At least in japanese gaming, japanese-Wizardry’s dog kobolds are bound to be hugely influential. That being said I’m rather intrigued to see most of the microcomputer versions of the first game had kobolds that look more like frogs.
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Draconians look like this
And they are piece of shit bastards!! So they deserve whatever they get!!!
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kobolds were reptilian as fuck in 3e i think this is a fair read of them
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Tony Diterlizzi ruled. I thought it was so classy when he incorporated a monster from an Albrecht Durher engraving into one of his pieces in the Planeswalkers Handbook.
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Following up on this, I ultimately committed to “Sentinel Comics: The Roleplaying Game” as the system. I’m glad I did, I enjoyed it a lot.
I created a one-shot with two groups - one in-person with @gary, another via Discord with some friends in Cali. Both groups had different approaches to a lot of the challenges in the scenario, which highlighted for me how collaborative this thing can be. It’s really driven by a creative “negotiation” between player and GM.
The scenario I made started with a “plastic tide” of doll parts overtaking streets in the city, with the team fighting a raggedy-Ann doll-type villain. They then pushed it back into a big dollhouse that had manifested in the city, where they entered the house and explored a sort of domestic bliss realm created by a sleeping girl with dream manifestation powers. Also dropped in some multiverse stuff because I love the idea of walking through windows and mirrors, Labyrinth-style.
Combat is very cool, as you’d hope for a comic book-themed game system. The game mechanically depends on teamwork, with one player setting up buffs or environmental effects for their teammates to capitalize on. I had one player who was a sentient street - a coal miner who was merged into the Earth by his company’s irresponsible technology use - and he would do things like quake the road to debuff enemies, or corral them into situations where they could all be hit at once, and one hero would take the attack while another would pull civilians from cars and whatnot. Very fun.
Another aspect of this I really enjoyed was that the villains are built like the heroes are, so your villain team will perform the same setups and knockdowns as the heroes. Having heroes thwarting villains’ in the thick of it is great. Somewhat regrettably, I made a villain team of multiverse rats called the Scavengers that both groups ended up befriending rather than fighting, which was a bit of a mistake on my part. If you end up GMing a game like this, really do try to get a full villain team to fight the hero team, even if it’s just for a turn or two. It’s a big part of the appeal of this system.
Outside of combat, it’s light, maybe too much so - you can essentially just Overcome “do a thing”, Montage (a sort of short rest), or Boost/Hinder:
As a result, most of the actions my players took out-of-combat, during exploration of the dollhouse, where Overcome actions. In essence, when you build your character, your origin, method of powers, and personality results in a set of things you are good at or knowledgeable about (i.e. Technology, Punching, Shapeshifting). When you take the Overcome action to Do The Thing, you look at your set of characteristics (Powers and Qualities) and describe how you could use that to Do The Thing somehow. If you can make that justification, you can use those better die. If not, you use the default die. It lends well to creative explainations of how players try to solve problems, which I enjoyed a lot.
So yeah, good system, we had fun. If I had any gripes, it’s that it takes a lot of work to come up with an encounter, since you have to make entire-ass teams.
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is this the one that’s a spinoff of that card game? Is it a wholly original system or is it derived from anything like Fate or cortex plus?
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It is indeed a spinoff of that card game (I haven’t tried it myself, the art was just too off-putting), but as far as I can tell, this is an original system.
I forgot to mention one thing I realized, which the book does a good job of reminding you of: Adventures should be built like a comic book. Envisioning your session in comic book form actually helps a lot, since you realize how much plot development in comics happens DURING combat. In essence, because comics are often one big fight, or a series of fights broken up slightly, you learn to do story work within the fights. It’s pretty cool as a GM storytelling challenge.
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Few more things on Sentinels:
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Combat encounters can involve Minions and Lieutenants, who are enemies that will either attack or sometimes do a basic action (like menace civilians). These are represented by individual die - say, a d8 for the minion, and a d12 for the lieutenants. When attacked, you cannot miss (there is no miss mechanic), and you roll your damage. For lieutenants, they then rolls themselves, in defense, and if they’re below the attack number, they’re demoted to a lower die. If they exceed the number, they’re fine. For minions, if they exceed, they’re demoted, and if they fail, they die immediately.
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Turn order is pretty fun. The GM decides who goes first, then from there, each player decides who follows them. That can be ally or enemy. You might want to make the enemy trigger their action first, so your ally can respond in some way when an enemy is out of fellow enemies to elect, and is forced to select the ally next. The last person in a round cannot choose themselves to go next.
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Rounds conclude with an “environment action”, in my case, the plastic tide would spread further and terrorize civilians, and also an incrementing up of the Scene Tracker, which is a tracker that progresses upwards from a Green zone to a Yellow zone, and ultimately a Red zone. When you reach the Yellow or Red zone, new powers unlock, and you can use better die for your third roll. This fits with the way comic books with, with the escalation of the battle. I loved this bit, the built-in escalation. It is also possible for heroes and villains to reach Yellow or Red before the tracker, if their HP drops low enough.
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There is no map in combat, only “Zones”. So in the example of the battle against the plastic tide, Zone 1 was the street, Zone 2 was inside a department store, and Zone 3 was on the roof of the building. Certain abilities would allow you to traverse or teleport between zones.
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Failing, or getting a mixed success on a role, results in “Minor Twists” and “Major Twists”, which again should be determined by the “what would happen in the comic book” mindset. These are negotiated between player and GM, ideally having some consequence or challenge befall them that is in-character, or in-theme for their character. Mechanically, this would make them lose access to an ability, sacrifice something in-game, get hindered, or lose health.
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This guy’s video really did a nice job succinctly explaining the entire system (it’s where I got those reference cards in the o.g. post):
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made the mistake of reading world of dungeons and i felt The Itch
i don’t really have the energy or brain capacity to go deep on this hobby anymore though, and open-ended games (e.g. apocalypse world) were giving me too much performance anxiety the last time i tried. i think my ideal at this point would be to run some kind of one-shot dungeon crawl with open-ended hazards, setpiece encounters (even basic stuff like “bats attack you on a rickety bridge”), weird treasure that requires creativity to be useful, and minimal effort required on my part because i really burned myself out on this stuff. is there, like, a dungeon module or something i could order off itch or drivethru or whatever that would fit the bill. i don’t care what system it pretends to be for id just convert it to wod or blackhack or whatever. you could even just hand me some rooms you like and that would be a solid start for me frankensteining something together
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Surely someone has done an exquisite corpse dungeon right? Would we have enough takers here?
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Tomb of Exquisite Corpses…
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https://watabou.github.io/one-page-dungeon/
just keep reloading until you get the kind of dungeon you want, swap out any details that don’t work for you
Edit: if you want something more bespoke, less procgen, just browse through one page dungeons on reddit until you see something you like. I ran a session last night that was a thorough rewrite/minor redesign of 1pd I got off of reddit the same day
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In general, I believe that any prep you don’t enjoy doing is time wasted, so it is always worth taking shortcuts the moment you are bored or frustrated by the process
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thanks for reminding me 1pd exists, that’s a start i can probably work with
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what are some good sports for dwarves
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caber tossing, rugby, baseball but with a pickaxe instead of a bat and a big rock instead of a ball
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oil wrestling, gateball, boulder shotput, dwarven gymkata
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help i came up with too much lore about dwarves (dwarflore)
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No such thing, friend
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