UncleBear Media

Race: Human
Attributes: Agility d8, Smarts d10, Spirit d12, Strength d4, Vigor d4
Skills: Fighting d4, Guts d6, Knowledge: History d6+2 , Knowledge: Latin d4+2, Knowledge: Ancient Greek d4+2, Knowledge: Ancient Egyptian d4+2, Notice d8, Persuasion d12, Shooting d4, Taunt d8
Charisma: +2   Pace: 5   Parry: 5   Toughness: 5
Edges: Arcane Background (Super Powers), Power Points, Charismatic, Jack of All Trades
Hindrances: Gloater, Heartless, Elderly, Cautious
Gear: 9mm pistol (Luger), Z-Belt, Yorkie (Mister Tinkles)
Super Powers:
Ageless (2): Very Old
Jinx (12): Area Effect, Selective, Improved
Fearless (2)
Super Attribute (2): Worldy (Smarts)
Super Attribute (2): Old Soul (Spirit)

This ancient and immortal man has known many names over the ages, but currently calls himself Elder Lehman. It’s his private joke, in spite of being a horrid pun. He appears to be a frail, doddering old man and is lacking in combat skills, but is deceptively spry when he needs to be. He is a manipulative mastermind, getting others to do his dirty work for him. He amuses himself by pretending to be helpless, getting women and children and even noble heroes to place themselves in harm’s way to protect and defend the poor old man. The dog is just another prop to that end. Elder Lehman currently resides in a gated retirement community, a cover which thus far has allowed him to elude detection by the V’Sori.

Elder Lehman’s major power isn’t that he’s lucky, but that around him his enemys are unlucky (Jinx). Anyone within a Medium Burst Template making an action against him has a mishap on a 1 or 2, regardless of Wild Die.

Notes: I originally started writing Elder Lehman (“Elderly Man”) as a joke character. My first take was to give him plant manipulation powers (“Get off my lawn”). My second take equipped him with senior citizen-themed gadgets: mele-attack false teeth, a blaster cane, targeting-sight bifocals, a hearing aid with super-hearing, sonar, radio and cell reception, an armor Buick and a secure lair within a gated community. As I started working out his background, I started taking him a little more seriously. I decided that the whole doddering old man schtick was designed to elude capture by the V’Sori. It was his own private joke on the world.

That got me thinking about the father of an old friend of mine, who was sharp as a tack but played senile for his own benefit. One of his tricks was to scam restaurants. At the end of the meal he’s stick the bill in his jacket pocket, plainly visible along with enough cash to pay the tab, and walk out. If he got stopped — and it amazed me how often he didn’t — he’d act confused, say he forgot and pull out the bill and the cash to prove it. What was even more amazing was that about 10% of the time people would feel bad for him and just let him go without making him pay. This became my template for Elder Lehman, who would do similar things but on a larger scale.

My other inspiration for Elder Lehman, once I had the manipulator concept in place, was Benjamin Linus from Lost.

Buy Necessary Evil: Explorer’s Edition (Savage Worlds, S2P10011)

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The new edition of the Savage Worlds supers setting is out, and it’s fantastic. All the rules you need to create super powered characters, a complete campaign, full color throughout, in the digest-sized Explorer Edition format, $20. Absolutely wonderful. Everything you need, except the core rules, is in this book. More like this, please.

In Necessary Evil, aliens have invaded and wiped out all of the superheroes. The only people standing between the invaders and the total conquest of Earth are its supervillains. Because they’re adept had evading the law, the alien security forces can’t catch them. They form up into resistance cells, battling a guerrilla war. Some of the villains oppose the aliens because they have designs on ruling the Earth themselves. Others are finding out what it means to be a hero and liking it. The setting offers up so many possibilities, but it comes with a whole campaign’s worth of adventures. Playing villains is a nice twist, especially since the setting is very Silver Age-y, but for players who don’t like playing evil characters there’s bigger villains in the aliens.

For those who already own the original Necessary Evil, this edition has been cleaned up to work with Explorer Edition rules, has a new chapter in the Plot Point campaign, and is in the awesome, easy to read, easy to carry Explorer Edition format. And it’s $20. Worth buying again, if for no other reason than to have an spare set of the supers rules for players to reference.

Buy Necessary Evil: Explorer’s Edition (Savage Worlds, S2P10011)

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Reposted from Greywulf’s Lair:

Want some inspirational artwork for your blog, character sheet or project? Want the freedom to edit, crop or change the images as required? Want to give to a worthy cause and friend of all of us in the RPG Bloggers Network? Then Classy Characters is for you!

Is that enough shameless advertising? Can I stop now?

Not 8 but 12 high-resolution renders, plus 50 lower-resolution (mainly 800×600 or thereabouts) images I’ve thrown in that are usable for blogpost art. You’re free to use any of them for commercial and non-commercial purposes (though I do request credit where it’s due for commercial usage), so if you want some Serious Fantasy Piccies for your blog or That PDF You’re Planning – or want to pay and give Fight On! the artwork – that’s cool by me.

Greywulf did the current UncleBear avatar… which I need to work into this page design at some point. He does great stuff.

Read more at Greywulf’s Lair

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• Encounter Savage! Update
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• Open Game Table Volume 2: It's Happening

Recently I had someone give me grief because I’m 45 years old and I play Dungeons & Dragons (and other roleplaying games, but D&D was what I was called out on). Not only do I play games, I write about them, talk about them on Twitter, and admit all of this in public. Using my real name, even! Somehow, I’m supposed to be ashamed of this, or embarrassed, or at least be more low-key about it.

While I could write a huge, long rant extolling why I’ve got nothing to be ashamed about, listing all of the positive things that arise from roleplaying games, or comparing roleplaying to more expensive, harmful, and mindless hobbies that are somehow “acceptable”, I’d like to just present the following:

Number of relatives (other than my wife and her mother) who picked up a phone, or sent an email, text message, or tweet to ask how I’m doing or offer support during the long bout of illness and hardship my wife and I have been going through: 0

Number of co-workers who picked up a phone, or sent an email, text message, or tweet to ask how I’m doing or offer support during the long bout of illness and hardship my wife and I have been going through: 0

Number of neighbors who picked up a phone, or sent an email, text message, or tweet to ask how I’m doing or offer support during the long bout of illness and hardship my wife and I have been going through: 0

Number of people from the roleplaying community who picked up a phone, or sent an email, text message, or tweet to ask how I’m doing or offer support during the long bout of illness and hardship my wife and I have been going through: I’ve lost count at this point. There has not been a day that has gone by where folks, many of whom I don’t even know, have touched base to make sure we’re okay, to take the time to understand what’s going on, to offer moral, spiritual, or material support. Through three months of sheer hell, it has been the members of the roleplaying game community who have cheered me up when I’ve been depressed, instilled me with a sense of self-esteem, expressed concern about my well-being, and have never, ever been judgmental about anything.

Do you want to know why I freely associate with roleplaying gamers, declare myself to be a roleplaying gamer, do all I can to support the roleplaying community both online through the RPG Bloggers Network and locally through the Southern Arizona Gamers Association, and do so proudly? Because when the chips were down, they were there for me. I never asked for help, but so many people bent over backward to do anything they could. So many people have given me so much respect, so much love, so much honor without asking for anything in return. For that, they will always have my eternal gratitude and support in return in any way I can offer it.

I am a 45 year old man who plays Dungeons & Dragons. If there’s a problem with that, it’s your problem, not mine. I am proud of my community. I am grateful to my community. And I will defend my community to my last breath from the willfully ignorant, self-important, holier-than-thou people who try to tear us down. When you try to mock me for who I am and what I do, by extension you are ridiculing my support system, fine men and women who have been selfless and generous, people who are scientists and students, lawyers and engineers, clergymen, fathers, mothers, and folks from all walks of life, all races and colors and religions and lifestyles, from all over the world. That I will not stand for. You do not insult me; you offend me.

To everyone in the roleplaying community who has supported me in so many ways over all these years by reading this page and more recently by taking an active role in the lives of my wife and I, words will never be sufficient to express my thanks. I am touched, I am humbled, and I am inspired. Thank you.

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Original superhero settings are something I’m always on the lookout for. Too many settings, especially in roleplaying games, are merely rehashes of standard Marvel and DC universes. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, and I certainly enjoy those tropes and that style of play myself. Given that superheroes encompass so many different genres, from detective stories to fantasy to science fiction, and that the Marvel and DC universes are hodge-podge kitchen sink settings that evolved over time, it’s hard to come up with something new that will meet the expectation that all those elements will be included, and do it in a way that’s consistent and coherent. We all sort of accept that comics are burdened with the baggage of the Golden Age and Silver Age, simpler times with less sophisticated writing. New universes have to meet current standards of quality and continuity without the automatic pass on silliness the old standards get.

Gestalt: The Hero Within meets all of those criteria.

In this world, superhumans embody values and principles and concepts, much like gods of ancient pantheons. Powers are thematic along these lines. Supers themselves are known as “gestalts” (hence the name), as they embody archetypes of the collective consciousness. One can be the gestalt of just about anything: a gestalt of Strength, a gestalt of Laughter, a gestalt of Pity. A Pure Gestalt is a physical manifestation of that collective consciousness, a being formed out of nothing but mankind’s collective hopes and fears. More common are Bonded Gestalts, where the gestalt-force has somehow linked with or chosen an individual to manifest or utilize the power. The gestalt-force is described as being extra-dimensional in origin and possibly sentient. There are “waves” of gestalts, as the extra-dimensional energy breaks through, although a person’s gestalt abilities can remain latent until some traumatic incident occurs. The triggering event is typically thematic with the type of gestalt.

Within this scope, anything is possible. Want to play a mythological god? Be a Pure Gestalt, that being reborn into the modern era. Want to play a typical superhero with an pseudo-science origin? The pseudo-science was the triggering event. Captain America? There are regional gestalts that embody the spirit of a Nation or City. Want to play James Bond, Harry Potter, Buffy the Vampire Slayer? All figures that exist in the collective consciousness via pop culture, you can justify their existence here. Magic, horror, science fiction, fantasy, any genre can be justified via this common origin.you can make anything work, and make sense, in the context of the setting. That’s brilliant.

The setting is just detailed enough to be useful without being so overly detailed as to leave no room for originality in your own campaign. There’s a timeline, explaining the Gestalt waves, and the existence of older gestalts. Politics, government, culture, how every aspect of the world has been touched by the existence of gestalts is explained. The heroes, villains and super-teams of major nations are outlined, but not all of them are statted out. There are even aliens. All of this allows you to use bits you like and ignore the rest, and to play the game as four-color or gritty as you choose.

There are actually two versions of Gestalt: The Hero Within. One is an M&M Superlink product, designed for use with Mutants & Masterminds. The other is for the HERO System mechanics. The “fluff” in both is the same, but each version goes into detail on character creation, rules tweaks, and stat blocks for NPCs and common gestalt archetypes.  I read through the M&M version for this review, as I’m more recently acquainted with that system, but only skimmed through the HERO version. Not surprisingly, the HERO version has a greater page count to accomodate the greater complexity of the system. The M&M version is tight, and of like quality with Green Ronin’s own M&M material. The best bits of this setting, however, are in the fluff, and with very little work Gestalt could be adapted to Savage Worlds or any other supers roleplaying system.

If you’re looking for a good superhero setting that allows you to keep all of the genre tropes while providing consistency and continuity, give this a look.

Want to learn more about Gestalt? Read on…

• Atomic Array: Episode 019: Gestalt
• Game Cryer: Gestalt Review
• Mad Brew Labs: Super Human Roleplaying in the World of Heroes, Archetypes and Modern Myths
• Uncle Bear: Gestalt: A Mythic Supers Setting
• All Games Considered: The Hero Within
• A Butterfly Dreaming: The Pieces of Gestalt
• The Bone Scroll: ‘G’ is for Gestalt

Drop by Black Wyrm Games today!

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• In a Wicked Age
• Worldbuilding 101: Designing a Soundtrack
• Setting: Houses of the Blooded

In the year 2707, war rages between earth’s four giant corporations as they battle over the planet’s dwindling resources. In an era marked by warfare and social regression, the earth is on the verge of ruin, destruction is everywhere; battles explode on every ravaged continent. Amidst heavy combat, an errant shell shatters an ancient buried seal releasing a horrific mutant army from its eternal prison deep within the earth. As the mutant scourge threatens human extinction, a single squad of soldiers descends into the earth to fulfill the ages-old prophesy of the MUTANT CHRONICLES and save mankind.

Mutant Chronicles is a licensing powerhouses. There have been multiple collectible card games, a roleplaying game, a miniatures game, novels, board games, video games, comics, and now a movie that will be available in the United States as video-on-demand starting today, and in theaters in in select cities on April 24th, 2009.  The film stars Thomas Jane, whom I’m neutral on; he made a decent Punisher in a film I felt was tarnished by an over-the-top John Travolta. I’ve never seen him in anything else. Ron Perlman and John Malkovich are also in the film, and are the major selling points for me; I’d watch either of them in just about anything, and (so far) no film can be completely bad with one of them in it. I’m looking forward to it even though I have no expectations of great cinema. It’s the kind of flick that looks like a good midnight movie, fun to watch with friends to get pumped up before playing a game, and something I’ll probably pick up out of the $5 DVD bin in a couple of years and play in the background while designing adventures for a related genre.

While I must admit I’ve never played the Mutant Chronicles RPG I do own one of the board games, Siege of the Citadel, based on the setting. It’s one of those RPG/miniatures/board game hybrids where you take pre-generated characters and stomp around a board killing things and trying to fulfill mission objectives. It’s a fun game for what it is. The setting definitely has potential in a post-apocalyptic cyberpunk tactical wargame sort of way. There’s supposedly a new version of the RPG in development, which I’m interested in seeing.

Links
Official Mutant Chronicles RPG Site
Mutant Chronicles Movie Site
Mutant Chronicles at IMDB
Mutant Chronicles at RottenTomatoes
Mutant Chronicle MySpace Page
Mutant Chronicles Trailer
Mutant Chronicles “Bloody” Trailer

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• The Kobold Guide to Game Design, Volume II
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This is a collection of recorded game sessions, taken from two published Call of Cthulhu campaigns: Horror on the Orient Express and Masks of Nyarlathotep. When I first heard about this project, I was at once excited and dubious. Recording actual game sessions as podcasts, and releasing them for public consumption, could either be interesting to listen to or boring as all hell. The scope was certainly perfect — take a well-known published campaign and serialize it, so there’s a definite plot to follow and a definite end point, rather than some nebulous never-ending homebrew campaign that runs indefinitely until it peters out. And at least one person, Paul “of Cthulhu” Maclean, was well-known enough to entice people to give it a listen.

Now, I have to admit here that I don’t listen to a lot of podcasts. I’m literally phoning it in from the late 20th century, on a dial-up internet connection. I don’t listen to anything on a regular basis, only grabbing an episode of any given podcast here and there based on a topic of extreme interest, because they take for frickin’ ever for me to download. That’s why I became very excited when I found out that not one but two of Paul’s campaign podcast series were being released on a DVD, along with a metric crap-ton of other cool stuff. All the listening enjoyment, none of the agonizing download time!

So how are they? The audio quality varies, as one would expect from a stationary microphone on a table recording people seated around it. Orient Express uses “binaural audio”, which I understand to mean two mics embedded in a styrofoam head to simulate what an actual person would hear. The quality of these recording is much better. As for the content, it is surprisingly engaging. The Bradford Players are obviously seasoned roleplayers, and entertaining to listen to. It was fun to hear other peoples’ table talk, as well as the way they played each of their characters. If you’re new to roleplaying, listening to some of these recorded sessions will give you a firm idea of what it’s about (although I’d at least expect the listener to understand something of the Cthulhu Mythos). As an experienced roleplayer myself, I gleaned a lot from hearing how another group handles things, both in the way players worked their characters and the Keepers of Arcane Lore (gamemasters)  dealt with keeping things moving and dealing with mechanical system bits.

The graphic design and artwork is top-notch. I don’t know what it is about the Cthulhu Mythos that attracts so many talented people (other than the obvious dreams, Ia!Ia!Iinjoke f’thagn!) but everything from the DVD box cover to the illustrations in the menus are gorgeous. The fact that someone composed a soundtrack for this is insane, but in the good way and not the “make a SAN check” way. Color (or should that be colour) me impressed.

The disc contains the following:

Here’s a potential revenue stream for other podcasters or even bloggers — release collections of your best downloadable products on disc, with some extra goodies. It’s one more channel to get your stuff out there into the world.

Buy Lovecraftian Tales from the Table

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• Revelations from the Book of Shemp
• Creature from the Haunted Sea
• The SKETCH System from Farsight Games

As I’ve stated many time before, the mechanics used to run a roleplaying game do matter, but what matters most is the context that those rules provide. Or, alternately, the context you provide to the rules. It’s a matter of when the rules matter, and how they matter. In preparing to run a 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons game, I’ve been thinking about why I would have chosen other games over 4th Edition, and what perceived advantages they would give me. I’ve also been reading many, many blog posts about “Old School” D&D. The conclusion I’ve come to is that I carry a philosophy on how games should be run that transcends mechanics, and that this philosophy is decidedly Old School. Below are some random thoughts about Mechanics, Game Mastering, and 4th Edition.

1. D&D Does Do One Thing Well
That’s the mantra of indie gamers, right – a game should do one thing well. 4th Edition does the exact same thing that 3rd Edition did very well: it has a simple and versatile core mechanic. Roll a d20. Add modifiers. Beat a target number. There are a lot of trappings and window dressing, and the “flair” of the system is different between 3rd and 4th Editions, but with that alone you can do virtually anything. I know, this is out of the context of whether it’s Gamist/Narrativist/Simulationist and doing one of those things well, but I’ll expand on this as I hit other points below.

2. Don’t Tell Me What You’re Rolling, Describe What You’re Doing
The best gamemasters I know, regardless of the system they’re running, do this. “I want to make a blah blah blah check, I have a plus blah blah blah”, says the player. The gamemaster responds “Well what is it you’re doing, exactly?”. Then the GM has the player roll dice. It’s roleplaying. Based on your description, the gamemaster will assign bonuses and a target number. This means that if you’ve got a great attack bonus and say “I swing my sword”, you’re going to get some basic modifiers and a by-the-book target number. Pretty Gamist, right, and it works well for folks who play that way. But the player with a crappy attack bonus who describes a wicked move he’s going to try might get some situational modifiers to help, and possibly a reduced target number, to support his efforts and creativity. Pretty Narrativist, huh?

3. Your Character Sheet is Not Your Character
How you play your character matters. If you come up with some wicked-swell move that you do all the time, I might give you a bonus, or a lower target number, because that’s how you play the character. I’ll take the character’s goals, dreams, and personality into account. I’ll take his upbringing and past history into account. Even if that stuff isn’t reflected on the character sheet. I’ll use that core mechanic in a Narrativist way. It won’t require me to change the rules, just to make rulings.

4. Rule Are Optional, As Are Die Rolls
If it makes perfect sense that a character could do something, based on the difficulty of the task and the character’s ability level, why roll? This is a very broad interpretation of the “Take 10″ rule, admittedly. Focus on the chance of failure when it can lead to something interesting happening, and don’t bog down the story just for the sake of rolling dice. If a character wants to do something and you’re not sure how, just fall back on the core mechanic and wing it. Look up the real rules later. Just keep the action moving.

5. Game Balance Comes from the Gamemaster, Not the Rules
I am a believer in what has been termed “Gygaxian Naturalism“. Monsters are what they are. If there is a horrible creature down that dark, dark hole that will serve a group of 3rd level characters their own behinds on a plate, then it’s probably a bad idea for 3rd level characters to go down that hole. My job as the gamemaster is not to “scale” the monster to make it defeatable by them. My job is to provide the players with opportunities to make their own decisions. I can give them all the warning in the world that going down there is a bad idea. I can make information available on what gear they need to fight the monster. I can balance the setting not only by giving them encounters they can handle, but by showing them a world that’s filled with things they can’t handle. This isn’t to be mean. This is to make them think creatively. This is to make them roleplay, and not just read numbers off a sheet and roll dice. You can’t fight that and win; find another solution.

Scaling adventures is like giving trophies to all the kids on a school sports team regardless of whether they win or lose or how well they play. It makes everyone feel good, but no one’s really earned anything. It also devalues genuine accomplishments. I’m really not trying to go all John Galt here, but there’s a great feeling that goes along with accomplishing something with skill, brains and luck. One of my greatest experiences as a player was in 2nd Edition when my 2nd level ranger killed a black dragon by himself. All I was doing was laying down longbow fire so the party could run away in the face of an enemy we could not defeat. I told he gamemaster I was firing at its face, specifically at its eyes. Then I rolled 3 natural 20′s in a row. If I had just said I was shooting at the dragon, I would have done more damage and hurt it, but it would have kept going. Because I stated specifically what I was doing, the gamemaster interpreted the rolls I made and declared that I pierced its eye and penetrated its brain, killing it. If the adventure had been scaled down to give us a better chance of defeating it, that would not have been nearly as thrilling.

Hopefully, all of these random thoughts taken together will give you an idea of how I approach running a game. If you notice, all of this can apply to any system.

Buy Dungeon Master’s Guide 2: A 4th Edition D&D Core Rulebook

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• Ask the Readers: Pathfinder or 4th Edition?
• 4th Edition Apathy
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To celebrate the inclusion of two of my articles on shemping in the Open Game Table anthology (on sale now!), I’ve written an all-new article on shemping for your gamemastering pleasure. Previously, we’ve talked about using the stas for one character or creature as stand-ins for completely different characters or creatures. Placing mechanics completely aside for the moment, I want to talk about the other side of shemping: dropping personalities onto those stock stat blocks to create three-dimensional characters practically from scratch.

This can by done by recycling characters you’re familiar with from movies, television, novels and comics. You can also use other peoples’ old, retired player characters, and even your own inactive PCs, as well. With no effort at all, these characters can do a lot of shemping for you. The advantage is that you already know them. You know their personalities, their motivations, and how they react under certain situations. That ground work has been done for you by other creators.

But wait, you say, it will be obvious to everyone when [WELL KNOWN CHARACTER] shows up in [YOUR SETTING]. It might even derail the game, because people will get wrapped around the [NOVELTY/JOKE/BIZARRE DISTURBANCE] of [WELL KNOWN CHARACTER] being introduced. And if I use my own player character as an NPC, won’t I be smited for invoking the specter of Mary Sue?

There’s an answer to this, my friends, and that answer is flair. File off the serial numbers. Change details. Race, hair color, eye color, even their name, it’s all flair. Let’s do a couple of exercises. Let’s take Jack Bauer from 24 and make him into an NPC for D&D. Jack’s dour. He’s grim. He’s the best at what he does in the Wolverine sense of the term. Let’s make him a dwarf, and name him Grimmbor. No one’s going to peg him for Jack Bauer; you just play him that way. When faced with a situation, ask “what would Jack Bauer do”. Then have Grimmbor spout some moral justification for torturing people and chopping off their heads.

Pick your favorite superhero. Take away their powers and their costume, and drop them into, say, a cop drama or a spy thriller. Peter Parker is a science wiz, he’d make a good junior Q-type, offering tech support in the field. Change his name to, say, Sam Hughes. Make him blonde. Or Hispanic. Or both. Give him a frail old Uncle Louis who raised him after his parents were killed and viola! You’re running NPC Sam Hughes, but you play him as Peter Parker.

You end up with more three-dimensional, lifelike NPCs, people that are interesting for the player characters to interact with. The players will think you’re brilliant for having these detailed NPCs that you’ve apparently spend hours thinking about and developing. They’re technically new characters, and no one but you needs to know what you’re actually doing.

Stock Shemps
You can also recycle certain types of archetype characters from one game to another. I’ve started a file of minor NPCs that are just descriptions of other characters their based on. I have a cop who’s based on Bruce Campbell (I avoided the obvious cliche of making him a store clerk; I always wanted to see Bruce play a uniformed cop for some reason). If I need a cop NPC, he’s my go-to for personality, motivation, and reactions. Almost every game has some generic stat block to use for a cop. In a supers setting, I name him, say, Bob Friedman, give him red hair and glasses, but play him as Bruce. In a Call of Cthulhu game, I name him Nathan Collins, make him blonde with a buzzcut. In Shadowrun, he’s a corporate security guard with a brown ponytail and a missing middle finger. In a pirate game, he’s a British Marine with an Essex accent and a duelling scar. In D&D, he’s a city watch, bald, and talks about his pet dog a lot. But in my head, they’re all Bruce. For his backstory, I simply translate what happened to the last iteration of this NPC into the current game setting.

Try it for yourself and let me know how it works. It will save you a lot of preparation time, allow you to create NPCs on the fly, and add new dimensions to the roleplaying aspects of your campaigns.

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• "Shemping" in RPGs
• Shemping Player Characters
• Shemping Player Characters: Followup

On the latest episode of Pulp Gamer: Out of Character, I talk about the Player’s Handbook 2, and the RPG Bloggers mini-carnival leading up to the book’s release. I also plug the Open Game Table anthology again. Jason Corley talks about Seers of the Throne for Mage: The Awakening. Don, Derek and Jeremiah talk about board games and their upcoming trip to the Caribbean. And the whole crew has a discussion about designing good villains for your roleplaying game campaign.

Download Pulp Gamer: Out of Character Episode 71

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