free stuff, and the goal of creating new or recurring customers for both the stores and the publishers. Quick-start rules and taster adventures are very popular for this. One introduces potential new players to a system, whereas the other caters both to existing players of the game, while at the same time introducing the world to new ones.
Last weekend I attended the UK Games Expo in Birmingham, in part to help my friends at Inspiring Games demo their games Legends Untold and Lord of the Horde, and, of course, in part for my very own delectation. Since it pretty much coincided with the launch of my RPG Hypertellurians, I decided to print up some flyers about it and this blog, and hand those out too: Travel to and from Birmingham was fraught with airplane delays and even one cancellation, but the trip as a whole was immensely enjoyable.
The time has come, and my “swords and sandals” meets “raypunk” RPG is live. Read about its inception, or jump right in. It comes in 3 parts: the core rules is the big daddy and contains the rules and more powers than you can shake a stick at; the GM’s 101 is a short piece on how to make the most out of running Hypertellurians, and finally the changelog details, well, changes to the document.
June 1st update: the game is now live! Like many games masters, judges, referees, or whatever you like to call them, I have many more adventures and adventure ideas than I’ll—sadly—ever be able to run. I’ve collected amazing one-shots, fabulous books, exciting PDFs, intriguing blog posts and much more, all spanning a variety of settings, themes, and tones. I had this idea percolating inside my head of a campaign that would span many worlds, where the characters would travel through dimensions and planes of existence.
Let me start off by saying, yes, I am working on a brandnew version of my character sheet app, with plans to support Pathfinder 2E, and possibly more. The other week I reached out to users of my Online Character Sheet for Pathfinder, to find out a bit more about how they use the app, and what they think is most important. While I haven’t personally played Pathfinder in some time now, the announcement for a 2nd edition has me excited.
“Professional alternative model, actress, latex aficionado, dork, avid RPG gamer, bookworm, crazy cat lady, music lover, soup maker, polyhedral dice addict.” — that’s how Caroline Pierce’s twitter introduction reads, and I think it covers most bases! I’ve had the pleasure of working with Caroline several times over the years, and I was very happy when she agreed to an interview for my little blog. How did I find out about her role-playing hobby, you ask?
Spell Chains Think of spell chains as thematically linked spells of increasing power levels. You might assign them spell levels such as 1st, 3rd, and 5th, or whatever suits your game. These use the low, medium, major power classification of my homebrew game Hypertellurians, but I also include some notes on how to use the spells in Dungeon Crawl Classics, or Lamentations of the Flame Princess. Converting to a Vancian or mana-based system should be a cinch.
Back in the early 90s, a few friends and I decided to start what was then labelled an “art group.” This was a digital collective out to create ANSI and ASCII artwork for the computer communication medium of the day: bulletin board systems. A BBS was kind of like a website, but you dialled directly into it (its address being a phone number), and all it could serve you was text, with a hint a color.