#Savage Worlds Adventure Edition

[krinsbez]

A TTRPG Question

For lore/fluff purposes, if I were to purchase all Deadlands SWADE stuff, would there still be value in also purchasing assorted Deadlands Classic Sourcebooks?

If so, which?

[basilhomebrews]

Heyo and a-hello, my name is Basil and you're watching the- *LOUD INCORRECT BUZZER*

In all seriousness, I've not had much creative energy to really homebrew anything for a while now (i.e. me and that friend of mine never really finished our entry for the Fabula Ultima game jam thing we joined, which kinda bummed me out), due to irl stuff taking up a lot of my time. So, instead of agonizing over making and balancing homebrew mechanics for TTRPGs, I've decided to just *play* TTRPGs! (what a concept, amirite)

Specifically, me and a couple irl friends are gonna try and play oneshots using a bunch of different systems and record our thoughts about them, which I will share with y'all. It's not gonna be anything scientific or follow super rigid review guidelines, it's just gonna be a measure of how much we enjoyed the system, how easy the system was to learn/play, and the specific things we liked and disliked about the system. This post'll be the first one in the series, which I am calling-

Givin' it a (One)Shot: Savage Worlds Adventure Edition

Resources Used: Savage Worlds: Adventure Edition core rulebook, Official SWADE Character Sheet, SWADE Science Fiction Companion

TL;DR

Fun We Had: 3.6/5

Ease-of-Learning*: 2.8/5

   *We are of average intelligence and have semi-busy schedules

Ease-of-Use (Actual Play): 3/5

Session 0 Necessity for Longer Play: 4.3/5

Would recommend for groups with 1-2+ years of experience playing crunchy/semi-crunchy systems looking to branch out to new “medium crunch” systems, would not recommend to groups with less experience looking for something quick to pick up and play, unless they really take the time to read through the rules and pick what works for them. For oneshots, either ask the players to make their characters ahead of time or make premades.

In-depth stuff under the cut:

Adventure: Xenos Misadventures on the ISF Galway (Unofficial/I made it the fuck up)

Session Time: Roughly 4 hours, with around an hour dedicated to creating characters for half the party (2 people)

Summary: The party is composed of the surviving crew on the ISF Galway, a Peregrine-class transport ship tasked with carrying refugees and prisoners from one star system to another. Halfway to their destination, they collided with a mysterious asteroid that flew under all their detection systems. Upon closer inspection by everyone higher up on the authority ladder, Xenos (Legally Distinct Aliens) burst out and ravaged the ISF Galway’s crew. The party holed themselves up in the cockpit until the ship grew quiet once more before trying to escape, or worse yet, to fight back. 

Cast of Characters:

Delusional Sanitation Officer turned “Captain”, armed with pilfered Sec Officer armor and a service pistol;

2,500 kg (important [not]) Rynocerant (intelligent rhino race) ship security officer with a grudge against one of the Polarian (intelligent polar bear race) prisoners being transported;

Private security android employed by Unnamed MegaCorp to guard corporate interests (read: POWs for experimentation) on the Galway; and

A straight up elf wizard. Stowaway from one of the Galway’s pit stops, is just a straight up space elf wizard.

All Rank 0 Characters using mostly premade races (Rynocerant is custom, made before the session) following the flowchart detailed in the Character Creation Summary of the core rulebook.

Expectation: Stealth-focused session owing to the fact that there are 3 male juvenile Xenos and 1 queen on the ship. More about navigating through the ship and collecting info and parts necessary to escape while avoiding detection or running away from the Xenos.

Reality: PCs in Savage Worlds can hit hard, huh. They immediately took down one juvenile out of combat owing to a success with raises, and were able to dispatch the other two with only the space elf sustaining a Wound. They escaped pretty handily, getting in the escape pods just before the queen managed to get her claws on them.

Overall a fun experience, though whether that was because of the system or because we were friends bouncing off of each other’s energies, that remains a bit muddled. We had basically 1 1/2 combat encounters (the other one was resolved so quickly that it was barely a combat scenario), and the rest of the session was mostly the usual player-GM back-and-forth fare.

Highlights:

The rynocerant smashing the cockpit doors open so hard that it sent a juvenile xenos careening down the stairs, which the "captain" took credit for;

The "captain" fumbling his revolver shots so bad that it ruptured a fuel tank for one of the ship's Heavy-Duty Cleaning Armaments (flamethrower), filling the hallway with gas;

The space elf taking one Wound and deciding "fuck that" and casting Bolt straight at one xenos so good that it just died on impact;

Said elf asking me if he could choose what element Bolt can take since the book doesn't specify, then subsequently igniting all the gas in the hallway to absolutely destroy the last juvenile;

The rynocerant somehow tanking the above explosion perfectly, no Shaken or nothing;

[EXTREME RYNOCERANT ON POLAR BEAR VIOLENCE]

The pros, cons, and opinions that came up before, during, and after the session:

Pros:

Playing card initiative is fun. The randomness it provides each round is a breath of fresh air for our group, coming from systems with fixed initiative or ones where PCs and enemies alternate taking turns. Also, it’s just cool to deal out cards for initiative.

Bennies are fun to spend and give. As a metacurrency, they can do a lot: my players mostly used them for rerolls and Soaking, but I like that you can spend them to influence the story, after some hopefully constructive back and forth between the players and the GM. Giving them felt intuitive for me, as I like rewarding players with stuff when they play their characters accurately or advance the story in interesting ways.

Wild Die is useful, helps mitigate failure due to bad stats; the Wild Die is a useful representation of how the players (and some NPCs) are big name characters in the narrative, how they are generally more important and more likely to succeed than other characters. Really helps to ease the chance of failure when a player tries something they’re bad at it, makes it feel like they’re more competent than the setting’s average Joe.

Rolls exploding (Aces) is fun for players and GMs. Not much else to say about this, exploding dice is just a fun mechanic to have for most games that use dice.

Raises are an engaging and simple mechanic to play out higher degrees of success; in my experience, I like giving control to players when they succeed more than normal, so raises let me explicitly do that here. Whenever a player got a raise, I gave the floor to them to dictate what additional effect happens on their success, after a bit of back and forth to make sure that it makes sense and it’s not too much.

Cons:

Character creation is crunchy to the point of being a bit confusing. Lots of points to move around, but the allocation system was mostly intuitive save for when a skill went above the soft limit set by its corresponding Attribute. We had to double check our math a few times, just to be sure. This would probably be solved if we had the system more internalized, had more sessions under our belt, but otherwise it seems like a lot to consider when approaching it at an entry-level of familiarity. Might have also been easier if the character sheet listed all the skills instead of just the core ones, and what attributes they were tied to (i.e. Athletics (AGI) or something similar), so that players can easily reference what they might need to pump to get past that soft limit.

Adding to the above, picking out Hindrances especially (and consequently, Edges) at character creation proved to be tedious or an exercise in min-maxxing. I would suggest highlighting the optional nature of the Hindrances rule; make sure players know that you are allowed to take up to four points of Hindrance for the benefits, and that taking none, more , or less is a valid option. Not every negative character trait needs to be codified into a game mechanic, and good roleplaying should still be rewarded with things like Bennies or contextual advantages, regardless of what you've got written down on your character sheet.

Book layout could be better: there’s a decent amount of going back and forth across the rules, and there’s some important things that are hidden or in small text. It helps that page numbers are clickable, but it still definitely feels like you benefit more from having the physical book on you with bookmarks since you might need to go back and forth.

The core rulebook seems really interested in WW2/modern era equipment, to the point where the options for medieval or futuristic settings are dwarfed by the wealth of options available to modern gear. I know that other genre-specific rulebooks exist, but if you tout yourself as a system that can handle a lot of genres, it seems reasonable to expect equal arsenals between genres. Could possibly be fixed by giving a quick rundown of how to make your own gear for different time periods using the options in the core rulebook as examples.

Opinions:

One of the players say that SWADE’s brand of setting agnosticism feels confused, at least for the core rulebook; they say that reading through the core rulebook gave them the impression that it was more of a grocery shelf of mechanics that let you pick and choose what you want to play with instead of a cohesive system that has no fixed setting. Another player agrees with this, calls it too broad; there’s a wealth of options in the core rulebook that newer players might think is fair game for any campaign, instead of an option that may or may not be allowed depending on the group.

A different player says that SWADE does not feel beginner friendly; while the core resolution mechanic is simple, getting to what Trait you need to apply can be tedious. Going through all the skills and remembering what each one does/where it applies can also be a hassle for new-to-semi-experienced players alike, considering how many there are and the overlap that they have (riding, driving, boating, and piloting are distinct skills which in their opinion seems to chase realism too hard).

Same player as above said that Hindrances specifically feel like an unwelcome crinkle; they complained that Hindrances feel like an unnecessary codification of character traits you would probably already have just making your character, and that you can easily min-maxx your way into getting max Hindrance Points for Edges and other benefits.

Personal opinion, what is up with the Obese and Yellow Hindrances. They gave me and another player the ick because: 

Obese seems like a pretty fatphobic Hindrance. The flavor text doesn’t even seem like it’s talking about obesity, just being large and clumsy in general; 

Yellow is a very outdated word for someone being very fearful, and with the book’s obsession with WW2, might be interpreted otherwise; and

There are definitely better names for them out there, like Bulky or Oversized for Obesity and Cowardly or Craven for Yellow.

In conclusion, SWADE embodies the system’s tag line of “Fast! Furious! Fun!” ok enough; it’s easy to pick up and play if you’re more familiar with TTRPGs in general, and it provides a bunch of tools to make game time dynamic and pulpy,  but getting there can be a slog; character creation can be hard to parse through if you don’t have the patience or experience with crunchier systems, and the skills list can be a bit daunting if you don’t familiarize yourself with it ahead of time. 

Highly suggest taking the time to sit down and give the rules a thorough read through, take notes if that’s how you operate, before running or playing this system. For GMs, especially those running this for the first time, I would suggest drip feeding the various mechanics found in the Situational Rules section to your players slowly/as they become relevant; there’s a lot of additional stuff in this section that may or may not come up, and you would be saving yourself a lot of hassle if you just kept bookmarks (for physical copies) or have the pdf handy to reference each one as you see fit instead of familiarizing yourself with all of them ahead of time.

That's all from us, hope this was useful/fun to read through. Til next time, space cowboy~

[garbodude]

I’m running what is, hopefully, the finale of the ‘Jailbreak’ episode of ‘The Midnight Crew’ this weekend! Our party, who I’ll describe later, are villains of ‘The Weird Ward’ setting, working under a master thief named Q to steal things his newfound form no longer can manage ( he’s been turned into a yucky little duck).

The party in question, consisting of Demo Dutch ( well meaning affable oaf with a ‘hulk’ style rage mode), Lobo (Italian assassin who can command and transform into dogs), Pipedream (my brother, a curmudgeonly lunk who can transform into living metal), Toolkit (jaded iconoclast technopath), Mojito (friendly barkeep who can break down his body into lengths of prehensile sinew, with limited shapeshifting ability), and The Breeze (survivor of The Battle of Blair Mountain, now an invisible saboteur extraordinaire), have been tasked by their mallard majordomo to break somebody out of prison.

The who? The infamous living biohazard Doctor Alchemy, who can transmogrify the chemical makeup of anything by touch alone. The prison? ‘The Brig’, a mechanical Alcatraz afloat in the middle of Lake Michigan, staffed by the Bureau against Unknown Relativistic Phenomena, guarded by a quartet of Edisonian Iron Men, and surrounded by a perpetual blizzard. Our Midnight Crew has made it into the prison proper, but can they keep up their charade as agents of B. U. R. P. to get to Dr. Alchemy? Does he even want to be broken out? What are Q’s motives, really?

All these questions will be answered in this upcoming episode of The Midnight Crew!

[crowcollectorarts]

crazy to find out something is up with your friend only from the party photos

[bearnadette]

i updated my savage worlds rpg character sheet lol. i have a print friendly one from last year, and a digital friendly form fillable one i made today. <3

[empire-of-thieves]

Starbuck Avenger, Good at a Bunch of Stuff

I wanted to rap about my post-apocalyptic super character, Starbuck Avenger, who I have been playing for almost 2 years twice a month. The campaign is a Savage Worlds Adventure Edition (SWADE) post-apocalyptic setting in rural Missouri along the Mississippi River. He's got 34 advances so he's an absurd level of Legendary.

Attributes: Agility d12, Smarts d12, Spirit d6, Strength d10, Vigor d12

Skills: Boating d8, Electronics d8, Fighting d12, Notice d12+1, Persuasion d6, Repair d12+2, Shooting d12, Stealth d10, Survival d8 (among others)

Edges: Dodge, Jack-of-all-Trades, MacGyver, Mechanically Inclined, Quick, Rapid Fire, Scrounger, Steady Hands, Weapon Master

Hindrances: Loyal, Vengeful

Pace 6, Parry 9, Toughness 8 (12 with armor!)

Starbuck is first and foremost a weaponsmith, having forged his own armor (+4) as well as his greataxe ("Excalibur", +1 to hit and damage, AP 2, no penalty to Parry) among other projects.

His favorite toy is a Blaster Rifle that he successfully hacked, and he recently used it in a fight against mounted bandits, taking down 8 bandits and 6 horses.

His side project is a speedboat, Avenger-1. It has a best quality large outboard motor, a ham radio, and a trolling motor that he modified to be extra stealthy. He has a vehicle workshop in an old gardening shed. There are a couple of busted jet skis, a big lawnmower, a golf cart, and a few other projects.

Starbuck is the party's backup Face, and with a d6 Persuasion he's barely competent at it. However, he's twice used Jack-of-All-Trades to learn a language really fast. He's also tough enough to work "first contact" without backup.

Finally, I really like the Midjourney-created picture of Starbuck, other than the mangled hand. It really evokes the feel of the guy.

[dungeonsandkobolds]

Spooky season, you know what that means!

Figuring out wtf to do for my annual halloween one-shot this year. All I have decided is that it will be run in SWADE so throw your ideas at me

[legionofmyth]

Savage Worlds Adventure Edition

🔥⚔️ Dive into endless adventures with Savage Worlds Adventure Edition by Pinnacle Entertainment Group! 🌟 Experience fast-paced action, versatile gameplay, and boundless storytelling possibilities. Perfect for any RPG enthusiast! 🎲🌍 👉 Check out the full overview now and unleash your imagination! #SavageWorlds #RPG #TabletopGaming #PinnacleEntertainment #RolePlayingGames #RPGCommunity #FastPacedAction #AdventureAwaits #GamingLife

Savage Worlds Adventure Edition by Pinnacle Entertainment Group What is it? Savage Worlds Adventure Edition (SWADE) Savage Worlds Adventure Edition (SWADE), published by Pinnacle Entertainment Group, is a versatile tabletop role-playing game system designed to handle a wide range of genres and settings, from fantasy and sci-fi to horror and pulp adventure. SWADE emphasizes fast, fun, and furious…

[prodigyduck]

Just finished this cover art -- inspired by a certain Larry Elmore piece -- for Fainting Goat Games and their new Pew! Pew! for Savage Worlds campaign setting.

This cover is exclusive to the KS campaign!

[metalgeologist]

Savage Worlds offers a similar set up with tracking Wealth (like how much currency you have) so I just adapted that to consumables. Way easier.

Friends, can I share one of my favourite bits of 5e homebrew?

This system (specifically the concept of a depletion die) has been a FANTASTIC addition to my campaigns, as it really breaks players out of that habit of hording consumable items and never using them for fear of needing them more at some point in the nebulous future.

You know what else this system is great for? ADVENTURING SUPPLIES. Now rather than expecting my party to go shopping and fiddle with small change and encumbrance, I just say they have a group "supply die" that's split across all their packs and baggage. How large is that supply die? Tally the group's collective strength bonus and compare it to the "average remaining uses" section of the chart. How much does it cost to resupply? There's a handy-dandy "cost" chart that you can just multiply by 10.

Rather than tracking rations, we just roll the supply die once at the end of each long rest. Whenever my party needs a random doodad that they that they could've picked up in town, they can roll the supply die and take it out of their bag, after that it's added to their permanent inventory until they lose it. Beasts of burden and carts

I've been looking for a system this elegant FOR YEARS and and finally I have it. Enjoy friends, let me know if you end up using it in your own campaigns.

[thydungeongal]

Just curious, do you know about any RPGs that use standard playing cards? I’m really curious how much it’s been done before and what types of games it’s in/what mechanics it appears with

A few odd the top of my head:

Savage Worlds uses a standard deck of playing cards for Initiative. The game is otherwise a fairly standard dice-based RPG but the use of playing cards for Initiative and the suggestion that players use poker chips as bennies sort of ties into it thematically. Jokers give special bonuses and allow characters to act whenever the fuck they want.

Castle Falkenstein uses cards for action resolution and in a neat twist players are dealt a hand of cards and they always get to choose which cards they play when an action mandates it.

Retrocausality is a really funny RPG about time travel in the style of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, and it opts to use playing cards in a pretty standard way, where each action that mandates it equals one draw of a card from a deck. But it adds a bit of variety by tying suits to the different types of time traveling abilities. Note, I am basing this off the first edition, the second edition might work differently. Hmmm, I should actually get that.

Also @ospreyonthemoon has an RPG that utilizes a deck of playing cards among other things. I can't find it right now though, it's somewhere on their page!

And I'm pretty certain that that's just scratching the surface.

[sleepyowlwrites]

writing prompts! cheshire cat quotes edition

from American McGee's Alice and Alice: Madness Returns

"I've heard self-relience is a virtue. Now, you've heard it."

"I suppose experience teaches best. Learn by doing and similar clichés have merit."

"Haste makes waste, so I rarely hurry."

"Reject only your ignorance and you may survive."

"A blunderbuss in the hands of a blockhead is a catastrophe waiting to happen."

"What resides beneath this betina of civility? Something wicked, I wager."

"For every task there's a proper tool, sometimes more than one."

"Those who say there's nothing like a nice cup of tea for calming the nerves never had real tea."

"How fine you look when dressed in rage!"

"Threats, promises, and good intentions don't amount to action."

"Every adventure requires a first step, trite, but true."

"When the remarkable turns bizarre, reason turns rancid."

"What is sought is most often found, if it is truly sought."

"Only a few find the way, some don't recognize it when they do, some don't ever want to."

"There's an ugly name for those who do things the hard way."

"Only the foolish believe suffering is just wages for being different. Only the savage regard the endurance of pain as the measure of worth. Only the insane equate pain with success."

"The steps to enlightenment brighten the way, but the steps are steep. Take them one at a time."

"Seeking refuge from the wicked world? Perhaps things only look like they've gone to hell."

"Seek and ye shall find, they say, but they don't say what you'll find."

"A reflection sometimes exposes more reality than the object it echoes."

"Back to admire your handiwork? Returning to the scene of the crime."

"Memories define our lives, and they renew us. Collect them, nurture them. An experience forgotten never was."

"Are you feigning ineptitude or is your mind in a muddle?"

"Some obstacles are overcome with the mind, some, with our heart."

"Different denotes neither bad nor good but it certainly means not the same."

[ttrpgcafe]

Heya! TTRPG trick or treat, please! 🎃👻

This one's got a backstory, so stick with me.

When I first got into TTRPGs, I learned about the big 6: D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, Cyberpunk, WoD, and Shadowrun. Of those, I've still, to this day, only played 5, and Shadowrun has remained the odd man out, despite having probably my favorite setting of all of them after Pathfinder. Part of this is its reputation for being a really crunchy game, keeping me from getting players, and part of it was that it's a very crunchy game that explains its rules SO POORLY (in recent editions at least, I'm told 3rd is the best in this department) that I couldn't even really convince my friends to get over the hump because it's hard for ME to grok the rules.

For well over a decade, Shadowrun has been my white whale, always on my shelf, never my table. So I did what any other well meaning TTRPG player does when they have a setting they like but a system for that setting they hate: I looked at every hack on the planet for every other system.

So here's your treat: every Shadowrun hack I've found!

Up first, Runners in the Shadows by Mark Cleveland:

This is a Forged in the Dark hack for the Shadowrun setting that is probably one of the better ones for emulating the "crew going on heists and doing cool shit" vibes that Shadowrun tries really hard to say is its core. I'm a sucker for FitD games in general, I think the system is *so* elegant, and I struggle to find a system more suited for the setting (SR's own rules included) than Blades, so this one has to go at the top.

With that said, there are still plenty more!

I'm going to give 2 PbtA games a shout out here, the first I've played, the second I haven't, but have heard plenty about.

Up first: City of Mist!

"But that's not a shadowrun hack!" I hear you saying behind your screen, and you're almost right, it technically isn't, BUT it's asymptote certainly approaches shadowrun, for my math nerds out there. This is a game about the (literal) power of stories, about struggles against an unseen and unknowable force trying desperately to remove every semblance of magic from your life, and about the yearning to keep your mundane life despite, or maybe in spite of, your magical adventures. City of Mist proper is a fantastic gritty noir urban fantasy game that works wonderfully as the framework for an early 6th world setting with minor tweaks, but it's sequel: Metro Otherscape, leans into the Shadowrun of it all, adding a 3rd axis along which your character can struggle, being "noise". In Otherscape, you're balancing a mundane, magical, technological life, and trying not to let any of those three overwhelm your being. A lot of cyberpunk games try to say that cybernetics reduce your humanity in one way or another, but I think Otherscape does the best job at embodying that balance in a way that isn't deeply ableist in its messaging. It's ALSO the only PbtA game I actually LIKE.

Hot take: I can't stand Moves, they annoy me to no end, and needlessly complicate an otherwise brilliant system. I might make a follow up post if anyone wants to hear my deeply bad take, but for now, just know that I'm a ttrpg heretic, and we can move on.

Otherscape completely does away with moves, and instead just lets the MC and the players decide whatever is most relevant to the action being attempted! It solves almost every problem I've ever had with PbtA games, AND kicks ass as a shadowrun stand-in, so this also deserves a place at or near the top.

Second PbtA game: Shadowrun in The Sprawl. This one is a hack of The Sprawl, a PbtA cyberpunk game in its own right, SRiTS adds the setting and magic of SR to its formula, and that's all I know about either system, due to my aforementioned PbtA-phobia. I've included this one for thoroughness, not because I have any stake in it.

Most of the other hacks I've seen use generic systems like Fate, Savage World, Cypher system, Genesys, and a hero system hack I've heard a bit about but can't find anywhere. All of this is to say that there is a wealth of options for generic systems that try to emulate SR, and most of them are fine. The last game I'm going to talk about though uses its own system, its own setting, and manages to be completely, utterly unique while capturing the vibes of SR so well that I'm still a little in awe at how well it does all of the above. I'm also not 100% certain it's a particularly good game, but the fact that I'm unsure about it should tell you that it's definitely still better than SR proper, because I KNOW that system is bad.

Without further ado: NewEdo

NewEdo is fascinating to me in that it feels like the same jump from Shadowrun that 3rd edition D&D made from 2e, or even the same kind of jump from 3rd to 4th, where you can clearly see the spine of the game it's evolving, but almost every other part of the system has been changed and improved in new, interesting ways that can still be used to tell VERY similar stories, but has its own identity at the same time. I mentioned that City of Mist is Asymptotic to SR earlier, and I stand by that assessment, but I'd say that NewEdo is closer to a parallel line, or a tangent from SR's line, if we're using the same terminology. To get into the nitty gritty, NE uses a system the author describes as "Crunchy lite easily managed", which amounts to a priority system during character creation very similar to the one SR uses, but with each tier you can select having pretty impactful ramifications for your character going forward. The easiest example is the modifications priority, at its top tier, you basically make a mythical creature into robo cop for your character's ancestry, but at its absolute lowest tier, your body actively rejects any and all implants, such that your character will NEVER have implants. On the same note, cyberware is handled REALLY well, with your body only being able to handle so much at a time, but otherwise the only ramification is a "biofeedback" line on your fate card, which I'll get to right now!

Almost every option your character picks gets added to a little personalized random d100 table on your character sheet called the fate card. This includes your character's crit rate, the possibility of a deity intervening on your behalf, or the aforementioned biofeedback line, which briefly fucks you up as you cyberware malfunctions. You get new lines on your fate card through picking certain character options, making impactful decisions during the story, and otherwise fulfilling the express goals of your character. The entire system kind of hinges on the fate card as a mechanic, which is weird, because I don't think I super love it, as it adds additional rolling to an already pretty dice heavy system.

Which brings me to the dice! New edo uses a d10 as its primary die for dice pools when rolling your characteristics like strength, speed, etc, but the rest of the polyhedral family for your skills. (D20 excluded) The skill system is a little funky, but I like it. Basically, each skill has a rank, which indicates how many dice it has, but each rank is assigned a die, each having a different cost associated with it. So my swordsmanship could be rank 4, but what that really means is that I've got 1d6, 2d4, and a d8 that I get to add to my strength rolls every time I attack with a sword. As far as resolution, you total all of your dice together to try and hit a target number. I don't have the table handy, but it's something like 15 for a moderately challenging task, and up to 40 for a nearly impossible task. I dislike addition in this context because math at the table usually slows things down, but it looks like you're probably only rolling 2-5 dice at a time at the beginning, which isn't *that* bad.

You'll notice that the two major mechanics I've mentioned so far have received pretty luke-warm responses from me, and that sounds like I hate the system, but those aren't that makes me like (\love?) this system is the back end, the choices that happen during character creation, and the things that those choices let you do. Every skill is attached to feats that unlock at different skills, magic is a skill, and its feats unlock better relationships with the Kami in your repertoire (magic is up next, I promise) and your class (path, they call it) doubles as a way to tie your character to the world, with each being associated with an in world faction which gives your character an immediate stake in the world and their community. It's a lot, but it all comes together to make something greater than the sum of its parts.

The last thing I want to talk about is the magic system, because I found it deeply interesting, as it's one of the very few skill based magic systems I've interacted with, and one of my favorites on a narrative level. Instead of spells or spell schools, your character instead develops relationships with Kami, and each new "order" or "type" of Kami your character gets access to represents them finding out how to supplicate, make an offering, or otherwise convince a given Kami to do a certain effect. If you have a relationship with the fire Kami (that's plural, not singular), then your character has learned that their local fire Kami really like a certain type of hot bun, so they offer them that hot bun after a scene where they invoked those kami, to maintain their relationship. Mechanically, this works instantaneously, you simply make a roll on your "Shinpi" skill, invoke whatever "rote" you want to use, and the relationship building is left for the GM and player to work out at the table.

(That's the last I have to say on the game itself, but I would ask anyone who has read the game and is more intimately familiar with Japanese culture to tell me if the game feels respectful to that culture, because I truly don't know, and the book doesn't list any sensitivity consultants. The author is Canadian, but spent many years sailing to and from Japan as a professional sailor, so idk. )

I guess the moral to this post, if there is one, is to acknowledge when a system or setting has faults, but learn from them, and don't ignore the good or cool stuff that's there! It might inspire you to make some amazing shit like City of Mist, Metro Otherscape, or New Edo, all of which, their relationship to Shadowrun aside, are fantastic games in their own right! (NewEdo is still up in the air, but it has its teeth in me, and that has to count for something)

That ends my trick or treat, thanks for asking!

[tabletopgayventures]

My current list of Tabletop Roleplaying Games.

13th Age

1879

A Grim Hack

Aberrant 

Absolute Power

Abyss

Accursed 

After The War

Anima Beyond Fantasy

Animal Adventures:  The Faraway Sea

Apocalypse World

Arkham Horror The Roleplaying Game Starter Set

Ars Magica 4th Edition

Arzium

Avatar Legends Starter Set

Babes in the Wood

Badger + Coyote and their Daring Adventures 2E

BattleTech:  A Time of War

Beacon Tabletop RPG

Beam Saber

Blades in the Dark

Bulldogs

Bunkers & Badasses

Cairn

Call of Cthulhu

Candela Obscura

Cantrip

Cats of Cathulhu

Chaos 6010

Champions Now

Collateral Damage

Contagion 2e

Cortex Prime Game Handbook

Cosmic Patrol

Cowboy Bebop Roleplaying Game

Coyote and Crow

Cthulhu Awakens

Cthulhutech

Cypher System 

Daisy Chainsaw

Deathmatch Island

Defiant Role Playing Game

Denial & Yearning

Dialect

Dinocar

Dinosaur Princesses

Discworld RPG

Dragon Age Roleplaying Game

Dragonbane

Dread

Dream Machines

Dresden Files Accelerated RPG

Dungeon Crawl Classics

Dungeons and Dragons 3.5

Dungeons and Dragons 5e

Durance

Dwelling

Epitaph

Epoch

Essence 20

Fabula Ultima

Fantasy Age

Fate Core System

Fever Nights Role-Playing Game

Flabbergasted

Fragged Empire

Fratboys Vs

Girl By Moonlight

Glitter Hearts

Goblin Quest

Goblin Slayer TRPG

Gods of Metal:  Ragnarock

Hannukkah Goblins

Have Axe, Will Travel

Hellfrost

Here, There, Be Monsters!

Hero Kids Fantasy RPG

Heroes Against the Darkness

Hopes and Dreams

Hounds 

I’m the Badguy?!?

In Nomine

In the Ashes

Inevitable A Doomed Arthurian Western

Ink

Interns In The Dark

Into the Dungeon

Jiangshi:  Blood in the Banquet Hall

Jordenheim

Katana-Ra

Kids on Bikes 2nd Edition

Killshot an Assassin’s Journal

Konosuba TRPG

Leverage The Quickstart Job

Lilliputian Adventure on the Open Seas

Little Fears Nightmare Edition

Lost Roads

Marvel Multiverse RPG

Mermaid Adventures

Micro rpg book

Modern Age

Monster of the Week

Moonlight On Roseville Beach

Mork Borg

Motel Spooky Nine

Musketeers vs. Cthulhu

Mutant Year Zero

My Mother’s Kitchen

Necrobiotic

Never Going Home

Night Shift:  Veterans of the Supernatural Wars

Night Wolves

Numenera

Odyssey Black Tales

OneDice Pirates & Dragons

One More Quest

Ork! The RPG

Our Woodland Gods

Outcast Silver Raiders 

Outgunned

Over the Edge

Overlight

Pasion De Las Pasiones

Pathfinder 1st Edition

Pathfinder 2nd Edition

Pathfinder Savage Worlds

Perils & Princesses

Pirate Borg

Power Rangers RPG

Prism

Psychic Trash Detectives

Punk’s Been Dead Since ‘79

Queerz!

Raccoon Sky Pirates

Raven

Rebels of the Outlaw Wastes

Reign

Rhapsody of Blood

Rivers of London

Ryuu Tama natural fantasy role play

Samurai Goths of the Apocalypse

Scum and Villainy

Shadowrun 5e

Shadows Of The Past

Shield Maidens

Shiver

Someone in this Tavern is a fucking mimic!

Spell The RPG

Squeeze

Star Trek Adventures Captain’s Log 

Star Trek Adventures The Roleplaying Game

Star Trek Adventures Second Edition

Star Wars 

Starfinder 1st Edition

Starfinder 2nd Edition

Stoneburner

Syma

Tangled

Temples and Tombs

The Bleackness

The Dark West

The Dread of Night

The Play’s the Thing

The Quiet Year

The Revenant Society

The Void

The Watch

Thirsty Sword Lesbians

This Discord has Ghosts in It

This house is Fucking Haunted

Thousand Year Old Vampire

Tomorrow City

Troika!

Unisystem

Urban Decay

Utopia

Vaesen

Vagabond

Valiant Universe

Variations On Your Body

Venture and Dungeon

Waffles For Esther

Wanderhome

Warcraft The Roleplaying Game

Werewolf the Apocalypse

What Lurks Above

What Lurks Beneath

What Lurks Beyond

World Ending Game

Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast

Xianta Cyber Wuxia

Xoe Microplayer

Zweihander

I'll update this list as I get more. Feel free to send me ideas and also reblog this!

[crowcollectorarts]

simple lil line up of Wylie University’s newest weirdos

[shadowland]

Dennis Hopper's collection of owned and gifted books (a few are listed under the cut)

Islands in the Stream (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1970)

Magic (Delacorte Press, 1976)

Sneaky People (Simon and Schuster, 1975)

Strange Peaches (Harper's Magazine Press, 1972)

I Didn't Know I Would Live So Long (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973)

Baby Breakdown (The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1970)

37 (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970)

Presences: A Text for Marisol (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1970)

Little Prayers for Little Lips, The Book of Tao, The Bhagavadgita or The Song Divine, and Gems and Their Occult Power.

Lolita (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1955)

The Dramas of Kansas (John F. Higgins, 1915)

Joy of Cooking (The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1974) 

The Neurotic: His Inner and Outer Worlds (First edition, Citadel Press, 1954)

Out of My Mind: An Autobiography (Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1997)

The Savage Mind (University of Chicago Press, 1966)

Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors (J.B. Lippincott Company, 1974)

The Documents of 20th Century Art: Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp (Viking Press, 1971)

The Portable Dorothy Parker, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, I Ching, and How to Make Love to a Man.

John Steinbeck's East of Eden (Bantam, 1962)

James Dean: The Mutant King (Straight Arrow Books, 1974) by David Dalton

The Moviegoer (The Noonday Press, 1971)

 Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness (City Light Books, 1974)

Narcotics Nature's Dangerous Gifts (A Delta Book, 1973)

The Egyptian Book of the Dead (Dover Publications, 1967)

Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines (Oxford University Press, 1969)

Junky (Penguin Books, 1977) by William S. Burroughs

Weed: Adventures of a Dope Smuggler (Harper & Row, 1974)

Alcoholics Anonymous (Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, 1976)

Skrebneski Portraits - A Matter of Record, Sketchbooks of Paolo Soleri, and High Tide.

Raw Notes (The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 2005)

Le Corbusier (Heidi Weber, 1965)

Henry Moore in America (Praeger Publishers, 1973)

Claes Oldenburg (MIT Press, 2012)

Notebooks 1959 1971 (MIT Press, 1972)

A Day in the Country (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1985)

Album Celine (Gallimard, 1977)

A Selection of Fifity Works From the Collection of Robert C. Scull (Sotheby Parke Bernet, Inc. 1973)

Collage A Complete Guide for Artists (Watsun-Guptill Publications, 1970)

The Fifties Aspects of Painting in New York (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1980)

A Bottle of Notes and Some Voyages (Rizzoli International Publications, 1988)

All Color Book of Art Nouveau (Octopus Books, 1974)

A Colorslide Tour of The Louvre Paris (Panorama, 1960)

Dear Dead Days (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1959)

Woman (Aidan Ellis Publishing Limited, 1972)

The Arts and Man ( UNESCO, 1969)

Murals From the Han to the Tang (Foreign Languages Press, 1974)

A (Grove Press Inc., 1968)

Andy Warhol's Index Book (Random House, 1967)

Voices (A Big Table Book, 1969)

Another Country (A Dell Book, circa 1960s)

On The Road (Signet, circa 1980s)