So you want a Gamma World DM screen, huh? So did I, when I started playing Gamma World. Initially, I downloaded this screen, printed it, and taped it to the inside of my D&D screen. An unsatisfactory solution, due to the fact that, if I were to play D&D, I’d have to remove all the Gamma World stuff, then put it back on when I switched games. So, I decided I needed a dedicated screen for Gamma World.

So, I chopped up the above screen and reconfigured the tables to my liking, arranging them in a 3-panel, landscape-style document. Then I grabbed some wallpapers from WotC’s website, and spliced them together to make some player-facing art.

After printing these things out on card stock, I mounted them to some foam board (which you can pick up in most craft stores). Initially, I attached both side panels to the center panel with packing tape, but this proved an unsatisfactory solution; you see, I couldn’t fold the second panel once the first panel was folded, which made it cumbersome to transport and store. So, I detached one of the side panels and instead attached it with Velcro, so that I could detach and reattach it at will, making it easier to store and transport. You can see the final product here:

DM-Facing Side

Player-Facing Side

If you’d like to make your own Gamma World DM screen, here’s the file that I printed and mounted to the foam board. It contains both the DM-facing side and the artwork on the reverse side.

Gamma World DM Screen (630)

Credit where credit is due: the tables come from here, the artwork comes from here. None of it is my own creation; I just re-mixed it.

Hello, all. A few years back, I participated (and finished) National Novel Writing Month. Since that time, the resulting novella has been sitting on my hard drive, collecting digital dust.

I don’t know that I’ll ever publish and sell it; I’m honestly not sure if the quality is up to that level. I do want people to read it, though, and I want to know what people think of it. This being my 500th post on this blog, I figured I’d allow you, the reader, a glimpse at something I wrote as my first real attempt at long-form fiction. This is unedited and unproofread; you may, indeed, be the first one to read it all the way through (assuming you do). I hope you enjoy it, and if you do, I hope that you let me know. If you don’t, I hope that you let me know what I can do to improve it.

Two Journeys, by Brian Engard (PDF) (863)

Two Journeys, by Brian Engard (ePub) (425)

I picked up Famine in Far-Go the other day, and I’m digging it so far. Here’s the thing about it though: it adds twenty new origins to the game. This, in and of itself, is not a bad thing. However, it does mean that, when rolling your origins during character creation, you have to refer to two books at once. It would have been nice of WotC had included all of the origins on the table in Far-Go, rather than just the Far-Go specific ones, but sadly that is not the case. They have released a very nice automated character sheet, which is a nice step, but if you’re playing somewhere without internet access (like most game stores), it’s not that helpful.

My solution was simply to create a sheet that I can print out and keep in the box that has all of the origins included. It’s not pretty, but it’s functional; here you go: Gamma World Character Origin Sheet (606)

If anyone would like to pretty this up for me, I can send you the original spreadsheet. Contact me via a comment on this post, and I’ll upload the new, prettier file, and you’ll get credit for your work. Otherwise, enjoy.

Yesterday, I ran a playtest for Bulldogs! that went quite well, from my perspective. The group seemed to have fun (I certainly did), and I got an idea about what works and what needs work within the system.

One thing that struck me, though, was how effective my preparations were. In general, I think I prepared fairly well; I knew the system, and I had in idea of where things were going. There were areas where I think I over-prepared, and others where I feel I didn’t prepare enough.

The chief area where I was over-prepared was simply in the length of the adventure. We played for a good three and a half hours, and got through about half of the adventure. In a more traditional, longer-term play setting that might be fine, but in a one-shot playtest, it’s really better if you can get through the entire adventure in one sitting. I decided partway through that I was going to cut some of the fights out of the adventure because it simply didn’t need it, but we still weren’t able to finish (I had to get home and feed the dogs, after all). I think the reason that I prepared so much was simply because I’ve never run a FATE system game before, and I had no idea how long it would take to resolve a single conflict. Practice, I think, will solve this problem.

Bulldogs!, like any FATE game, is fairly easy to improvise with; it gives you a lot of tools with which to adjudicate player actions on the fly, and doesn’t require nearly as much preparation as, say, D&D does. In fact, the adventure that I prepped (the one that was too long) was only two pages long. I also had a set of cards with character stats and notes on them, though that stuff could have easily been included in the adventure document, and would likely only have increased its length by half a page or so.

It was pretty easy to run the adventure from this document, but I could definitely see areas where I could have prepared more. For example, simply putting stress boxes for the enemies on the document would have saved me a lot of time that I spent hand-drawing them before encounters. I also think that some of the fights that I planned were a little too hard for the party. This is partly due to inexperience, I think, and partly also due to the fact that it’s difficult to gauge how difficult an opponent should be for a particular set of PCs.

Despite these hitches, I do think that everyone had a lot of fun. I really enjoyed running the game (and I had a good, creative set of players), and I’d definitely run it again.

This is the final member of the Dawn Chaser’s crew.

Larson grew up on an Arsubaran colony world, Heska; it was a rough and tumble world, but also highly industrialized. He learned to fix things and monkey around with machines at an early age, and it was clear he had a gift for it. When he was seventeen years old, TransGalaxy offered him a job as a ship’s mechanic on a luxury cruise ship, a job he readily accepted, if only to get off of Heska. The lack of excitement was not good for Larson, though; he began drinking too much, and getting into fights with crew and even passengers aboard the cruise ship. During one altercation, he killed someone, and he was sentenced to several years on a prison planet.

TransGalaxy continued to monitor Larson while he was imprisoned, and they noted that his exceptional mechanical skills got even better. He seemed to thrive in the rougher prison environment than he did on the luxury liner, though he still got into the occasional brawl. On one such occasion, his opponent got the better of him and used a piece of heavy industrial machinery on him, crushing his right side and nearly killing him. Mysteriously, TransGalaxy paid for his hospitalization and his new cybernetic prosthesis, and had him released from prison on one condition: that he would be the ship’s mechanic on a class-D freighter, the Dawn Chaser. Larson has no idea why TransGalaxy is so interested in him, and he doesn’t care. As long as he gets to work on machines and gets more-or-less left alone, he’s content.

Here are two more members of the Chaser’s crew; only one more to go!

An’k T’rbrik was born amongst her people, in Templari space. She was raised to believe that she was superior to members of other species, physically, mentally, and in every other way. She grew up being taught to strive for perfection. She strove for physical perfection, studying Templari martial arts and other physical disciplines, and she strove for perfection in her chosen career: the path of the space pilot. She became one of the better-known pilots in the Templari navy. Something, however, in the back of her mind always nagged her, some doubt as to the entitlement that was bred into her, the superiority of her race.

Then, one day, she made a near-fatal choice: she refused to fire upon a defenseless ship full of refugees from the Frontier Zone. For this, she was sentenced to execution; rather than face death, she chose exile. She ran from her home, haunted by her perceived failure. Even now, as a pilot for a rag-tag group of spacers on a Class-D freighter, she has trouble getting past the Templari indoctrination; she believes that she is superior in most ways to her crew, though she tries to get along with them. In the end, she is an exile and and outsider, tentatively accepted by the crew of the Dawn Chaser.

Lexi Stardust, like most Ken Reeg, started making deals at an early age. She had a natural talent for gaining peoples’ trust, and she used that talent to make a lot of money. Her penchant for compulsive risk-taking and her love of games of chance meant that she rarely held onto that money for very long, and she often made enemies just as easily as she made friends. When the chips were down, though, she managed to talk her way into a job on the Dawn Chaser, as the ship’s front-woman and dealmaker.

Since that time, she has more than earned her keep. She has contacts everywhere, and where she doesn’t have contacts already, she makes them quickly. She leverages those contacts to procure discounted goods that the crew ships and sells at a significant profit. Though she sometimes gets the crew into hot water with her thrill-seeking behavior, she is often worth the trouble.

Here’s the third member of the Dawn Chaser’s crew.

When ADAM-101 (Automated Defense And Maintenance) was created, he was without free will. He had not yet awakened to the world, so he was content (if he was even capable of that emotion) to go about his work on Infocity, keeping things running and defending it from invaders. He was just one of many ADAM units on Infocity, and because there were so many, the System (a militant organization of robots that sees itself as an immune system for the Galaxy, with organic creatures a disease) attacked and took many of them to swell their own ranks. They Awakened ADAM, and attempted to indoctrinate him.

The newly Awakened robot was grateful to his rescuers for his new state of being, but he did not agree with their radical philosophies. He bided his time (robots are nothing if not patient), and when the time was right, he escaped from them. He was soon captured by pirates, who attempted to reprogram him and wipe his memory so they could sell him. This worked in the short term, but gradually his memories and his free will started to return.

When he re-Awoke, he found that he was aboard a ship called the Dawn Chaser. He found that he enjoyed the company of the crew, even if he often didn’t understand them, and while they didn’t always treat him with respect, they usually treated him with affection. This, for now, was enough for ADAM.

Last time I talked about the ship, and the ship’s muscle. Today I’m going to talk about the medic. With this character, I not only tested the character generation system, I also created a custom species (along with a custom species trait), a stunt, and some gear.

Doctor Modorion grew up on his home planet Thul. He came to Arsubar when he was young, to study medicine, and he excelled in that field. He used his natural psychic talents to bolster his keen medical mind, and graduated from the University of Arsubar, magna cum laude. Modorion started what looked to be a promising career, but his arrogance and his disdain for the law got the better of him. Convinced that nobody was his intellectual equal, he started pushing the boundaries of what was medically possible–and what was medically ethical. This resulted in the deaths of more than one patient, and he eventually lost his license. He would have been arrested, but he escaped and changed his identity. He found some street contacts and had a false medical license made, so that he could continue to practice, but he decided that he didn’t want to stay in one place for very long, lest the authorities catch up to him. He signed on aboard the Dawn Chaser as a way to continue doing what he loved among people who were in equally desperate situations, and would be unlikely to turn him in should his secret be discovered.

As I mentioned earlier, I’m going to be running a playtest demo of Bulldogs! in its current alpha state on the 19th. I thought that it might be fun to post the PDFs of the pregens for the demo as I make them. This first one is a double-whammy, because it’s got both a character and the ship’s character sheet.

The Dawn Chaser is an old ship (as are most ships in TransGalaxy’s Class-D program). Many of its systems are outdated or obsolete, and the ship-board AI has picked up more than its fair share of quirks and ghosts in the machine. As the AI, Navvy, has control over most of the Chaser’s systems, this often leads to what the crew refer to as “poltergeisting”. Lights flip on and off, showers change temperature, bulkhead doors open and close, and Navvy wakes everyone up in the morning with a rousing version of the Arsubaran national anthem. Despite the apparent inconveniences, most of the crew have come to regard this behavior with affection, and would not replace Navvy for the world. Thus far, he has never put one of the crew in danger.

Barg Drabog, like many Hacragorkans, is pugilistic, ill-tempered, and violent. He looks upon the other crew as weak, though he is quick to protect them when danger infringes upon their lives. He grew up on the planet Stakes, hiring himself out as a bodyguard or bouncer, or occasionally as a mercenary. He learned to love gambling there, though he never became truly addicted. He did, however, rack up a number of small debts to a variety of unsavory people. These were not much of a concern to Barg; these people had bigger fish to fry, and figured he’d pay them eventually. One day, though, somebody mysterious bought up all of Barg’s debts and sent someone to collect on them. Barg threw the collection agent through a window, then went to the nearest spaceport and signed on with the first crew he could find that would take him. It happened to be the crew of the Dawn Chaser.

I received a request shortly after posting Aria the Executioner for the template that I used. I didn’t use a template per se; rather, I used one of the existing pregens to create the image in PhotoShop. I told that user that I’d send him the .psd file but, sadly, it exceeds the 25 MB file limit in Gmail. So instead, I’m uploading it to the site, for anyone to download and modify as they see fit. Be warned: I didn’t create this file with the intent for others to modify it so, while you’re welcome to, it may not be that user-friendly. Virtually everything is in its own layer, making it easy to modify individual elements of the image (and change text and numbers), but I didn’t label any of the layers beyond what PhotoShop does on its own, so it’ll be difficult to find specific layers in the mess.

I don’t currently have any plans to create a template through which you can easily make your own character cards. If enough people express interest in such (which you can do simply by commenting on this post), I will do so, and I will post it on this site. Enjoy.