Tuesday, February 2, 2016

Alpha Crawl Classics Mashup Funnel Thing

I dig DCC, and I deal in Paranoia.  I mean, like, professionally, man.  All day long some days.  Not to bring my work into my hobby but real actual paranoia is sort of my bread and butter.

the early days of computer worship! This sexy little reel-to-reel number holds approximately 5MB, almost enough to keep the image on!


Now, playing Paranoia!  That's another thing.  I think maybe it was +Adam Muszkiewicz  that rang that bell for me on an episode of DSR but I have really only actually played it once, maybe in the early 90's - seems in my recollection it was a sudden and brief transgression away from 2e right before my gaming chums all got into Vampire 1e.  Edition wars!  You want to talk about edition wars, why some people are convinced that 5e Paranoia doesn't even exist! Don't even get me started on the fnord Holloway Texts that were discovered hidden in a farmhouse in remote New Hampshire!  That's practically a whole other game right there, bro

I have often longed to play it, but that's neither here nor there.  Luckily, I have in DCC a fairly flexible rudimentary d20 engine with enough weirdness and entropy that I can kick it in the guts and do whatever I want with it.  By the way, the thing I have mostly written at the moment is like a cross between +Kabuki Kaiser 's excellent systems for solo-play, Margaret St. Claire's Sign of the Labrys, Logan's Run, and Paranoia with some Cthulhu sprinkled inside, all wrapped up in a DCC/MCC/CUaBM package.


Maybe for hilarity, maybe for laffs, I have prepped a PDF for people to use to generate suspicious clones to commit thought crimes adore OUR GOOD FRIEND COMPUTER with, and will run a Paranoia-flavored funnel type thing next Tuesday, maybe, if all goes well.


I think it nicely incentive-izes the usual Paranoia Stuff that players generally avoid but is really the hilariously spiteful throbbing heart of Classic/Zap

Space Dungeon - Philosophy and Progress

What with the recent uptick in interest about this campaign, I thought I'd throw it out there and refresh the thing, and interest new people.  I guess it must be partly on account of all the Star Wars:TFA resurgence and the well-deserved success of White Star by my pal and fellow Marylander +James Spahn

What is it, besides some gruesome chimera of Star Frontiers, DCC, and Ravenloft?  I don't rightly know.  I conceived it at first of a way to inject my anti-corporate politics (says a guy whose website is hosted by GoogleCorp; I know I know) into a low-fantasy grubby space faring game.  I thought immediately of the Cryptic Alliances of GW and the galaxy spanning corporations of Star Frontiers, and I tried to build into the campaign a fun bunch of premises (I mean, maybe, FUN TO ME):

  1. The action advances behind the scenes whether the PCs play or not.  Players ought to be able to interact with each other via the community (I saw this first done by +Jason Paul McCartan in his Barrowmaze Open Table thing and it's worked well in all the campaigns I've kept on Google+ communities)
  2. Always have some weird topography or gimmick to induce awesome movement and zero-G Mighty Deeds and stuff
  3. Always introduce an Alien race each game.  So far, these have been the Fed, the Sheeple, the Wolfoids, the Silgurians, the Mechannids, and a couple of others.  I am awfully fond of the original Star Frontiers races and the premise is that any race is welcome as a PC
  4. Flailsnails-ers are welcome (this was a New Year's Resolution of mine at the time, and I'm cool with it entirely, now)
  5. Low-fantasy.  It's a struggle.  It's dirty.  Things are breaking down.
  6. Nebulmor, the Tomb Planet, is where the action takes place and the undead and weird aliens are fine, but it's really the naughty corporations that are kind of the bad guys.  Right now, at this minute, Vista Financial has sent emissaries to the Berserker Droid fleet that approaches this sector of space.  They were awakened during the second game by some intrepid adventuring scumbags, after being locked away metaphysically for a long, long time.  With the captured Shining Trapezohedron that the PCs recovered for them, communication with the Berzerkers ought to be easy peasey.
  7. I'd included a basic idea (but maybe not very good mechanics) for people to set up businesses and interests for in-the-downtime investment and carousing, and criminal enterprises.  I haven't really devoted too much time to it, but I gave a couple of examples (Carl's CloCloCloning, for example)
  8. I stole some ideas from Kabuki Kaiser to give an example of how a settlement on the surface might work.
  9. It's nestled seamlessly and fluidly into my other campaigns, and the Robolich/Cyberlich are patronized into my Purple Planet campaign (not yet published - I like there to be a little mystery but it's based on  Helgaz Belkur from AD&BI)
If you can read this, and you take an interest, you're invited to come to the Fed Station in the Spring of 2016 when I crank the thing up.  Join the community - run your own adventures, whatever.  I don't care about keeping it neat and tidy, the time-stream has already diverged like 4 times!

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