Pair O’ Dice Games

I am now reading Scion: Demigod to get a better idea of where the game should be heading. So far it seems like an interesting book although, as many people have already stated, the pre-made characters and adventure do take up a lot of room.

My group had our first Scion game this past Saturday and overall I feel it went fairly well. One of the players is new to our group but seems to fit in quite well and while first sessions are (at least for me) rife with distractions it seemed everyone had a good time.

So far only some small pieces of the story have unfolded. I won’t include any information the players don’t know here (and would also hope no one else would in the comments section) so that they may read this post if they so choose.

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Guest Post: this post contributed by Rev. Joe.

Well, I went to the April 19th pre-release event for Shadowmoor, the newest installment of Magic: the Gathering. Regardless of what Josh writes I think it is a phenomenal set, full of darkness and twists that keep you on your toes.

First, let’s break down the new abilities:

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One of my flaws as a game master is my description of things. I have had this problem in my writing as well but that’s another story. I tend to rush to the next plot point or piece of dialogue (while we don’t usually call it dialogue in a role playing game it amounts to the same thing) and ignore the mood affecting descriptions of things.

Some of this comes from a desire not to take control of my player’s actions. For example if I say something like, “You approach the house” I am telling them what they are doing. While this is acceptable and is in fact inevitable I have, for some reason, always had issues with it. Thus one of the things I would like to work on is these details.

They say the three rules of advertising are Location, Location, Location and I think to some degree this translates to role playing as well. Give the players an interesting place to explore and you as the storyteller have reduced your burden as they will already be intrigued and involved. I hate to think how many times in the past my players have walked into an abandoned warehouse, for example. I would like to make sure that this doesn’t happen too often in the future.

Because of this I thought it might be good to write down some of the places my players may visit. That way I can have a general description of them to build off of and a place to refer to if I forget exactly what I wanted to do with them. Below are a few of the places that will become important in my Scion game.

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Expanding on the other post regarding Titanspawn, this post includes a modified version of one of my previous types as well as a new creature that hints at elements not yet mentioned in my overview.

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As I previously mentioned in my Games I Play post our group has some problems with History of the World and yet lately we’ve played it a lot.

One of our problems is that there is too much of a chance of a person in last ending up with the worst Empire because while they get to pick a card to either keep or pass, if they draw a bad one and pass it they often end up with whatever is left over in the end (and that left over Empire could easily be pretty horrible or even the worst of the bunch).

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I attended (if you can call it that) the Sunday Shadowmoor prerelease in Syracuse over this past weekend and I felt I needed to chime in a bit about my initial impressions. First I should say I didn’t play too much. I opened my packs, realized I wasn’t winning, played one match where I went 1 and 2 (I had my opponent to three life in the first game and four in the last but it wasn’t enough obviously), dropped and went home.

Magic the Gathering

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What follows are some of the NPC statistics and descriptions, including a little bit of plot information, for my Scion game.

Again, if you are in my Scion game please don’t look.

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What follows is a brief overview of the concept for my Scion campaign. I’m still working on fleshing out the details and would encourage any input. Obviously if you are in my Scion game you probably should not read any further. In other words… no peeking.

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I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty psyched about Shadowmoor. Next weekend is the chance for Magic players everywhere to experience the new set, aka: pre-release time!

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I just wanted to make a quick post on some of my thoughts about Social Combat. I added a link to Social Combat rules under my Scion House Rules post. These rules have been modified from Exalted 2nd Edition for use with Scion and I have been thinking about this concept for a couple of days.

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I love Shadowrun. Even when I don’t get to role play very frequently (which is another story), Shadowrun is one of those games I enjoy reading, and hope to play again when the chance arises.

Yet for months now it seems to have disappeared from major online stores. Were Shadowrun books selling out as fast as they came in? Or was the game making the transition to Catalyst Game Labs poorly? Perhaps a more sinister force was at work, maybe Lofwyr suppressing any media which made mention of his name?

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I have been trying to decide exactly what rules I want to change for Scion (it seems almost everyone feels that some rules need to be changed) so I have been tracking down places on the net that have information about different rules. I’m going to try to keep this post up to date and add the rules that our group ends up using. For now I am going to post the rules I plan to change and places that people can find information about what other groups have changed.

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A few months ago Scott and I started to work on a project categorizing gamers. Essentially we wanted to come up with umbrella terms that scooped gamers into recognizable groups so that it would be easier to review a game and tell which groups we thought would enjoy it. It’s actually a fairly daunting process in that there are so many subtle variations and one does not wish to detract from any group by sliding them under an umbrella where they would not feel they belong. Still there are certainly different kinds of games out there and in general I would say we all tend toward liking certain groups of those games.

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