Tarot Witch of the Black Rose for Mutants and Masterminds 3rd Edition

As many of you know I have been in "research mode" on Tarot, Witch of the Black Rose for some time. And you may also know I just picked up Mutants and Masterminds 3^rd Edition. Well I felt it was time to give them both a spin and see what I can come up with.

Tarot, Witch of the Black Rose

Real name: Rowan Gender: F Age: mid-20s Height: 5'9" Weight: 140 lbs Hair: Red Eyes: Green
Group Affiliation: The Black Rose Coven. Base of Operation: Witches' Hollow, Salem, MA

Power Level: 9


Abilities

STR: 2	AGL: 3	FGT: 4	AWE: 4
STA: 3	DEX: 2	INT: 3	PRE: 5

Dodge: 6
Parry: 6
Fortitude: 5
Toughness: 6/3
Will: 5
Armor +3

Advantages
All out attack, Artificer, Attractive 2, Benefit (Witch of the Black Rose), Connected, Contacts, Diehard, Equipment (Sword and Armor), Extraordinary Effort, Languages (English, Latin), Minion 3 ("Pooka" her flying Goblin Cat), Power Attack, Precise Attack (all), Prone Fighting

Skills

Acrobatics +7, Athletics +6, Close combat (sword) +12, Deception +7, Expertise (Magic) +11, Insight +6, Intimidation +5, Investigation +5, Perception +6, Persuasion +7, Sleight of Hand +5, Stealth +5, Treatment +5

Powers
Healing 2
Magic 5 (Dynamic)
 Eye bite (Blast, does not require hands) 2
 Dazzle 2
 Flight 5
 Forcefield 5
 Impervious Toughness 3
 Teleport 5
Magickal Senses (Awarness: Magic, Precognition (limited to Tarot's loved ones and to tarot card images)) 3
Telekinesis (Move Object) 5

Complications
Rival: Raven Hex (sister)
Enemy: Dragon Witches
Prejudice: Wiccan
Relationships: Jon "Skeleton Man" Webb (lover), Boo Cat (lover), Mother (mother)

Power Points
Abilities: 52 Powers: 34 Advantages: 21 Skills: 20 Defenses: 8 = 135 pp

This version of Tarot focuses on her fighting ability. She admits herself that she is not the most powerful witch, magic wise, around, but she has had quite a bit of training with the sword and in combat as a Swordmaiden of the Goddess. I also wanted to focus on the magical nature of her armor. Sure she goes to the same armorsmith as Red Sonja, but there is a magical aura about it that protects her all the same.

I opted for PL 9 here. She could not stand toe to toe with the likes of Zatanna or even Willow and Tara magic wise, but still has some room to grow her abilities.

ETA: I am also posting this on The Atomic Think Tank.

My First New Game of 2011: Mutants and Masterminds 3

Well, it's still 2010, but 2011 is starting off like 2010 did , with a new Supers game.
In this case the new supers game is Mutants and Masterminds, 3rd Edition.

M&M 3rd Edition first off looks a lot like the DC Adventures RPG also from Green Ronin out earlier this year.

What are the big changes from 2nd Edition?  Well GR is moving more and more away from the d20 3.0 standards and more into True20 land.  That is the Abilities (and there are now 8 of them) are the pluses.  So instead of Strength 18 (+4) like you see in other d20 games, M&M3 just uses Strength 4.  Easy enough and a logical extension of their line of thought with True20.

I mentioned there are 8 abilities now; Strength, Agility, Dexterity, Stamina, Intellect, Awareness, Presence and Fighting.  Agility and Fighting are the big new ones.  Agility had been part of Dexterity and does some of the things Dex used to do.  Agility relates more to "bodily dexterity" and dexterity is more like "hand-eye coordination".  Fighting is now the close combat ability. Now while I rather see this more of a skill than an ability, this is a comic book world and it works here.  There are "close combat" and "ranged combat" skills as well.  So Fighting I suppose is more of a natural aptitude towards combat.

Skills are given greater coverage and are streamlined from the d20 3.0 base, but not quite as streamlined as say D&D 4.  They are closer to Cinematic Unisystem in nature really.  Skills are still linked to a specific ability like d20, but are also now detailed on what sort of action they are, move, standard or free.  Much more detail is given for skills and how to use them in a variety of situations.

Feats have become more Unisystem/GURPS like and renamed Advantages. They are ranked and used very much like a Advantage or Quality would be used in another game.  I can see the next evolution of True20 doing something like this too since they are organized in a similar manner to True20's powers.

Powers come next.  Powers are similar to Advantages, but have a much greater effect on various game systems.  An Advantage might boost a skill or change an aspect of combat.  Powers go above an beyond that.  In general the Powers are much more detailed than earlier editions.  There are a lot of Extras and Flaws to add to Powers for a lot of customization.  Gadgets and Gear are separated from Powers in this edition.

Damage is handled differently in this game.  The Damage Track is gone replaced by a very Marvel Superheroes looking chart.   The results are basically No Effect, some penalty all the way up to incapacitated.  It is simple enough to use.  I am of two minds on this.  First, while I never really warmed to the damage track in M&M/True20 it was easy to use and innovative. The damage chart here is also very, very easy to use as well and works on similar principles. The chart has some Old School "feng shui" about it without it being an "endless chart".

Green Ronin has always produced top notch products.  This one is no exception.  I didn't notice much in the way of recycled text from earlier editions or even from DCA, but it very well could be there.  I would be surprised if there wasn't really;  I only really noticed one or two bits of recycled art and that was from their Magic book and Powers book for 2nd Ed.  There were few other bits here and there and there might have been others, but if I didn't notice it that is the same as it not being there right?

All in all this looks like a great game and it might even be superior to M&M 2nd ed aka "The World's Greatest Superhero Game", which I notice M&M 3 does not say on the cover.

The big issues for me of course are conversions.  How easy will it be to convert to/from M&M2 or Unisystem?  Converting actually looks pretty easy.  To/from M&M2 might even be trickier than Unisystem.  I am going to have to give it a try in the next few days.

Well I just put away all my M&M 2 books.  Looks like it was only to make room for my new cache of M&M 3/DCA books.

Year End Review?

Last year I did a "Best" and "Worst" of the year.

This year I have seen so much more that it is hard to quantify and qualify it all.
So here are some random highlights of the year.

D&D Essentials

D&D Essentials became basically what 4e should have been.  I think if WotC had waited and not done D&D4 like they did and came out with Essentials....well people still would have bitched and moaned cause that is how gamers are.

God we suck.

D&D Essentials boiled down D&D 4 to its, well, Essentials.  Presented in a format that certainly owes something to the old-school vibe (note I don't say Renaissance or movement here), Essentials does an end run around edition wars by focusing on being fun.
Interestingly enough WotC seems to be acknowledging the old-schoolers out there with the release of the Red Box Starter set and the revamp to their website.

DriveThruRPG Reviewer
I became a featured reviewer at DriveThruRPG this year.  My plan to have more reviews up next year.  At least a couple a week.

Blogs
Lots of great blogs out.  Just look down the side of my blog here.  Many of them have very interesting things to say.

Stats
I am a stats junkie.  I love seeing what people are reading here, what pages people go back too the most and which ones are the most popular.
While this will skew my data,  here are my most popular pages of the last year.

• Xena and Gabrielle, this one is due to some of the images on the page.
• Erzsébet Báthory
• The Hex Girls made it three times in the top ten, Unisystem/Witch Girls, Cartoon Action Hour, and Cortex.
• People also seem to like Succubi, as the hits on Sympathy For the Succubus Part 1 and Part 2 show.
• And Every Angel is Terrifying

My top referring sites were:

• RPG Bloggers
• The Underdark Gazette
• Eden Discussion Boards
• Destination Unknown
• RPGNet forums
• Asshat Paladins
• Daddy Grognard
• Risus Monkey
• Swords Against the Outer Dark
• Gothridge Manor

Games

A lot of really fun games came out this past year as well.  I have not had a chance to catch up on last years even yet though!  Pathfinder was a big hit this year in addition to all the new D&D 4 and OSR games I scored.

For me though the highlight was the release of B/X Companion.  A really well done book and a lot of fun too. Best release of the all the OSR games this year.
B/X Companion as well as some nice buys at this years's game auction at Games Plus, has gotten me really interested in Basic Era D&D again.  It is very much nostalgia, no two ways about it, but it is still very fun.





The Bad
Still no Ghosts of Albion in print format.

I guess the Worst part of the year, gaming wise, was getting hit by another driver coming back from Gen Con this year.  I on the plus side, everyone was fine and now the van is back to running fine too.

What will 2011 bring?

How much Fantasy in your FRPGs?

I am still thinking about world building in my game and I was thinking about Oerth, the Greyhawk world.  In Greyhawk the sun goes around the world, as it did in some dark ages beliefs.

Now here is the thing.  Or two rather.  First, in today's age we tend to think of ourselves as very progressive and smart and forget that a lot of the things we know now, people also knew then.  Sure there are some "fantasy" style beliefs.  After all the Greeks knew a lot about Astronomy and even knew the size of the Earth (and the fact that it was round) as far back as the 4th century BC.  Sure today some people still think the world is flat or created by magic, but for the most part people are and were smart.
Secondly I like my universe to make some sort of sense.  Afterall I still would like to play a Greyhawk 3000 game someday and that might be harder if  my sun is really just a burning mountain going around a flat earth.

So yeah, I like magic, vampires and ghosts in my games, but draw the line at Earth-centered cosmologies.
Maybe I can have parallel cosmologies.  If one goes to the sun via magic, they find the realm of Pelor there, but if you launch a probe, it is just a ball of nuclear fusion.

What do you all do in your FRPGs?  Do you even bother?   What is your cosmos like?

Sometimes Wikipedia really irritates me

I have a love/hate relationship with Wikipedia.
As an academic I like it because it is a nice starting point for any topic, but hate it for anything close to "real" research.   As a  teacher I would never accept Wikipedia as a source unless there were plenty of other sources to back that up.

As a gamer I like it since it usually gives me what I need fairly quickly. 

I also like the "every one works together" aspect.  But that also gets on my nerves.

Today though the wikipedia community is getting on my nerves.  Long story short, some articles I worked on are up for deletion.  Not only that, the editor that put nominated them for deletion chose to do it over Christmas where it is likely that he will get them deleted since no one can help me "save" them.

I used to be a very active editor on wikipedia.  I even donated money.  But it seems more and more that there are some people there with personal agendas to have articles they don't like deleted.  I just spent a a couple years waiting for one such person to get banned, and now others want to take up his crusade.

Maybe I'll just post stuff here instead.  The audience is smaller, but at least I get the feeling that it would be better received.   Though some of the stuff I work on wouldn't fit even the broad range of topics I cover here.

Merry Undead Christmas!

So Christmas has come to the Brannan house.  Electronics were had by all.  But I wanted to talk about what I got RPG related this year.

Castle Ravenloft Board Game
I got this as my "big" RPG gift.  It looks like a lot of fun and we are going to play it later today I am sure.  I grabbed my Strahd mini that I got a while back and put it into the box to replace the weak looking vampire it came with (he is fine for the "young vampire" they also have you use him for).  Tons of skeletons, ghosts and other things were included.  Got a dracolich and a zombie dragon too.

"Orcus" Modules
I got the last titles in the P and E series I needed.  E2 and E3 and P2.  I now have all nine of the "Shadowfell/Orcus" modules.
I know the reviews of these are mixed, but I wanted them all.

Beholder Gift Set
I also got the D&D Beholder Gift set, which comes with 4 beholders.  A regular one, an shadow beholder, a ghost and a frost beholder.  They are very cool and I can't wait to use them somewhere.

Now on to the other gifts!

Forgot to mention!  I also got a new book, "Vampyre Kisses" and a bunch of "Tarot Witch of the Black Rose" comics.

Merry Christmas!!!

Happy Hanuka, Merry Yule, Joyous Solstice, Happy Festivus, Happy Kwanza and any other number of holidays I have forgotten.

And Happy New Year!!