Sunday, March 20, 2011

World Building: Janus

(Caveat: Yes, I know; none of this is exactly new. But that's not the point; the point is to create a world in which role playing adventure can occur.)


The planet Janus was named for the Roman god with two heads (or, more importantly, two faces).

This was because the planet also looks both ways, being tidally locked; one side is perpetually bathed in the fire of its parent star, the other looks out eternally on the icy dark of space.

Circling the world between these extremes is a twilight zone, a narrow habitable area no more than five miles wide. It is here that most of our action will take place.

In the world of light, the heat is so intense that the only portable means of combating it is magic -- the local name for a force made possible by absorption of the star's unique pattern of ratiation.

In the darkworld, science is the only force capable of keeping one warm enough to function, since magic doesn't work here.

Magic, of course, is not the fantastical nonsense that defies all reason. It's something to do with the confluence of the solar radiation and the planet itself. It somehow changes people, allows them to utilize a strange force not found elsewhere in the galaxy. This force was dubbed Magic, an acronym for Mutated Ability for Generating Improbable Conditions.

Over the centuries since the world was settled (and particularly since the collapse of the empire-wide spacelanes stopped all interstellar traffic from arriving here), a cold war has developed between the daydwellers and the nightsiders.

And in conflict, one finds adventure...


Rules: The game will use the 1980 edition of Basic Role Playing, amended by elements of Future*World and Magic World from the "Worlds of Wonder" set, as well as modifications of my own.




So, whaddya think? Groovy? Stupid? Beneath contempt? More importantly, especially for the locals, would you play such a game?

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

I'm looking for...

...a copy of Chaosium's "Worlds of Wonder" boxed set, from 1982.

You can read James Maliszewski sing its praises here.

I have three of the four booklets already, but it's the additional material that I'd really like to get my hands on.

(Although if a complete set were to turn up, I'd be very interested.)

Thanks for any help anybody can provide.

Holy cow, a post!

Haven't posted in a while. Sorry.

Sunday was my usual AD&D game. We spent the whole session (4 hours) in town.

One guy levelled up (now 4th). The way this DM handles advancement is that if you learn something NEW (in this case, a weapon proficience; but it could also be a spell level or whatever), then you have to pay for training. Otherwise you just advance once you're in town and have enough xp.

So, we spent the whole session in town. Nothing happened.

I mean, nothing.

This is the only problem I have with "sandbox" games. If the players don't know (or can't decide) where to go next, the whole game grinds to a halt. And we couldn't decide.

Part of this was because one of our party is a druid. Now, druids in AD&D aren't bad, but she decided to play it to the hilt, and won't go into a dungeon (in a game called DUNGEONS & DRAGONS...)

(If we'd had an objective, we'd have spent about half an hour in town and gotten on the road again.)

On the plus side, however, nobody died. And now both of our main fighters can use a longbow. So that's something, I guess.




In other news, this is my 100th post on this blog. Not too bad, considering.