I'm having fun, how about you?

A bunch of posts this past week and weekend about the supposed creative dearth in modern RPGs.

If you have not seen them, here are some round ups.

• Malcolm Sheppard, Why Do RPGs Suck?
• Steven S. Long, The Licensing Trap.
• RPGPundit, ranting about what ever it is he rants about.  Frankly I don't pay him any attention since his relevance to my world of RPGs is minimal at best.

And a few analyses.

• James Raggi throwing in his 2cents (or Euros).
• Errant RPG
• Bat in the Attic
• Old School Jump and Playing D&D with Porn Stars for their own point of views.

I am sure there is more.

Now Long and Sheppard have earned their stripes with Hero Games and White Wolf respectively and RPGPundit has...what exactly has he done anyway?  Anyway, they are not some RPG noobs or someone on "teh internets" with a half-baked opinion.  But I think they are missing a very important point.

RPGs are supposed to be fun first.

Sure creative, well manufactured RPGs that take advantage of the medium they are in is a great thing.  But sometimes what is great for me is not great for you or some other group.  There are a lot of designers out there doing really cool things, but some of those "really cool things" would bug the shit out of me as a player.

D&D still works for me now for the same reason it worked for me in 1981; it is fun.

I think that is what games should be about.

Wikipedia, Wikia and D&D

Once upon a time I a was a huge contributor to Wikipedia.  I'd edit articles, save them from deletion and generally improve them.  I spent a lot of time researching material and I even helped get a few articles to Good and Featured status.

The trouble is it is an uphill battle against the deletionists; people that want to remove anything from Wikipedia that didn't fit with their often narrow view of what should be in an encyclopedia.  I have locked horns with people on personal crusades (often self admitted) to remove content of a certain type.  There are the anti-porn crusaders that want to delete all articles regarding porn actresses and I have lost a few battles with them.  There was also the guy that took it upon himself to delete all articles on D&D because, well, we were never really clear on that, but he had a single mindedness of it that spoke of some personal hatred (as someone that has a  psych degree and spent a few years working as professional psychologist I am comfortable to make that claim).  He was ultimately banned from Wikipedia because he was a dick.

But now the deletionists are at it again.  I lost an article I spent a lot of time on last month and now another one is up.  Frankly I don't have the desire to fight them anymore.

The article in question is the one on Glasya, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasya

So instead I am looking for other places for D&D related articles.  Wikipedia was a great resource for pop culture but it's effectiveness is soon going to ground to a halt by factions within the site itself.

There are a few other D&D-related Wikis out there.  Here are the ones I know off and have contributed to in the past.

• Canonfire's The Greyhawk Wiki, http://www.canonfire.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page
• The Forgotten Realms Wiki at Wikia, http://forgottenrealms.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
• The original Dungeons and Dragons wiki at Wikia, http://dungeons.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
• The new Dungeons and Dragons wiki at dnd-wiki.org, http://www.dnd-wiki.org/wiki/Main_Page
• The Eberon Wiki, http://eberron.wikia.com/wiki/Eberron_Wiki (Thanks to migellito for this.)
• and an extra one I like, Monsterpedia, http://www.monstropedia.org/monster/Main_Page
• and the Same Universe wiki, http://www.thesameuniversewiki.org/MainPage.ashx

I am sure there are more.  It would be nice to have a couple places to go for research.

In the mean-time as D&D articles get deleted I'll try to find new homes for them elsewhere.

Post 500

Another milestone!  This is my 500th blog post.

I really don't have anything special to say here.  I have a lot more posts to come.

Here is to another 500!

Zatannurday: RPG Stats

This might seem like a bit of a cheat, but as an RPG Blog I want to post RPG stats.  Seems only right really, given this site.

Here are some links to some of my favorite versions and a Zatanna pic colored by Ginjirou,
http://ginjirou.deviantart.com/art/Zatanna-coloured-33727410.

Thom Marrion did a great Cinematic Unisystem / Ghosts of Albion version, http://edenstudiosdiscussionboards.yuku.com/reply/34516#reply-34516

A bunch great ones over at the Atomic Think Tank for Mutants and Masterminds 2nd Ed:
Baron's, Batgirl's, Jabronville's, Narsil's, Pamela Isley's, and MDSnowman's.

M&M 3rd Edition/DCA can be found in the DC Adventures Hero's Handbook.

I did one for Witch Girls Adventures here:
http://timbrannan.blogspot.com/2010/05/zatanna-every-little-thing-she-does-is.html

Will consider doing some more in the future.  Cortex might be a good choice.

Season of the Witch: Episode 4

Episode 4: Under a Cajun Moon

Late Summer / Early Fall 2004
New Orleans, Tara is possessed by the same spirit that had possessed her mother. Learn more about the summer that Bob met Megan.
Special Guests: Eliza Roberts as “Megan O’Kelly / McClay” and Eric Burdon as himself.

Synopsis Willow and Tara arrive in New Orleans. They are still getting used to the idea that Bob is tagging along as a ghost. He keeps reminding them that they need to focus on the mission, the girls remind him they are not on a mission. While sitting outside at a bar enjoying some gumbo (Cajun food was a very big deal for me when working on these adventures), a band begins to play some hypnotic song. Tara, unbidden gets up and begins to dance in a highly erratic fashion. Willow snaps her out of it, but not before she is seen by a tall man with his face painted to look like a skull.

The man is a voodoo priest, known as “Bone Man” and he works for a local crime lord/voodoo practioner Guillaume “Papa” Le Basque.

Papa Le Basque kidnaps Tara, who he sees as a pure conduit to the power of Loa. He takes her to Cottoncrest Manor. Le Basque is a legba hougan seeking the power of the forgotten “dark Loa” he knows is trapped in the manor.

The former owner of this manor was a cruel woman that turned an old slave plantation into a brothel. She eventually tried to burn the place down with all the girls trapped inside to cover her increasing debt. When it later became an insane asylum in the 1950s the women inside were driven to murderous rage to kill any man. Even mild depression became a murderous rampage. The government shut it down after a mother of two went on a rampage and killed 12 inmates and half a dozen staff. Even in notorious NOLA it was never used as a drug den or vampire nest for very long. The last known death was a when teenage couple came to the place after a night of tagging to drop some LSD. The girl who was 16 and described by everyone as shy, butchered her boyfriend. She was discovered days later naked, covered in blood and in a fetal position. She was never the same.

Bob and Megan had been here before and this was their last mission. Most of his team was killed, and Megan was possessed. They thought it was a simple poltergeist. It was a demon lord, Hysterix. A demon that feeds on the despair, fear and pain of women. He was trapped in the burned out house by occultists years ago. Occult Poet Eric Burden remains so he can make sure it does not escape. Le Basque believes Hysterix is a powerful but forgotten Loa. (His corporal form was destroyed, but he bonded with the house).

Bob always felt a little bit of the demon remained in Megan. Hysterix claimed he would have their daughter (they were not married yet, though the demon predicted that Megan’s daughter would be a powerful witch) and her daughters as well. Bob was relieved when Donny was born, but horrified when Tara was born a year later. Bob had to admit his love to Megan to drive the demon out.

The house is filled with the ghosts of all the slaves and prostitutes killed there, of all the people in the asylum, and even memento mori and apparitions of past sufferings. Also illusions created by Hysterix.

Cordy doesn’t want to go in unarmed…she switches to full angelic form. What can I say, the idea of a asskicking angel is just too good to pass up.

Demons feed on fear, uncertainty and doubt, but are repelled by love.
To force the demon out of Tara, Bob (not Willow this time) must confess his love for her and seek her forgiveness.

Part of the episode is also played in flashback with Tara’s player taking on the role of Megan, Bob’s playing Bob, Willow’s playing Nigel and Cordy’s playing the groups medic. The idea here of course is to get the Players to enact the same scene as in the past, with Bob confessing he loves Megan in the past and now making the same confessions to Tara in the present.

Notes: Obviously I wanted to focus on the relationship between Bob and his daughter and Bob and Megan. While Willow is somewhat sidelined in this episode, I came up with the flashback idea to keep her player busy at least. There were still plenty of ghosts in the manor to fight and Cordy and Willow were the only ones with the firepower to do it.

Again, and it may be a dead horse with me now, but I wanted to once again show that there is power, real power, in love. The demon is very much Charmed influenced, with the proclamation of love needing to kill rather than beating on it. The manor is based on this reoccurring nightmare I have had since I was small that I called my “Very Haunted House”. The woman who owned it is still in the house, mummified.

Papa Le Basque is of course killed by the demon, as most human dupes for demons are. But Bone Man, a character from my early Chill days, is still out there. Eric Bourdon appears mostly because I am a fan of “The Animals” and “War” but also due to a documentary I watched about him.

The biggest critique of this episode though came from my players and it is a good one. Basically this is another “Tara in peril” episode. I could not disagree. While I wanted to change things around, the truth is I needed this episode. It sets up the relationship between Bob and the Girls. Had to be done. Plus the demon makes a prediction about the future and that had to be said now. Sure there were other ways I could have done that, but this worked out well enough.

This episode I also introduced some items/plot from my old Chill game.  I had considered running the flashback in Chill, creating characters and having even a little bit of combat.  But that never really panned out.

Next Episode:  Willow, Tara and Bob find Faith in South East Texas hunting Bigfoots with the last person they expected to see in “Veteran of the Psychic Wars”.

Season of the Witch: Interlude

Interlude: When Robert met Megan

Sunnydale, June 1976

"I am telling you I don't like this!" The man said for what may have been the twelfth time that evening. He was young, early or mid twenties. He still had the hair and mannerism of someone who had spent a lifetime in the military. In fact that is how he, Robert Maclay, got his current job as squad commander for S.A.V.E. He lit his cigarette and handed the lighter to his companion who lit his own.

"Well, too bad. Her orders came in from Dublin HQ and a fat all good it does talking to them. Sorry mate, she is our problem now."

"Well I for one have not spent the better part of a year and a half fighting god-knows-what just so I can invite a witch into my group" Robert swore.

"Cleanser." Came a feminine voice. "Cleanser or Craft-Worker, but never a Witch."

Both men turned around to see they had been joined a small, rather unassuming, but attractive woman. She was dressed in hip-hugging bell bottoms, sandals, and a tattered Led Zeppelin concert shirt. Her hair was long and blonde. She looked every bit like all the other California girls they had seen since coming to this hellhole of a town. She carried a burlap bag on one shoulder and wore sunglasses that covered half her face. She took them off to reveal sparkling blue eyes.

"Great." Bob replied. "I ask for a spirit removal expert and S.A.V.E. sends me a kid."

"Hey. I just graduated from Berkeley, I'm no kid. Besides you're like not much older than me anyway." She shot back.

"Oi. Don't listen to him." The other man rose to shake her hand, "Nigel. Nigel Delamort. Don't let the accent fool you, I'm French, not English. I just had the misfortune of having to grow up there. That over there is our fearless leader, Robert Maclay. Don't let the rough exterior fool you, deep down inside he is still every bit the humorless bastard we all know and love."

"Megan" the woman answered back, "Megan O'Kelly. Here are my papers. So. What brings S.A.V.E. to Sunnydale?"

Witch Hunter Robin for Unisystem

I swear I had posted this before, but a quick search brought up nothing.  So here is Witch Hunter Robin for Cinematic Unisystem.  If you are curious to see what else I have done with this character I have done write-ups for OVA, BESM 2r, Witch Girls Adventures and True20.

I worked up this character during during the early days of the working on Ghosts of Albion.  I was working on the magical battles rules and needed someone to try them out with.  I didn't want Willow fighting Tara and I had been watching the WHR fan-subs (and later the DVDs with my wife) I thought Robin would be a good choice.

So here is my full write up on Robin Sena.

Witch Hunter Robin is a fascinating Japanese animation by Sunrise (of Cowboy Bebop and Gundam Wing fame). I am that not much into Anime, but this one was great. A cross between “X-men” and “The X-Files” with parts of the old TV show “The Others” and CJ Carella’s “Witchcraft” thrown in for good measure. Any modern horror gamer should find something here to like. A great tale of government conspiracy, occult themes, and witches. What is not to love about all of that?

The 26 episode series (that is all they were going to make) deals with a witch hunter named Robin Sena.

Fifteen year old Robin is the newest hunter to be assigned to Solomon Toukatsu Nin'idantai (Solomon Executive Organization) – Japan, or STN-J. Robin though is different. She is European-Japanese working in an all Japanese environment (in one episode a co-worker makes fun of her Japanese, in another she eats Miso soup with a spoon). Her early childhood was spent in a convent in Italy. There her life consisted of prayer, chores and learning to use her craft. She dresses in a full-length black dress that is reminiscent of the Victorian age. But that is not what sets her apart.

Robin is a craft-user. A witch.

She is sent to STN-J after the death of another hunter. What Robin is really there for, and what she does are part of the drama and story.

Now “Witch Hunter Robin” is different than most American fare. It is by it’s nature, slower; it takes time to build up to the main plot. We need to see her reactions to the various day-to-day operations of STN-J. Like how she relates to fellow hunter Amon (is she crushing on him? does he want/need to kill her?), or what is the deal with Dojima anyway (great payoff there!). Or why she refuses to use the anti-Witch Orboro guns.

It lacks sex, T&A and some of the things that we have become accustom to on American TV, but the story is first rate. I don’t know much about anime really, but the visual style is fantastic. It is very easy to see this being remade as a live action drama. The musical score is also reminiscent of “the X-files”, haunting, dramatic and really just very, very good.

Robin’s Powers
Robin is a fire-starter, a pyrokinetic. She can create and manipulate fire as a force of will. She can set small fires or large ones at will, or even use her fire to block attacks of a mundane or magical nature.

She also has quite a store of occult knowledge, she knows about magical circles and the histories of various witch-types. So her classical training is a bit better than her co-hunters. She understands witches because she trained as one.

Robin’s weaknesses come in the form of her eyesight. As she uses her magic, her vision blurs. Unless she is wearing her glasses, she can’t see to hit her target.

Witches in Robin’s World
Witches is the world of Witch Hunter Robin are treated as another race of humans, much in the same way that the mutants are in the X-Men. Witches has a specific “witch gene”, which in a sense makes them more like psionicists or mutants rather than witches, but they draw connections with this and the witches of Salem and occult ideas, so an interesting mix to be sure.

The job of Solomon is to “remove” witches and seeds (witches whose powers have not manifested) who use their powers. STN-J’s policy is not to kill witches, but instead they use a drug “Orobo” to nullify their magic and knock them out (In Unisystem I would say one shot per levels of Sorcery, or Magic in BESM). Witches are then carted off to “the Factory”. What happens to them is one of the major plot points of the show, so I won’t reveal it here.

Robin in Your Game
There are a multitude of reasons Robin Sena (or any number of other STN-J agents) could show up in your game. Maybe Solomon HQ is setting up shop to take out the local supernatural population (whether you want them too or not) and in tow is Robin.

Or maybe you decide that Robin strikes out on her own. After all those 26 episodes were in 2002; who knows what she could be doing in 2004. So she ends up in your neck of the woods. Is going to be Hunter or Witch? Well that is for you to decide.

In any case Robin should be one of the most powerful witches in your game despite her age. That is sort of her purpose really. To continue her tale she would be naturally drawn to places with large numbers of supernatural events, whether you have her working for Solomon or not.

Robin is quiet, a little shy and withdrawn. She was shown to be uncomfortable in some situations, but that can be due to understanding the culture she was in. Also Robin is carrying around a few secrets with her, mostly to do with her real reasons for being at STN-J and her own origins. In the show Robin is rarely seen without her glasses when doing magic. She also owns a Vespa scooter and a bike (her driving skills are calculated with these in mind). When not hunting rogue witches she can be found drinking coffee or espressos. Lots of coffee.


Robin Sena

Race: Human
Occupation:Witch Hunter / Witch
Age: 15 (in 2002)
Gender: F
Height:5'1"
Weight: 105#
Eyes: Green
Hair: Auburn

Mother:Maria, dead
Father:Toudou, dead.
Grandfather(maternal): Juliano Collegrie, priest and high ranking officer of Solomon HQ.
Allies:Amon, Nagira, hunters from STN-J
Enemies:Rogue witches, rival hunters

Languages: Japanese, Italian, English

Attributes

Strength 2 Intelligence 5
Dexterity 2 Perception 2
Constitution 3 Willpower 6

Life Points: 33
Drama Points: 10

Skills
Acrobatics 0
Knowledge 4
Art 1
Kung Fu 1
Computers 1
Languages 4
Crime 3
Mr. Fix-It 0
Doctor 0
Notice4
Driving 2
Occultism 6
Getting Medieval 1
Science 1
Gun Fu 0
Sports 0
Influence 1
Wild Card 0


Qualities
Attractiveness 2
Contacts 3
Fast Reaction Time
Hard To Kill 1
Occult Investigator
Occult Library 1
Pyrokinesis 7
Sorcery Level 4


Drawbacks
Adversary 5 (witches, rival hunters)
Addiction 1 (Mild, caffeine)
Emotional Problems
Honorable 1
Impaired Sense 1 (Vision when using magic)
Obligation 3 (Solomon, STN-J)
Outcast (foreigner in Japan)
Secret 3 (witch, others)
Teenager
Zealot

Useful Information

Initiative 7 +1d10
Perception 6
Additional actions 0
Armor 0

Combat Maneuvers
Maneuver Bonus Base Damage Notes
Dodge 3 - Defensive Move
Punch 3 4 Bash
Kick 3 6 Bash
Magic 16 - By Spell type
Pyrokinesis 12 5 x SL Will x SL + Fire Damage
Telekinesis 10