Living in the NW coast of Tasmania you are kind of limited with what to do with Free RPG Day. Not to mention the fact that I work all day Saturdays too puts a real cramp on my possibilities. The one positive is that I work at a service station on Saturday and therefore I can have people come and visit me. As I am wading my way through 13th Age I thought I would have my mate +scott desmond in at some stage and we would work on a character.
I spoke with Scott about the system and asked him if he would give it a try as it has intrigued me a great deal. He agreed and so I printed out the character sheet and busily read the rest of the classes. I have to say that out of the classes, the Sorcerer is my absolutely favourite class. It is exceptionally well put together and I think that this should be the way a sorcerer is modelled in nearly every game. They are similar to wild mages from AD&D making their magic interesting and unpredictable. It is a great way to build colour and story into the game so great work again 13th Age! The more that I read this system the more I like it.
Take for example the Wizard class and the talent of Vance’s Polysyllabic Verbalizations. That is such a great talent. For those of you who aren’t in the know, that talent gets the player to rename their spells in complex and verbally challenging ways. What do they get in return? Well, the GM comes up with some way that the spell reveals something or adds something to the story in an unexpected way. For example, if I had a Wizard with this talent and I renamed Fireball to Chinlax’s concussive eruption of plasma the GM might rule that the spell explodes burning the Chimera I am fighting as well as some of the outer flames get sucked through the seams of a secret door set in the ceiling that I was previously unaware of…
Story, story, story and it is all there in this d20 game. I am getting quite excited about playing it now. It is such a shift of focus from the normal d20 games I have played. The spell system in it is really well done and easily manageable. Feats are handled brilliantly as are the the talents. I can even see the DnD 4e influences in there but rather than that influence turning it into a board game it makes it a much better RPG.
But I gush. So, also on my Free RPG day I have spent some time writing out an encounter or two for the module into Realm Works and looking over a rough draft of the Temple map that is getting drawn. This module is coming along really nicely though much slower than I had originally hoped for. Of course, I only have Realm Works to blame for this delay as it has really shown me a lot more material that I should include in the module to make it 100% better than it was when I first thought it was ready to go!
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| The state of the character generator at an early stage on free RPG day |
Once I was all done there I then felt the need to zone out a little and to me that means doing some programming. I fired up my integrated development environment and found my Classic Traveller Character Generator there. I have actually done all the rules programming that I needed to do and it has sat dormant for a long time in that state so I started to work on the Graphical User Interface for the program so I can finally bring all the pieces together. It has been a long time coming but it is a fun process and I want it done so I can make up some new characters with it for my game on Wednesday.
So my free RPG day did not actually contain any role playing per se but I was as busy as I could be around the hobby. I know that when this post comes out those of you in the USA will still be in the midst of free RPG day so I hope you are having a ball. Let me know in the comments what you got up to. Keep rolling!