6 more brilliant blog posts from around the web

Some older, some newer. All worthy of your time.

First off, one I stumbled on and used in my Stars Without Number campaign: Coins and Scrolls has a comprehensive - and often hilarious - d500 mutations random table.

Image (cc) MassCreed

Bastionland makes an excellent point about some important key questions, and their answers, around how easily we are able to pick up and play RPGs and game settings.

Another great random table - there are never enough tables - this time Graphite Prime asks "what happened in that town?"

The Grave Robber's Guide asks "How can games teach themselves", which has started off an interesting train of thought in my mind...

I stumbled upon an interesting experiment in reusable dungeons over at Lapidary Ossuary which looks at a problem I am mulling but from the other side.

Papers & Pencils has a whopping SIX d100 dungeon-creation tables up - the rest are linked from this one.

Please support the blogosphere and, of course check out this month's RPG Blog Carnival which is hosted right here!

What's been a'happening in the Polyhedral Tower...

It's been a while - insanely busy at work, I'm afraid - but although I've been too busy to post, I've not been too busy to game!  See photographic evidence below:

Our group's been working on our own near-future / SF skirmish rules, although some of the factions are expanding way beyond "skirmish" size!  Pretty cool-ly, the rules still hold for larger forces too... hopefully we'll post a beta soonish ... if anyone's interested in playing.

Getting into 15mm gaming...

Image (cc) Kaptain Kobold via FlickrIt's been a while... sorry!

I have been busy - after trying out a few free SF wargames rules, our group is working on our own 15mm near-future skirmish rules, so we can use modern and sci-fi minis.  Which means I finally get to make some terrain!

Current projects:

• 15mm modular city table
• 15mm Hordes of the Things fantasy scenery & armies

Updates will be posted as they come, Peter Pig pirate minis and samurai have already been purchased, along with Dixon Minis ninjas for my Ninjago-obsessed son...

Hopefully we'll all be getting some 15mm SF minis from Ground Zero Games when the shop's back online too.  Keep 'em peeled!

[Guest] On games design and complexity

Malifaux: Image (cc) waferthinninja

I'm not going to lie to you, because, at root, this is a blog about Skrapyard, the skirmish miniatures game that Precinct Omega Publishing has in development.  But just to prove that I'm not randomly spamming adverts, I'm not going to provide a link for the lazy.  If you actually find this blog interesting, then why not do a Google search from Precinct Omega Skrapyard?  You're sure to find a link eventually. (or see my posts on the game - Tom)

But before we get to Skrapyard, I'm going to have a bit of a moan.

Summer Projects

The main project for development over the summer is VIRUS (Variable Index Roll Under System) as an RPG system. I've found I like d% roll-under systems, but have always had a dislike for the arbitrary +/- modifiers - attributed to the fact that I'm terrible at mental arithmetic so it tends to make my head hurt, even under d20.

VIRUS is an expansion of THOGS that I developed... last year? It was fun to play, and worked the way I wanted it to, which was surprising! Sadly, it was overly complex and ruined by cheating, and VIRUS is being designed to counter those flaws. I'll be attempting to combine the (random) primary and secondary stats I loved from HarnMaster, DnD style "powers" or techniques, wound tracks as opposed to hit points, tiered skill trees and defaults for untrained skills, and intuitive difficulty scaling. Wish me luck!

And the main reason...

...that there's been little activity: I've started making my own games properly - not just the ever-in-development VIRUS RPG, the first off the press is Loop. I'm building the site for my stuff now, so it's not going to pollute this page after this.

Next project: critical hit / failure cards for d20 / GURPS / Savage Worlds / and of course, VIRUS...