'Barbarism is the natural state of mankind,' the borderer said, still staring somberly at the Cimmerian. 'Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.'
-Robert E. Howard
Beyond The Black River
Places of Interest
Sunday, June 13, 2021
The Rescue of Gunnlief
Tuesday, May 25, 2021
Travel Interludes in Sword & Sorcery
Welcome back to another exciting blog post! Today I want to share the first pass of my ideas behind travel interludes. Way less overhead than a hex crawl, way more story telling then waving your hands and bein at the end of the journey. This represents my first pass at the idea with no real testing.
After a quick chat this afternoon, something I was aware of but had completely forgotten, was that this system was inspired by Savage Worlds as well.
The Interlude
When characters travel from one location to another, a common question is often, “How do we resolve this?”. Is it a hex crawl? Do we just wave our hands and say it happens? Both of these are valid and have their place, but both have weaknesses as well.
If your adventure is not focused on the outdoors, and you just need to move the PCs from one city to another, hex crawls introduce too much time, energy and wasted narrative that isn’t part of the sword and sorcery tale you and your players are telling.
On the other hand, simply waving your hands and saying it happens and you are not in Tarantia solves the logistic aspects of the hex crawl but it also removes ALL of the narrative qualities of a trip.
This system is inspired by Sword & Sorcery films and a card mechanic that I first encountered created by Chris Hartigan, who took the idea from Savage Worlds and adopted it into his games. It was a system I enjoyed and went on to adopt and modify into my narrative terrain cards system. This is unsurprisingly a variation of that system. It will utilize a standard deck of 52 cards, as the original system used for a chase mechanic.
Phases
The first part of this system is to determine how many phases of the interlude exist? This answer is simply 1 phase per player. This system will require each player to tell a short tale of the adventure with the cards steering the direction it goes. The order the players go can be any that is desired.
If you know how the distance between the two points and the length it takes to travel between A and B, you can determine the time each phase actually takes, but it isn’t important to the overall system.
The Cards
As discussed above, the cards will denote the basic idea of the phase.
The suit will determine the overall classification, and the number how intense the encounter is.
Hearts - Interaction (Story teller, Bards, Village, Fortune Teller)
1982 Conan example - Witch/Subedei.
Diamond - Trade (Wandering sales, Hub city)
1982 Conan example - City with lizards on a stick, Zamora.
Clubs - Conflict
1982 Conan example - Dogs chasing him.
Spades - Environmental
examples - Storms, flash floods, earthquakes, tornado
Ie drawing a 10 of clubs would indicate that the party encountered some sort of major conflict along the way. What story makes up that conflict, even what that conflict was, is up to the player. These narrative phases will generally have no effect mechanically on the overall story.
Benefits of Travel (optional)
Players can come up with a sort of hook that might be helpful in the upcoming adventure. This should be a minor advantage gained under a specific set of circumstances. Since the players do not know what is coming up in the adventure it can be difficult to necessarily know what sort of advantage they might incur.
It should be sufficient for the players to specify they have found a piece of equipment or gained some information that might be useful later.
If you want the players to be more specific, you as the GM should be sure to present them with an opportunity to use it.
Some examples might be that the party encountered a wandering fortune teller who foretold them of some bad event. You could then allow the player to gain inspiration in 5e, or an extra die in Conan 2d20, when attempting to avoid something, ie an ambush, trap, etc.
Face Cards (optional)
If a face card is flipped up during the interlude you can provide the central player some sort of newly found equipment based on the story they tell. An example of this from the 1982 Conan might be Conan finding the burial chamber of the Atlantean king when being chased by the wild dogs. With this system he would have flipped a king of clubs, denoting a conflict, the dogs, and an upgrade, the sword.
The level of the equipment should be tailored to the face card pulled with Jacks being a very minor upgrade to the king being a major piece of equipment.
Conclusion
Overall the drive of this mechanism is to quickly move players from one end of the map to the other with out. Till next time, don't forget to Keep it Weird!
Saturday, May 8, 2021
Torch Hexflower
Welcome back everyone! It has been a little while since I made a post here, but fear not I haven't forgotten about the blog or my readers! My morning blog time has been largely (completely) replaced with doing some more post secondary training!
A little while ago Matt Hayles, who I know through the local RPG community, was making posts about hex flowers. He in turn picked them up from Goblin's Henchman. Goblin's Henchman has an instruction cookbook on these things as a mechanic, which I haven't read, but you can grab a copy here!
Looking at the idea, I thought they looked fun and wanted to look into them deeper. At the same point I was working on a way to make torches more fun in my sword & sorcery games without it turning into a resource slog. At present I haven't actually attempted this as a mechanic, largely because I think it will work way better during an in person game.
The basic idea is when the players light a torch you place a marker in the middle of the hex flower, and as they progress through the dungeon they roll 2d6, each roll moves the marker through the flower. If the marker moves off the flower simply place it back on the other side of the flower.
The players get to watch and make the rolls seeing the torch staying lit or eventually going out. My hope is that it will make the torch a fun little mini game and add a little bit of tension to the torch.
Depending on the system you are playing you might even opt to let players re-roll if it is going badly for them. Perhaps in D&D 5e you could allow them to burn inspiration or an action to get a re-roll as they fight to keep the torch lit. In Conan 2d20 or other similar games you could use momentum or advantage to allow the players to influence the torch.
Either way I hope this idea will be useful or at least get those creative juices flowing!
Looking forward to getting back around the table with everyone!
Till next time, don't forget to Keep it Weird!
Tuesday, December 15, 2020
Conan 2d20 on Roll20: Custom Sheets
NEW: Youtube Introduction to the Custom Sheet!
UPDATED: January 12, 2022.
- Fixed an issues with ranged damage being calculated with coordination instead of Awarness.
- Switched right and left soak on armor panel
- KNOWN BUG. Submitting a NULL value when spending gold causes an API crash.
Alright, if you follow me at all, anywhere on social media, you are likely aware I've been working on a Conan 2d20 sheet for Roll20. The sheet won't be available via the standard channel since it requires the API and there are already two free sheets available directly. For those of you who expressed interest and wanted something with a little more automation, I still wanted to make this available.
Requirements: Roll20 Pro Subscription. No way around it, the sheet uses the API extensively.
Set-up Requirements: Like most Conan games on Roll20 we will need a few roll tables.
CD for combat dice with the following entries: 1, 2, -, -, 1 + effect, 1+ effect.
HITLOC for hit locations with the following entries: Head, Torso, Right Arm, Left Arm, Right Leg, Left Leg. These entries need the following weights as well: 2,6,3,3,3,3.
Finally you will require a character named GMPANEL. This is the Doom pool. This is the player momentum pool. The Character sheet makes calls to the API using this object by name. It must be named this or the sheet will not work.
Basic Game Setup
Ok, now that we know what we need lets walk through the steps. I have a video detailing these steps here: VIDEO LINK
- Copy and paste the HTML code into a game's custom sheet HTML.
- Repeat this for the CSS code.
- Save these.
- Switch to your Game's API input and add a new script, I normally named it Conan.js
- Copy and paste the API code here.
- Save it.
- Open the game and create the two roll tables
- Create the GMPANEL character.
- Open the GMPANEL, go to the character sheet and select the GMPANEL tab.
- Click Initialize.
The GMPANEL
Creating a character
!!IMPORTANT!! Anytime you create a new character you need to go to the GMPANEL on that character sheet and click initialize. This sets up the characters attributes so the API can call them when it needs to. If you do not do this, the API will likely attempt to get attributes that do not exist, resulting in a crash.The Code:
I will update the dates on these as I make modifications and release new versions.
Last updated these on May 9, 2021. I inadvertently broke the combat dice without realizing it. That is fixed. Also noted the pay upkeep was not working properly due to sheet workers. Still has some issues. The main UI for the character sheet has been updated as well (I believe the last update had the original version)
HTML CODE: Updated January 12, 2022
CSS CODE: Updated January 12, 2022
API CODE: Updated January 12, 2022
Going forward the sheet can be found here: https://github.com/starshipsandsteel/Custom_2d20Sheet-roll20
If you open the code and simply copy and past it as is, it will mostly be fine, but I have found it will append a little snippet of code to the end of the copy and paste. This doesn't seem to affect the HTML and CSS, but it breaks the API. After you paste the API into the API window, scroll to the bottom and delete the bad part of the code.
All graphics are hosted on IMGUR.
And one final note. If you go looking through the code, you will most assuredly find references to things and classes that are no longer used or commented out. Some things need to get reimplemented still, others need to get removed. Code cleanup is the least fun part, and so the last thing I do...IF I do it. :)
If you have feedback or ideas of improvement, I would love to hear them, even if I don't use them.
Stay strong!
Remember this isn't the end times, this is humanity working together to save as many lives as we can through a proven methodology for fighting a new virus. Stay Strong.
Till next time, don't forget to Keep it Weird!
Saturday, November 28, 2020
John Carter of Mars for Roll20
Welcome back to Starships and Steel!
It has been a little while since the last post, but I want to assure everyone that I am still here and I am still playing and creating my own personal RPG experiences. Most recently I ran a game of Conan 2d20 and a game of Vaesen at the RPG Alliance Convention (online) up here in Calgary. It was a solid weekend of gaming, playing in two other games.
I have never been a large fan of the original roll20 Conan sheet. Although functional I always felt it wasn't the best way to go about things, and that combined with its creation during the quickstart rules has directly lead to this John Carter project.
Moving forward to run a Conan 2d20 game for all experience levels I elected to write a new Conan sheet that ended up leveraging the Roll20 API. This means it is not exactly user friendly, but it is functional (It has not support for Alchemy or Sorcery at the moment) and I will most likely make it available in another format for Pro level Roll20 accounts.
After playing Conan 2d20 the sheet was tweaked and the result left me with, what I think is, a decent framework for 2d20. Of course in creating this sheet for John Carter I have ripped out all the API functionality, basically the sheet no longer tracks momentum and threat, leaving that to the players and GMs.
Without further pre-amble, below is the top-half of the roll20 sheet.
Repeating Fields
Clicking on the "LOCK" will unlock the table and allow you to sort or delete items from it. Clicking "LOCK" again will finalize and relock the table.
Stress & Afflictions
- Max stress for each of the three tracks is calculated from the character's stat block.
- The two attributes each one effects is listed below its name.
- Each stress track has a unique color, this is handy to color code the 3 red circles above a roll20 icon for a character and link them appropriately left to right for simple reference.
- Each track has 5 checkboxes below it to represent the various afflictions.
- Finally the reset stress button resets all stress tracks to full.
The heart of the sheet: Attributes & Die Roller
- The first thing you do is click the check's difficulty. This number will populate below in the step 2 section, "> vs. difficulty".
- Next we will pick our two attributes. Back over on the attributes side we will note there are two buttons an A and a B, click "A" next to your first attribute and "B" for your second. These will populate and update the Target Number and Focus values for the roll. Back to the difficulty line we see that after our base difficulty we have a box listed as "+ Harms (Max D5). This box will populate based on your afflictions and chosen stats. It may not show all afflictions, ie if you have a difficulty 3 check and have 3 afflictions, it will only show 2 of your afflictions and max out the test at D5.
- Choose bonus dice. 4 options are available: Momentum (gem), Threat (skull and crossbones), Luck (gold coin), Other (Question mark). Clicking these will update the total dice we are rolling in the bottom 1/4. It will max out at 3. Below these is a "Reset Dice" button. This will clear out any dice you have picked from previous rolls and allow you to start again if you change your mind on how you are buying your dice.
Talents, Flaws and your Weapons.
- Flaw gives you a simple place to store your characters flow.
- Talents:
- Name: Talent name
- Grade: Talent grade
- Circ: Circumstance when the talent becomes useful
- Eff: The effect the talent has.
- USE button: No real effect beyond reporting the talent to the chat box to allow others and yourself easier reading of the talent
- Equipment:
- Name: Equipment name.
- Type: Core or non-core equipment.
- Description: Description of what the item does.
- Weapons:
- Name: The weapon name.
- Type & range: Melee, Near, Away, Threaten
- Dmg: Base damage listed in Combat Dice.
- Bonus Damage: Bonus dice to be added via momentum or other factors.
- Roll Damage Button: Rolls damage for the weapon and reports it to chat
- Notes: A place to store effects etc. Also reported with the weapon's damage roll.
Momentum, Renown, Allies and Luck
- MOMENTUM: This is simply a place to record it. It is NOT automated in any way.
- LUCK: Again, simply a record field. It is NOT automated in any way.
- Renown: Currently simply a place to keep track of your renown, nothing it updated here at the moment.
- Experience: A basic field to store you XP.
- Allies: A basic place to store a list of your allies.
Final thoughts, Momentum and Threat.
There are a few ways to track momentum.
The method I am currently favoring is using custom token markers. Adding a marker set with 6 gems allows a PC to turn momentum on and off as they store it from turn to turn. This way is fast and simple.
Till next time, don't forget to Keep it Weird!
Thursday, October 1, 2020
Tool Trunk Thursday: Gas Arrow
Dog Brothers and Sword Sisters! Welcome back to another installment of Tool Trunk Thursday! I have been absent the last few weeks and so the Tool Trunk has remained firmly closed, but today we shall open it once again!
We have a local convention that will be running online this year so I have been madly prepping a Roll20 sheet to run Conan 2d20 at it. Yes Yes, I know there is already a Roll20 sheet. I just don't like it much.
Don't forget to grab your free narrative terrain deck! I have used them to add more challenges to my game beyond combat and to exercise my player's narrative muscles. I hope you like them and find them useful. I would love to hear what you think!
Gas Arrow
If you have questions or comments don't forget to hit me up on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or Instagram!
If you need to check out any of these great games stop on by DriveThruRPG and pick something up through my affiliate link to help support the blog!
Equipment icons are found on https://game-icons.net/ and are provided under CC BY 3.0.
Remember this isn't the end times, this is humanity working together to save as many lives as we can through a proven methodology for fighting a new virus. Stay Strong.
Till next time, don't forget to Keep it Weird!
Thursday, August 27, 2020
Tool Trunk Thursday: Medicine
BY CROM! It is Thursday again! Let us open this ancient trunk full of wonder and mystery and see what lies within its walls today!
Don't forget to grab your free narrative terrain deck! I have used them to add a little more skill challenge to my games and would love to hear what you think of the system!
Medicine
If you have questions or comments don't forget to hit me up on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or Instagram!
If you need to check out any of these great games stop on by DriveThruRPG and pick something up through my affiliate link to help support the blog!
Equipment icons are found on https://game-icons.net/ and are provided under CC BY 3.0.
Remember this isn't the end times, this is humanity working together to save as many lives as we can through a proven methodology for fighting a new virus. Stay Strong.
Till next time, don't forget to Keep it Weird!