Transitory States
Edward:
David S Leyman:
Hisham:
Luke:
James Kight:
king:
Hisham and Sila has been writing stuff down on this weblog since 2005. Sometimes they post photos of family, sometimes they talk about film, books and music, sometimes there is artwork and stuff about tabletop gaming.
Here's the first creature artwork commissioned by Wicked North Games for their Azamar sourcebook to be used with their Cinema6 RPG system. Dragons, I think are one of the least exotic fantasy beasts to grace the land of Azamar.
Watch this space for more creature artwork.
Click here to download the Cinema6 beta R2 version of the rules.
Cthulhutech is a role-playing game that combines elements from the Cthulhu Mythos with a bit of Macross and Neon Genesis Evangelion; a post-apocalyptic, cosmic horror with a dash of freaking giant mecha throwdown.
One of the creatures in the world of Cthulhutech is a dhohanoid, a lethal, horrifying, shape-changing monster which hides itself by shape-changing into a regular human.
I was commissioned to illustrate a new dhohanoid by Kai for the scenario he was running. I was to play in this scenario too, but the flu got the better of me.
Cinema 6 is a new D6-based role-playing game produced by Wicked North Games, which uses the OpenD6 initiative released by West End Games. The D6 system, of course, is a long standing tabletop RPG engine which had its origins in the Ghostbusters RPG and developed further with the Star Wars RPG.
The first setting book for Cinema 6 to be released will be the sourcebook for the fantasy setting named Azamar. Here's an excerpt from the chapter "Understanding Azamar".
The co-founders of Wicked North Games have given me the task of coming up with some black-and-white illustrations for Azamar. The first artwork I was assigned with was the exterior view of the Immyr city of Guradiin Ithural.
Here's a brief description of the city:
Back in 2002, I was commissioned by Ian Houlihan to come up with five character illustrations for a Star Wars roleplaying game d20 one-shot scenario called Savours of the Light: The Soul Child. The scenario, set during the Dark Times, was to be run at The BIG Weekend. BIG was an acronym for Brisbane Indoor Games, which was obviously held indoors in the city of Brisbane, Australia.
The characters were members of a music band who had to protect a Jedi padawan. The padawan had an infant in her care, who was strong in the Force. Not an easy task, for Imperial Inquisitors naturally are also hunting for the baby.
I've found the five player characters I drew in a directory somewhere, but it appears the original files are lost forever. Here are the artwork I drew:
Shari-Dae Elore, the Jedi Padawan, with the infant Tristan Forseti given to her care by her deceased master Vesik Len.
Unor Lak, the Rodian keyboard player of The Troubled Souls.
The Eclipse Phase RPG campaign I've been gaming in, gamemastered by Ivan, has been real fun. The posthuman campaign involves the players as "pre-emptive retrieval specialists" who have been plying their trade between Luna, Mars and the asteroid belt. And although I've drawn Hokusai before, as well as Billy Cable Jr. and Bishop-6 in vac suits, here is the first ever visual representation of the entire crew of the cargo ship Fastball Special.
Eclipse Phase was on today. I played Hokusai Tarnungshaut the uplifted octopus once again. As we played, I sketched the final scenario as we played it. Here we were, Bishop Six, Billy Cable Jr. and I had to rescue Maria, the advisor to the von Trapp family in spaaaace (a bunch of neotenics, really) from the Nine Lives crime syndicate.
We all wore vac suits because we infiltrated the bad guys' base from outside the space habitat, where I lost my Groucho Marx glasses. I wielded a pair of heavy railgun pistols, the neurachem-stimulated Bishop Six had a sniper rifle slung on his back and Billy wore a pickelhaube helmet for some reason and tried to bluff some guards with a dazzler in his hand.
Ultimately, we figured out how one does solve a problem like Maria.
Recently I was given the task to come up with some spot illustrations for Strike Force 7 - Savaged! from Super Genius Games, the role-playing game that uses the Savage Worlds system. It's currently available for sale as a pdf on RPGNow and DriveThruRPG, but Super Genius Games will soon be releasing a print edition.
Strike Force 7 is basically America's daring special missions force, with a special purpose to defeat "Skorpion", a ruthless terrorist organisation determined to take over the world. These are just minor black and white spot illustrations, so these aren't the best or the biggest ilustrations on the book. I can't wait to see the final copy which must be filled with a host of great images.
... is a penny earned. Or something.
Here is an image of a penny dreadful cover I made based on the three characters in the previous entry's Doctor Who RPG game that chose to stay in the alternate timeline of Victorian London filled with strange alien refugees and hybridised alien technology from the future.
Click here to view a larger version of the illustration at DeviantArt.
Kai deliberately GMed the session rules lite and with a more freeform style which allowed for cinematic fast play.
You have Attributes and Skills which allow you to do pretty much everything with an allocated number from 0-5 or above, 5 being a something you're exceptionaly good at. To perform a task, a player rolls 2d6 + the appropriate Attribute + the appropriate Skill. You roll against a target number. The harder the task, the higher the target number.
You also have Traits, giving you some special abilities or bonuses to your rolls. Traits can be good or bad, with names that range from the simple Attractive, Brave and Charming to the more esoteric Time Traveller and Run for your Life!
If you opt to take Bad Traits, such as Clumsy, Cowardly and Phobia, you gain extra points to put into more Good Traits or into your Attributes and Skills.
Those are the basic rules.
Irfan played his first complete Star Wars Role-Playing Game adventure today, as everyone's favourite intrepid astromech droid Artoo-Detoo. He was awesome at figuring out solutions to simple problems that were presented in the scenario that I cooked up. He even role-played Artoo well by having in-character conversations in regular robotic beeps.
We played on the living room carpet and I used the gamemaster (GM) screen for the first time ever, with the D6 rules and stats inserts I made. My coterie of white D6 were arrayed on the floor, while the singe red D6 served as a Wild Die.
The scenario was designed to be short and with minimal story twists.
Shortly after the Battle of Hypori that, Artoo-Detoo, the lone player character (PC), was sent by Clone Commander Cody for a mission. Orbiting the planet, say for story's sake, Eiattu 6, Artoo's task was to be flown from the Venator-class Star Destroyer Resolute to the surface of Eiattu.
There, Artoo will need to sneak into a Separatist safehouse containing a redundant tactical computer databank and hack into it to determine the position of Count Dooku and his fleet.
Artoo was supposed to be flown within a short distance of the safehouse in the hills, but the LAAT gunship he was in was shot by a ground-based missile. Before the gunship smashed into the landscape, I thought Irfan was going to get Artoo to attempt a controlled landing, but instead he did something I didn't count on. He jumped.
However, he failed his rocket operations roll and slammed down hard into a sand dune. Thankfully his Strength roll's Wild Die came up 6 twice! So Artoo shrugged off the damage which I attributed to sand absorbing the impact.
Using his sensors, he tried to get a fix on the location of the hill and the safehouse. But this time his Wild Die turned up a 1. I ruled that he knows the direction of the safehouse - which is south - but he doesn't know how far it is. And it's all desert as far as he can see.
My player character in Eclipse Phase is named Hokusai Tarnungshaut. He is an octopus.
Specifically, he is a North Pacific Giant Octopus with an uplifted human-like intelligence. He comes with the regular eight arm, a beak and a camouflage skin.
He was uplifted by a scientist in a hypercorp during the fall. The hypercorp was destroyed but Doctor Kyle Hoo the scientist took Hokusai away and taught him about the world. The scientist also used his resources to fit a whole bunch of cyberware - including a basic mesh insert, deadly cyberclaws and a cortical stack - in Hokusai. Because the body of the octopus lives only as long as two years, the scientist have been cloning his body and resleeving him in a fresh cloned body every couple of years.
So the other day I made three pages of rules and stats for a SWRPG GM screen. Those face inward, to the gamemaster who has to refer to rules and tables and some stats at a moment's notice during a game session. What about the other side? you may ask. What do the players see?
So people print out photos and artwork of scenes of whatever game they use. There are hundreds of official and fan artwork of Star Wars in the internet wilds. If you download the Pirates of the Spanish Main GM screen inserts for Savage Worlds, they also come with inserts for the player side with artwork and map.
Here's one insert I've made for SWRPG on the player side:
A blaster visual reference guide. No longer do you need to tell other players, "I have that blaster pistol that Han uses to shoot at the sarlacc tongue." You can just refer to its name on the insert, or just point to any blaster and tell your player, "You find a blaster carbine in the cupboard and it looks like this."
Many thanks to the Rancorpit team for damage code for weapons that appeared in the prequels movies, which came out after West End Games lost the Star Wars license. I obtained the photos from all over the internet, especially the Star Wars Wiki.
Right-click-and-save the link to the zip file on the left. (405KB)
Here's something I've been working on for the last year or so, created over long periods of nothingness punctuated by brief periods of activity. My very own design for a full-colour Star Wars RPG Gamemaster's Screen in D6 rules - using Inkscape.
There are three pages of inserts, each US Letter sized. They work great with the Savage Worlds Customizable GM Screen.
The first are tables for combat (injury, scaling, damage, healing, etc.), movements (manoeuvre modifiers, character & vehicle) and astrogation mishaps.
Last Sunday, the GOKL gang continued the role-playing adventures of Star Wars: A Bad Example in the Spacelanes.
Two new players, Nigel of Singapore who played Bob the Wookiee, and Razzman who played Reelo Jackson the Rodian bounty hunter, joined the party as they embarked on a mission to retrieve their kidnapped crewmates, beginning with Weapon X the HK-78 assassin droid.
The previous episode can be found here.
Long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...
Upon exposing a traitor Starson O'Kreem in the mobile asteroid pirate stronghold Irontooth Station, pirate lord Slaughter Maelstrom has confirmed a truce with the crew of the Bad Example. After returning to Sriluur to pick up Tickley, the crew sets off to recovered their captured droid companion Weapon X.
Using the data taken from O'Kreem's datapad, they attempt to discover Weapon X's location and soon track him to a warehouse in the Rodian district on Coruscant.
About six months ago, I ran the third Star Wars D6 game with the GOKL crew, which continued from Episode 2. But I was a bad GM then and did not take notes (mentally and on paper) of what occured. Here is a rundown of the lost Episode 3 of Star Wars: A Bad Example in the Spacelanes.
Details such as combat and NPC names were lost. New NPC names are fabricated for the purpose of continuity in the adventure and will be considered official for upcoming games.
The crew of the Bad Example, Hunter Maelstrom the freighter captain, Nek'Koh'Moo'Su'May a.k.a Annie the Trianii, Ssssawar the Trandoshan chef and the clone Adenuneasily enjoyed the dinner set out for them by The Five Skulls Brigands. Weapon X, the HK-57 droid, just sat and made small talk. The pirate leader Lord Irontooth had earlier revealed himself as Slaughter Maelstrom, Hunter's brother. Sitting beside him were his two lieutenants: the suave, young Starson O'Kreem who smiled graciously at the newcomers, and the bald, older Yoat Jumpo who appeared to regard them with distrust.
So, in part two of the Eclipse Phase quickstart demo scenario, Ahmir discovers that his knowledge on Mars - or anywhere other than the Outer Planers, the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud - is worth zero.
Ahmir's player - me - discovers that his Gamescience dice is trying to kill him.
Early on, I took these photos of the Tachikoma figure we used to represent Ahmir after he was resleeved following the previous episode's nuke encounter. I forgot to snap more because the encounters were exciting. Action movie exciting.
Also, they were somewhat hilarious thanks to some hilariously bad dice rolls. Kinetic weapons jamming. Beam weapons overheating. Parkour attempts that were... less than stellar. But there were some spectacular heroic acts as well, such as Zora shooting a bad guy through the neck to destroy his cortical stack embedded at his cervical vertebrae*.
We finished the adventure with a 20-kilometre radius, devastating anti-matter explosion that scooped out a whole lot of dirt - as well as deadly TITAN artifacts and bad guys' corpses - off the Martian landscape.
Thanks to Ivan the GM, Ivan the player, Keh Win and Kai for a great game. And Doug and Adrian for their input and chuckles from the peanut gallery.
* In hindsight, I believe that to shoot a person's C1 "Atlas" vertebra successfully from the front and at a high angle, you have to shoot him through the face with an AP round instead of the neck.
Sunday was gaming day with GOKL and this time Ivan ran Eclipse Phase, the science fiction role-playing game with intriguing and extensive post-singularity and transhumanist ideas. Even running through the demo scenario in the free quick-start pdf, a lot of these high concepts shone through to us newbie players of the game, making the game even a more unique experience. (To be fair, I haven't played GURPS Transhuman Space before to make a proper comparison, and the technology application in Eclipse Phase is much more high-concept than Shadowrun or Cyberpunk 2020.)
This afternoon I had the pleasure of gaming at Mage Cafe with the GOKL gang. Ivan was gamemastering Warhammer Fantasty Role Playing 3rd Edition, using the introductory adventure Fantasy Flight Games put up on their website, A Day Late, A Shilling Short. Here is a close up of the dice we used: red Reckless dice, green Conservative dice, white Fortune dice and black Misfortune dice. The Characteristic dice and the Expertise dice and the Challenge dice (blue, yellow and purple respectively) are located just away from the camera's POV:
You roll the Dice Pool based on your character's stats and tally them up. Some dice cancel other dice out, like Fudge dice. Then you determine the outcome with the remaining dice.
I once wrote of my plans for writing a role-playing game.
I've been really writing it, in an attempt to fill it to the brim with the campaign setting, the bestiary, the rules - along with some setting-specific plug-ins and a whole bunch of neat stuff. The editing and artwork are still a long way to go, but would you want to game in a setting world which is coloured by the following glossary?
