”WHAT!?” A tall man, with black hair and a short, well trimmed beard. He was lean and looked extremely irritated. This man was Locken Frey, once a powerful wizard, now a magicless man who found power elsewhere. Politics.

”I know it’s not ideal, sir, but our image needs it right now, if we associate with the Brigade…” The young, yet already balding man, sitting on the other side of the gigantic mahogany desk was terrified. He could set Frey on fire with a word, yet…

The History

The Order of the Tome was founded about 15 years back by Maelen Frey, an aging wizard who decided he would not put his son through the merciless combat training the Golden Brigade forced upon all young magic-sensitive, recruiting all spellcasters to their cause, mostly to not have them fight against them in the future. Thus began the Order, an alternative for spellcasters who ultimately just wanted to deepen their understanding of the Verse without having the responsability of fighting dissonnance wherever it appeared.

(more…)

You’ve heard it here first, folks! The Heroic Orchestra setting is getting the zombie treatment!

For the next campaign, the players will be member of an elite team of explorers, soon to be sent to a strange floating island, far west, above the Valessian Sea. This floating island is believed to be one of the largest untouch ruins of the Ancients, a race of highly advanced proto-humans, believed to have had access to incredible technology and magic (IE : A FREAKING FLOATING CITY!).

More after the jump.

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I’m one for heavily modified settings. In fact, I very often run my DnD games in steampunk, or even modern, settings. My main problem always was firearms.

The thing with firearms is that almost every systems who uses them make them extremely complicated, with magazine size, reload time, rate of fire, autofire rule, and so on, and so on. While this, in theory, is not much of a problem, for me who has to often handwave or house-rule firearms into my game, it makes the whole situation unmotivating. I don’t like being bothered by rules, I’m more of a rulings kinda guy, old-school yo.

Thus, here’s what I’m thinking : Why not make a universal rules for firearms? For the D20 players amoungst you, here’s a table with definitions!

• Damage in rules -> equivalent in d20 system -> What it represents
• Glancing damage -> d4 -> A feebly thrown dagger
• Light damage -> d6 -> More or less a hit from a short sword or dagger
• Medium damage -> d8 -> An arrow, or a good sword swing
• Heavy damage -> d10 -> A crossbow bold
• Devastating damage -> d12 -> A sledgehammer to the face

General rules

Autofire : Weapons capable of autofire may make an area attack instead of a normal attack. It uses up the weapon’s ammo, thus the character must reload before being able to shoot again. One cannot make another attack in a round in which he has used autofire.

Reloading : When a character rolls a non-disastrous critical fumble (some systems will define it, some others won’t, most often, you choose), his weapon is empty. Reloading takes a full round (unless you wish to make an advantage that reduces that to a number of actions), and leaves the player vulnerable. It’s hard to dodge and reload at the same time

Pistols

Pistols deal light damage and are rather reliable, they should have decent range (handwaved, define what is “Decent” in your own game). The good thing about pistols, you can have two of them.

Submachine guns

Submachine guns should be treated as pistols with autofire possibility. A character using a pair of submachine guns may make his area attack with a small bonus to damage (consider it one category higher than the submachine gun, thus, medium damage).

Revolvers

The big brother of the pistol. Essentially the same thing, but bigger, bulkier, deals medium damage.

Rifles

Rifles have good to great range, sometimes, they have an autofire mode, sometimes, they have attached grenade launchers (treat as autofire, but you don’t have to reload the gun before shooting again, just have to reload the grenade before using another one). They deal Heavy damage

Shotguns

Shotguns are particular in that they very their damage depending on range. At point blank range, the damage is always Devastating, and for every 2 steps a character  lowers the weapon’s damage, the character may add an additional target to his attack. Thus, a character could shoot two (close-by) targets for Medium damage, or 3 targets for Glancing damage. A shotgun has a maximum range of Short, as should be adjucated by the GM.

That it, really! I wanted to keep it as basic as possible. For anything else, stick to your favorite system’s ranged combat rules, add the numbers and be happy!

Note: Some people might wonder why a shotgun blast would make as much damage as a hit from a great axe in DnD, when firearm damage was much greater in d20 modern for example. My thinking is simple : Get sliced by a freaking greataxe and come back to tell me it was less painful then a shotgun blast. Plus, it balances ranged and melee combat so that melee weapons are still viable.

I’ve discovered this problem a few years back. When I create a character I truly love, I just can’t let it go. At all.

It all started with an NPC called Shiro. a japanese teenager in a Magical Girl game (I know, I know) that I just really loved.  A little arrogant, rude, kind of a bastard, but ultimately, a man with a good heart and a chip on his shoulder.  When the game (that I played during my classes in highschool with Ophite) died as a result of the year being over, I decided the character was awesome and was kinda sad he would be gone forever.

Thus, I decided he would return, and he did. Shiro had between 5 to 10 interpretations in different settings, different systems, he went from an agressive young fighter to a troubled hero-cop in WoD. I did not make the error of making him overpowered when he was a NPC, no, I just can’t get over him, or a few others, really.

The truth is, it became some kind of Fan Service to my long-time players. Loveable inside-jokes and such. My players remember the magical merchant Kerstan, who was also a slave to a powerful entity in an earlier game of DnD, and a possessed chemist later on. He was always a eloquent 7 foot tall, 110 pounds freak of nature that spoke only is raspy wispers and entered your personnal space, but was, in the end, a really swell guy (if scary as hell).

The fact is, I can’t get enough of my fan service, from the famous Milliarriss (ridiculously gleeful catfolk) to the “died by attack of opportunity” Morann (ridiculously gleeful sociopathic necromancer, the party loved her, she collected fingers, but they needed to be given willingly), I just can’t get over them.

Ah, confessions! I’m not one to reuse character concepts because I hate the idea that I’m a specialist type of player. But every game, a piece of me wants to come back to these awesome characters of old and play the shit out of ‘em.

More Year Zero goodness! Introducing a funky duo of NPCs the PCs hopefully will cross!

“Is he alive in there?”

The man was rather average in build, had blond hair and a joking smile. He was dressed odd red and black robes, clashing both with his bright hair and the stark whiteness of the laboratory. He knocked on the glass of a large glass tube. Inside was a naked, hairless man. Closer to a machine than any man had been before. He was a volunteer, it was all good. “We advise you not to do that, sir.” The other man in the room, a small scientist with large glasses and dark hair. He always refused to get his eyes fixed through surgery. His collegues never knew why.

“Can you wake him up, I’d love to introduce him to…” He looked at his papers. “Well, to himself, mostly. Would be nice for him to know who he is. Or will be. Or could be if he doesn’t kill us all!” He laughed, no one else did. “Enough jokes, good man, wake our friend the super-weapon up. You did set up the frequencies for the control chip to the voice-set we gave you, right?”

The smaller man looked at him with the blank eyes of a disillusionned, annoyed scientific genious. “Of course sir. Awakening sequence starting… ”

The tube was slowly emptied of it’s bluish fluids, and the man inside, with his perfect grafted muscles and multiple weapon subsystems sinked to the ground. The door at the base of the tube opened. He was breathing!

“Good morning, Eleven, my name is Reynard and I’ll be your new partner.”