The Gaming Den

Dragon Warriors occupied a niche at the time, but it was a narrow one. The setting can be described as 1) almost historical, but also 2) high fantasy, and 3) not very detailed. DW is a hack an experienced Gamemaster with a modicum of historical knowledge can put together over the week-end, with only...

So the conspiracy goes that the first major city that got a 5G rollout on its mobile network was Wuhan. I think that might even be true, especially if you narrowly enough define 'major' (Wuhan has ten million people in it and is the size of London or Chicago). And... that's it. Just that correlatio...

The big conflict of course is the existence of "pink mohawk" sensibilities. On the one hand, you have various hidden weapons and gadgets that could be concealed in eyeballs - but you also had Cyberpunk 20XX's "combat zones" and Shadowrun ranting about open shootouts on the freew...

Overall, the official numbers that are currently available are not reliable, like, at all. Testing policy restricted test to people with symptoms AND either requiring hospitalization, returning from a foreign country deemed at risks, or confirmed to have spend at least one hour within one meter of ...

The situation in France - basically the same than in the other western country - the disease, the dead, lockdown, people partying ahead of lockdown, people leaving the urban areas for the countryside just before the lockdown, lack of hospital beds and testing, no more toilet paper nor pasta in store...

So, to fix cyberlimbs, you need to fix their cost and the value of the Strength attribute, and to fix the value of Strength you need to fix melee combat, and to fix melee you need to fix the damage scale and the combat turn system... That being said, the combat turn breakdown into Simple and Complex...

One of the main racist terrorist factions is based in Texas (Alamos 20K), but aside from a few disparaging remarks about racist slags in Bubba country, the game was pretty much uninterested in the goings on of the Confederacy. Which was probably for the best because it turns out that there's no tac...

I don't know about the original edition, but the French edition only has a map of Elleslande at the beginning of the chapter on page 14. There are maps of the rest of the world much later in the book, a physical map on pages 168-171 (in the chapter about travel), and landscape map on pages 266-269 (...

Bargaining rules that set in stone the profit that can be made from a skill roll are usually bad. But with the rules in Cynabar's Fantastic Technologiy Droids , West End Games' Star Wars even removed to the need to have any Bargain skill. The bargain droid : Using the rules from Cynabar's Fantastic ...

A core idea the people who designed Shadowrun got right was to set rules that protect the setting itself from magical effects. Like, if you want to have the wealthy use private jets and limousines, limit or outright ban teleportation (which also leave some chances for paid criminals to reach valuabl...

Hidden on page 41 is also the mention of "Gumel Haibibulai and Nzitunga Ngayabarambirwa, the former dictators of Nigeria and the Kinyarwanda Rwandans" as living on Bermuda. This is, as far as I know, the only piece of information Shadowrun ever had on Rwanda (in The Sixth World Almanac, t...

The addition of Miami makes rather less sense. Basically I think Miami was originally included in the Caribbean League as a joke , because “It's basically Cuban” or something. This book suggests that the Southern states kicked Miami out because there were too many brown people and then it joined th...

The final bit is about Dunkelzahn having left 36 million nuyen to the “head houngan of the Caribbean league.” Which is hilarious, because there is not and never has been a “head houngan.” So naturally there's a big dust up as various voodoo priests with real magic powers attempt to force all the ot...

The book proper opens with an in media res event told through on-the-spot news reports where pirates captured a ship that was supposed to be carrying oil, but it turns out that it was a false manifest and actually it's carrying radioactive waste and everything goes to hell and the Aztec navy gets i...

I think it's the same John Tynes who was credited as the author of "Nemo Solus Sapit", an adventure in The Stars Are Right , an official "Call of Cthulhu 1990s" product published by Chaosium in 1992. Interestingly enough, that particular adventure has little to none modern or cyb...

Auspex conceptually can include everything from heightened senses to the very acts of reading, spying, investigating, as well as clairvoyance and precognition and other "intelligence" checks. Animalism conceptually can include Animal Ken everything from the ability to feed on animals, &qu...

hyzmarca wrote:It's not even out of genre to have enemies on that level. High end Anne Rice vampires are basically invincible to anything that humans could throw up them, with only vampires of the same tier providing a challenge to them.

It depends whether you want to have the need for a masquerade or not.

Still as food for thought, I tried to make a more detailed list of vampiric powers, based on what I posted earlier. VtM-like discipline ranks appear to be a good solution to deal with powers that overlap with other while being obviously better, like Wallwalk versus Fly, or Bat Form versus Mist Form ...

In regards to bat form, you could turn into a bat sized bat, turned into a human sized bat, or turn into a group of bat sized bats that together are human sized. Those seem equal valid choices, but would you want to have 3 different bat form abilities? My first thought was no, but you might want to...

For the record, Vampire: the Masquerade has 17 Disciplines (leaving out the more exotic bloodlines). Auspex (Super-perception + Mind probe) Animalism (Animal mind control) Celerity (Super-speed) Chimerstry (Illusion magic) Dementation (Emotion control + Madness) Dominate (Human mind control) Fortitu...

While this might just be me, "The Beast" is something that a vampire is, while "The Master of Arms" is more something a vampire does, it's not inherent to their bloodline or anything, while presumably The Beast's powers are (unless they learnt shapeshifting and could have learnt...

McWoD was so terrible we did an OSSR of it. Technically, Monte Cook's World of Darkness came out in 2007, which makes it dubiously acceptable as an OSSR in 2015. But it's an unholy mashup of World of Darkness and WotC's Open Gaming License. And both of those things come from the Clinton Administrat...

As food for thought (and because I'm on holidays with a lot of time on my hands), I started putting together a list of team roles and specializations for a vampire team. I build it on the premise that a typical adventure would involve searching a person/item/place, defeating opponents and suppress e...

While each of those vampire archetype require a minimum set of powers to be spot on, I think there are very few powers whose addition would break the concept (by the virtue of being fantasy stoies). If, with enough investment at chargen/experience points, your Blade expy learns to practice magic or ...

But Masquerade hadn't got nearly that far. Indeed, the abilities and relevancies for being a Ventrue - or any clan - were so bullshit that really no roles or concepts were supported. If our vampire aristocrat doesn't have the option of having a bat form, I have already lost interest. Because the va...