#RPGaDAY 2017, Day 1: A Published RPG to Play

by ThomasNo Comments

The #RPGaDAY event has begun once more! Daily writing prompts about our gaming hobby to spur creativity and share the joy of gaming with friends, family, and complete strangers at conventions and game days! I’ll also be revisiting past questions, but first today’s topic: “What published RPG do you wish you were playing right now?”

Wait, you mean right now, now, on the evening before this goes live while a gentle breeze is sending a light sun shower along the way while I hear our neighbor mowing his back yard and the family is all busy winding down after an emotionally draining day?

That right now?

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Spine Treatments

by ThomasNo Comments

When obtaining art assets for books in the roleplaying industry, I have noticed there is a lot of input into getting the interior artwork and cover artwork. With selling pdfs (and other electronic editions) through places like DriveThruRPG, you’ll find that those files have the front cover, the back cover, and the interior. They are usually in that order so you can view the pdf as a two-up document with a separate page for the front cover, preserving the page spreads in the printed work. What seems to be forgotten — or at least not considered fully — is the treatment for the spine of the book. I find this odd, because at a store, your book is more likely to be shelved spine-out.

I hadn’t really noticed this until I developed the cover for Magpie Games’ Urban Shadows. For that book’s cover, we only had the front artwork which was to be placed on a black background. The back artwork was a composite of four of the character types, combined specifically for that space. We used an interesting typeface for the logo (and some chapter headings) with a white fill at about 85% opacity, re-purposing it for the spine. I wanted to make it big, bleeding over the edge of the printed spine. As a happy accident, this wound up looking amazing on bookshelves.

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#RPGaDAY2015, Day 19: Favorite Superhero RPG

by ThomasNo Comments

Day 19 of #RPGaDAY2015! Favorite Superhero/Comic Book RPG.

Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, no contest.

avengersBack in high school, I played a few Supers RPGs like Champions and Villains & Vigilantes, but despite the characters wearing their underwear on the outside, they never felt like they were actual scenes from a comic book. Marvel Heroic does.

Our heroes were at a remote location, trying to prevent the newest version of Ultron from activating, when at a crucial moment of the conflict our Superman-level hero was suddenly pulled out of space and time by his mystical supervisor and made to recount his failings on his path to redemption. The conflict about the hero’s past choices was just as important as the physical fight to stop Ultron. It felt like a comic book — hell, it felt like a Marvel comic book.

Oh, and the milestone system is so very much “Let me tell you what I want out of this game.” Player-driven agency, yay!

Part of (all of?) the design team on MHR are developing the Sentinel Comics RPG, by Greater Than Games. I’m interested in seeing how that shakes out. Sentinel Comics is the setting for the Sentinels of the Multiverse card game and all of SotM’s spinoffs.

Huh.

Not even 200 words today.

What else?

Oh, how about links to some of the fan work I created for Marvel Heroic?

If you’re playing that, here’s Christmas With The Hulk, an extended fight through midtown Manhattan against a very, very tough Hulk. If you’re planning on playing the Civil War event, you can use this as a prelude to that and have “the Rockerfeller Center Incident” be the kickoff to Civil War instead of Stamford.

Also, the Handling Action Scenes document I created, which talks about, well, how to handle action scenes in Marvel Heroic.

Oh, I forgot I had Deathblow, a mini-event about the resurgence of Hydra and (possibly) the death of America, uploaded! Grab that, too!

What else… maybe this thing I did about using allied heroes in your Marvel game? Or Freakshow, where I ramble on about a street-level police procedural in the Marvel Universe.