RPGaDay Day 14 2020: Banner

         Banners and heraldry can be a major part of RPGs from knights and religions in fantasy games to  sports and nations in modern games. Coat of arms can be used to recognize knightly orders on the battlefield to discern friend and foe much like uniforms today.         
        Symbols are an important detail of RPGs that can make them seem more intricate. For example, the difference between an encounter with simple goblins wearing non-descriptive tattered clothes and fighting with knives versus a hobgoblin unit in uniforms bearing a kris knife on the shoulder with chest armor and shields etched with the symbol is a more interesting encounter. The hobgoblins might even fight with a kris knife and favor finesse instead of the brute force that they are known for. Hobgoblin rogues? What does the kris knife symbolize? Who do the hobgoblins work for?

RPGaDay Day 13 2020: Rest

      The Earthdawn Ten year Quest began at The Wanderer's Rest in Bartertown and ended with a modified version of the adventure Fallen Leaves. 
      The Wanderer's Rest is an Earthdawn and GMing website you should check out. It was one of the first Earthdawn websites that I read thoroughly on the internet and was an inspiration to my longest campaign.

http://members.iinet.net.au/~schibeci/

      The Earthdawn material is quite good.

http://members.iinet.net.au/~schibeci/material/earthdawn/

     But the GMing articles section and particularly Musings of a Madman is well worth a read.  

http://members.iinet.net.au/~schibeci/articles/

RPGaDay Day 12 2020: Message

      Communication is important in RPGs. Both in and out of games.
      Once the age of computers began, Earthdawn was run through Yahoo! Geocities on a group for messaging about game as well as the E-Dawns which were mostly in character written recaps. Earthdawn 7 Sands was a website that was dedicated to my in-game house rules.  The original Earthdawn ten year campaign remains one of the most organized campaigns of all time with a lot of surviving content although much of the early days of that campaign are lost to the mists of time and only exist in the memories of the gaming group and myself. Especially since the death of Geocities and the 7 Sands.
      These days, recaps are mostly done from the GM's perspective in most campaigns as I often don't have an NPC to record the relevant session and offer their thoughts. Earthdawn Cathay Quest didn't have a relevant NPC voice. Necessary Evil was an outlier because of Dr. Destruction. Shaintar had Hiraltki, Phelos, and Grundy who aren't writers but were a warrior, comedy relief, and an engineer. Return to 50 Fathoms is similar with Equias gone. Saga of the Goblin Horde doesn't have any NPC to write except for perhaps Chief Bignose as leader of the Redfang Tribe. And writing a blog trolling the players in the voice of Chief Bignose doesn't seem fun (at least for the players that read the blog to remember what happened last session).
      Now games have their own dedicated Facebook group and a Facebook messenger group to keep people informed about game. I moved the recaps to Blogger. I used to just post them in the Facebook group, my wall, and other places were people might be interested around the net. Blogger is a useful app because of its photo upload capacity. I used to lose a lot of pictures by just uploading recaps to walls and such. I still don't have a full campaign here on Blogger as I started about using the app about 1/3 into Necessary Evil and the newest campaigns are still in progress.    

RPGaDay Day 11 2020: Stack

     The word Stack will always remind me of Magic: The Gathering, the stack of cards that one must work through as responses to spells being played. It also reminds me of Axis and Allies and the huge infantry stacks indicated by a single infantry on a mountain of small poker chips in the late game.

     When it comes to role playing games, I've been known to stack Axis and Allies chips next to a character on the map as status modifiers in a game like Earthdawn (like 2 blue chips for Harried, 5 red chips for Taunt, etc to remind me of a -7 Action test penalty). These days in Savage Worlds I've been known to stack my foam core status modifiers like wound counters, shaken counters, -2 parry counters next to a character on the map. Or stack a flying character on d6s or d10s to indicate height on the map. More recently I've used platforms from Magic: The Gathering Arena of the Planeswalkers for flying creatures.

RPGaDay Day 10 2020: Want

    The word Want always brings me back to Babylon 5 and Mr. Morden oft said phrase. "What do you want?". 

     As per Day 4: Vision I have several Savage Worlds campaign ideas. For the Blackwood and Interface Zero, I have everything I need. For Solomon Kane, I'd want the core book at the least. For Hellfrost, I want the Bestiary and maybe the GameMaster's Guide. For the Suzerain jumping around idea, I'd want the Accursed core books at the least.

RPGaDay Day 9 2020: Light

      Light brings us back to Shaintar: Rangers Riding out the Storm. In the final battle against The Tempest, Asteron used his legendary bolts to clear away the minions of the Tempest. This allowed Muinor to reach the master of the tempest, the big bad boss at the end of the campaign, Ragar. The Aevakar Paladin prepared for a final winged charge with his white silver skylance and charged into Ragar's eye becoming an Arrow of Light as if shot out of a bow by Archanon. A beam of light erupted from Ragar's eye as Muinor reached Ragar's brain. More and more light beams coruscated from his eyes as Muinor sacrificed himself to save Shaintar using his Martyr edge taking Ragar with him. Ragar's final tempest took half the party to Norcan Darr while the rest who managed to hold on remained in Shaintar.

RPGaDay Day 8 2020: Shade

     Shade brings me back to Earthdawn Cathay Quest. The party had found a mysterious evil book, a pattern item for a Horror and burned it to ash. They had placed the ashes inside a pouch afraid to let the evil dust out of their sight. The Horror had horror-marked Vek, a Sorcerer, and told him to bring it the ashes. But Vek refused the Thought Worm. Furious, the Horror killed Vek and then brought him back as a Shadow using Create Shadow. Instead of controlling it myself, I gave the player, Kevin, the stat sheet for Shadow Vek and ordered him to get the ashes by any means necessary. Then I just sat back and watched the carnage at Kevin's repeated attempts to get the ashes back. Shadow Vek was eventually defeated, but it was definitely a highlight session of the Cathay Quest...and lazy Gming.