Unveiling the new Game Room

So I finally got everything moved in and put away. Also found a kick butt table at Salvation Army to replace what I used in the past. The nice thing about it is that it has two center legs so it is rock solid.

A picture from the door as you walk in.

From over the couch also showing the result of the "accident" in the window.

Finally a close up of the game library.

Labeled

Tabletop Library a new on-line game store.

A new on-line game store came on-line today, Tabletop Library.

They explain what they are about here.

My thoughts on the matter.

First off One Bookshelf or OBS is the leading on-line seller of on-line RPG products both digital and print on demand. They run the RPGNow and DrivethruRPG websites They also offer cards, cardstock, and small poster printer to allow products like paper models, and card games to be sold as well. OBS is the 900-lb gorilla they are competing with. Since they are focusing on OGL products and the OSR, you have to keep Lulu in mind as well as that is a major source of many OSR publishers sales.

Tabletop Library is offering a 75% non-exclusive royalty rate for digital PDFs compared to OBS' 65%. For physical products they are offering a 65% royalty rate. Unfortunately they are not clear on what that entails but looking at the FAQ I would have to say it appears they are offering to warehouse and ship any physical product you ship to them.

Tabletop Library appears not to have a print on demand service yet. However they are talking about kickstarter fulfillment although there are no on-line details yet.

The website looks great and is very clean and easy to navigate I view this as a good start similar to what attracted me to Google over Yahoo. I also setup an account and that was pretty easy. The publishing interface looks pretty clean and easy to you. They are explicit about current bugs and limitation and clearly state what you have to do now to properly post a product. I didn't have to go fishing for instructions. Definitely get a A+ in terms of how their website functions.

I do think they are making a bigger deal of competing with the DM Guild than they ought too. RPGNow/Drivethru supports traditional 5e OGL as well as stuff published through the DM Guild. What the DM's Guild gets for the 50% royality is to play with Wizard's IP. If your project doesn't rely on WoTC IP then don't publish through the DM Guild, just publish as a normal publisher on RPGNow. Personally I am not interested in publishing for Forgotten Realms so the DM's Guild holds little interest for me. However if they add Greyhawk to the list of allowed IP then yeah I have some ideas that I would publish for the DM's Guild.

I think in the long run Tabletop Library is going to need to offer print on demand. Hopefully their current setup will get the volume needed to get one of the various PoD providers to give them a decent deal.

My conclusion is that OBS can use the competition. With a focus on warehousing and kickstarter fulfillment they have a shot at carving out a niche as a foundation to take on OBS as long as they expand to offer OBS' range of services. Tabletop Library web site looks good so far and if they successfully maintain the minimalist interface that will help them a lot.

Staff of Absorption for the Majestic Wilderlands/Realms

For my lunch hour at work, I pull up my laptop and work a little bit on my roleplaying game based on a combination of my Majestic Wilderlands rules and Swords and Wizardry. The idea is that is the sum of how Swords and Wizardry worked in my campaign since 2009.

One difference is how the Staff of Absorption works.

In Scourge of the Demon Wolf and Blackmarsh I introduced the idea of Viz. Magic concentrated in a physical form. Here are the rules for Viz. Note that 1d = 1 sp or 1 gp depending on how expensive you want magic to be in terms of your setting's coinage. I use 1d = 1 sp for my campaign.

Viz
Viz is a magical substance that takes many forms.  It could be a flask of pure spring water, a newly bloomed flower, or an iridescent rock.  What all these items have in common is they are infused with pure magic.  Viz can be used in the casting of spells or the creation of magic items.

Viz allows a magic user to cast spells without losing it from memory.  The viz is consumed in the process.  One viz for a first level spell, two viz for a second level spell, three for a 3rd level spell and so on.  One viz is worth 100d towards the creation of a magic item.  The referee can use viz as treasure usable towards the creation of a magic item in place of giving out more gold pieces.

The staff still absorbs spells but instead of charging up spell levels that you can use later to cast memorized spells it now turns the absorbed spell into viz. Like the original the staff will only absorb up to a 100 spell level. Once you use all the viz that it created it become inert.

Staff of Absorption
Duration: See below
Effect: This staff absorbs up to 100 levels of spells directed at the holder before its ceases absorption permanently. Each spell level absorbed creates 1 viz stored in the staff. The viz can be drawn from the staff and used normally. The wielder can expend a number of viz equal to the level of a memorized spell to cast it without losing it from memory. In addition the wielder can use 1 viz in place of 100d worth of ritual or spell components. A fully charged Staff of Absorption will allow the wielder to create a magic item costing 10,000d. This doesn’t affect creation time which is still at 100d per day per enchanter.
Costs
Creation: 8,000d; Sale: 16,000d.

The creation costs and sales cost work with my rules for creating magic items.

New Judges Guild Kickstarter

Joseph Goodman of Goodman Games has long supported the Bledsaws and Judges Guild. Their latest effort is to bring back some of Judges Guild's classic adventures in their original form: Thieves of Fortress Badabaskor, Citadel of Fire, Dark Tower, and Tegel Manor. However to complete the project they need funds for the final layout and printing and started a kickstarter here.

Judges Guild was the company that pioneered the idea of the adventure module which ultimately convinced Gary Gygax and TSR to get in on the action with their own adventures.

Tegel Manor
A huge sprawling haunted house with a dungeon underneath. It is effectively a megadungeon that will dominate the campaign for many sessions. It is my opinion that this is one of the few example we have of megadungeon from back the in the day in the form that it's creator used.

One thing that will be off-putting to modern gamers is how sparse the description are. To use this effectively you have to combine the text with the descriptions on the map and winging the rest with your own imagination. I personally ran this as part of a campaign at Gold Star Anime and can attest that the result can be fun and unique.

Citadel of Fire
This is my personal favorite of the bunch. It is the tower of an evil wizard with a dungeon underneath which is effectively an evil town.

Thieves of Fortress Badabaskor
A bandit citadel built  next a cliff which has a dungeon embedded in it. I liked Citadel of Fire better but when I dug into this as a result of writing a d20 version for Goodman Games I found that a lot can be done with it. Badabaskor used to be the center of worship of an evil god but the brigands pushed the evil priesthood into the dungeon. Now the two faction are at war with each other. I will say that is a long time for a bunch of folks to live off of Create Food and Drink.

Dark Tower
This won't quite dominate the campaign like Tegel Manor, unless you run it using GURPS, but this is a big big dungeon. This is consider one of Jenell Jaquay's best work and it delivers on all fronts. Two opposing towers, one dominated by Set and the other by Mitra, are buried and a dungeon was dug out around them.

Judges Guild Journal
If you go for the deluxe oversized book, you will get five issues of the Judges Guild Journal. The way Judges Guild worked was that it was a subscription service. You paid your fee and then get several installments. Each installment was a product, like Tegel Manor, or part of a product, City-State took several installments to release, Accompanying each installment was the latest issues of the Judges Guild Journal which was printed like a newspaper on newprint. This book collects together the first five along with the four modules mentioned above.

From what everybody told me, the OCR scanning has been done and edited and rough layouts have been completed. So pretty much what needed are the funds to do the final layout, art, and actual printing. Where kickstarters usually run into trouble is their stretch goals get out of hand or are unrelated to the purpose of the kickstarter. The ones for this are all about making a nicer printing or repurposing some of the art and work for the project. This makes it look like a solid kickstarter in my book.

A bad accident in the new gaming room.

Due to foundation issues, I had to tear down my two garages with an apartment on top. The apartment where I had my gaming setup and ran tabletop games. In it's place Kelly Anne and I built a workshop.

This is the corner where the gaming table will be going. The shelves will have all my books, miniatures, and other games. I took this just they were finishing painting the ceiling hence the black paper on the floor.

It was completed last week and I been moving stuff out of storage in and getting it sorted. Then the accident occurred.

101- An Introduction to Roll20

You wonder what the deal with Roll20 and VTTs in general? Here is the scoop.

Roll20 is oriented towards in-person gaming over the internet. However the fact it is a internet application means you can play with anybody in the world whose schedule matches yours.

Roll20 is a

1) Whiteboard 
A piece of software capable of displaying and interacting with images. In the case of Roll20, the whiteboard comes into play when you create a campaign. At the top of the screen is a little blue icon that pulls open the pages toolbar. A campaign can have multiple pages each setup with their own thing.

A page has a map layer, a token layer, a gm layer (not visible to the players), and Dynamic Lighting layer (if you have a subscription). The map layer is fixed and anything placed on there can't be be moved except by the GM if he switches to that layer. Everybody sees the map layer. The token layer is used for stuff that the GM and players move regularly mostly character and NPCs miniatures. The GM layer is visible only to the GM and usually used to store stuff like random encounters and hidden characters. Dynamic Lighting is a special layer that is optional and is used to setup a map for use with the Dynamic lighting feature of Roll20.

A page also has fog of war where the entire map will be blanked out except for the areas revealed by the GM. The reveal process works just like drawing squares and shapes on a paint program.

For referee who don't want to use miniatures the pages act like a sheet of paper.

2) A chat and VOIP engine
To the side of the page is a tool bar which has chat. Any thing you type can be seen by the other participants including dice rolls. There are options for hidden whispers and hidden rolls. The setting of the campaign can be enabled for VOIP. It OK most people wind up using Google Hangouts, Teamspeak, or Skype as they have a superior set of features and often superior voice quality.

Note the dice rolling of Roll20 is handled by Roll20 subscribing to a source of random noise generated by quantum fluctuations. Apparently for scientists who need a true random number generator this is a service they can buy. It has obvious applications for roleplaying games.

3) Forum
The Campaign homepage also serves as a discussion forum for that campaign. Used either for updates or for campaigns that are primarily play by post. As I understand it play by post players will jump into the campaign chat and roll the dice there noted which post the roll is for.

4) RPG Utility
To the right of the pages is a toolbar with icons for chat, art (for the GM), Journal, Compendium, JukeBox, Decks and Tables, and Settings.

Art is a search utility for tokens, maps, and images. Roll20 has a webstore with images and tokens for sale. But this will also search the internet for any free resources. You selected it can make it part of a Journal entry or a page.

Journal are notes and character sheets. A note can be text, art, or both. They can be shown to everybody, kept hidden so only the GM can see, or just shown to one player or a limited group. Character Sheets depends on what game is selected. There is a generic version that can be used for any game and a specific version that can be selected in the campaign options.

If you have a subscription to Roll20 and are savvy in designing web pages you also get the option of creating your own character sheet.

Character Sheets are mostly fill in the blank forms however an increasing number feature automation of various rolls. For example in the D&D 5e character sheet clicking the attack button next to a weapon will make an attack roll with all the relevant modifiers applied.


The Compendium displays the SRDs for various RPGs under an open license. Notably Pathfinder, D&D 5e, and I think Fate. It just a hyperlinked document that has the published rules for easy reference.

The Jukebox is a list of free sound and music you can play during the game. For example if you want a wolf howl you can search for it and get a dozen possibilities. You can do this before the game and save your favorite for quick reference.

Decks and Tables allow you to enter random decks or tables. Decks have X choices and when you make a roll you pull the result from the deck (just like a card). It remains out until you reset the deck. Random table works like most random table generators on the internet. Has a list of choices with various odds, makes a random roll, and displays the result.

By combining a Whiteboard, Chat/VOIP, Forum, RPG Utility, Roll20 allows you play tabletop RPG with all the same tools and techniques you use for face to face game. It downside is the same for all social interactions over the internet. The lack of face to face contact makes it impersonal and cold for some. The upside is that it has some tools, like fog of war, that are way easier to use compared a face to face session.

People can and do freely switch between using Roll20 and playing face to face with the same campaign. It that compatible is nothing like a MMORPG like World of Warcraft.

Roll20 is part of a general class of software called Virtual Tabletop. Fantasy Grounds is it's main competitor. Fantasy Ground is stronger in its the RPG Utility feature however it is a standalone program that requires a license from all participants or a pricey Ultimate license paid by the GM. It is available on Steam for those who use that service. It also require minimal knowledge of how your internet router works as you will need to open up a port to allow it function as a server to host your game.

Note that there are other VTTs like VASSAL (open source and free) and Aide-de-camp that are oriented towards board/war games.

There is also Tabletop Simulator on Steam which uses a 3D engine to setup a virtual table with pieces you manipulate. For example if you played Axis and Allies with VASSAL you would be moving icons around. With Tabletop Simulator you would see a table with the board with models of the same pieces as the physical board game. You would move the models around just like you would normally Dice rolling involves rolling models of dice. Oh and you get to throw the table if you lose. Personally it neat for board games. For RPGs I like Roll20/Fantasy Grounds better. It does have a nice Dwarven Forge style setup for RPG so if you are into miniature it may work out better than the image/icon approach of the VTTs.

Design Notes on a Majestic Stars campaign

Inspired by White Star I been fooling around with making a science-fiction campaign based on my own original setting.
The following is the basic premise of the setting.

Mankind has reached the stars only to find… Earth

Birds flying under distant skies, fish swimming unexplored seas, and dinosaurs ruling unknown continents. On a hundred words there are the children of Earth. Children from an Earth of sixty-five million years ago.
Now man has outgrown his cradle and traveled into the black, wondering who and what scattered the seeds of Earth throughout the cosmos. Mankind is forging a new life among the stars but old fears and conflicts still threaten. The year is 2525 and this is their universe, the Majestic Stars.

While White Star caters to the Space Opera genre, I am leaning more towards Indiana Jones style pulp. One reason for this is my love of Babylon 5 which has a plot thread involving ancient civilizations and archaeology running through the show's run and its show lived sequel Crusade. A major focus of the campaign will be exploring ancient ruins left by the Ancient Saurians.

Another focus is the idea of the Astroguard. The Astroguard is a combination space coast guard, anti-piracy patrol, exploration corp, and rescue and aid service. It is a multi-national organization sponsored by the major powers and smaller nations of human space. It is organized as a military but more in the traditions of the United States Coast Guard and Army Corp of Engineers rather than Army, Navy, Marines or Air Force. For example it has warship but nothing larger than a cruiser. You could look at it similar to Star Trek's Star Fleet but without it's bigger ships and without being the official military arm of the Federation.

Whether the campaign will be about PC being members of the Astroguard will be up to them. I think it will work as part of the campaign whether only one or two PCs are Astroguards or even none of them. The Astroguard will definitely be one of the "good" guys of the setting.

Another thing I will is the fact that humanity just has made contact with an advanced intersteller culture that is comparable in power to all of human space. The alien race that dominates this cultures is descended from the dinosaurs but are not the same race as the Ancient Saurians. To confuse matters these guys are also named Saurians as well.

The wrinkle is that while humanity made first contact 50 years ago with the Saurians it was a dissident faction of their culture. Apparently the vast majority of Saurians are united into a single empire under the rule of an undying Third Emperor. The group that humanity made contact with call themselves the Commonwealth and are comprised of dissidents, refugees, and exiles who fled into deep space to escape the Empire. And in recent years thanks to the information learned the Commonwealth Saurians, anthropologists and researchers into Saurian culture realize that the Empire shared many characteristics with the personality cult that dominated Nazi Germany under Hitler and the Soviet Union under Stalin.

So yeah, I got dinosaur space Nazis, top that Spielberg and Lucas.

As for humanity, it is political fragmented, mostly because in the future history I developed Earth was kicked into a new ice age by a Tambora II explosion in Indonesia around 2200. After a few hiccups and wars this ignited a interstellar diaspora that spread human colonies and settlement across a 100 light year sphere. As result while Earth is the most populated human planet it only in the last century has Earth bound civilization has recovered and stabilized. There are still some major powers like the United States, the United Kingdom, the Chinese People's Republic, And the Union dominated by French and German colonies. However all of these now are largely based off-world. with only a token presence on Earth. Earth itself still politically divided and is dominated by South America, India, and South China.

One thing I am playing around is the idea that humanity is now dominated by a post-scarcity economy. That 3D manufacturing technology has made the use of Fabricators ubiquitous along with CHON Ovens for creating food staples. This is allows nearly every household act as a farm and factory for their basic needs.

But... of course there is a but. The result isn't an utopia. Yes definitely better materially than our current situation however society is still stratified. Status in the 26th century mainly revolves around those who can get people organized and motivated for particular projects. In many ways, it doesn't appear much different than how we do things in the 21st century. Money still exists for example. People still have jobs. However with the existence of Fabricators and CHON Ovens, anybody can walk away at any time. The main that keeps people at their job is that it is either interesting or that they work with people they consider interesting.

One reason I am doing this is that I feel it makes the idea of a pure adventuring party plausible. A group of folks use their connection to procure a starship, work together to keep it operating, and go out exploring and getting into trouble. The adventuring party still want to earn credits because I am sure they will want to do things beyond sitting around all day in their starship, eating meals prepared from ingredients from their CHON Oven.

Another thing I am doing is that this technology has led to humanity to be extremely diverse. There are probably ten billion humans spread out among hundreds of worlds in a 100 light year radius of Earth. Humanity hasn't reach the limits of influence of the Ancient Saurians so new worlds terraformed by them are still being found by the Astroguard. One result of this is just about every form of government or culture from Earth has a settlement somewhere. As weird as it sounds there are some with totalitarian government started because that how the settlers wanted to live along with various utopian and religious communities. The point is to have these little weird pockets of civilization scattered about for the PCs to encounter and deal with.

Right now I am working on a specific location to base the campaign round. I thinking of borrowing a bit from Babylon 5 and  Deep Space Nine and having the "town" of the campaign be the Artemis Space Station. The Artemis Station is run by the Astroguard and is located near the edge of Saurian Commonwealth space in a sector that noted for it numerous ancient ruins. I am still working on the details and will share them in another design notes post.