The Gaming Den

Choosing a clan should be meaningful to define a character: how he behave, how he looks like, and/or what he is capable of. For all its limitations, that's what D&D manage to do when you say you play a lawful-neutral elf bard. But VtM clans are widely inconsistent. Being a Tremere or a Gangrel d...

In order to function, every RPG needs at least one basic adventure premise like "monsters threaten the village" or "Mr. Johnson wants you to steal a thing." If you happen to have two that are equally workable, so much the better, and I don't see any reason why Vampire can't cont...

So what do a bunch of vampires in New York City or Beijing have as motivation to party up and... do something together? As said previously, the best pick is probably to task your teams of Camarilla vampires with protecting the masquerade: killing or capturing vampires and other supernatural entitie...

If you keep in mind the ultimate goal is to play adventures involving a group of vampires (the thing the authors of Vampire: the Masquerade forgot), there is practically no case where the statement "Caine was the first and most powerful vampire" has any added value over "Caine was one...

Flashback in Hellywood . The players can summon flashbacks when they want. For instance, as the GM describes the two cops guarding the police station, a player can say "the one on the left, I served with him during the war." The gamemaster and the player can then play a very short scene (s...

WoD vampires' historical roots in the Fertile Crescent were merely a by-product of their Biblical origin story with Cain. On the other hand, the eurocentrism is really lazy writing by white people who never bothered with non-white History. They shifted their entire setting from the Biblical Middle E...

Vampire's biggest failing was not letting the players start as princes. Giving ownership of the city from the start solves all engagement problems. Why should you investigate the weird rumors about the old mill? Because it's your city and if something is about to blow your sweet gig you want to sto...

In real life, two of the reasons for fielding assault rifles instead of giving everyone minigun or sniper rifle is weight and handling ease. So I would try rules where carrying heavy weapons make you slower, and possibly prevent you from moving and firing in the same "turn." You may also r...

Actually, the corporations were heavily balkanized in the earlier sourcebooks. Throughout the Seattle Sourcebook , The Neo-Anarchist Guide to North America and Native American Nations , you keep getting another and another corporations in every chapter (Hyundai-IBM anyone ?). It wouldn't be until Co...

Thirty years of Shadowrun and we're still having this discussion... The setting is not the story. The cyberpunk genre was defined by its setting, its theme, writing/visual style and characters - while being relatively open regarding the plot. A cyberpunk setting alone, or any other of those componen...

Shadowrun had a state where your social status is based on a nation-wide academic and athletic test and whether you're a Tolkienesque ubermensch or not. It had the southern states seceding from Washington bureaucracy and corporate lobbies and preparing for war against latinos for the control of Texa...

[Elves are super special, though stated not to have souls. Fairly standard. Rule-wise, the lack of a soul prevents elves from being resurrected by most techniques. Not a big difference before level 8-10 when such spells become available. Once a magician reaches level 10, resurrection is rather chea...

The rules for combat are simples (as insurance meerkats and British PMs would say). You subtract your opponents Defence from your Attack, and roll under it on a d20 to hit. 20 always miss, and 1 always hits (and bypasses armour). [...] Instead of Attack and Defence, for magic you use Magical Attack...

Strength - you don't get a separate Constitution score, Strength covers this as well. Reflexes - which should be called Dexterity or something, but I'm guessing they wanted to move away from D&D sounding terms Intelligence - there's no separate Wisdom. Looks - like Charisma, except utterly usel...

A while ago, I started drafting a short story about a mage order venturing into that kind of dungeon in the seemingly only appropriate way: with fifteen or twenty experts applying a CSI-like, tedious protocol, one meter at a time, with colored ropes to show the range of detection spell which were ca...

In any setting that has giant flying lizard has the apex predators and compulsively taking magical items and treasures for their hoard, building underground complex to hide into and store said magical items and treasures would seem like a good idea. Not that dragons cannot enter said underground com...

As an extention to extra-territoriality: Being a sovereign nation, a megacorp always has its own army. Monsanto landed a foot here when they bought Blackwater (by whichever name they're going today). I can't believe that story is still alive. The only source for Monsanto buying Blackwater was one s...

I always found the baseline people use for vampire feeding frequency particularly high, for little added value, if any. you actually don't want all the four of five vampire PC in the team going on hunt, each with their specific technique, in the middle of an adventure, so "once per night" ...

The sequels don't feel like More Star Wars, they feel like Fake Star Wars. This. One of the thing that bothered me the most when I watched The Last Jedi was how much time they used to introduce secondary characters like Admiral Holdo or Benicio del Toro. Sure, secondary characters like Boba Fett or...

Also, I notice that the women tend to have far more complex costumes than the men. I'm guessing this is not an effort at establishing vampire gender roles as a worldbuilding element and more because there is a demographic gap in how much effort is put into a costume in the Swedish LARP scene. That'...

I'm not sure why either of these things is supposed to be a particular selling point for an alignment system. It is entirely possible to make an alignment system in which all alignments are non-colors like "Buddhism" or "Legalism." Going with ROYGBV makes the list easy to rememb...

I think Gumshoe Trail of Cthulhu hit something with their rules for pillars of sanity. Basically, your character was losing important aspects of his life - his/her marriage, job, faith... - as he/she was losing sanity (because they sticked to CoC 100 scale, a pillar was worth 20 SAN). In a way, the ...

Any attempt to design an alignment or faction system ought to start with a clear explanation of whether the alignment/faction is a conscious and independent choice from the character, or a changing state based on his/her actions or decided by a superior entity (which is basically the same thing - th...

So, to give some extra information on the vikings in INS/MV, they were originally introduced in the 1st edition sourcebook Berserker . In spite of the name, the rules for vikings only make up the first third of the book (the second third contains the rules for sorcerers, and the last third two adven...

La conclusion After rereading the book from cover to cover (I admit, I skipped some powers' entry), my first conclusion was about the same than the list time I took a look at it: my god, this system sucks. The power scale is narrow, it's impossible to make the math on what each level of attribute o...