Nakazi (Contagion Demons) For Gary Vs The Monsters

Hey Family! I'm back!

Here’s a new monster for the incredibly fun Swords & Wizardry based B-Movie RPG Gary vs The Monsters by Magic Pig Media. Inspired by some fun Italian movies.

"They will make cemeteries their cathedrals, and the cities will be your tombs."

Tagline for Demoni (1985)

Nakazi (Contagion Demons)

Armor Class: 7 [12]
Hit Dice: 2
Attacks: Claws 2x (1d6) or Bite (1d6)
Total Atack Bonus: +2
Save: 17
Move: 15 (-1)
Fear: -2

Special:

Infectious: Nakazi are creatures of contagion and plague. Anyone bitten or clawed by a Nakazi should make a Saving Throw. On a failure the victim turns into a Nakazi in 1d8 minutes.

Quarantine: Reality seems determined to cordon off the Nakazi from uninfected victims and goes to extreme lengths to do this. What was once a door is now a wall. The windows that offers escape before the summoning now opens to a pit of spikes. Coincidences pile up to keep the players and the Nakazi contained. All Saving Throws against Haywire and Fear are at -2 in the Quarantined area. On a failure the GM can decide that one or two Nakazi escape...

Foul Blood: The blood and bile of the Nakazi are capable of contagion as well. Anyone who is forced to swallow Nakazi blood or have it sprayed upon them should make a Saving Throw. On a Failure the victim has a 50% chance to be transformed into a Nakazi (GM discretion)

Killing It (B): Slashing, stabbing and burning are very effective against the Nakazi. The survivors can escape the Quarantine.

Similar to the Necroids (GvM p 37), the Nakazi are demonic spirits who seek to possess the living and wreak havoc. Unlike Necroids, the Nakazi are feral and destructive, rampaging monsters who want only to spread death and contagion. The Nakazi manifest through story and vision, summoned to reality by watchers and readers of works that introduce them to this reality. One victim is chosen, and soon begins to spread the infection throughout a confined space like a theater or an apartment building. If the Nakazi escape into the world, so much the better. Reality reacts to their very nature by confining them to one space and hoping the victims can stanch the contagion. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't...

Fight On! #10 is Out

Fight On! #10 is available for release at Lulu in both Print and PDF editions! I've recommended Fight On! in the past but this issue is special. Why, you may ask? Because one of the tables I wrote on this very blog is in this issue! Tom Moldvay is celebrated in this issue, and my table is a tribute to the mad genius that he introduced me too. Check issue 10 out!

Goblinoid Games, Public Domain, and Sinistar

Yeah, I know it's been a while since I've posted, but the writing just wasn't there. But now I feel more ideas coming on, so it begins again.

Goblinoid Games

*The Advanced Edition Companion by Goblinoid Games is a stroke of genius. Like many gamers, I started out with Red Box D&D. The people who were DMing often pulled goodies from the AD&D game and grafted them on. The AEC for Labyrinth Lord shares this spirit as well. More spells, classes, monsters, and stuff that brings back memories. Other people have explained the coolness of the AEC better than I could. Just get yourself a copy.

*Mutant Future Mania: The recent upswing of the Mutant Future goodness in the blogosphere is fun. My current favorite blogs are The Savage AfterWorld with the masterful Thundarr Thursdays and Brutorz Bill's Green Skeleton Gaming Guild, who had me when he stated Sleestaks. A ton of great material has already been produced. I may have to stat up some Mutant Future stuff, too. Maybe I should go the Grindhouse route...

Public Domain

*Two days ago I was looking up the Earth Alpha blog for some BASH RPG stats that the person had posted. One of the posts was a discussion about public domain superheroes. Following the public domain tag, there was a post about a wiki dedicated to the superheroes and supervillains that have fallen into the public domain.

Aslanc has posted his thoughts about using the characters here.

The link for the Public Domain Super Heroes wiki is here.

I love the work that others have done with these characters from the comics of Bill Black, Alan Moore, and Alex Ross, to Ken Hite's Lovecraft/Superhero opus Adventures Into Darkness. When I was a boy, I wrote up stats for many of these characters using the Marvel Super Heroes RPG game using entries from Jeff Rovin's Encyclopedia of Superheroes.

If you're looking for some superhero campaign inspiration, or trying to fill in your character's background, check out the Public Domain Super Heroes wiki.

Sinistar

People over the age of 25 will remember this. Turn up the volume up to really loud before you hit play.

The Obelisk of Kronos Redux--In d30!

In the spirit of the really fun science fantasy material that is appearing in several blogs throughout the RPG Blogosphere, I present this random table. Set in the mighty world of Vanth from Encounter Critical, this table originally appeared in the world famous Encounter Critical Mailing List Files section using a d20. I’ve dropped some of the reference notes, but added 10 more possibilities, ‘cause daddy’s using a d30!

The Obelisk of Kronos

An Encounter Critical Adventure Starter

The Players touch a strange obelisk and are swept away to a strange new place.

The Obelisk of Kronos: An indestructible 6-foot tall crystal carved in the shaped of an obelisk. References in the Dimensionomicon tie these artifacts to the mysterious Kronosians. An Obelisk of Kronos not bound to a Table of Thoth is prone to cause a lot of chaos.

When a character touches the obelisk they must make roll against the Saving Throw skill. Success leaves the victim shaken but not hurt. Failure results in a multiversal shift.

Roll a 1d30 and Check the table below.

1 Alternate Vanth—Roll a d6

1 Reverse Alignment Vanth: Evil guys are good, good guys are evil.
2 High Tech Vanth: No magic, just psionics and technology.
3 One Race Vanth: One intelligent race on Vanth, with many variants.
4 Robodroid/Lizardman War Vanth: terminators vs. serpent men for control of the world.
5 Super Vanth: Vanth with superpowers and comic book tropes.
6 GMs Choice. Go nuts.

2 Throneworld of Price Dax, Protector of the Insector Alliance

3 The home of the gods. Pick a pantheon and run with it.

4 The World of Mythika

5 Asteroid 1618

6 The Bridge of the Starcruiser Durandal

7 Victorian England Roll a d6

1-4 Historical
5-6 Steampunk stuf

8 Megatheira: Gargantuan monsters rampage this world

9 The Planet Klor, rotating around the star Betalguese

10 One of the Elemental Planes: Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Others

11 The Prison Dimension of Lord Dire Killblade, Thanatosian Overlord

12 Camelot Roll a d6

1-2 Classic Arthur
3-4 Twist on the Legend
5-6 Alternate Arthur

13 The plane of Limbo. Roll again or make up something REALLY weird.

14 The jungle realm of the Animal Lords

15 Post Apocalyptic America during the Neo-Luddite/Cyclor Empire War.

16 The Citadel of Honor, New Liberty during the Megaforce/Allied Battalion reunion

17 The Realm of Shatterstone, Crystal Warrior sector

18 The castle of Baron Bramm von Vulkav, country of Vulkavia

19 The Known Lands

20 Neo Chicago, 2255. You land in the middle of a battle between the Defender and Conqueror factions of the Transchangors.

21 Carcosa. One of them (Biercian, Chambersian, Tynesian, or McKinneyian)

22 Harlem, 1970s. Prince Mamuwalde is gathering monsters to his noble cause to fight inhuman creatures worse than he is.

23 Atlantis. Pick one of the thousands of version of Atlantis.

24 The Gothic Empire of Terra during the Andromedan Crusade against the NecroOrks of Antares.

25 The Keep on the Borderlands

26 New Georgia Megastracture, Mecha Police Squad

27 Modern day Earth, Illuminated.

28 The middle of an active wormhole. The players get stuck wherever the wormhole leads, and with whoever was going through it.

29 Somewhere in the history of Vanth.

30 GMs Choice: Anyway from TV, movies, books, other games or anything else.

Some Notes:

Multiversal Shift: The act of traveling through the multiverse at random.

The Dimensionomicon: A tome containing vast amounts of information on the multiverse and the omniverse. There are many different editions and versions of the Dimensionomicon, so not all of the information is valid, honest or up to date….

Kronosians: A morphic race of mutiversal travelers who observe (or try to protect) the omniverse. They can incarnate 9 times before their energies fade into the omniverse. All Kronosians have a tendency towards overconfidence and curiosity.
Thanatosians: The opposition of the Kronosians, the Thantosians are a morphic race that feed of the death and destruction of the omniverse. Whiles they do not Incarnate like the Kronosians, they can take over bodies and make them their own.

The Moldvay-esque Adventure Helper!

Everybody has his or her favorite authors and game designers. For me, Tom Moldvay is one of those game designers who influenced my role playing and my writing. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson may have opened up the dungeon for me, and I started playing the Red Box Basic D&D edited by Frank Mentzer. But for lost cities, islands of dinosaurs and Clark Ashton Smith in my Dungeons and Dragons, that was Tom Moldvay .

And then there was Lords of Creation.

Every gamer has their guilty favorites. Lords of Creation is one of mine. I bought it for $10 at a long gone toy store at a lone gone shopping mall. This was the deep immersion to the zany world of Tom Moldvay. This game awoke my appreciation for the weird and bizarre in RPGs. One of the best descriptions of the game is here.

Submitted for your approval is a table designed to add a little Moldvay feel to any scenario. Roll a couple times on the table and let the fur fly!

The Moldvay-esque Adventure Helper!

Roll a d20

1 A portal opens to a random elemental plane: Roll a d6:

1. Earth
2. Air
3. Fire
4. Water
5. Elemental Blend
6. GM created elemental plane.

2 The Wild Hunt attacks! 1d3 Hounds and assorted beasties per player.

3 Anachronistic devices added to treasure-troves.

4 Strange prophetic dreams begin for the most intelligent player in the party. They can be useful, terrifying or both.

5 The vehicle the characters are traveling in is intelligent or a transforming robot.

6 A portal to the Plane of Shadow opens! Roll a d6:

1. Terrifying visions
2. Players take cold damage per GM choice
3. 1d6 Shadows attack
4. Shadow maelstrom! Everyone sucked into the Plane of Shadows
5. A random player becomes haunted by an Schattendoppleganger
6. Nothing, just some trippy descriptive passages

7 Ghouls attack! 1d6 Ghouls attack the party.

8 Random famous historical or fictional character interacts with the PCs.

9 Different versions of a creature or character meet and fight!

10 Genre mash. Add an unusual genre scene in the scenario. Think gun slinging orcs, cyborg elves, biotech dungeons, and haunted graveyard in a post apocalyptic city.

11 A portal to a parallel earth opens! GM Choice where it leads. Nazis are probably involved. Fricking Nazis.

12 A mysterious benefactor and/or their adversary choose to use the PCs are their representative in a grand conflict.

13 Random gates are littered through the campaign world.

14 A portal to the Realms of the Gods opens. Roll 1d12 for Mythos:

1. Greco Roman
2. Egyptian
3. Chinese
4. Japanese
5. Babylonian/Sumerian
6. Celtic
7. American (North, Central, and/or South)
8. Vodoun (The Loas)
9. Pick a lesser known Earth Pantheon
10. Animal, Plant, or Elemental Lords
11. Lovecraftian Entities. This is not of the good.
12. GM Created Pantheon or Neutral Ground

15 A portal opens that leads to a planet across the galaxy

16 Suddenly, dinosaurs attack! I got nothing. Throw a bunch of them at the PCs.

17 Have a sense or section of the scenario that is a tribute/homage to a popular book, movie or TV show.

18 Take every monster book in your RPG collection. Pick 5-15 monsters and sprinkle them throughout the scenario however you can.

19 A portal to a world based on a fictional setting opens. This can be an exact simulation of the setting, or one that is darker or lighter than the actual setting.

20 GMs Choice. Get as weird as you want. Some of my favorite moments in the Lords of Creation are scenes in the modules that make you say "WTF?"

RPG Blog Carnival: 5 Thoughts on The Future of RPGs

This is my first contribution to the RPG Blog Carnival. Of course I would have to choose a serious subject. Here are some musings on the future of roleplaying.

The Printing and PDF Connection

One of the things you will see more in the future is even more PDF support for Printed roleplaying games. You already see a lot of this now. The average small to middle tier RPG Company might put out their core rulebook, wordbook, maybe an opponents book, and an adventure collection to your FLGS. On the web they can put out a huge variety of support material in PDF and print on demand formats that would not be economical to sell in the stores.

You’ll also see more of the e-book version of an RPG come out before a print copy is ready for sale. That is just a truth of the industry. If you can make money now on PDF rather than wait several months for the print copy to come out—what would you do?

You will see the amount of publishers who put their entire product line out on PDF increase as well. With places like Office Depot and Kinko’s able to print out your e-book, and the ability of publishers to set up a Print-on-demand front on Lulu, this may be a more attractive option.


The Death of Dungeons & Dragons as an RPG

The above statement may seem like overkill, but I believe this is a definite possibility. A number of factors make this possible including the fact that 4e D&D probably didn’t sell what Wizards of the Coast thought, the “I want results NOW” drive of the Hasbro Overlords, Wizards’ arrogance in several situations, and the OGL itself (see below). All of this could add up to Hasbro shutting the whole shebang down. They could sell the game to another company (probably not). More likely they will shut down the game for a while, then use the properties, as they will. Then D&D will return as a board game (as my friend Joe thinks) under the Milton Bradley brand.

The OGL and the Rise of the Retro-Clones

In my opinion, the OGL was one of the greatest forces of change in the RPG industry since it debuted in 2000. I believe that the fact that the OGL exists beyond 3rd edition D&D will have detrimental effects on the 4th edition of said game. This is for one simple reason: you just gave other people the tools to create games that can compete with yours. 3.0 and 3.5 edition D&D may be gone, but you have Pathfinder (the 3.5 rules touched up), True 20, Mutants & Masterminds, Spycraft 2.0, the Conan RPG, and the d20 SRDs that are still rolling.

Other children of the OGL that will affect the future of roleplaying are the retro-clones. Games such as OSRIC, Labyrinth Lord, Swords & Wizardry, and others all use the OGL to recreate the D&D/AD&D editions of yore. Many have a few twists here and there, but they have definitely tapped into a desire to revive the old school games. The love of the old school goes beyond using the OGL to reconstruct the rules of the past. Games like 4 Color, ZERFS, and the remastered Star Frontiers rules all mark a return of older systems that emulate the games of the past.

I think we’ll see more of games like Mutant Future that use the retro –clone concept and bend it. Take a retro idea (Gamma World-sequel game) and give it a twist (what if they used the Basic D&D engine for Gamma World). The Hideouts & Hoodlums game by Scott Caspar uses Swords & Wizardry (a retro-clone of the 0e D&D rules) for Golden Age Superheroes. That’s the kind of games that I think we’ll see more of.


The Sharing of Rules and Settings

One of the more interesting things that came from the OGL was people able to publish their own settings and rules expansions. Other game systems have continued this strategy. Some of them are descendents of the d20 system, and some are not. Look at your local game store or favorite PDF storefront. Game rules that have either licensing or SRDs include Savage Worlds, True 20, Runequest, Traveller, M&M Superlink, and the Hero System. These are the ones off the top of my head, not including the retro-clones above.

Another thing will see is the sharing of worlds as well. There are at least 5 different rule system versions of Green Ronin’s Freeport world that you can download. You can get Ken Hite’s excellent Lovecraft/Golden Age Comics pastiche Adventures in Darkness in M&M, T&J, and Hero System editions with more coming. This sharing on both ends will continue.


The Strength of the Small and Fan Presses

The most interesting possibility in the future of roleplaying is what I consider the return of the fan press. This includes not only the fan sites and message boards with netbooks and hundreds of pages of game materials both fan and orginal free rpgs.

This goes into the realm of small press publishing on sites like Lulu and other print-on-demand venues. Magazines like Fight On and Knockspell are part of what I am referring to, as are those small press companies that are one or two guys making a game and publishing it themselves.

Related to this are the truly small press items that people have been putting out. I’m talking about self-published works like Geoffrey McKinney’s Supplement V Carcosa, James Raggi’s Green Devil Face, the recent fanzine editions of Iridia, and Jeff Rients' recent opus The Miscellaneum of Cinder. This is a fascinating trend that I hope will continue. Hell, if I had time I’d love to try a project like that myself.

These are some of my thoughts. Make of them what you will.

Fourth World Mythos or Jack Kirby in Deities & Demigods

I’m in the middle of getting a “new” computer (my aunt’s Windows XP) and assorted family business. Because of this, I haven’t been doing any extensive posting or writing this past week. But I had this brainstorm, sparked from a comment by max from malevolent & benign here.

Imagine if, somehow, someway, TSR was able to get the rights from DC Comics to use some properties created by Jack Kirby in one of their books. The book is Deities and Demigods. The characters are the New Gods of New Genesis and Apokolips. Welcome to the Fourth World Mythos.

The introduction would give the origins of New Genesis and Apokolips, and the struggle between them. The Plane of these New Gods would be classified as an Alternate Prime Material Plane, like the Aztec Gods in the Central American Mythos. Like the Norse Mythos, members of the Fourth World Mythos adventure sometimes with their worshipers. And, one can suppose that Earth is not the only planet (plane) they can visit.

There are plenty of gods, heroes and monsters to choose from in the Fourth World Saga that could be adapted towards an AD&D setting to interesting effect. Kirby often worked with mythological archetypes in his comic book work, and these is evident throughout. (This is also used to excellent effect in The Eternals for Marvel Comics). Also, many of the science type gadgets wielded in the Fourth World Saga can easily be “bent” to a fantasy style setting.

An AD&D campaign using elements of Kirby’s Fourth World would be kind of awesome. Your 15th level fighter could battle Parademons in the service of Glorious Godfrey, god of treachery and persuasion, who is trying to take over the countryside. I’m thinking Mother Boxes as artifacts and prizes to quest for, and monks who live outside of time meditating on the writings of Metron. I see clerics who tap into the Source to cast their spells and assassins who use the dark knowledge of Kanto the Assassin and Desaad to slay their victims. High-level anti-paladins of Darkseid search the Outer Planes for the Anti-Life Equation, as the Hounds of Orion stalk the servants of their god’s father.

Can your party of 20th level characters venture into the dark Orphanage of Granny Goodness to rescue their mentor, Mister Miracle, God of Escapes and his Consort, Barda the Protector? Wouldn’t it be neat to try?

Sources for the Fourth World Saga by Jack “The King” Kirby:

Jack Kirby's Fourth World on Wikipedia

Kirby expert Mark Evanier on Jack Kirby

The New Gods Library