That's right, Dragon Age RPG Set 3 is on it's way. I'm still not finished exploring the lower levels so am probably not going to be able to contribute much to the play test but it's exciting none the less.

Another new product that you can get free documents to help you try it out is Leviathans by Catalyst Game Labs. It's apparently going to be ready for release as a box set 'any month now'. It looks pretty cool and has evocative fiction that goes with it. Fans of Battletech will feel at home with the rules. You just have to hope that it doesn't become a competitor to Battletech rather than bringing in new players of tactical wargames. I don't think there's much of a market to share around and you would hate to see a dilution of a brand.

And while I'm talking about things coming to fruition I'd like to quickly mention the Marvel RPG (Marvel Heroic Roleplaying) which came out on DriveThruRpg today. I bought it and downloaded it because I've been hearing so much about it and the first impressions are that it looks good. It's a variation on the Cortex+ system and looks like it should be able to do things in a quite fun way. There are some places where it looks a little cluttered, like too many people have tried to cram their ideas in. It'll certainly be worth a play to work out how the game works in practice.

It took a while before I got to read the rules as I always buy too much other stuff when I shop at DriveThruRPG and ended up with a large download. I picked up a bundle of maps from Jonathan Roberts which made up the bulk of the download as well as Don't Rest Your Head from Evil Hat and a texture pack from Posthuman Studios. Neither of these have I had a chance to look at yet.

Since writing for the blog last I've been very busy moving house and with work. I haven't had too much time for role playing and nor have my groups. Two people I play with had had babies in the last couple of months and that is, understandably, eating in to their free time. We have had some gaming though, I got Spirit of the Century and Diaspora for Christmas and we spent New Years Eve doing character and system generation for Diaspora. That went tremendously well and we almost missed midnight while making up back story for our characters. The Fate system really speaks to me. Our new Pathfinder game is getting going well. We had a few introductory sessions where I was the only player that could make it and now we're off and knee deep (or waist deep for my dwarf) in intrigue and stolen relics.

We also had character creation for the Savage Worlds game set in the same world as our 4E D&D game but a new baby has, in a good way, put pay to that game for the moment. Meanwhile the adventure keeps getting rewritten with better and better ideas. By the time it gets played it's going to have more information in it that an old TSR or MERP supplement.

Last random thought for the night is Kickstarter (www.kickstarter.com). I've become addicted to backing cool sounding projects on there. I've done 4 in the last week. It's a great idea and it's good to see people using it in different ways. The latest couple of projects I've backed are School Daze and Rogue Mage and if you are interested in cool, new RPGs then they are worth taking a look.

That's it for randomness. That was just a few things that I wanted to get out of my system. I'll write something more in depth about a subject soon.

So when trying to get ideas for how to characterize a military NPC I searched around for a bit of inspiration and found that there is a new research paper from the Pew Research Center that takes a look at the attitudes and challenges of American veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. It gives some simple statistics that, while interesting on their own, can give some inspiration for military characters. I'll present a few of my ideas to start you off from a few of the statistics there. I'm using the same subset that was presented in the freakanomics.com blog post where I first found about the paper.

•  96 percent of veterans are proud of their military service.

This is a high percentage. Most recent American veterans are proud of their service. Yes, it's a rather general statement but it's still useful for the games master. If you are going to put a soldier NPC in your campaign that is somehow ashamed of his military service then you had better have a damn good reason, and it had better be story appropriate too. The soldier being ashamed of their service is not the norm. There are plenty of good story ideas for that 4 percent but they should probably be quite prominent in the story rather than detracting from it.

So the average military character should be proud of their service. That doesn't mean that they haven't seen, done or known about anything that they are ashamed of. Nor that they have a great opinion of their superiors, inferiors or the way the service is run in general. But at the end of the day they can hold their head up high and say they were a soldier. You don't need to emphasise this in a character, just have them have a consistent vague sense of pride in their military service.

• 90 percent said they gained self confidence.

This gives a great bullet point for the traits of a military NPC. Whatever other facets of their personality they should probably be played with self confidence. This is especially true if you want the players to meet someone before and after they joined the army.

Again the flip side is that you will find a few vets who didn't gain self confidence during their service. What will that mean? Ignoring those that considered themselves to have already been supremely self confident you might have those who were traumatised by what they saw and now shrink away from society. How about those who can't talk to commoners but since leaving the army has tried to run a farm when he can't sell wares to local hobbits and elves? They feel especially alone because their old comrades have no issues.

• 37 percent say that, whether diagnosed or not, they have experienced post traumatic stress.

The way this is worded it's clear that this is how the soldier feels about his experiences, it's not about what a doctor thinks about how he is dealing with it. The story ideas here are plentiful, and the movies give us plenty of examples to choose from. If you don't want to draw too much attention to it then this is the time for the brooding type.

I would try not to draw too much attention to this if you are playing with an actual combat vet though until you talk about it with them. I can see opportunities for offending people are abound here. But if you have a real combat vet in your group and you are creating military characters you should probably be talking to them anyway.

• 44 percent had problems readjusting to civilian life.

This one bears a lot more investigation to find out some interesting ways to involve this in your stories. I would expect there to be a lot of subtle and extreme issues that people face when leaving military service that you could introduce to an NPC to make them much more interesting or involve them into the characters story.

• 34 percent say that (given the costs and benefit) the wars were worth fighting.

This one is interesting and, again, is very general and doesn't give us a lot of depth of information about what the vets were saying here.

In your campaign we would be talking about different wars, but lets assume that the answer would be the same. It suggests to me a couple of different types of NPC that would say that a war was not worth fighting. One is the soldier who has seen war and decided that it's a brutal place that nobody should ever experience and has dropped out of it for a life of peace, maybe they are now a druid in a grove, a steward on a star ship or has taken their vows as a priest in the inner city. Another is the soldier who has seen war and decided that it's a brutal place that nobody should ever experience and so he's going to do his duty and fight the wars so that nobody else has to. He knows that it's not worth the cost but it's been committed to now and it needs to be fought, and they are one of the ones to do it.

• 11.5 percent were unemployed in 2010.

While it's interesting to characterize some NPC vets as people who either can't find work or don't want any, or turn to crime, remember that most will be working. The military doesn't turn out shirkers in general. This is especially true seeing that the unemployment figure is much smaller than the next statistic.

• 16 percent were seriously injured while serving.

This is a great opportunity to give an NPC a distinguishing mark that might help to get even the least interested player to remember them. War creates some of the most hideous injuries to a body that you can, or can't, imagine. A fantasy campaign might have people with eye patches, wooden peg legs or hooks for hands. A sci fi campaign might have cybernetic implants, replacement limbs or minds from broken bodies uploaded to computers or robots.

More subtle serious injuries can also aid in characterization of your NPCs though. Everything from a limp that's immediately noticeable to a twinge that the characters might only notice after being in the company of the NPC for some days can add to the character. Whether these injuries started out like that or are only this subtle after years of therapy or bloody-minded grinning and bearing can come out slowly as the story of the NPC unfolds.

• 84 percent think the American public has little to no understanding of the problems that the military faces.

This suggests a few things for your game. One is the soldier who is misunderstood, or believes they are, and is frustrated by the ignorance of the commoners. Another is that there is something that needs to be done to save the city, country, world or multiverse that the characters need help with resources for but it isn't popular with the general population so they can't just do it. In fact there is a whole campaign there for the political types. See the Critical Hit podcast from www.majorspoilers.com for an example of this on the multiverse scale.

There are a few ideas that were inspired by these statistics and I'm sure you can think of many more. Follow the link to the Pew site for more inspiration.

These are obviously statistics that are specific to contemporary America and won't necessarily be reflected in your game world. A halfling civilization might not have a high regard for military service in their conscripted army while House Kurita might find they have a 100% pride rate in their army. A fantasy campaign might have a seriously hideous maim rate for soldiers, or the clerics might whip everyone back in to shape quick smart. A Hunter:The Vigil game might use these statistics to generate the outlook of an Afghanistan vet NPC. I was just using them for inspiration of different ways that a soldier or ex-soldier might think in an RPG.

Do you have any others ideas for getting into the heads of military NPCs? What about other types of character who's occupation we don't have experience with? Please leave a comment if you do.

This came at a convenient time for me. My D&D game came to a satisfying conclusion a few weeks ago and we're just about to finish the season of Traveller to switch to Pathfinder in my other group. Now is a good time for PANRPG month. In fact my D&D player and I were intending on trying a few one shots of different games over the next few months as he is often too busy to play recently (he's expecting a new baby, yay). However, seeing that I've been getting excited over lots of different systems and settings recently we're not going to do it as intended. For one, we are not going to just play one new RPG, and two, we are going to spread it over three months.

At least for the remote group we're going to do it over three months, the Traveller group is ready to start the new Pathfinder game at the beginning of November, with Corporal Punishment at the helm. So we're going to do a few one shots in October with them.

So what games do I want to try? Well, lots of them, and a lot more than we can actually play. We have decided on a few definites but I'm going to leave a few others around that we might be able to fit in. Mainly I want to try games with different settings, but different mechanics are also important. Both of my current games are dice plus modifier type games. They play out very differently with the d20 plus modifier having a much higher variance to 2d6 plus much smaller modifier. I'm interested in dice pool games as well as different skill systems and other mechanics that feed into the role playing.

Here are the games that we will probably actually get to.

• World of Darkness. This will be the Free RPG Day offering that White Wolf kindly allowed to be downloaded for free (from RPGNow) after this years Free RPG Day. I don't know what it is about because I haven't read it and I've passed it to one of our player to read and run.
• Pathfinder. While this is the game that we are starting a campaign for in November one of our players is keen on learning to run it and wants to do a one shot, maybe mostly combats with 6-7 level characters.
• Savage Worlds. This is going to be a game set in the world that I created for our D&D game, but it will be focused on more normal people (probably apprentice mages, so maybe not that normal) rather than heroes and I'm looking forward to seeing the world from a different perspective. What I'm missing here though is a proper rulebook for Savage Worlds. I bought a PDF of the explorers edition off of RPGNow but PDF isn't my first choice to run RPGs from, I'm going to have to get an actual book soon.
• Mouse Guard. I love the comics and I only got the RPG book recently but I love the system and it lives up to the hype from the likes of ChattyDM(http://critical-hits.com/2011/02/18/mouseburning-it-hacking-a-rpgs-skill-system-small-press-style/). I will likely play this with my remote group, but I dearly want to GM this one.

And here are the games that I would like to play but will only get to if we have time and can get some player interest in.

• Leverage. This looks great and I want to give something a try that uses the Cortex system. Serenity was one of the choices when we decided to play Traveller but, from what I've seen, the system has changed since then. It's also the system that is going to be used for the new Marvel RPG and I've heard good things about that.
• Dragon Age. I've said it before, but I love this game. I've been able to play it with some people from work and I have a copy of the first box set next to my bed for bed time reading. This is probably a bit close to our D&D or Pathfinder games in genre though for it to be near the top of the list so I don't think we'll get to it.
• Old World of Darkness. I still have my old Mage and Vampire books. It would be good to get them out again.
• Battletech. I have the free A Time of War quick start rules that would be good to play, but also we might be able to have a good old miniatures battle with this.
• AD&D 2nd Edition. In particular the old Dragonlance modules. I miss Dragonlance, and as it only take a few minutes to create a 2e character this should be a good, light RPG to play.
• Lady Blackbird. Lots of people talk about it, I would like to see what all the fuss is about.
• Star Wars d6. I left my books back in the UK for these with my D&D player. Hopefully he's still got them and is ready to GM a game.

Now there are some notable games missing from that list. In particular there are no Fate based games. I nearly bought the Spirit of the Century a few weeks ago and went back to the shop yesterday to get it but it had been sold, otherwise it might have been on the list. I'm staying away from the Dresden Files game until I've read a few more of the Dresden novels after getting a spoiler when flipping through the Our World book in my LGS. I would very much like to play a Fate game soon, but maybe this isn't the time. There are no western games and no post apocalyptic games. That's just because I came up with a list of games I would like to play and it started getting long before those games came up. I have been intrigued by games such as Deadlands and Eclipse Phase. There is also a free, fan made Mass Effect rpg based on the Star Wars d6 game but none of my players have played Mass Effect.

This list isn't definitive though. If any of my groups bring out a game they want to play then I'm willing to give it a try.

If anyone else has any games to add that they feel I should be interested in or are intending to play soon please leave a comment below.

I'm enjoying playing Mongoose Traveller at the moment, a science fiction RPG and I am a big fan of the skill system that it uses. The skill system is the heart of the game and if you want your character to do anything that they would not automatically be able to do you need to roll a task check. This includes spacecraft operation, combat, arguing a case in court, looking for something, researching an alien species or making a deal for some cargo. The mechanic is that you roll 2d6 and add the appropriate skill modifier and the appropriate characteristic modifier then you add any dice modifiers and compare the result to 8. Above 8 is a success, below is a failure. Keep track of how much you succeed or fail for a lot of situations. As a referee I'm particularly interested in how badly you've failed for consequences purposes.

For example if you are trying to fix a piece of machinery that you've never seen before I might ask you to make a Mechanic check. So say you have 1 rank in mechanic you would add that to your roll. What characteristic would you use? Well in Traveller there are two characteristics that might be appropriate here, Intelligence and Education. Which to use? It would depend, in this situation, on how the player would want their character to approach it. They are likely to want the biggest modifier but it would be best if they can justify that. For instance if they wanted to use Education because that would give a +2 bonus then they could say that they are using their training with a similar type of machine to work out how to fix this. If they succeed then they can describe how it turned out that this machine had a part very similar to what they were used to dealing with and it just needed replacing. If they fail then it could have been that they thought they saw something they understood but it worked in a completely different way to how they were expecting and now the machine is useless.

The most complicated part of the skill check is the dice modifier. It's basically a way to change the challenge of the skill check. For instance it's suggested that for a simple task you should add a difficulty dice modifier of +6, an easy +4, routine +2, difficult -2, very difficult -4 and formidable -6. You can get +1 for taking longer over the task, or sacrifice -1 for rushing. Situation modifiers are +1 for things that might work for the character such as decent tools, clear weather or assistance from a robot, or -1 for things that might work against them like having to perform surgery in a muddy field in a storm with only a butter knife. These modifiers add and subtract to each other to give you the base likelihood of anyone being able to succeed in the situation where as the skill rank and characteristic modifier add in your characters likelihood of succeeding and then you roll the dice.

The mechanic works very well for a RPG that is focused on characterisation and the skills that characters can bring to the table. A character that is untrained in a skill and attempts to use it takes a -3 modifier to their roll so would be unwise to attempt any task of any but the most easy difficulty so it pays to have people with different skill sets work as a team. Characters with overlap in their skills can work together, there are rules for assisting, and everyone gets a chance to shine.

Having a single +1 can mean a lot on a 2d6 roll. The numbers on the dice are more likely to be in the 5-9 range so any advantage you can get will help. Having a total dice modifier of 0 gives you a 42% chance of succeeding but that is up to 58% for +1. As such the Mongoose Traveller rulebook suggests that having a +1 in a skill means that you are competent at using the skill, you could easily get a job doing that. If however you have a +2 you are likely to be high up in your field, +3 at the top of your game and +4 an almost unique practitioner. If you have +3 or +4 then you probably want to incorporate the reasons for that in your character background (driven by how you proceeded through character creation, another area of Traveller I love). Characteristic dice modifiers usually range from -2 to +2 with 0 and +1 the most common, characteristic generation is random but I'm not going to force a player to keep a -2 DM if they don't want to.

This pretty much means that if a character is notably good at something them under normal circumstances they will probably succeed at doing it. This is helpful in a game like Traveller when a pilot is trying to land the ship under ideal conditions. Combat however is a bit more complicated in that there are a lot more dice modifiers that are likely to apply for things like cover(-), aiming(+), dodging(-),owning a smart weapon(+), firing into fog(-), and inappropriate range for weapon(-). Things can get away from you fast in a fight, but still professional soldiers are likely to still be able to hold their own (it often comes down to differences in equipment in combat for people with high skill levels).

Overall I like the task resolution system in Mongoose Traveller. It's great for the style of game. I have heard that the designers had some great ideas about both dices having special meaning but that got cut from the game before release. I don't know how true that is but the clean system left is a good one. It works well for a normal, but trained, Joe type of character. This is different to the D&D style D20 system that works well for the epic hero but with large variance in the outcomes to add tension.

I was also thinking about writing about the World of Darkness skill system as a dice pool example to contrast with the roll plus modifier one here but I got a bit carried away by Traveller because I enjoy it. Does anyone have any other non D20 skill systems that they love that I should know about? I can think of the dice type per rank of Savage Worlds or Cortex+ games and the Jenga tower of Dread and some people have had good things to say about Legend of the Five Rings but I've never played it.

Map from my campaign. The party mopped them up.

Recently I mentioned in my previous post that when DMing a one on one game of Dungeons and Dragons 4e over Skype I use Maptool from www.rptools.net as a pretty basic digital battlemat during combat. Seeing that I've heard some people talk about Maptool as if it's only great if you have a lot of time to prepare and learn all of it's features I figured that it was worth writing about how I use it to try to dispel those myths.

Maptool is virtual tabletop software that allows you to display a map and put objects and tokens on the map to represent a combat encounter area in an RPG. It replaces the battlemat and miniatures that you might use in D&D and puts them on a computer screen. It's useful for playing over the internet because players or extra DMs can connect to a central Maptool server and share the play space, including having limited control over it.

It also has a lot of useful features, including:

• Initiative Tracker
• Chat between players
• Dice roller
• Limited vision, Fog of War, low light
• Attach stats to token (HP, Abilities, Attack details etc)
• Macro language so you can program buttons to help run your game
• Numerous other small features

With all these features it's natural to consider using Maptool to be a bigger undertaking than drawing some objects on a battlemat and throwing down some minis. But There's no reason why you have to use all these features. While running my recent D&D campaign I probably didn't spend more than half an hour or so on setting up each map before hand, even for the finale (I'll get to that below). Basically I just treated it like a battlemat. Instead of wet erase markers I had a library of various images of things that could bound the encounter area depending on where it was set. Dragged them onto the map as per the encounter design. Put the player and monster tokens down and saved the map.

Does that sound easy? Well this is how it's done.

First download Maptool from www.rptools.net or use one of the launch links on their site if you have java web start available. Yes it is written in java and I've used it on Ubuntu Linux and Mac OSX (presumably it works on Windows too but I've never needed to try) so if you are running on a system that doesn't have java you will also need to install that. Launch Maptool and have a poke around, we won't be using much of the functionality today.

Next you'll probably want to download a large repository of resources (mostly images that can be used as tokens, objects and backgrounds) that has been put together by the RPTools community and gets you up and making maps quickly. You can find links to the repository on the Maptool FAQ on the RPTools site. This gives you lots of tokens for fantasy games including knights, rogues, wizards, dragons, beholders, etc. Also objects such as trees, cavern/castle/house walls, chairs, chests, wagons and a thousand other things. Tilable backgrounds are also included to give your maps the flavour of where they are set.

Once you have these resources you can add them into your library in Maptool using File -> Add Resources to Library and put in the path to where you put the resources.

When they appear in the resource library pane on your Maptool display (if it's not visible click on the Window menu and select Library to bring it up) you can have a look through them and drag interesting ones onto the map.

When originally looking at using Maptool I selected some generic tokens to represent the heroes and they have just stuck. None of them have been replaced but players could design their own tokens, they are just png images.

Layers options

One thing to note is the layer selection. There are 4 layers: Token, Hidden, Object and Background. If you are using Maptool in the way I'm showing here as a basic battlemat with nothing fancy then the difference between the Object and Background layer doesn't really matter. This is where you put the walls, obstacles and maybe traps. The Token layer is where the heroes and villains go, on this layer they are treated as game pieces and you are allowed to rename them, give them stats and apply states to them.

So to get started click on the Map menu and select New Map. A dialogue will come up asking if you want a square or hex grid, some size definitions (leave it as default for now) and a name. On the right it will allow you to set a background (solid colour, or a tiled texture), a map (if you have some artwork to set your battle on) and fog of war texture. Out of the box it selects a grassland background so lets use that for now.

Now simply click on the Background layer and select something to put on the map to bound the encounter area. This is assuming that your encounter even needs to be bounded, it might be set on a massive field with no features. This can be trees, fences, rocks, walls, whatever you feel like. What we're going for here is functional, something that achieves the same thing as drawing on a battlemat but with a little more flavour simply because we have a lot of objects available.

These guys might be in trouble

Then drop your monsters on the map where you want them. If you don't find tokens for the monsters that you want see below. Lastly drop your heroes on there.

The map is ready. Launch the integrated server get other people to connect and play the game. When I played I still handled initiative on paper, rolled real actual dice (although for some time my player used the '/roll 1d20+5' style macro) and counted damage on paper. If you right click on a token you can set a state icon to appear over the token if it is bloodied, sleeping, slowed or such like.

Now you are not always going to get the token you want for a monster, especially humanoids, but it's still a lot more likely than with real minis. If you want you can create your own tokens and the easiest way I found was to do a google image search for what I was after. Note that you might want to turn on googles SafeSearch so you are only getting the type of images you want. I learned something that I didn't know before, and was happier not knowing, when I did a search for tentacle when I was making tokens for a demonic boating encounter. A lot of searches though for iconic D&D monsters bring up images from the WotC web site that are often exactly what I want.

Chatty DM made into a Maptool Token. Used without permission. I expect Wolverine to turn up to exact punishment.

On the RPTools site you will also find TokenTool which allows you to easily make tokens for use in Maptool by dragging images into a frame. You can make a token in a few seconds.

For the finale of my campaign I wanted something a little more fancy, but as it turned out I didn't need to do too much more work for it. I found that some people sell maps on www.rpgnow.com that come as Maptools Campaign Files as well as PDFs and jpegs. I picked up one that fit the bill almost perfectly, changed a few things and applied lots and lots of monsters, a big bad and a Duke in distress.

So next time someone says they don't have time to learn all about Maptool so aren't going to use it let them know that if they can use a battlemat and minis, and they can use a mouse, they can probably use Maptool too. Sure they can do all the fancy stuff if they want to but it isn't necessary to run a game over the internet.

This is something that I've done on a small scale before. In fact this player and I played our first AD&D 2nd edition games in my parents attic, which we'd renamed The Inn of the Last Home in honor of Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman back when we thought they were a duo of female writers. This game however was to last, and did last, for more than the few hours or sessions of my teenage years. It lasted for a year and told a story about a city in the midst of a coup by a demonic entity. We finished a couple of weeks ago with the city being saved but the true extent of the threat being hinted at to set up for next season.

This differs from a traditional group of 3-6 plus DM for D&D (and most RPGs) in many ways. One was that the typical balanced group has characters covering the different aspects required to face any situation. This is more important in 4e D&D than ever where it's pretty explicit that you need one character of each 'role' in order for the balanced combat mathematics that make the game run so smoothly (blandly?) to work. How did we work with this? I provided a party of NPCs that were built as PCs to cover the other roles.

Well actually I built a defender, a controller and a striker. The player created a striker and we were left without a leader. How bad could that be? Pretty bad if you are trying to play 4e straight as it turns out. For the first few sessions it was blind luck and healing potions that got the party though their encounters. It was clear that they were missing the ability to heal. We could have played it as it lay and I could have adjusted the encounters for a party without a leader but I was still new to the system and wanted to continue to play by the rules so I decided on a two pronged attack to combat the situation.

I added a few leader NPCs that would some times be available and sometimes not to join the party. Also I gave the NPC striker a chance to take the Warlord multiclass feat by conveniently levelling up when they were at a training camp run by a warlord. He also took the rest of the multiclass power swap feats as he continued to level up. This provided some healing for the party and also the buffing that was pretty helpful but with two strikers and a heavy hitting defender really wasn't necessary.

The party of NPCs helped to make combats a bit more normal that just the single player. Obviously the strategy for combat was decided by the real player so he pretty soon became the in character leader of the group. Unfortunately I underestimated how much work it would be to run 3 built characters built with full mechanics in combat at higher levels. It became hard at level 3 really. I think combat suffered in that I didn't have enough head space for the monsters to do much that was interesting because I was flipping through sheets of powers deciding what the wizard going to do next.

This also affected the experience of the player. 4e combat is long winded as decisions are made. In combats that had a decent number of monsters it would be quite some time between the player having a turn. During this time it would mostly be me talking and rolling rather than talking and strategizing of other players. Once the player fell asleep while waiting for his turn. While it was late at night where he was, we were playing over Skype because we are 8 time zones apart, it was still a pretty damning commentary on how well I ran the game that day.

The normal table talk between players was, of course, missing as well as talking through problems and decisions. This is part of the fun of playing RPGs so not having it could have been a problem but the player coped pretty well. It allowed him to be the sole decision maker which I think he enjoyed, but there were a couple of decisions which could have done with the sanity check provided by a table full of people. This also put a lot of pressure on both of us due to him being in the spotlight for almost all of the time, which also put me in the spotlight by virtue of being everyone else in the world. I find with my Traveller group I can sit back and watch the players concoct some new trouble between them, which also has the side effect that I have to come up with less trouble for them to have.

Playing the roles of the NPCs that were part of the party was a challenge, but a rewarding one when I was able to pull it off. They needed to be particularly well fleshed out characters and have at least some character development. They also needed to have only the information that would be available to them. When I'm actually playing three quarters of the party that I'm challenging it can be hard not to metagame in their favour. When it all came together though it worked out pretty well and the PC even ended up building a particular mutual respect with one of the NPCs after starting off with a very antagonistic relationship.

All in all I think we did okay with the one on one campaign. We told quite a good story together, had fun, rolled a whole lot of dice and changed the imaginary world. I got away with some stuff I wouldn't normally, including a Dukes of Hazard style wagon run, because it was a single person that I knew well enough to get away with things like that. We would have had a very different experience with more people. But given the time difference and the scheduling problems we had I think that the biggest difference would have been the game would have died before coming to a conclusion.

We are having a hiatus of the D&D 4e game while we try out a few indie RPGs and also the player is due to welcome a new arrival soon but we intend to continue the campaign at some point. It did reach a good stopping point though, whether we come back to it or not.

Let me know in the comments if anyone else has had much success with just one player and one DM, or if you have any tips on how to work it better.

Image courtesy of floodllama on flickr, used under Creative Commons License.

I have been thinking about food at the game table. Recently in one of my gaming groups two of us have been taking it in turns to host the game night and we've been having different types of food on our respective nights. He's a really good cook and has been doing ribs and chicken wings while I've been largely sticking to either traditional chips and dips or serving oven baked snacks or most recently antipasto with crackers and bread. This has all been working fine and I'm not complaining but after hearing game food mentioned on a podcast today (the Dungeon Master Guys since you asked, search iTunes for it) I've been thinking about game night food and maybe trying to shake it up a bit.

Now I'm all for pizza, chips, dip and soft drink so I'm not thinking that I'll be dropping those. I'm just thinking of experimenting with a few different things to see if they work.

However not all food types are suitable for ingesting at the game table. When eating ribs we take a break from the action to save sauce getting on all our papers, but it doesn't really detract from the game that much. However something like a steak with potatoes and salad is probably going to impact the game and is probably best done before or after the game. A bowl of soup is probably going to impact the game also, but a bowl of stew might not, depending on how you serve it.

Some of the snacks that fit easily into your hand and can be easily picked up from a bowl and put in your mouth, perhaps after being dipped in something, seem to be the most suited to working at a game table. This can lead to issues with communal food bowls though, especially if you have a finger licker in the group.

Another consideration is to try to make game night snacks a little more healthy. This isn't actually something that is necessary if you're getting a balanced diet on non game days. I don't mind having a bit more grease than usual during a game, however I do sometimes get indigestion after a game where I've been GMing and talking for hours straight while piling stuff into my mouth so I might think about that side of things.

Then we have themed foods, and I mean RPG themed. We're playing a science fiction game at the moment so I guess that protein bars and dried foods would be the order of the day. For a medieval fantasy game we could have dwarven stew, stale bread and cheese, or Otik's Fried Spiced Potatoes. If fact there were a whole load of Dragonlance themed recipes in two of the books that TSR released that I still have on my bookshelf.

I'm not sure that I want to think about the World of Darkness themed menu, nor if we were playing All Flesh Must Be Eaten.

But rather than over think it further I'll put down a few ideas for what I could do over the next few weeks and in future posts report what I did and how it went down with the group. It shouldn't be a shock to them when they sit down to play as it's all here on the blog.

Just to start...

Alternative Bite Sized Thing and Dip

• Falafel with yogurt or garlic dip. I love these, especially home made.
• Koftas and mint yogurt dip.
• Sausage Rolls and Ketchup.
• Party Pies
• Unusual Pizzas
• Bruschetta

Winter Warmers (it's currently winter down here in the southern hemisphere)

• Stew
• Roast Meat
• Potato Bake
• Pasta Bake
• Bake

Themed Food

• Dwarven Meatballs
• Dwarven Stew
• Tavern Food (tapas?)
• Protein Bars and Dinner in a Tube
• Where can you get whole pheasant for roasting in Western Australia?
• Elven Granola
• Baked Beans for a Western Game
• Scraps out of the bin for a Post Apocalyptic Game (maybe not)
• Strawberries (Serenity RPG!)

These will do for starters. Does anybody else have any good ideas that they are willing to share?

So having not been there I'm not the person to ask about what the product announcements were, and how cool the people doing the announcements were. I also haven't seen any of the products I'm talking about. There are plenty of places to get that information. Here's a good one for the WotC seminar. I caught the live tweets of those guys to get the announcements live. They also won an Ennie for their blog.

What I'm going to say here is what my thoughts are on some of the announcements. I was all ready to write a post about how excited I was by the Wizards of the Coast offerings for the next year but I was left feeling pretty underwhelmed by what was announced. I understand that there were some promises along the lines of "We are listening and will do better." but that's a little like me saying that this blog post is a little light, and the next one will be too, but you wait until the posts in a few weeks time. They're going to be great. That's pretty meaningless until I actually get those awesome posts out of the door. Let's not be too negative about that though, it means that there is likely to be some time in the nearish future that I am going to be excited if they do turn the potential into reality.

Another reason for the let down is possibly that one way to interpret some of the signals that have been coming out of WotCland recently is that there is a new edition on the horizon and they were leading up to an announcement at Gen Con. By signals I mean the Legends and Lore columns about going back to basics and defining D&D and the staff changes. The latter though I would think is more of an indication that they are not in a position to announce anything. But a new Edition or a shake and rerelease of 4e didn't happen.

So what do we have? A new campaign setting. Okay, people like campaign settings. This one is a setting within a setting. More of a closer look at the region of Forgotten Realms than a whole world. Not a bad idea, Waterdeep has been done to death and I gather that there is a lot of in depth information for both players and dungeon masters in there. I've only heard good things from people that actually have the book, it seems quite good quality. Nothing earth shattering but nothing bad. Probably not high on my list but I might buy it.

A deluxe adventure, Madness of Gardmore Abbey, sounds interesting. Not so much the adventure itself but the format. They are including lots of maps, dungeon tiles, tokens for the monsters, a deck of many things and appear to have designed it to be an open ended super adventure style set. There is information on NPCs, hooks and locations as well as encounter details so you just might be encouraged to actually role play. This reminds me of some of the old TSR adventures (particularly the Dragonlance ones for some reason. That may be my memory romanticising them though) and could be a place where you could play a whole mini campaign that is more player lead if there is enough room to fill in the details and customise the setting. This may be just what a DM with very little time to prepare but with a dislike for throwing together a string of encounters and a love for a detailed environment could be waiting for. Of course you can go to third party publishers for that http://www.koboldquarterly.com/kqstore/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=5&products_id=87 but it's a good thing to see from WotC, especially as their efforts to make DMing easier with 4th edition have, it seems to me, led to the lowest common denominator becoming louder in the community and creativity getting largely ignored. Of course that has meant that the exceptions have become easier to find (some of them are in the blogroll on the right don't you know). 4th Edition has an unfounded reputation for being tactical combat game first and an RPG second. This seems to be partially as a result of the way the core books present the rules, and because combat takes such a huge chunk of your game time. I think that material like this could help in this respect.

Heroes of the Feywild. Okay, bear with me a moment. I'm going to have a rant and then explain why my rant is invalid. Disagreements can be submitted though the comments system.

The Feywild is probably one of my most favourite parts of the current incarnation of the D&D universe. The whole magical, primal place intrigues me with it's liveliness and danger and things being bigger than life and smaller than life. What a great place to adventure. It's full of mystery. Well it was full of mystery anyway. The manual of the planes did it perfectly when it described it but didn't go in to detail. The point of this place is that surprises are around each corner. Familiarity and alieness combine to achieve compelling adventures. However this, more than anything else (the Shadowfell comes close though) really loses something for me, as a setting for games, when you start to pin it down. So I'm really not looking forward to the Heroes of the Feywild. It's the whole taking the magic out of it for me. I don't want players to be saying to me "That's not how it works in the Feywild, it's like this" because that is taking the whole point of the entire plane and ruining it. A load of players boasting an arsenal of fey powers is far less fun, for me, than an NPC that comes along and does something, once, that makes everyone go "Wow, what was that".

On the other hand my point is pointless because WotC isn't actually the boss of me. They don't get to tell me what my world does, and I wouldn't have thought that they expect to. I use their general multiverse as a model for mine because I don't want to create my own. I like to tweak other bits of it so why not the Feywild. Other people however are going to love this book, like they did the Shadowfell one. They should buy it, Fey stuff is cool whether it's my Feywild or the Wizards designers one or anyone else's (I especially liked it when Rodrigo Lopez set his Feywild on fire in the Critical Hit podcast at Major Spoilers).

I have very few opinions on the rest of the RPG lineup for the next few months. We've been waiting for Mordenkainen’s Magical Emporium for a while. It could be good, but I'm more interested in creating less, but more unique, magical items for my games at the moment so it's not really holding my attention. Book of vile darkness, interesting but not that interesting. There is a promise that there will be advice on getting evil campaigns to actually work, but this kind of advice tends to be nothing you haven't seen before. New dungeon tiles, new player's option book for elementalists, Box O' Dragons (can't argue with that. Dragons are always good), new organised play style. All good additions, none of which interest me much.

More books, cool, books are always good. More board games, okay. I still haven't got around to getting the first D&D board game yet but I intend to. Drizzt doesn't hold my interest as a character (in fact I'm displeased with him and everything he stands for) but it might be the game to get when I do get around to buying one as I assume they've polished the format since releasing the first two. However I'm unlikely to buy a board game just because it has the D&D logo on it and uses D&D IP (and a 20 sided die). A board game pretty much has to stand on it's own for me, so I'm really not that interested in the 'Euro Style' Lords of Waterdeep game they announced and won't be unless I hear that it's actually a great, unmissable game.

We have the promise of non random minis. This is great. I don't think I'm alone in this. I only bought one of the boxes of random minis and I still haven't found a use for most of them (one of them I still haven't identified). So we have the promise of boxes of orcs or drow or whatever. This is probably the thing that caught my attention most from the WotC announcements because it was the least expected. I don't know if we will be seeing a lot of these sets or if they will get cancelled if they don't sell well immediately. I was under the impression that the minis were cancelled because of economic reasons, they needed to sell a lot more to make it worth it. It may have been that they weren't as far from making it profitable that I had assumed and they think a rethink of the sales strategy might help. I hope it does. There's also talk of a skirmish game to go with the minis that might be worth a look.

So that was the news from WotC. What news *did* excite me that was coming out of Gen Con.

Well, Star Wars has a new home. Fantasy Flight Games has bought the rights to make games, including RPGs, for playing a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Any movement at all on making Star Wars games is a good thing in my opinion but I didn't know much about FFG. I knew of them as those who made those Warhammer RPGs that I try to ignore and those car games that I've always been meaning to try. The reports from Gen Con seemed favourable about the X-Wing miniatures game, and I liked that there was no mention of the clone wars (I'm in my thirties. There are two versions of Star Wars for me. One I love and one I like. Doesn't make me a hater). I went out and bought the Lord of the Rings living card game that they make and was impressed. I hope they do a good job of the Star Wars stuff. I loved the old d6 WEG Star Wars RPG and thought the d20 one was okay. I'm looking forward to what FFG do. I do hope that what the license must have cost doesn't push their finances too much though, especially in the current economy.

Another exciting development is that Margaret Weis Productions has the license for the Marvel Universe RPG, and they are going to use the Cortex system to do it. My first thought was that finally I could do what Marvel couldn't and kill Peter Parker and replace him with someone better. But then I remembered that they have actually just done that. But I'm looking forward to this. I'm not usually that interested in superhero games but I like the cortex system. I like Marvel. I like that my favourite Canadian well of enthusiasm for games is on the team (The Chatty DM, Philippe Ménard). I'm looking forward to this. Details are sketchy at the moment though.

That's what largely got on my radar from the news coming out of Gen Con and what I thought of it. I saw news about lots of other new products that may be really cool but didn't catch my attention. It might be nice to go there some year to see these things first hand.

I was however impressed that Quinn had done all the hard work and something to publication and out of the door. So for the small amount of money required I was eager to support him by buying it. When I got it downloaded I was blown away by my first impressions.

It looks great. Really great.

Now this is the time to mention the art was by Shane Tyree and the layout by Fred Hicks (yes, that one) but we haven't forgotten Quinn, we'll come back to that in a moment, we're just distracted by the fantastic look of the thing at the moment.

Now I like the art and layout of RPG books a lot. I like the simple ones like the latest Traveller, d6 Star Wars and Talislanta, I like the really complex graphic and font intensive ones like D&D, Dresden Files, and World of Darkness. I even like the small really indie ones like Breaking the Ice. It seems to me like were lucky to happen to have a hobby that has so much art in the medium that it's described in. I wouldn't expect many woodworking books to be anywhere near as beautiful as what the woodworker creates but so many RPG books convey the beauty of the hobby so well.

This product is no exception. I love the art of the Dragon at the beginning and how well it fits with the design of the whole thing. The layout is excellent and perfectly done for a pdf. Just looking at it now I realise that even at a highish zoom I'm never far away from something telling me what I'm looking at or at least giving me a visual clue. The colour scheme, grey, is very evocative of the material and I like the stat block being in grey scale as well as conforming to the WoTC scheme for monsters. The fonts and spacing all seem to fit perfectly with the mood of the subject.

And that mood? Despair. I won't give too much away but the title of Etherkai: The Nightmare Dragon does give it away a little.

The idea of a worldbreaker is simple. This is monster of such power and presence that, for a short period of time, it drastically alters the world around it. That's the text from the summary. Basically it is for when your players have bored of solo monsters that do predictable things and, even the fixed ones in later WoTC 4e products, play by the rules. This is a great idea, but as I said earlier I'm hesitant of adding new 3rd party rules into my game.

The way that Quinn has presented this concept however has made me change my mind about this. The way he has combined a flavourful history of the beast with interesting reasons for it's powers along with a simple addition of a self contained 'worldbreaking' power, which uses temporary hit points as a limit to it's effect makes me think that not only could I easily use this in my game but I think it might become compulsory. Not necessarily this monster but the idea of a boss that changes everything, plot, rules, setting, characters is just a little too hard to resist.

Not just in D&D either. With a little thought this could fit into plenty of role playing games. In fact I'm not sure what should happen in Call of Cthulhu if the players should come face to face with Cthulhu itself but it would be better if the rules that the players were familiar with didn't have much to do with it.

The description of the monster doesn't just stop at the background, tactics and stats. It's explained just what will happen to any characters when they even start getting within a few miles of the beast, what the effect on the surrounding area and population is likely to be and how you could spend a few sessions just approaching the lair before you meet face to face.

I particularly like how the tactics section begins, 'Etherkai chooses battlefields that...' This is a Worldbreaker, it doesn't make use of specific bits of the terrain at hand, it chooses the battlefield. It's on it's own ground and the party had better get used to being at a disadvantage.

Also great is that this first Worldbreaker is level 10. This dispels the impression that Worldbreakers might only be for Epic Tier.

Okay. So I like it a lot. What don't I like?

Well the format of 6 pages for one worldbreaker is good but when Quinn mentioned that he was publishing his worldbreakers I did initially expect that they would be all in one book so it was a little disappointing to get just one released. While you can't argue with the price I think that I don't really need to buy any future Worldbreakers. As I've said I'm unlikely to use this exact monster in any game I run and it's more the ideas for my own Worldbreakers that excites me. The actual specifics I can come up with on my own. That's not to say that others are like me but I wonder if Quinn will sell as many of the next ones as the first. He might have been better off selling a few together for more money.

Having said that of course I probably will buy any future Worldbreaker PDF's because creativity like this needs encouraging and for the great art.

I also didn't like the RPGnow watermark on each page. I realise that it gives a visual reminder that the pdf can be traced back to your order so you aren't tempted to distribute it but it's like somebody scratching their own name on a Rembrandt. It's a pity they couldn't put it on layer that you could hide for viewing or something similar.

So if you were to ask me then I would say buy it. It's a really cool beast if you need one for your game but more than that it's a great concept that should be influencing your games for years to come.

To convert the module I had a look through and decided that I only wanted to use the first half of the Tomb. There were a few reasons for this. The first was that I only wanted this adventure to last one evening. These guys are space farers, they don't want to be stuck in a dark underground ancient tomb for very long without good reason. The second was that Traveller characters are fairly squishy and the traps and combats become pretty deadly in the second half of the Tomb of Horrors. You can't just find a cleric that's willing to raise your dead crew mates. They are dead and it's back to character creation and a session to introduce the new character into the story.

Next I had a think about how to handle the magic. This is science fiction, there is no magic unless you include psionics so everything had to be technological. This limited some things and a few had to go. I kept one of the teleporters though. The fact that there isn't any teleportation technology in my galaxy made this significant.

The traps were next. Most of these operated just as they would in the original. Poison spikes were poison spikes, I just had to change the mechanical effect to fit with the Traveller rules. Some of the traps were blunted a little to reflect the realism of Traveller compared to D&D but certainly had the crew made it to the Perilous Hall they would have been in serious trouble as they became barbecue.

Monsters. How was I going to portray undead? Easy, skeleton cyborgs, with laser guns. Although I kept the iconic double sabre for one of them. The added sound of servos whirring along with the sight of moving skeletons coming towards you just adds to the effect. The gargoyle turned into a killer robot bristling with weapons that fell off as physical stats took damage. I added an extra killer robot in the chapel too just for good measure instead of the lightning trap. Snakes were snakes, everyone likes snakes.

So how did it go on game night? It went well, not especially earth shattering, but well. The players picked up on the writing on the floor at the Tomb entrance and did well to work out the clues during the game. They even missed out on the Perilous Hall due to working out the clues. We only had one unexpected triggering of a pit trap and it was the guy in the full combat suit who fell down it so the spikes didn't even pierce his armor.

They battled the robot gargoyle and pretty much destroyed it before it got a good shot in. This was a good outcome for a squishy Traveller character but a bit disappointing for a referee who was looking forward to that fight.

The sections with weaken and fear gas were interesting. I had neglected to take into account that one of the characters was wearing full combat armor and so would be immune to these. This turned out to be one of the funnest unexpected departures from the plan because he was carrying on searching the place while the others took cover in another area and had to hold his own when a killer robot unexpectedly attacked.

When the crew got to the fake Acererak (another cyborg skeleton, this one with higher stats and lasers) things got more interesting. The engineer who wasn't wearing armor and doesn't really know how to hold a gun was sent in and got hurt, badly. The ex space marine PR specialist threw a very effective grenade in that set the furniture on fire and hurt the engineer more. Everyone missed. Acererak tried to kill the pilot. Everyone hit and eventually they brought him down, and stole his laser gun. Everything was now on fire so they took what they came for (I have deliberately not mentioned what that was) and got out before the place collapsed.

On the way out they went through the chest room and for some reason the captain opened all three chests, assuming there was going to be treasure in at least one of them. The already seriously injured characters were forced to help him take out the threats and then made their way out of the Tomb.

We had fun and reached our objective, got out and got the injured to hospital, although one NPC, the engineer, ended up with a permanent limp and loss of stats. I wasn't really left with a feeling that it really clicked though in the way I had hoped. I think maybe I was hoping for too much. I was a little disappointed that nobody present had played through a version of the Tomb of Horrors in previous versions of D&D. That would have been great if someone had recognised the entrance and broke out in to shivers due to previous experience.

I think the idea worked. It was a good change of pace for the players, they were isolated from their ship and any technology that they weren't carrying and thrust into an environment that they had to endure to get back to civilisation. I think I would do something similar again. Not too often though, the straight sci-fi drama is working quite well and I don't think we need to overdo the gimmicks.

I would be interested to know if anyone else has had good results taking published modules out of their usual environment.