Bundle of Holding Alert: Mindjammer !

 

Looks like there's a Bundle of Holding for MINDJAMMER! If you've always wanted to collect the corebook and various sourcebooks, now's your chance.

Here's the spiel from the site, for your consideration:

Citizen! From the 17th Millennium we've resurrected our May 2018 Mindjammer Bundle featuring Sarah Newton's transhuman science fiction tabletop roleplaying game Mindjammer from Mindjammer Press. In the New Commonality of Humankind -- a hyperadvanced far future of realistic aliens, lost colony worlds, and the vast Mindscape shared consciousness -- Mindjammer lets you play hardened mercs, cunning corpocrats, culture agents and memetic engineers, aliens and para-human hominids, scouts and socialites, uplifted animals, androids, and even sapient starships. The Second Age of Space is your stage for transcendent cutting-edge space opera in the tradition of Cordwainer Smith, Iain M. Banks, Alistair Reynolds, and Charles Stross.

Mid-March and Enhanced Quarantine Protocols (FATE Accelerated, Champions, and Gumshoe)

With covid-19 doing its number on the world, and on my country in particular, it looks like I'll be staying at home for a while. That means less time in traffic, and more time for some lapsed hobbies -- including gaming!

So here's my March 2020 gaming update.

Gaming with my boy

It's Pay-What-You-Want.
Go get it now!

We've returned to gaming, and are now setting time aside each night to play. Since he's shifted fandom camps away from the Power Puff Girls and has landed on Sonic the Hedgehog, we've now begun playing a dimension-hopping game with Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, and his character -- Lector the Ultimate Green Fighting Cyborg (based on MegaMan). It all starts with an emerald pyramid in the middle of a forest on Planet Moebius -- one that's bigger on the inside, filled with shifting platforms, ladders, and doorways.

Our system is currently Fate Accelerated because (1) I could't find any Hero System stats for these characters; (2) I'm out of practice building in Hero; and (3) benchmarking the abilities of these characters is way more than I'm willing to do at this point.

So far, he's enjoying it immensely.

I am using it also to try to force him to imagine things more, and to understand things from a single character perspective. He gets to order the other three character around, but they won't necessarily always do what he says. Especially if there are ways to activate their Trouble Aspects.

A Return To Hero

My fave cover.
George Perez rules!

That being said, I plan on taking some time to go on a character building binge. Not super-heroes, just Heroic characters for now. All Hero 5th Edition with some house rules -- because this is what my old gaming group, based in the U.S., uses for their Science Fiction gaming.

I need to get back into it anyway, and I've not gamed for any substantial amount of time with the Champions 6th Edition rules, so 4th through 5th rules are top of mind when I start rummaging through my remembered rules.

It's important, as I hope to begin writing for DriveThruRPG's community program for the system. I had some initial spadework done, but it was swallowed up by a ton of work and travel time. Need to revisit my initial ideas on these, and check up on what's already out there in the online realm.

Go, Go, Gumshoe Gaming!

Long Kiss Goodnight meets
Dracula: Dead & Loving It? We'll see.

Lastly, I hope to try out some one-on-one gaming with my wife as well. This time, I'm looking at Gumshoe and Night's Black Agents: Solo Ops in particular. Particularly appropriate, given the inspiration for this Superspy meets Vampire Conspiracy RPG (Jason Bourne vs. Dracula), that a solo super agent tangles with the blood-sucking freaks hiding in the shadows of history.

I've been wanting to taking the system out for a spin for a while, but with the One-on-One Gumshoe take, I'm even more intrigued!

Moreso, for now, than the apparent community content being developed for other flavors of Gumshoe. But I shall look into those as well. I've been wanting to do a Tintin / Secret Seven / Fabulous Five / Johnny Crossbones / Detective Pikachu type of campaign using the Bubblegumshoe system -- but I'm not comfortable with playing the system at all.

Let's see how the rest of March treats us.

Fading Sundays: FATE of Humanity Amongst the Stars

I've been looking at the various FATE rulesets / implementations for various settings, and have been looking at doing niche Fading Suns campaigns using these rulesets.

After considering looking at the FateWorlds books, the Toolkit, and interesting takes like Atomic Robo and the FATE Freeport Companions, I began searching online for some existing conversions.

Also, RIFTS FATE conversions, but that's another story -- I digress.

So here are some that I've been able to find; do you know any others?

Samhaine's Blog: dude named Stephen (according to his "About" page) worked on a FATE conversion. There's also some interesting musings of the similarity in mechanics between the original Fading Suns ruleset and Pendragon.

At Evil Hat's Wiki, there a couple of links to FATE + Fading Suns:

• Pablo Moro's FAE conversion for Fading Suns (nice looking PDF) which seems to only cover character creation
• FATE of the Known Worlds (Google docs text file) which seems to be around 24 pages and has some handling of the Theurgy and some sample character builds.

Playing with the FATE dice

I was revisiting the result distribution of the FUDGE / FATE dice for the 4d6 option, when I thought about applying a variant of the classic Hero System BODY roll to reading the dice. In this option:

1 = -
2 through 5 = 0
6 = +

This results in this distribution (courtesy of www.anydice.com):

In essence, the chances of a +4 or a -4 are 0.16% combined. This means that the modification to someone's basic ability rating is more or less likely to take place between the -3 to +3 range. There's a chance that there might not be enough variance in the rolls during gameplay, but we'll see. Certainly not as varied as the range for the standard FATE roll below:

It makes me think that perhaps the standard FATE roll is better, but I want to tweak it because -- in the absence of actual FATE dice here in the Philippines, it may be easier to just explain that 1 is -1 and 6 is +1 and all the other dice faces are 0.

System musings

Listening to the Ken And Robin Talk About Stuff podcasts triggered my fascination with game systems and how they impact gameplay.

And reminded me about systems I used to favor, systems I've only read, and systems I've only heard about. Here are some of them:

• D6 - ghostbusters has been on the plus threads recently, which makes me happy. I ran it a lot, ripping off and tweaking adventures from Call of Cthulhu and Chill to add that humorous spin. Then Star Wars came round and I ran that a lot - and became the first system I messed with (badly) with house rules. Hope to go back to it again.
• Amber diceless - there's a new game out which I hope to explore which is based on the Amber Diceless system. Never played it, fascination with diceless systems have always been there, and I like to see how gods are handled system-wise.
• Mortal Coil - speaking of handling gods, one of the campaign frames for Mortal Coil does deal with gods. However, my main interest in this system is how it handles magic across multiple spell casting styles and systems.
• Gumshoe - been looking at this damn system since Trail of Cthulhu, Esoterrorists, Mutant City Blues, and Ashen Stars. Need to run a game with this soon.
• RuneQuest 6 - tried building a character for this already, but the multiple magical disciplines are different enough to constitute separate systems to learn.
• FATE - Now that I'm able to appreciate the game system elements, thanks to the sideways entry through Cortex Plus's Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, I'm trying to pick the right game or setting to tackle this system with. 

Other systems out there are also creeping around the edges of my awareness, too many to reasonably attempt, but I can dream.