An Example Crew

To follow up on yesterday's post about character generation in Any Planet Is Earth, I rolled against some tables tonight to generate a sample crew of five people for play following their respective careers. I rolled 100% randomly here, not picking services for any characters, whether initial or follow-up.

Pardon my coffee table (janky).

Any Planet Is Earth: Character Generation

After establishing intitial concept for Any Planet Is Earth, I've put together the service tables for terms served by players during character generation. You'll either roll for or select your starting service, roll 2d6 against the corresponding table, then either accrue skills or bonuses or roll against subtables for events, mishaps, and boons. In this manner I am scraping my favorite bits from the expanded Mongoose Traveller 2 career tables and stripping them of their context, allowing for players to come up with the context for their results or with help from the referee. This provides some easy worldbuilding while also setting up your character quickly with a lot of variablility.

Any Planet Is Earth: Core Rules Draft

"Any planet is 'Earth' to those who live on it." 

Isaac Asimov, Pebble in the Sky

I thought I wanted to set out to make a fantasy adventure game of my own design. I was wrong. I already held Into the Odd and (the tragically lesser known) MoldHammer up as near-perfect designs (the former with a bit more crunch than the latter [which sounds amusingly impossible]). After digging into the Electric Bastionland rules (not to mention already enjoying Mausritter, Maze Rats, and other venerable off-Odd derivative hacks), I realized that there is no fantasy design space I really care to fill. I will 100% always play or run or hack any title from that family of games.

So with few other strong contenders for genre, I turn to science fiction, which I've really always admired reading and exploring far more than fantasy literature and games of all stripes. Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Jack Vance, Orson Scott Card, and William Gibson took up (and still take up) a great deal of my reading budget, among other similar contemporaries. 

The Sci-Fi Encounter Die

I really enjoy hard-going-on-harder science fiction. Star Wars and general science fantasy/space opera are wonderful, but I prefer the Robert Heinlein/Issac Asimov variety the best. I've been reading it for far longer than I ever read Tolkien, Vance, or LeGuin. I find myself in the thick of the OSR fantasy side of things if for no other reason than the ubiquity of dirty goblins in the world. This is not a bad thing. In fact, it is readily enjoyable. That said, after reading through The Traveller Book several times after grabbing it in POD format, I realize that really and truly I am a sci-fan before I'm a fantasy fan. It's not really a "this or that" situation, of course, but all that is to say that I have spent a lot of time trying to come up with a "perfect" fantasy rule set for my use, only to find that in all honesty, Mausritter beat me to it. Seriously, every riff on modern "old school" fantasy I had brewing in my brain has been done already and better by Isaac Williams. Go download his game and enjoy--it's Into the Odd taken to the Platonic Ideal of OSR adventure.

The illustrious A. Shipwright.

Three Alt-Mesozoic Fantasy Dinosaur Archetypes

For this year’s bonus Secret Jackalope, I present Lexi with dinosaurs from a different, fantastical Mesozoic era.

AD&D Allosaurus, looking a bit bent.

Dinosaurs, as we know of them on earth, were once the apex examples of both predator and prey alike. The various eras of natural prehistory featured a menagerie of amazing creatures, but only the Mesozoic Era provided us with dinos, and we got zounds of them. Traditional dinosaurs have shown up in RPGs since their inception, with a number of supplements, adventures, locales, bestiaries, and whole campaign settings devoted to them or highlighting them prominently.

Six Mighty Boosh Backgrounds for Troika!

Open your mind. Let us begin our quest to find the new sound. Come with us now, on a journey though time and space...

Back in my first-ever post I mentioned my firm belief that The Mighty Boosh takes place in the Troika! setting. Consequently I present you with six backgrounds touching on both common and unique Boosh flavors. Were I more ambitious than I actually am, I'd promise you thirty more backgrounds to make a proper d66 table. I might.

Runes and Rune Words

Diablo II is a masterpiece. 

I'm not much for "gearporn," and in fact, I mostly hate that wretched term. That said, if one game got the idea of nigh-limitless equipment options right, it was Diablo II. The vanilla game was stacked with all sorts of axes, boots, wands, gems, helms, belts, and potions... but when the expansion, Lord of Destruction, was released along with some battle.net patches, the scope of the game's equipment list became truly staggering. I won't go into undue detail here, but one item type introduced in the expansion content is the focus of this post: runes.