Tag Archives: Destiny

#RPG – Postmortem Studios November Update

Posted by grimachu on

224636The image to the left presents a beautiful, pagan statue – perhaps reminiscent of those found in India. A fine illustration to flesh out any dungeon or cultural passage in a world guide.

This is stock art by industry veteran and workhorse, Brad McDevitt, available from our stock art collections for you to use in your personal or professional projects. You can find our stock art HERE.

We’ve got hundreds of pieces by him at affordable prices for your handouts or your own gaming projects.

If YOU are an artist who wants to sell your work via an established storefront, we can also help you out. Contact me privately if you’re interested. Keep an eye on this blog and my Youtube channel for information on the ZelArt Scholarship this year. We’re doing something a little different as I need a bit of a break, but want to keep things going.

Please support me via my PATREON – you get discounts for as little as $1 a month, as well as access to me for advice, suggestions, video topics and more.

This month’s discount is on 100 Dark Places, so if you like running horror games based around spooky locations, now is a good time to donate!

As a loyal follower of this blog, and because its horror season, you can also get a discount on Art of Gor,  presenting large scale images of Michael Manning’s art for the Tales of Gor roleplaying game.

NOVEMBER DISCOUNT

216179Art of Gor

The art pieces by artist Michael Manning that were created for Tales of Gor and World of Gor.

Accomplished and talented fetish Artist, Michael Manning, brings the Counter-Earth to life in these illustrations for the RPG and world guide to John Norman’s Gor. Here you can see the illustrations in their full-size glory and appreciate their detail and style.

October in Review

 

Another shitty month.

I am still sick, but slowly getting better. Having some issues with my depression medication, but nothing severe enough to risk changing for a different one. I have started going to see people from MIND and Together, which are mental health charities, to try and get me back on track properly. I have also, after ten years of on-off illness, finally applied for some financial support from the government. This felt extremely shameful, but hopefully that will wear off and the additional help will remove some of the pressure I’m under.

On top of all that, perhaps extending it, I was in a car crash, have had a radiator leak at home and had to put the car in for a service immediately following the crash. Never mind the cost, the stress when you’re already ill is intolerable!

Since the cancellation of IndieCon, we’ve been holding our own mini-con for our friends called ‘Awesomecon’. Since I have to put some game material together for that anyway, you may see some small releases later in the month for Blood! and/or Starfinder. I’ll also be running my fan-hack for Numenera, to play a Destiny RPG session.

Otherwise on the reasonably near horizon, once I’m well enough, I hope to finish the next Gor adventure (The Golden Cave – working title) and to break ground, finally, on my survival/post-apoc game series, The Green.

I am also considering starting a ‘choose your own adventure’ on my Youtube channel once a week as, of all the things I do, I’m finding making videos the easiest.

The DarkZel Scholarship will be starting this month, but in a different way as I am not well enough to stand the stress of running a full crowdfunder.

I AM AVAILABLE FOR FREELANCE WORK:

Links to my profiles on Fiverr & People Per Hour (these will be expanded as I add services):

DIRECT SERVICES:

Currently, my remaining 2017 plate is clear and free for freelancing and consultancy. I’m pretty reliable, despite my health issues, and can offer reasonably fast turnaround. I can, perhaps uniquely, provide detail and grounding to scenarios – even dungeons – to humanise them and give them a bit of depth. Give me a try, see what I can do for your games.

I am a 17+ year veteran of the tabletop game publishing world with lots of experience in freelancing and self-publishing.

I’ve worked for Wizards of the Coast, Steve Jackson Games, Nightfall, Cubicle Seven Entertainment and more. I have also written fiction and worked on social media computer games, packing a lot of meaning into short pieces of text.

As a self-publisher, I have overseen every step of the publication process from concept through to publication including writing, editing, layout and modification. I also produce Youtube material and have begun producing audiobooks. If you need some narration for a video project or an audiobook reading, I can help.

Here are some of the services I can offer, and the minimum prices offered – though anything is negotiable up or down depending on the client. I will work pseudonymously if that is a concern for you.

  • New writing (raw text): $0.03c/word (minimum)
  • Proofreading/Light Editing/Commentary: $0.01c/word (second and third deeper passes are possible).
  • ePublishing/RPG Publishing consultation. Skype/Hangout/Call: $20/hour.
  • Consultation on your game project: $20/hour.
  • Layout (InDesign): $11 an hour.
  • Stock Art Shopfront: Postmortem Studios have a huge stock art catalogue from multiple artists and we’d love to add you to that storefront. If you’re an artist who wants to sell your stock art but doesn’t want to deal with the accounts and uploads etc with your own storefront (which would be my first recommendation), then I can do that for you for 50% (I round up your payouts). Even if you don’t want to do this through me I recommend doing it anyway for all artists and can consult on best practice if you need advice.
  • Voice Work: If you find my dulcet tones to your liking, I’m available for voice over work and narration, recording audiobooks and more. Rates negotiable, starting at $11 per hour.
  • Promotion/Interview: Free. If you have a product you want to pimp out or would like to just talk game design and culture, you’re welcome to talk to me and appear on my Youtube channel.
  • Book Trailers/Videos/Adverts.
  • Paid Gamesmastering over streams/skype.

RECENT PRODUCTS

The Turian Gambit:  Long ago something precious was hidden amongst the wagon people to keep it safe. Now it seems something else – a key to the Game of Worlds – may be hidden amongst the savage and vicious people of the Plains of Turia. This booklet contains an adventure, heavy on tribalism, diplomacy, and ingratiation, as well as additional rules for chases and pursuits – as well as the games of the Wagon People.

Inside Gamergate: This book exists to record, for posterity, the events of Gamergate from the perspective of someone within Gamergate. There is a real danger that, what with the media bias against Gamergate, that the other side – the right side – will not get recorded. In the future, anyone looking back is likely to encounter an entirely one-sided version of events from people who have been acting very shadily.

The Game of Worlds (Gor): The Game of Worlds A ‘side quest’ from the line of Tales of Gor adventures, The Game of Worlds is an excellent way to bring Earth-based characters to Gor and set them off on their adventures as an introduction. It starts on Earth and takes them to Gor, in the wake of being caught up in the intrigues on their own world, from there they can return – or stay – to live a life of adventure on a more colourful planet. This booklet also contains non-canonical speculation, rules and ideas for Earth-based campaigns and characters, as well as the interplanetary cold war as it plays out on that world.

Art of Gor: The Art of Gor contains the pieces by artist Michael Manning that were created for Tales of Gor and World of Gor. Accomplished and talented fetish Artist, Michael Manning, brings the Counter-Earth to life in these illustrations for the RPG and world guide to John Norman’s Gor. Here you can see the illustrations in their full-size glory and appreciate their detail and style.

The Silver Cult (Gor): The Silver Cult thrusts the characters into a conspiracy that threatens to overturn the natural order of Gor and the city of Tharna. Will they side with the revolutionaries who seek to usurp the power of that city, or help crush the rebellion? This supplement also contains rules for slave-breaking and torture, and for encouraging better roleplay through mechanics.

Print products are available at Lulu.com and The Game Crafter.

Social Media & Contact

I’m always open to contact, discussion, ideas and more. If you have questions, queries, suggestions or feedback – good or bad – please do get in touch.

Due to continuing issues with Youtube censorship and demonetisation, I now also have a channel on Vidme, please subscribe to me there. At 100 subs I can monetise my channel there as well, and it is less paranoid and sensitive as a host. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t subscribe on Youtube, rather, sub to both – to be on the safe side.

I have a number of old books and stock available for sale. £5 for small format books, £10 for large format books + shipping (UK only).

100 Conspiracies
Abney Park’s Airship Pirates
Adventurer’s Vault 4e
Agents of SWING: Agent Casefile
Ant Assault (Cardgame)
Black Rock Bandits (4e adventure & Map)
Bloodlust RPG (French)
CTD: Isle of the Mighty
Cthentacle (Hardcopy)
d20 Mecha
Dark Conspiracy: Darktek
Dark Conspiracy: New Orleans
Darktown RPG
Desecration (Pathfinder adventure & map)
DK System (French)
DM’s Guide 2 (4e)
Dog Town RPG
Exalted: Return to the Tomb of Five Corners
Legend of the Five Rings LRP Rules
Mantel D’Acier (French)
MET: Antagonists
MET: Book of the Damned
MET: Dark Epics
MET: Journal No 4
MET: Laws of the East
MET: Laws of the Hunt
MET: Laws of the Hunt Player’s Guide
MET: Laws of the Wild Changing Breeds 1
MET: Laws of the Wild Second Edition
MET: Oblivion (Obilvion)
MET: The Long Night
MET: The Masquerade Second Edition
MET: The Shining Host
Monster Manual 2 4e
MTA: Akashic Brotherhood
MTA: Akashic Brotherhood 1st Edition
MTA: Blood Treachery
MTA: Book of Shadows
MTA: Cult of Ecstacy
MTA: Dreamspeakers
MTA: Initiates of the Art
MTA: Masters of the Art
MTA: NWO
MTA: Progenitors
MTA: Sons of Ether
MTA: The Book of Chantries
MTA: The Loom of Fate
MTA: Verbena
MTA: Void Engineers
Ninjas & Superspies RPG
Palladium The Mechanoids (Rifts Sourcebook 2)
Player’s Handbook 2 4e
The Sting (Pathfinder adventure & map)
Traveller New Era: Fire Fusion & Steel
V:TM 2nd Edition
Victoriana 1st Edition
VTM: Blood Bond
VTM: Blood Magic, Secrets of Thaumaturgy
VTM: Children of the Inquisition
VTM: Children of the Night
VTM: Clanbook Malkavian
VTM: Clanbook Tremere
VTM: Elysium
VTM: Ghouls, Fatal Addiction
VTM: Guide to the Sabbat*
VTM: Midnight Siege
VTM: Storyteller’s Handbook to the Sabbat
VTM: Storyteller’s Handbook
VTM: Storyteller’s Screen 2nd Edition
VTM: The Anarch Cookbook
VTM: The Hunters Hunted
VTM: The Player’s Guide to the Sabbat
VTM: The Succubus Club
VTM: Time of Thin Blood
WOD: Blood-Dimmed Tide
WOD: Combat
WOD: Outcasts
WTA: Anansi
WTA: Axis Mundi – The Book of Spirits
WTA: Corax
WTA: Mokole
WTO: The Risen
WTO: The Sea of Shadows

Comics

2000AD
315-351
353-383 (two 383’s)
385-734 (two 393’s)
736-989
991-1199

Megazine
Volume 3
1-11
13-15
19-23
25
27-38
72

[Review] Destiny: The Taken King

Posted by grimachu on

Z-1Destiny

I already liked Destiny.

This is an unpopular position to take and has made many people very angry.

I could always see the game within the game, the lore, the secrets, the hints of Big Ideas(tm). I enjoyed rooting them out, browsing the revealed grimoire information online (find the dead ghosts myself?) and figuring out what was going on and who my character was in this universe.

Of course it had some flaws. Not least hiding all that rich lore and story away where your average player wasn’t going to bother with it. Being limited to FPS gameplay. Becoming repetitive. Relying far too much on the grind. Relying far too much on multiplayer. All the rest of it. Plus it had the problems all MMOs have where everybody has done all those heroic things so nobody has any unique acts of heroism, plus the world never truly changing despite your actions.

Still. I loved it. The progression. The customisation. The lore. The look and feel. The world. The Big Ideas. It was just a flawed presentation that might have worked better as an RPG (so I made one…)

Previous Expansions

Neither House of Wolves nor The Dark Below really did much to change any of this. House of Wolves filled in a bit of lore about The Reef and the Queen and her Brother (whom, one suspects, may have had a Game of Thrones relationship…) and the Fallen who had settled there as well, The Dark Below took the mask away from a big enemy and gave us a bit more to understand about the Hive, but really this was more of the same.

2QThe Taken King

The Taken King is NOT more of the same.

The most jarring thing about The Taken King is how it has rejigged everything. Your ‘Light’ is now more akin to a ‘gear score’ in standard MMORPGs and, once you get past how jarring it is to lose all your old unupgradable gear (I almost cried) this change to the system and the gear subsystems is great. Just don’t forget you can upgrade purples to have higher attack/defence from other gear and don’t discard them, like your humble author (who probably shouldn’t have played all day).

On the other hand, you get swords now.

Story-wise presentation is much better now and… here be spoilers… the plot makes good use of Nolanbot, Cayde-6 (Nathan Fillion) and Eris Morn (Morla Gorrondona – which might have been a better name for the character, come to that) when it comes to exposition and really starts to, finally, bring some of your allies to life.

Now, I actually liked Dinklebot’s delivery (another unpopular opinion which has made many people angry) and find Nolanbot worse, but the way they’ve improved the ghost’s interactions and exposition – including scanning things for pure story reason during missions and patrols – is better.

You now have lore in the game, where you can get at it.

Patrols have a minor overhaul and have been more integrated into missions, you also get mysterious signals with unclear objectives you have to figure out.

The questlines dealing with The Taken King and leftovers from House of Wolves are better integrated, better explained, more ‘present’ as story and just generally better.

I haven’t bothered with PvP yet (I loathe PvP and only engage in it out of necessity or sufferance), but I’m told that the new Mayhem Mode is a lot of fun and that there are eight new maps. The most interesting new map is set in the European Dead Zone, which holds out promise for the future that we may get more content set on Earth and outside the now monotonously familiar Russian patrol zones.

Personally I’m holding out for Saturn, Jupiter and their many moons coming along in the future.

Guardians

Each Guardian now gets access to a third subclass that they can obsessively level up, can now level up to 40 and can further refine their gear to absurd and obscene levels.

Titans now get to be Sunbreakers, a solar class with all sorts of explosions and smashing powers.

Warlocks get to be arc-empowered lightning-throwers as the Stormcaller subclass.

Hunters now get to be void-empowered bowmen, kind of like the old Dungeons and Dragons cartoon ranger. Playing a Hunter this is what I have gotten to play so far and I honestly find it a little lacklustre. More effective in team play, playing solo it just doesn’t seem to have the sheer, devastating power of the arcblade attacks and, once I’ve levelled it up completely, I’ll be changing back.

ZAll things considered…

This is much more like the game Destiny should have been at launch. Finally the complete game we deserved. If it had started with this sort of level of presentation and polish I don’t think we’d have seen the harsh kinds of reviews we did. With the changes I would up my original review score of 3.75/5 to 4/5. There’s still some issues with the PvP necessity, more in-game presentation of lore needs to happen and we need new places to explore and conquer (the Dreadnaught is just too much like the Moon).

It’s also left some new things unexplained and taken some major NPCs out of the game (or has it…?) before we had a chance to really connect with them.

Still, things are really starting to look up.

LUMENERA: Destiny Roleplaying Using Numenera

Posted by grimachu on

lumenera

Despite something of a lukewarm reception from many, I’ve really been enjoying Destiny and it seemed, to me, to be a perfect translation into a Tabletop RPG for a deeper experience. Numenera seemed the most obvious fit, given that it already slotted neatly into three classes and the degree of player agency that it provides.

Here’s a rough, raw, document version for now.

This is purely a fan thing, but if you feel like supporting me in producing game material personally and professional you can support me on Patreon or support my current professional project, a Gor RPG and world/art book.

DestinyFinal

#Destiny Review Redux

Posted by grimachu on

BxRsfydIcAANE5II played in the beta, and whatever it was before the beta (which certainly wasn’t an alpha) and I find myself perplexed by the response of many webcomics cartoonists and bloggers to the game. That response being disappointment for many. Review sites – in the spotlight recently over #gamergate have been giving it scores like 6 and 7/10, which are actually more like 4’s and 5’s once you take into account score bias (where the average trends towards 7).

For me, the game isn’t a disappointment, despite having thrashed through the Earth stages a huge number of times during beta access and having to do so again with the full release. Despite having already played through it in some intense play over the last week (I was laid up with a fractured wisdom tooth for a couple of days).

I can see myself continuing to play the game a great deal in much the same way I continued to play Trion’s Defiance console MMO (also very good!) even after I completed that.

So why have I had such a different reaction to Destiny than so many other people and why is it – in my opinion – a very good and worthwhile game?

I think I can nail down a few reasons.

  1. I didn’t follow the hype: I understand Destiny has been hugely hyped but I hadn’t really been following it that much. My expectations were shaped by my experience in the beta and not anything else. If I hadn’t played in the beta it wouldn’t be on my radar because…
  2. I wasn’t expecting Halo: I didn’t especially like Halo. It was expensive for the single player campaigns and I’m not a fan of PvP which is where the franchise seemed to be increasingly concentrated. Because I wasn’t expecting Halo I wasn’t disappointed and was, in fact, delighted by what appears to be the bastard offspring of Borderlands and Phantasy Star.
  3. I’m a Roleplayer: The views, the lore, the Grimoire (no pun intended) are crack to me. I want to understand this bizarre, post-transhuman world in which we find ourselves playing. I have been inspired enough to start putting together a kit to play Destiny as an RPG (using Numenera) and I’ve been poring over my Grimoire, reading the strategy guide for the lore and poking at the online wikis to see more about it. It’s a really, really interesting world even if it is all based around a singular deus-ex-machina in the form of The Traveler and pseudo-scientific techno mysticism.

Graphically the game is superb, the first new-generation game to really seem to stretch the legs of the PS4.

The music is great and will likely come to form background to some of our tabletop roleplaying sessions in the same way the soundtracks to Mass Effect and other games have (Prince of Persia was great while playing Dark Sun).

Gameplay wise, yes, there’s not a huge amount of levels yet, but the design is tight and they are replayable in different builds, different character types and at different levels. The Strike missions remain genuinely challenging and fun and the patrol missions are excellent time sinks already, especially with random events going off.

The elements many have complained about, the lore being scarce, the story being incomplete and unsatisfying make sense within an MMO context, you don’t want to shoot your bolt and have nothing left. I am sure more is to be revealed over time, though I appreciate people’s frustration with the current state of play.

I can’t stand PvP, so I can’t really comment on that aspect of the game.

Score
Style: 4.5/5 (a true next-gen piece of art, but I found the character design a little too dehumanising, distant and ‘unsexy’)
Substance: 3/5 (while the substance of the game is currently rather limited, the promise it holds is enormous. The hints of further Earth areas – Chicago, Mumbai, and other planets – especially the Jovian sub-system – all hold enormous promise that I hope will be fulfilled).
Overall: 3.75/5

The major problem with Destiny is that there isn’t enough of it. When you’ve made a game, that’s a nice problem to have and one that’s fixable.

Also, give us facial hair, goddamn pogonophobic game industry.