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 (377)

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) (301)

Two Journeys, by Brian Engard (ePub) (231)

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 (341)

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.

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.

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.