100 Days of Halloween: Stranger Stuff & Teenage Witchcraft (TinyD6)

I am jumping around on systems like a meth-addicted moth this week.  Tiny D6? Sure, why not!

As always I will be following my rules for these reviews.

Stranger Stuff and Teenage Witchcraft (TinyD6)

Tonight's game uses the Tiny D6 game system and is a supplement for Fat Goblin Games' Stranger Stuff game. Stranger Stuff is described as "80's Inspired Adventure, Horror, and Science Fiction."  I think it is pretty easy to tell where this inspiration is from and frankly, that is good enough for me.

I love how the book cover aims for an old-school writing journal look for the core RPG and a "Sweet Valley High" look to the Teenage Witchcraft book.  Really nice.

Stranger Stuff

PDF. 124 pages. Color covers and interior art; sort of. It is black & white with accents of red.

Both books use a similar notebook-style art as their background watermark.  So these books look like they were written in a notebook. 

Stranger Stuff is a Tiny D6 game, based on the Tiny D6 engine released by Gallantknight Games.  IT is also based on Fat Goblin's own vs. Stranger Stuff game.

Essentially you are playing a kid in the 1980s in a small town where things are, well, strange. There is a list of movies to watch to get the proper feel for this time, but I honestly feel that most of my readers have seen them. 

Character creation is simple. Come up with a concept, give them some traits, and disadvantages and you are set to go! There are only two stats, Toughness and Stress.

The system is based on the venerable D6 system, but stripped way down. 

The book is rich in background and has plenty of details about playing in this odd world during the year 1984.

Teenage Witchcraft

PDF. 44 pages. Full-color cover and black & white interior art with accents of red. 

This book takes the basics of the Stranger Stuff game and adds in the ability to become a witch and cast spells.  So if you are thinking the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina or The Craft, but in the 80s, then you have the right idea here.

Most of the rules involve the casting of spells, as appropriate, There is an example walk-through with two spells and many examples are given, but the fun, of course, is making your own spells. OR as in the case with The Craft or Charmed, finding the right mix of witches to work with.

The two combined look like a ton of fun and since the rules are easy, something you could pick up and do in an afternoon.

Sucker for a Slipcase

Maybe it goes back to my first set of the Lords of the Rings books, but I am a sucker for a slipcase for my books. I was in my office and I was noticing that many of my books are getting bleached out due to the fluorescent lights I have.  I turned the spines to the back, not a great solution, which got me to notice all my slipcases for other books.

This got me thinking about my AD&D 1st Ed collection and how they seem to be getting the worse of it all. So I went on a search for some slipcases that would fit my AD&D books, in particular my oldest ones, and "fit" them thematically. 

Searching for custom ones was not very helpful since most places that make them custom-made expect you to order a bunch of them.  There are binder ones too, but nothing that I really liked.

Once again, eBay provides.

Back in the 1980s the RPGA made slipcases for Dragon and Polyhedron magazines. I found one on eBay that was only slightly more expensive than a binder slipcase.

I can fit in my second printing of the PHB, DMG, D&DG, and my softcover PHB and MM from Games Workshop. There was enough room to slip in my DM's screen too.  I can justify grabbing this since I actually had joined the RPGA during its last days

You can see why I want those protected.

The only problem is that the double slipcase is taller than my shelves!  I am going to need an oversized bookcase or make room on my desk for my oversized books.

But at least now they are protected.

I still would like to find a custom one for some other books, in particular, my 1st and 2nd Edition reprints.

100 Days of Halloween: Witches & Spellcraft

Another little departure tonight, another story game, and this one looks like fun.

As always I will be following my rules for these reviews.

Witches & Spellcraft

PDF. 15 Pages. PWYW. Full-color art.

Ok, to start off I have to say I really love the art in this. It is not a lot and it is mostly character art, but since characters are the focus of this game that is 100% fine with me. And the art is good. You can see the cover and those might be my least favorite, but I still like them a lot.

The game is designed for one Head Witch and four other witches, but that number is variable. You fill out your school sheet and witch sheet as a group.  The Head Witch then helps guide the story along as a game master/GMPC.

Rolls are simple, largely a 2d8 plus or minus various modifiers. Rolls of 10 or greater are a success and you can get even better success with higher rolls. There are also failures. 

The game covers spell creation and there are worksheets for your witch and school.

I think it is lacking a good example of play BUT I also see how such an example could also be limiting to new players. They might end up just following the example. 

While you could use this game to say make your own school of witchcraft in the Scottish Highlands, it feels better suited to properties like Sabrina or the Magicians or even something like the mobile game Switchcraft or a new take on The Craft. 

There is an actual play video. It is 4 hours long, but gives you some ideas how the game can be played. 

If I were the developers here I would do this but break it up into chunks for new players to digest. 

In any case, this is another fun game. I am so pleased I found it.

The Witches of Prowlers & Paragons Ultimate Edition

Yesterday I spent some LONG overdue time with Prowlers & Paragons Ultimate Edition. It is a ridiculously fun game that is really easy to learn and play. I want to give it some more trials, but one of the first things I always do with a game is to see how well it emulates one or two of about a half-dozen or so characters I am always throwing at a game. 

I choose these characters because I know how I want to play from the start, the question is can I make the game do what I want.  Today, with the Fall Equinox knocking on our door and my 100 days of Halloween still on my mind, I am going to do witches.  Shocking. I know.

BUT there is a good reason for this. I always want to check out the "magic" power of any supers game since that is the place you can really break the system. Also, I want to use characters familiar to readers here. This way you can compare and contrast between the various systems. They all do very similar things, but they all also do something different and it is in these differences I make my decisions. 

So, let's get back to some old favorites of mine!

Click on the sheets for larger.

Taryn Nichols, AKA "Teen Witch"

Taryn is my young, "Teen Titans"-esque superhero character. She needs to be on the low end of the supers scale. Her purpose is to see what I can do with the fewest amount of points.  In P&P I started her off at "Low" which is 100 hero points.

Larina Nichols, AKA "Witch Queen"

Larina is always my "rules as written" witch.  To get her the way I wanted I had to jump a level to "High" at 150 hero points. I wanted to do 125 but she kinda got away from me.  Plus I would like to see the interplay of mother and daughter here in a supers game. 

She gains the extra Super Senses (Magic) power from her cursed left eye.

Tara Maclay

Anyone who has been here for a while knows of my undying love for Willow and especially Tara.  They are largely retired now but would still be magical powerhouses in any game. I set Tara at "Legendary" with 175 hero points. She puts some points into her ability to heal by touch.

Willow Rosenberg

Willow sits at the highest end of my experiments. She is at "Iconic" level with 200 hero points. Like Tara she no longer has Burnout or Concentration con modifiers to her powers the Nichols girls do.  They have to focus, magic to Willow and Tara is like breathing at this point. 

I like how they turned out.  As with any game you might do things a little differently and that is fine. These builds work for me and give me a good idea of what the Omni-power can do for Magic.

I used the character sheets instead of typing them all up because I wanted that visceral feel of pencil on paper. Also so you all could an idea of what the sheets look like. 

You can see my other write-ups too for Zatanna, The Refrigerator, and Justice.

100 Days of Halloween: Paragon Hags and Occult Covens

More hags and more Pathfinder tonight!  Really getting in the mood for some witchy hijinks this Halloween!

In Pathfinder (much like AD&D 2nd Ed) there is a deeper connection between hags and witches. I have looked at a few products here that explore that. This one looks promising as well.

As always I will be following my rules for these reviews.

Paragon Hags and Occult Covens

PDF. 28 pages. Color cover. Black & White interior art. 1 cover, table of contents, 1 OGL page, rest content.

We start off with some history and the in game assumption that all hags are the daughters of hags and mortal men. These offspring are known as changelings, and will eventually become hags once they reach 15 years of age.

We get a new race, Hag, for player characters, and a new class, the Paragon Hag. 

Paragon Hags get a number of powers above and beyond that of just what the Hag race gets. Among these is the ability to cast Witch spells up to the 6th level. 

Different Hag families are detailed. Many of these are familiar. They are the Annis, Blood, Bone, Green, Hearth, Moon, Night, Sea, Storm, and Winter.

We get new archetypes to go along with the new class. There is the Cauldron Hag, Coven Mother, Focused Hag, and Mother of Steel.   So by choosing different archetypes and different hag families you can get a wide variety of hag types. 

New races and new classes mean new feats, and we have them here. Pretty good mix really. Mostly "Coven" feats, which could be used by witches as well. 

There are new Rituals and new Spells. 

Finally, we get monster stats for the Bone Hag, Hearth Hag, and another take on the Moon Hag.

I have to admit I rather like it all and will add to my growing pile of Pathfinder material to use.

Review: Prowlers & Paragons Ultimate Edition

This one has been sitting in my TBR pile for so long I actually feel kinda bad that I am just now getting to review it.  But this is my unofficial superheroes month so but late than never I guess.

Prowlers & Paragons Ultimate Edition

I like supers games. While I might be suffering from a little bit of superhero burnout right now I still enjoy these games. While I have not found the Prefect-for-Me supers game, this one is very, very close.

For this review, I am considering the POD and PDF I got from DriveThruRPG via their 2019 Kickstarter.  The book was ready rather quickly I am just really slow on my review.

PDF and Hardcover, 192 pages. Full-color covers and interior art.

This is a supers game so one of the first things I consider is the art. I know, that seems shallow of me, but comics are a visual medium. So are superhero movies and TV shows. The art of P&P is gorgeous. I read through it and wonder where is the comic that should be attached to this game? No comic. But the game still looks great.

Foreword and Introduction

The foreword from Sean Patrick Fannon talks about the game he wanted to create and then discovers that the original P&P from Leonard Pimentel did more or less everything he wanted. This new P&P updates the old with some new ideas from both Pimentel and Fannon.  

The Introduction covers the game and various glossary terms to get you going.

Chapter 1: Basics

The game mechanic is very basic and very easy to use. Every trait, ability, power, or what have you has a score. Figure our what you want to do, find the right combination, add those numbers up, minus any negative modifiers, and then roll that number of d6s.  "2s" and "4s" are one success, "6s" are two successes.  Compare that to the Thresholds table and you will know by how much you succeed, or fail.

Some special d6s would be nice, but that could get cost prohibitive. Keep in mind Fannon's original supers game was called "Handfuls of Dice" so it's good you can use regular d6s here!

Actions, Combat, Resolve, and Adversity are all dealt with in more detail in chapters 3, 4, and 5. But it is great to have here to get an idea on how to create your characters.

Chapter 2: Characters

The heart and soul of any supers game are the super themselves. Here we cover how to create your characters which will include types and power levels. This is a point-buy system so you get so many points depending on your power level and then use those points to buy everything you need. 

Abilities are your base abilities like what you can find in most games. Agility, Intellect, Might, Perception, Toughness, and Willpower.  Similar to D&D and very similar to Unisystem. 1d (1d6) to 6d represents the human norm. Talents are like skills, but broader.  We also have our huge list of Powers. Powers can have Pros and Cons. For example, Ironman and Green Lantern both need to have a power source for their powers. This would be a con. Characters can also have Perks (Wealth for Batman) and Flaws (Compulsion, also for Batman). 

The powers seem pretty comprehensive. Very much similar to say Mutants & Masterminds or other supers games.

This is the largest chapter of the book as expected.

Chapter 3: Action

This is the shortest chapter since action rolls are pretty easy to figure out.  Again you are rolling a bunch of d6s (determined by abilities, talents, powers, and other modifiers) and counting your successes ("2s" and "4s" are 1, "6s" are 2). Compare that number to the Thresholds chart. You can also embellish your actions.

Chapter 4: Combat

Combat is largely a specific type of action, but since fighting bad guys is so central to many supers games and the variety of ways to engage in combat, this one is a bit larger and on its own.

Chapter 5: Resolve and Adversity

It is not the powers that make heroes the heroes, but their ability to do what is right and fight on. This is Resolve.  Resolve allows the heroes to push through the tough times, to help their allies, to be able to "do this all day." It is a bit like the Drama Point system in Unisystem (Buffy, Ghosts of Albion). You can save it for the right moment for the best heroic action. Adversity is what challenges them. 

Chapter 6: Equipment

Utility belts, flight suits, fast cars, even swords, bats (baseball, not the flying kinds), and your base of operations are all covered here.

Chapter 7: Environment 

Street-level supers might be limited to the mean streets, but a supers game can take you anywhere and the players need to know how to handle these situations. 

Chapter 8: Friends and Foes

I always love these chapters in Supers games. We get a variety of heroes and villains to help populate our worlds. Often they are the authors' homages to the heroes and stories they love, but also to fill certain niches.  This chapter starts out with the basics; animals, extras (NPCs), and then we move onto the main heroes.  There are variations of some classics here; your speedster, your blaster, you martial arts expert, the super soldier, and so on. If you have read a comic...well...ever then you should know what to expect here. I can almost judge a game by how many of these heroes I'd like to use. So far this game is doing great since all of them seem interesting me. These are followed by the Foes. They are also very interesting. Sure in both cases (heroes and foes) are built on very, very familiar archetypes, but that is also why they work. 

Chapter 9: Superhero Gaming

This last chapter covers running your Prowlers & Paragons games including creating villain and their motivations. Also creating scenes, stories, and series.

This is followed by a character sheet, a list of Kickstarter backers, and a good index. 

Honestly, this is really a great supers game. It is a little less on the complexity scale than say Mutants & Masterminds, but more so than say Icons.  

while the notion of rolling say 20+ d6s can be daunting for really powerful characters, the fact that you are just looking for success makes it go really fast. Plus dropping a handful of dice for an attack? Yeah, there is sublime satisfaction in that as well.

There is also a free Quickstart and free Character Sheets.

Character creation is pretty fast and very fun.  Here are some examples of ones I was able to do with just some of the Quickstart details and a pre-Kickstarter draft.

• Zatanna Zatara
• Justice
• Dr. Andreas Gelé, "The Refrigerator"

I am going to have to come back to this game for some more!

100 Days of Halloween: Elements of Magic - Mythic Earth

Going back a bit when the D&D 3.5 edition of the game was all the rage and ENWorld began publishing material under the OGL and d20 STL.

This one covers the mythic magic of our World. 

As always I will be following my rules for these reviews.

Elements of Magic - Mythic Earth

PDF in a zip file. 58 pages. Front and back cover supplied as separate JPG files.  

You can tell this is the early days of PDF publishing. The publisher provides a README file to explain how use the layers to make a print-friendly PDF. Vey nice I have to say. Very polite.

This book largely assumes that you will be using this in a modern d20 game where magic is real.  There is an appendix in the back about using it with "Fantasy d20" coughD&D3.5cough.

Preface

A one-page overview of what this book is and how it is updated from it's predecessors (other Elements of Magic books).

Chapter One: Myths

This chapter is the foundation layer for playing a "mythic" game. This covers what sorts of myths you to use or create for your game. The default is a modern high fantasy. We get some very basic examples of how myths work in the world. Such as the abduction of Persephone causing the seasons to a basic overview of A Hero with a Thousand Faces monomyth.

Honestly, there could have been a lot more here.

Chapter Two: Spellcasting and Magical Traditions

This covers the spell-casting basics.  This includes "regular" spell casting and ritual magic. Magic is largely a skill-based system. Because of this any class can cast spells but some are going to be better trained than others.  There are new backgrounds, new skills, and of course lots of new feats.  Feats are the primary vehicle to differentiate the various magical styles.  It works much better than it would seem or even to anyone that is "feat exhausted."

In truth, the feat system is really rather perfect for this, or maybe, this book's conceptualization of these different mythic traditions is well suited for feats.  In other games, these would be all different classes or sub-classes.  Here it is entirely possible to build an arcane dabbler that knows a little runic magic, some voodoo. Your dabbler will never be an expert in anything due to the limited number of feats you can take, but that is also true in real life. They are also designed to provide some interesting playability if you do take more than one Tradition feat.

Examples of some magic items and a ritual spell are also given.

Chapter Three: The Magic of High Fantasy

This is our campaign world; magical modern Earth. They make a distinction between our Earth, "Terra" and the magical Earth, "Gaia." It is not a particularly new idea, but it is well executed here and that is the important part. Detailed within are various organizations that exist on Gaia that are related to magic. There is the governmental "Bureau" that act as the law enforcement in the magical world and "The Knights of the Round" that enforce the treaties with the Fey.  There is room for many more.

We are also given The Mage, an Advanced Class for d20 Modern. This rounded off with some NPC Mages.

Chapter Four: Spells

Spells here are applications of magical skills. The ten skills are Attack, Charm, Create, Cure, Defend, Divine, Illusion, Move, Summon, Summon, and Transform.  Each skill must be trained. So it is easy to see you can have generalists in all skills and experts in just a few.  Each skill has a number of spells associated with it.  You can design spells as needed with whatever enhancements seem to work the best.  Each enhancement requires a skill rank.  So four enhancements mean four additional skill ranks. 

The system takes a little bit to learn but is easily adaptable and usable in play.

Appendix

This covers converting the Mage advanced class to a Base class for use in Fantasy d20 worlds. 

It is obvious to me that this was someone's favorite campaign model for a while. There are a lot of really great ideas here and few I'd like to try out.  Reading it now I am taken by how much of this could be ported over to True20 or even a modern OSR game.