HE LIVES! – 13th Age

It's been a while! Let's get back into gear with a relatively easy one. Not being very familiar with how it plays, there are two features I've noticed thus far that set 13th Age apart from other d20 titles, and they're both narrative. Hooray!

Sponsored Review – Monster Castle by Sixjoy

Today, we’re taking a brief break from the sweep of history in the World of Darkness to visit a vastly different genre that’s nonetheless near and dear to my pocket: mobile strategy games. Suffice it to say that the story of Duayet and her role in the war with Set is far from over.

Starting up my prerelease build of Sixjoy’s free-to-play Android strategy game Monster Castle, I was greeted by a colorful loading screen – a neat accelerometer-enabled 3D scene that lets us peek over the shoulder of a hero to see a chaotic (if cute) battle. It looks like the monsters are winning, pushing the human forces back from what I suspect is the titular Monster Castle. The lack of a built-in mute button here is a bit of an oversight, but once the patch downloaded, it’s off to the races.

So far, so good.

Pyramid Scheme Episode 1 – Mummy 2nd Edition

Apologies for my extended absence – I got bogged down in AMP: Year One and never recovered. Oh well!

So let's put supers aside for a while and take a look at some White Wolf / Onyx Path games – notably anything involving mummies. We'll take a look at them in chronological order:


Classic World of Darkness
Mummy 2nd Edition (1997)
Mummy: The Resurrection (2001)

New World of Darkness
Promethean: The Created (2006)
Mummy: The Curse (2012)

Mummy 2nd Edition is an interesting book, not the least of which because the metaplot draws together no fewer than three product lines. The war between Osiris and Set is largely vampiric in nature – over the course of his lifetime, Osiris:

• Is Embraced as a vampire, creating a cult of ghouls
• Suffers True Death...
• But somehow gets better, thanks to Anubis
• ...who helps him master the Beast, effectively reaching Golconda in the afterlife
• ...and teaches him magical secrets that, among other things, help Isis and Nephthys Awaken (Mage: the Ascension)
• All the while, fighting alongside the Mokolé and Bubastis Changing Breeds, as well as the Silent Striders werewolves (Werewolf: the Apocalypse)
• And technically, all mummies spend time as incorporeal Wraiths before returning to the mortal realm (Wraith: the Oblivion)

It's busy, but it's flavorful, and the explicit melding of multiple mythoi is far less cautious than many other corebooks in the Classic World of Darkness. It's far from the "toolbox" philosophy that Onyx Path is moving towards these days, but it's a start, and I like it.

So who is this particular mummy?

Let's ask!

Creating Supers Characters – Villains and Vigilantes

Having noted that designer Jeff Grubb cited Villains and Vigilantes as one of Marvel Super Heroes' contemporaries, I took a look in my Drivethru library and – lo and behold – discovered I owned the cleaned up version of the 1982 original. Let's take it for a spin!

Creating Supers Characters – Marvel Super Heroes (FASERIP)

Before I get started, I should mention that Truth & Justice does include a few tables to roll up random characters and provide inspiration, and they're totally fine.

But when it comes to truly gonzo random character generation, nothing really approaches the psychotic variety and dubious playability of characters that the classic Marvel Super Heroes Advanced Set spits out, particularly when the Ultimate Powers Book is brought into the equation. And though it's entirely possible to leave this up to a program, I'm going to run it all manually.

Creating Supers Characters - Truth & Justice

There are a lot of supers tabletop RPGs out there, and there's a pretty wide gulf between narrativist and simulationist takes on the genre. Although I've purchased many a crunchy supers game -- I'm looking at two editions of you, Mutants and Masterminds -- I find myself put off by the massive point buy systems that generally underlie them, and the ludicrous variety of abilities, modifiers, and available combat actions that result. That said, I think it might be instructive to play around on the spectrum. So let's take a look at one of the least crunchy supers games I know: Atomic Sock Monkey Press' Truth & Justice.

Character Creation

I think it ought to be considered axiomatic that character creation be exciting. I've noticed an increase in collaborative character creation systems of late, and that's deeply encouraging -- but along those same lines, I think it should also be fun (and possible) to roll up a character on your own. Being able to start playing on day 1 with a bit of not-particularly-guided homework under one's belt is also fairly exciting.

So I'll be taking a look at my terrifyingly vast collection of tabletop RPGs and going as far as I can as quickly as I can. Let's go!