Espionage Branch of my Genre Tree

Another opportunity rife with wide adventure swings is the Espionage branch of my genre tree. The act or practice of spying is fraught with the edible tension we all crave when we set down face to face around the game table. This branch of the genre tree should speak loudly with tantalizing titles promising rich role playing rewards for players comfortable with public speaking, and relevant acting skills.

Whether flinty Boogy types or sexualized dimensional tramps character is king, style is substance, and the well is deep and dark. Therefore I do adopt the following three broad catagories in which to offer my gathered players to chose from;

3. Espionage;  3.1 Cyberpunk, 3.2 Hard Boiled, 3.3 Time Travel.

Holy sh$t, many places one can go off of the above three. Get your free flowing narrative style ready for this gas fueled adventure combination! For Cyberpunk I suggest grabbing a soft bound copy of R. Talsorian’s Cyberpunk 2020 rulebook. It will easily strip down for use with the simple rules found in Trollish Delver’s USR role playing system.

Hard Boiled, now you have got some range here. Sam Spade, The Maltese Falcon, these are some of the usual tropes. These turn of the century Sherlock Holmes styled intrigues are all ripe for the Cthulhu mythos to be thrown at them. Elliot Ness, and his band of Untouchables run into werewolves? Play some Warren Zevon, how can you miss!

How about finding inspiration from one of Fiasco’s great playsets like Havana 1953? Spies, mobsters, whores, rebels, players, tourists.

Time Travel opens up all dimensional opportunities for your players to wander into paradox bending adventures. Whether you draw your inspiration from Zelazney’s Amber series, the serial television programs of Dr. Who, or horrible movies such as Looper there is plenty of material available to throw at your players. In the next few posts I will show you the detailed campaign settings I would plan to use.

Metal Earth has gone dark?

I am a fan of Aos' great sword and sorcery blog Metal Earth. I find all the free campaign content he has hosted fantastic. His last post mentioned he was bored with the site, and was done with it. What I found intriguing about the walk away was it seems the comment function was turned off.

While I appreciate, and respect an artists right to declare a piece of work finished I do wish Aos would leave the comment function open.

This would provide glowing fan boys such as myself to gush over the content provided.

Why would you not want to know years from now all the crazy ass adventures folks from around the world had used your stuff for?

So there you have it; AOs, please turn your comment function back on, please...?

Just Received Basic Fantasy...

And had a blast creating some old school PC's straight out of the book. I printed out some of the BFRPG 8"x10.5" Notebook Paper Character Sheets, and got to rolling ye olde 3d6's!

My initial character rolls left me with Strength, and Intelligence as my two highest stats sitting at 11. If I understood the rules on Combination Classes on page 6 correctly I decided to go with a Human Fighter/Magic User. This would mean "Daegan Fiend Seeker" would need a total of 4,500 XP's to achieve 2nd level, but would enter the game world fully armed, armored, and sporting the ability to Read Magic, and cast Protection From Evil (this spell was rolled randomly)! I chose race Human for the additional 10% XP bonus.

For my second character the ability scores were all 12 or above with Wisdom and Constitution as the highest at 14, and Charisma garnering a +1 bonus as well at 13. Can someone say Cleric! "Lamithe Vor'gund, servant of Balach" looks to be a perfect companion for Daegan, a learned warrior dedicated to crushing fiends of darkness.

So, yeah, I'm showing my role play upbringing  was solidly based in D&D Basic boxed set, but I feel I could take complete newbies to role play and easily help them create satisfying fantasy adventure heroes with Basic Fantasy.

If I happen to be so lucky to gather a game group somehow someway here in the wilderness of the High Rockies I wouldn't hesitate to use this rules set as an introduction to role playing games.

Playing Sci Fi with USR

Space Opera; Hard Sci Fi on my genre tree starts with Traveller. I've never played Traveller, but I have Gurps, and Hero Games sourcebooks, and would love to play some cliched sci fi tropes from "Behind the Claw"!

I would try to plunge in hoping to achieve an arena death match, star ship combat, fearsome space marine assaults, interstellar espionage, corporate sponsored wars, alien first contact, and lost civilizations. These type of grand adventures should be made available to your players  as their PC's take shape preparing for their first adventure.




2.3 Space Opera, Hard Sci Fi

2.3.1 Traveller Universe