This week on Underdiscussion Kat joins us to discuss RPG settings. General differences, a few specifics, and finally our favorites. This episode clocks in at about 43 minutes.
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Mar 192012
Feb 272012
Recorded all the way back in January, Slacker joined Hooligan, WDR and I to discuss everything geek that we’re looking forward to in 2012. This episode clocks in at just over an hour.
A quick correction, we mentioned Far West, but couldn’t quite remember the name. It is indeed Far West.
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Feb 242012
Looking around my old files I found this little gem. Presented for your approval, straight from the days of the Pathfinder Beta playtest, is Captain Oakthrash. His huge ironclad ship, The Nature’s Bane, and it’s treant crew were the terror of high space. Forgive the formatting, I wasn’t used to the new Bestiary format at the time.
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Captain Oakthrash
Huge Plant
Hit Dice: 10d10 +82 (141 hp)
Initiative: +3
Speed: 30 ft.
Armor Class: 30 (-2 size, -1 Dex, +13 natural, +2 armor training, +8 armor), 7 Touch, 30 Flatfooted
Base Attack/CMB: +10/+22
Attack: +23 Melee (Hg mstr Greatsword 6d6+17/17-20×2)
Full Attack: +23/+18 Melee (Hg mstr Greatsword 6d6+17/17-20×2)
Space/Reach: 15 ft./15 ft.
Special attacks: Animate trees, double damage against objects, Trample 2d6+13, Weapon mastery (+2/+2d6)
Special qualities: DR 10/Slashing, low light vision, plant traits, vulnerability to fire, bravery
Saves: Fort +7, Ref +3, Will +3
Abilities: Str 30, Dex 8, Con 22, Int 12, Wis 16, Cha 12
Skills:
Feats: Blind-fight, Endurance, Diehard, Improved Critical (Greatsword), Improved initiative, Power Attack (-10/+10), Overhand chop (standard, +5 dmg), Weapon focus (Greatsword), Backswing (+5 dmg first atk during full atk), Weapon specialization (Greatsword), Greater Weapon Focus (Greatsword)
Treasure: Huge Masterwork Greatsword, Huge masterwork FullplateBravery (Ex): +3 bonus to will saves vs fear.
Animate Trees (Sp):
A treant can animate trees within 180 feet at will, controlling up to two trees at a time. It takes 1 full round for a normal tree to uproot itself. Thereafter it moves at a speed of 10 feet and fights as a treant in all respects. Animated trees lose their ability to move if the treant that animated them is incapacitated or moves out of range. The ability is otherwise similar to liveoak (caster level 12th). Animated trees have the same vulnerability to fire that a treant has.Double Damage against Objects (Ex)
A treant or animated tree that makes a full attack against an object or structure deals double damage.Trample (Ex)
Reflex DC 22 half. The save DC is Strength-based.
I’m going to have to go back and bring this up to current Pathfinder standard someday.
Dec 022011
This week I only have one thing that can justify this post’s inclusion in my RPG feed, but it’s enough. Also, we continue the brief reviews of all the Harry potter books and I reveal I’m an uncultured swine with my Animal Farm “review”. Let’s get started, shall we?
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The Astromundi Cluster by Sam Witt
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
I don’t generally buy campaign setting books, but since this was part of the SpellJammer line I had to pick it up. My single biggest problem with the Astromundi cluster was that it was too contained, that it allowed no real chance to escape into the wider galaxy of spelljamming. I know that there are a lot of people who hated the crossover setting approach that Spelljammer took, I personally hated having to deal with the Dragonlance steel for gold exchange scheme that by players came up with, but there was no reason to trap players in a single sphere for an entire campaign.
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I own every single SpellJammer product that was not an article in Dragon Magazine, and this is my least favorite. There is really nothing in this setting that I could mine for my home brew SpellJammer spheres.
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Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
In my opinion this is the best of the Harry Potter series. They introduce a great character who might actually care enough about Harry to help him in his epic struggle against an evil wizard who couldn’t kill a baby in a crib (Memo to voldemort: just use a knife). The dementors thing was cool, but the deus ex time travel thing was easily the worst part of it, and really introduces the the biggest plot hole the series has.
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Some people may disagree, but I think it was all down hill from here.
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Angel: After the Fall, Volume 1 by Joss Whedon
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
As a fan of the Angel (how I became a fan is a funny story) I felt that this was a good start to a comic adaptation of the series as well as a good start at resolving the cliffhanger ending that Joss and Co left us with. I think the way it jumps into the action a while after the end of the show and with LA plunged into the heart of hell was the best way to deliver a great story and I would recommend the comics to any Angel or Buffy fan.
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Great followup to a great series.
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My rating: 1 of 5 stars
I have to admit, I read this only because it was required reading in High School. I’m not a fan of political satire, and while I understand why this book was assigned I’m still not a big fan.
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Remember, these review posts are just sort of a “light snack” to start off your day. You don’t have to tell me how wrong I am about my opinions in the comments section of this post. I would hate it if some big internet personality, like say Wil Wheaton, were to point his followers at this page to show me how wrong I am in my views or how badly I spell.
That would just be awful.
Oct 142011
Comic book mash-ups, spaceships, and nerds make up this week’s Book Review Friday!
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The Amalgam Age of Comics by John Byrne
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I’m a bit of a comic fan, and while I’ve always liked the idea of the characters from the DC side of things, for the most part their stories have just never grabbed me. I’m very much a Marvel zombie. I think that colors my opinion of this collection a bit, because I think the Amalgamations that work well and seem like they could have made great ongoing books were characters that leaned much more heavily on their Marvel counterpart than their DC counterpart. The best example in this collection is DarkClaw: It’s essentially Wolverine and Jubilee as seen through a lens of Batman and Robin. Overall it was interesting to see how the characters and concepts were combined and I think an ongoing anthology book could have been successful.
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I think anyone who has read more than a handful of comics has had the thought “what if I combined [hero x] with [hero y]?” and quite a few of us have played that hero in a Supers RPG. I myself am guilty of that. Mac Magma (The Pyroclastic Powerhouse!) was essentially “What if I combined The Thing and Jonny Storm?
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Full Frontal Nerdity 1: Big Book of Epic Fail by Full Frontal Nerdity
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I’ve been a big fan of Aaron Williams ever since the first time I read a Nodwick comic in the back of a Dragon Magazine. He’s always found the humor in roleplaying settings and with Full Frontal Nerdity he proves that there is ample humor to be had in the act of Roleplaying itself. In my opinion the FFN guys seem more like the roleplayers I know than the KoDT characters do.
If you like gamer humor I would recommend picking this up.
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It’s hard to put into words why I find FFN so funny. I think it’s the fact that almost every time I read one of the strips I can either say “yup, I know that person” or “that seems like something I would do.”
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And Another Thing… by Eoin Colfer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
It’s… alright. It’ not good (what fan fiction is?)* but it’s not bad either. It reunites the cast and gives the series a much more satasfying ending that Douglas Adams’ did, so there’s that. It manages a crappy Cthulhu joke but makes up for it by making Thor an important character, so again there’s that. I will admit that I could be being very unfair to the book, but while reading most of the book I kept thinking “This is alright, but Adams could have done something really funny with this.”
*Yes, this is fan fiction. Just because it was commissioned fan fiction doesn’t make it any more legitimate.
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That last book about fantasy space rolls us right into…
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Beyond the Moons by David Zeb Cook
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
It’s the story we all know and can relate to: a simple country farmboy goes off to war and comes home to tend the family farm when all of a sudden a spaceship crashes in the field, the boy gets befriended by a hippo-headed military man, and he gets stuck with a powerful artifact that dangerous forces want to take for themselves. I think we’ve all been there.
The pacing was a touch slow in parts, and I have to assume that the only reason the novel series started in the Dragonlance series was because the series HAD to visit all of the big three TSR settings, as the rest of the series dealt with hardly anything else from Dragonlance.
Anyway, this is the first in a series of SpellJammer novels and I think that it was pretty good. People who are fans of the setting or are fans of light heated silliness and adventure should find something enjoyable, but anyone who doesn’t like the less serious elements of the SpellJammer setting may not find it to their liking.
View all my reviews
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I’m a huge fan of SpellJammer and finding these in a local used bookshop was awesome. I’ll be posting the rest of the reviews in the future.
