The Black Wheel Casino

Samael Black is the owner of the Black Wheel casino and a minor demigod of (mis)fortune. He is Neutral Evil, and uses his powers to alter the chances of players so that he comes out with the biggest profits possible but so that there's always at least one person with a magical winning streak. After all, it's excellent marketing. He can also use his powers for the good of other people. For a price, of course.

Black's powers as an aspect of luck allow him to re-roll dice for any action done in his presence. This includes all actual dice or drawn cards in the game world as well. However, the second roll once rolled has to be accepted and cannot be re-rolled.

Kill it with fire!

Holy hell my update schedule has been dead lately. Sorry about that.

Sometimes mundane weapons are not enough. Sometimes you have to kill it with fire! Some methods of dispensing fiery death follow:

Emergent Backstory

So we're back in business after the unannounced, overlong christmas hiatus. I've been doing some serious game development during this down-time, however. Though I don't like to publish anything until it's final, so I don't have to grimace as I look at my previous posts.

Anyway, on to the topic at hand. I've been thinking of a new mechanic for creating backstory during the gameplay itself. Basically, every time your character fails a sanity roll (or equivalent) and thus gains a point of insanity the player must narrate a small detail/vignette/flashback of backstory that explains why the event affects him specifically. Maybe he's seen the alien diagram before, in his father's basement or the dead taxi driver reminds him of the murders he investigated in Paris twenty years ago or something.

Now, the main problem here is that in some games, sanity loss is much, much more common than in my design. Also, it could prove problematic if the player's narration doesn't fit the GM's plans. Though you could argue that a specific type of horror/weird gameplay doesn't need to have a coherent plot or timeline.

Also, it seems my use of the label system is woefully inadequate and really weird so I might rethink it.

Damage table

After thinking of several different schemes for RPG health systems, I found most of them lacking. Specifically, they weren't brutal enough. I want my players to be actually worried at the chance of physical conflict, and have them prepare for it instead of just kicking the door down. So, the rules I chose favor the attacker and most fights are over in just one round. Don't worry, though, player characters still get those three magical 'fate points' (name pending) that allow them to basically deflect any one attack.

So, without further ado, here's the wound effect table in its most basic form:

New Rules for Psychic Powers

So, I've been revising and rewriting the ruleset yet again...
First of all, the players have 5 Skills, which are

Might - Toughness, strength, health..
Will - Mental strength & resistance, intimidation..
Agility - Dodge, acrobatics, speed..
Smarts - Lore, mechanical skill, medicine, persuasion..
Intuition - Awareness, empathy, searching..

I'm considering adding specializations that you could make a bumbling tech-whiz or a weak-willed pyrokine etc.

You distribute the following amounts of dice into these skills in any order you like: 3, 3, 2, 2, 1.
If you want a jack-of-all-trades, you can also put 2 into all the skills.

When you roll a skill, you roll all the dice and all that exceed the target difficulty count as success dice. Usually your target difficulty is your opponent's highest die value.

If you want to play a psychic, you can lose one die from a skill in order to get one psychic talent. These are things like pyrokineticism, psychometry, animal control (beastmasters!), etc.

Psychic powers are not tied to any one skill, though Will is the most common one used.

I have a new hitpoint-less damage system as well, which I will talk about next time.

Beastmaster Pits

This idea came to me while watching an episode of Samurai Jack. It's basically a psychotic version of the druid.
The Beastmasters form packs of primitive scavenger scum who live in the outskirts of a city, usually in a garbage dump or a scrapyard. A Beastmaster pack is lead by from 1 - 3 alphas, one or more of whom is a shaman. These shamans have the ability to command all kinds of animals (and even some animalistic humans) and force the minds of an animal and a human to change places. A Beastmaster pack always has a cadre of beasts with them, ranging from carrion birds to vermin swarms and frenzied, degenerate dog-things.

The favorite entertainment/justice system with many Beastmaster packs is to exchange the minds of two humans with two dogs and then pit them against each other in their makeshift arena. Meanwhile, the human bodies with the dog spirits inside are kept in their cages. When one or both of the combatants die, their original body lives on, and the beastmasters use the resulting creatures as shock troops and disposable cannon fodder.

Usually the Beastmasters pit captured outsiders against their champions, as the dazed victim usually has little control of his new body. Some prominent alphas even manage to intimidate the shamans to give them a sort of immortality; moving their minds to new bodies as they begin to age. Though this is a risky business, as the alpha is easy to betray when mindswapped.

The New Death and Others - a review

Though I usually don't do reviews, I thought this was a nice chance to mix this blog up a bit.

So, The New Death. It's a collection of short stories and vignettes, 94 pages long.
It also contains a few poems, of which Under the Pyramids (based on the H.P. Lovecraft/Harry Houdini story) was my favourite. This poem, and other gems like The Face in the Hill, Rumpelstiltskin, The Jeweled City, The New Death are the best parts of the book, and I heartily recommend buying and reading the ebook for those stories alone.

However, even Under the Pyramids has a problem that pervades the whole book, however. The quality is very variable, which makes me think that Mr. Hutchings could use a good editor. As it is, there are some stories that seem to be there just for the sake of it. This, however, wouldn't bother me nearly as much if it weren't for the good ones. Especially in the case of the poems. It is extremely jarring to read excellent, flowing verse, only to come to a part that uncomfortably stumbles on the words. I think the book would be better off with careful cultivation and cutting of the worse material. Sometimes less is more.

Though the main cause of this problem is that the book's style is all over the place, which is not a bad thing in itself. I can easily see that some parts that didn't appeal to me would appeal to another. The bright side is that this allows almost anyone to find something they like.

The New Death and Others costs 99 American cents and can be bought at Amazon or Smashwords. I recommend reading the preview pages at Smashwords, though it doesn't have some of the best parts of the ebook. Overall, I'm glad I read this.