Friday 29 July 2016

Saga of the Goblin Horde: Goblin Thug

July is nearly over, and it's been yet another busy month, with final edits for the upcoming Mutation Deck and a revised version of Savage Dragons, not to mention my ongoing work with the Saga of the Goblin Horde setting book.

But I didn't want to miss my monthly archetype! So without further ado, here is the eighth archetype: the goblin thug.

As always, you can grab the archetypes from here, and the three One Sheet adventures from here, here and here.

Tuesday 26 July 2016

Savage Dragons: Updated fan PDF

In order to practice my layout and presentation skills, I've been going back over some of my older PDFs and redesigning them, experimenting with different styles. I updated Savage Frost Giants and Savage Undead earlier this year, and now I've had the chance to update Savage Dragons as well.

The original Savage Dragons supplement was released on 1st October 2013, and included rules for a playable dragon race, with 26 Edges and 3 Hindrances. I later added some suggestions for using dragons as an Accursed Witchbreed.

The updated version of Savage Dragons offers a slightly revised race, with 27 Edges and 6 Hindrances. The Witchbreed rules are now included in the document (with permission from Melior Via).

I've also added a section for balancing dragons against SFC races, a special Draconic Injury Table (the table in SWD is really designed for humanoids), and 5 dragon archetypes (with selectable layers for Seasoned and Veteran versions).

You can download it from here: Savage Dragons

The old version is still available here if you want to compare the two.

Monday 18 July 2016

Mutation Deck: An Overview

In the latest episode of the Wild Die podcast (starting at 5:30), Eric Lamoureux discussed Just Insert Imagination's upcoming Mutation Deck. This is actually my latest freelance project, and I'm now allowed to talk about it, so I thought I'd give an overview of what it is and how it works.

The Mutation Deck is a 56-card playing deck, consisting of thirteen ranks of each of the four suits, along with four Jokers. It can be used as a thematic action deck - and if you're one of those people who likes to play with four Jokers, this means you won't need to buy a second deck just to get those extra Jokers.

However the main purpose of the deck is to generate random mutations, and although there are various ways to do this, the standard approach is to split the cards into four decks (organized by suits with one Joker per deck), and allow each player to draw three cards during character creation, with the option of taking up to two cards as Minor Hindrances, and up to one card as their Major Hindrance. Of course these are optional, so players are never forced to have a mutation they don't like, and they're balanced against regular Hindrances, so the player won't be "nerfed" if they don't want to use them.

Each of the four suits represents a different type of mutation (Bestial Transformations, Elemental Gifts, Physical Anomalies, and Psychic Talents), and the four Jokers also have suits, so this gives players control over the type of mutations they receive. The GM can also let players exchange Mutation cards (much like they can Adventure Cards), which is a great way to get everyone working together during character creation.

In addition to the Mutant Hindrance, there are also six new Edges: Mutation Mastery allows the player to gain the listed Advantage for one of their mutations, while Elemental Focus, Physical Endowment, Psychically Gifted and Shapeshifter each boost one of the four types of mutation, and Mutant Surge is a more generalized mutant ability.

The mutations were originally intended for a post-apocalyptic setting, but could just as easily be used for a low-powered modern-day supers game, or designing fantasy or sci-fi alien races, or even representing Warhammer-style chaos mutatations. One of the optional rules also covers a "Mutation Trapping" that can be applied to powers, which is a great option for evil spells in horror or dark fantasy campaigns.

Overall it's a very versatile deck with a lot of uses, it was fun to work on, and I think people are going to like it!


Sunday 10 July 2016

Guild of Shadows now available in print

Guild of Shadows was released back in November, but now it's become available in print as well - and it's currently on sale, so if you're interested running in a campaign where the players are a gang of thieves, spies and assassins, you should definitely take a look.

Get it here: Guild of Shadows

In addition, the Rogues Hall of Fame (which contains 27 famous rogues from history and mythology, built as pregens using Guild of Shadows) is now available as Pay What You Want, so why not grab a copy for free, and if you like it you can go back and toss in a dollar or two, or perhaps write a short review?

Get it here: Rogues Hall of Fame

The original Rogues Hall of Fame contained 30 rogues, but 3 were left out as they were considered more "villain" than "rogue", so I turned them into an unofficial final page.


Although I'd previously submitted articles for Savage Insider, Guild of Shadows was the first official licencee setting for which I did major freelance work - I wrote a lot of the mechanics and edited the rest; I also wrote the Rogues Hall of Fame, and did the layout myself. So while Savage Insider got my foot in the door, I consider my work for SPQR Games to be my first major foray into freelancing for Savage Worlds.