Hey Man, well this is Babylon

I know I’ve mentioned this game a few times before, but I’d like to take some time out right now to put some spotlight on one of my small handful of ongoing projects. The campaign I call “Timiro Nights” started as an extended playtest for my now-abandoned KnownWorld Palladium RPG rules hack. After only three sessions, I had grown tired of the cumbersome mentality of the mechanical source material – no matter how you package or rearrange its numbers, the Palladium RPG system is just a sad sack of unbalanced hackneyed crap.

But damn me if I can’t shrug off my love for the core fantasy setting! It’s straight-up old school fantasy excitement, and my love for it is nigh boundless. The lands are rich with adventure, the gods come down and fuck with mortal pawns like it ain’t no thang, social conflict and strife are everywhere, and ancient beings of infinite malignant power lie slumbering beneath the world’s surface. It’s just plain rad, if you ask me. Of course it also helps that this was the setting I first ever “officially” tabletopp’d in, way back in my middle school years.

Anyway, long story short: KnownWorld was getting old, Palladium’s core system blows hobos, and we switched to Burning Wheel. We’ve had a much better time since then. So allow me to introduce our heroes! Read more

This past weekend, I finally made the official complete switch, fully translating the events, characters, and setting from my KnownWorld “Timiro Nights” campaign into the Burning Wheel game system. This particular campaign is relatively new (only a handful of sessions so far since inception), but it has been a consistent source of gaming joy for me since getting the group together. It’s been a while since I’ve had a group this responsive, and this eager to extend the game talk well into our downtime. I’m glad to say that so far, the conversion to the new rules has been a success. I’d like to take a few here and talk about the juicy technical bits behind that conversion, and my own ideas of how the Burning Wheel system should work. Read more

I’ve made some major updates to the KnownWorld rules system, which are now live. A lot of the text has been cleaned up for better ease of understanding, and a handful of additions have been put in as well. Major changes of note:

• The success threshold of the system has been changed from 5 to 6. This means that each multiple of 6 rolled on the dice nets you another success.
• Armor has been significantly changed. Check it out for yourself.
• Rules have been added for handling issues when multiple characters work together on the same task.
• Modifiers have been condensed into two types: Pool modifiers and Roll modifiers.

Check it out and let me know what you think!

I totally forgot to mention this, but in the most recent edition (March 2009) of the RPG Review, both QUAD and my KnownWorld hack were featured for all to see. Awesome! Thanks, Lev, for helping to spread the word! If any of you read the RPG Review and found your way here as a result, I welcome you to head over to the new forums if you have any questions about those games, or just want to stop and chat.

As for the rest of you, if you haven’t heard of the RPG Review, I highly encourage you to check it out. It’s a RPG Fanzine along the lines of the late Shadis, Polyhedron and Dragon (pre-3rd Ed, that is) Magazines, only in a completely digital format. This magazine covers just about every RPG under the sun, from hardcore combat grinders to intense storytelling games and more. The format is simple and easy to digest, and reading it takes me back to the joys of my younger days of gaming, when similar fan magazines could only be acquired by special mail-order or through old Prodigy dropboxes. Ah, nostalgia!

I spent the entirety of last night re-writing the core Palladium Fantasy RPG 1st Edition dice system to make more sense. It’s called KnownWorld, and it’s awesome – it actually makes the Palladium system *gasp* playable. Check it out here!

Also, aside from the bonus points system this has nothing to do with my previous post on the Palladium system. In fact, all of that can pretty much be trashed, as I doubt I’ll ever use it in light of this awesome new re-write.