Category: Roleplaying

Wolf-Spoor points to a thread on the RPGnet forums suggesting "Tangent" versions of the World of Darkness, i.e, settings that share the familiar names and ideas but mix them all up into interesting new takes.

The post that caught my interest was a Tangent version of Mage, inspired by Zoroastrian Magi.

Zoroastrianism, the religion founded by Zarathustra, is most commonly associated with dualism, although this is a western misconception. The Greeks and Romans seem to have had their own misconceptions about The Magians (although they note explicitly that they do not engage in Sorcery).

Anyway, although it’s a religion still practiced today, it is also makes a suitably exotic basis for fantasy mysticism.

I got Mutants & Masterminds while in London last weekend, and am busy admiring it. Also, looking for info about it’s potential bugs and options for players to powergame it into the dust. So far, I found this fan site noting some issues (basically, he’s complaining about combat going slow, as players think over their options, and about characters built for effectiveness rather than to fit a concept. Maximizing attributes is mentioned as an example).

There’s now another fan-produced Matrix RPG online which is worth reading, Steve Darlington‘s There is no spoon:

The First Rule
Reloaded does not exist. It never existed. It
will never exist. The same goes for
Revolutions. Likewise for any animated films
you might have heard of, and any other
derivative products. If a player mentions any
of these, the GM is allowed to smack them in
the face.

My cunning plan to run embedded roleplaying cons as part of Bigor 2004, thus saving it from being an RPG supermarket, are being set in motion. Pages for my two themes, "Twilight of the Elves" and "Psychedelia and altered states of consciousness" are now ready (Hebrew).

I do suck as a designer, but the temptation to give each con a page was too great…

Bulk and Surface, an Aberrant campaign, hidden in Anders Sandberg’s games directory.

It seems to be a fairly straight take, except that it looks like he’s ditched White Wolf’s metaplot (Aeon, Utopia, Terragen) and he provides a whole new level of technobabble to "explain" the Supes:

A variant (theory – DD) suggests that novas are infected with a self-organizing quantum mechanical resonance state in the microtubuli network that produces their powers.