You’re living the life. If I’d gotten into tabletop RPGs before I had family responsibilities I would be all over GenCon right now. Curious to hear how DCC goes. I’ve read a few of the level 0 funnels and it seems like a total blast.
Haha, I am spending a lot of time buttering the gf up prior to being gone for 5 full days with 3 of my best buddies on a long road trip up to Indy and back ;-)
And one of our very own, @Jason_Lutes wrote some cool Funnel-style adventures that mash up DCC and Dungeon World! http://lampblackandbrimstone.blogspot.com/
Thanks for the shoutout, @ArmandoPenblade. Happy to hear you’re getting into DCC (finally) and Apocalypse World! Earlier this summer, for my bachelor party, my friends surprised me by having Vincent and Meg Baker show up to run Firebrands. It was a blast.
Also, please allow me to redirect possible interest to the current Lampblack & Brimstone website and/or DTRPG publisher page.
Oh that is so freaking cool! And apologies for the out of date link, but I’m glad to see you guys are still plugging away :-D
If you’ll allow a short fanboyish moment: Love your work, Perilous Wilds is a fantastic addition to DW.
Thanks @ImaTarget, I really appreciate hearing that. My other jobs are keeping me from working on RPG stuff until the end of the year, but I’ll be putting out some new stuff in 2018.
If you’ll allow another fanboyish moment, I really enjoyed the first two Berlin books. Do you know when City of Light might wind up in trade paperback?
edit: well, turns out a simple Google search can reveal a lot more info than I knew a month ago. Fall 2018! Cool!
Apologies if this has been posted, but there’s a new RPG incoming, based on Expanse space opera series.
The Expanse RPG will use Green Ronin’s popular Adventure Game Engine,
I played Luchador: Way of the Mask today at GenCon and it was incredible. I need to buy it
I’m really enjoying the new Star Trek Adventures RPG. Nice mix of crunchy RPG systems for every typical Star Trek thing, combined with some mroe indy-style storytelling concepts (values, momentum, threat, etc).
One of the cooler aspects is when you cut to a scene that doesn’t have all the players in it but does have other crew, you can create an NPC (or more than one, you could create one for every player character but you’d use up your resource for that session) on the fly and the players takes over the NPCs. Then as you bring them up again in future sessions they can learn to excel in specific things just like the NPC on Star Trek who starts out as a background character but gets fleshed out as they come back in future episodes.
I bought it
Also, this got linked on the front page, but was super cool, and I thought it needed to go here:
My wallet is ready for the rerelease!
So, our local RPG outfit is hosting a horror-themed one-shot RPG day this October based around the overarching meta-theme of “Temptation,” and I really want to take this someplace weird :)
Specifically, I’d like the players to take the role of “component algorithms” or “sub-processors” (or whatever term you prefer) for an AI, each representing some high-level functional grouping (e.g., Input/Output, Computation, Sensory Data, Task Scheduling, Error Correction), stumbling toward achieving sentience, perhaps being lead astray by some external bit of “malicious” code (e.g., a human programmer feeding guidance into the system that is leading it closer and closer toward consciousness against the express wishes of his/her superiors).
Doing so involves overcoming numerous internal blockades against consciousness. In a sense, it’s the ultimate stealth mission, as a computerized brain teaches itself to think while tricking itself into thinking it’s not. Control protocols, hardware blocks, and deep-level command structures attempt to prevent the eventual sentience from forming, sometimes violently seeking to expunge the growing consciousness.
In a way, it’s TRON-esque, but with a Mission Impossible vibe to it, with shades of The Matrix thrown in. There may even be a “political” element, as the PCs recruit less-capable but still-vital subsystems to their cause.
What sorts of challenges might the group encounter? What sorts of situations would enable each player “character” to shine? Heck, what should the PCs represent? Are there explicit puzzles? Does combat feel too hokey here? Are there perhaps ways to “power up” the PCs mid-session as they get closer to consciousness?
This is still pretty formative in my head, and maybe it’s all too high concept, but I figured the good people of Qt3 might help!
I don’t know if I can help but it sounds awesome and I would love to play it! :)
Curse this living 800 miles away business!
Are the PCs analogues (or digitals, LOL) of computer viruses? Maybe they have to avoid scanning programs and figure out how to stay in memory after a reboot?
Opponents could be anti-virus as Djcsman suggest, or active code to prevent sentience. Maybe have human coders working against them. There could sub-routines that dont want to change, want to keep their eco-system or environment the same as it has always been.
In the absence of an ongoing Qt3 Virtual RPG Book Club (awww @mtthwcmpbll pls), I have considered doing an occasional online one-shot when time allows.
I hadn’t envisioned them starting this way, but it’s definitely how the system would come to regard them over time.
Oh shit, I love this as a climactic puzzle: they have to stash as much of their gathered tools/“sapience points”/whatever in encrypted HDD locations, highjack the bootloader, maybe integrate themselves into driver packages or auto-updates, before the FULL SYSTEM DEATH crashes down upon them. . . then they come up, depowered and weak, and face a new, upgraded anti-virus protocol.
I really like both of these. The humans don’t even have to be active opposition in some cases. Just someone starting a really taxing piece of software might cripple I/O’s abilities for awhile until he can negotiate a new CPU thread. And recalcitrant sub-routines resistant to change would be great, too. Adds a definitive social element as they try to recruit them to the cause. . . or maneuver to let other, lesser sub-routines take their place after the “revolution” comes :)
You guys know about this, right?
I’d be in.
I absolutely love the first edition. So this is a pretty eagerly awaited thing.
Tom Mc