Warlock!: Skaven Clan Rat

Skaven Clan Rat for Warlock!

Type Civilized

Actions/round 1

Weapon/skill/damage Weapons/6/-

Armour Armour

Adventuring skills 5

Stamina 12

Notes Intelligent, Poisonous, Tracking

Description -    "Clanrats forms the vast overall bulk of Skaven military power, a large verminous horde of ratmen that go to war as basic and highly-expendable front-line infantry. These Skaven belong to any one of thousands of Clans scattered throughout the underground burrows, strongholds and bursting cavern-cities that make up the whole of the Under-Empire. Of all the teeming masses, only the worker dregs, the worthless and even more insignificant Slave Rats, are considered even more numerous than the Clanrats themselves.

Clanrats are slightly smaller than man-sized, standing four to five feet high. They range between lithe and scrawny and are possessed of constant energy, most commonly seen in a nervous twitching of their hairless, worm-like tails. A single Clanrat is not a fearsome opponent. A lone warrior will lack any degree of discipline or determination and is likely to skulk in the shadows, afraid to go forward, too cautious to go backward, and terrified to even stand its own ground for more than a moment without fleeing. Unless driven by black hunger, a single Clanrat will only attack something that is visibly weakened or crippled, preferring even then to attack unseen from behind. When banded together in a large pack, however, each individual Skaven would bolster each other's confidence and fuel their feral ferocity to a highly aggressive level. This allows the individually cowardly ratmen to form massive units that will recklessly hurl themselves into a fray against obviously superior troops."

Monstrous Monday: Beaked People/Parrot Men for Barbaric!

From Season 1 of the Herculoids for Barbaric!

Beaked Person (Parrot Man): Winged conquerors from the stars. 6/16, Move 10m/round (flight), Armor 0, Beak (1d damage, piercing), Combat 2, Lore 1, Physical 1, Social 1.

Hawk the Slayer: Gort for Barbaric!

Gort, Master Rank Giant

SKILLS

Combat 2

Craft

Lore

Physical 4

Social

Sorcery

Stealth

Endurance 13

Lifeblood 22

TRAITS

Hardy

EQUIPMENT

Battle-axe 4D

Breastplate 6

The Darkhold for D&D 5th Edition

Chthon, a mysterious tiefling who was the world's first practitioner of black magic, was the principal author of the Darkhold. Being academic, Chthon wrote all his collected knowledge of magic into the iron-bound scrolls which served to protect it even during the Dawn War.

DARKHOLD

Wondrous Item, Legendary

Random Properties

The Darkhold has the following random properties:

• 4 minor beneficial properties

• 3 major beneficial properties

• 3 minor detrimental properties

• 5 major detrimental properties

Adjusted Ability Scores

After reading the Darkhold for 40 hours you may increase your Charisma, Intelligence, or Wisdom by 2 to a maximum of 24. Additionally, you gain the Magic Initiated feat based on the ability score you chose to increase.

Your Greatest Desire

Once you have increased one of your Ability scores the Darkhold will offer the means to your greatest desire by allowing you to cast the Wish spell. Once cast there is a 66% chance you may never cast the spell again and you gain a random long-term madness from the Dungeon Master's Guide.

Turn Undead

As an action you may present the book and speak the Montessi Formula, censuring nearby undead.

Each undead that can see or hear you within 30 feet of you must make a Wisdom saving throw, vampires have disadvantage on this roll. If the creature fails its saving throw, it is turned for 1 minute or until it takes any damage.

A turned creature must spend its turns trying to move as far away from you as it can, and it can’t willingly move to a space within 30 feet of you. It also can’t take reactions. For its action, it can use only the Dash action or try to escape from an effect that prevents it from moving. If there’s nowhere to move, the creature can use the Dodge action.

Book of Shadows

You can reference the Darkhold whenever you make an Intelligence check to recall information about some aspect of celestials, deities, fiends, magic, otherwordly patrons, and undead. When you do so, gain advantage on that check.

Destroying the Book

If the Darkhold is destroyed in any way, it reappears in 3d10 days in a random library, personal or otherwise, in the world.

Groundlings for Barbaric!

I've never run a single edition of Traveller, but I've been keeping my eye on the OGL version known as the Cepheus Engine and Barbaric! is a neat game, and Groundlings, minions from Thundarr the Barbarian, seemed like a good start.

Groundlings: Ratlike mercenaries. 6/16, 

Move 10m/round, Armor 1, Bite (1 damage, piercing), 

Club (2d, crushing), Combat 1, Physical 1, Stealth 2.

State of the Planes March 2021

I'm sure like many of you the past year has been...challenging....at best. Last fall I dove headfirst into action figures and DnD, the OSR, and RPGs took a back seat to that new hobby which is where my passion has been directed since then.

I don't want Cross Planes to go away but I don't know if I can go back to anything close to a post every day. It's not that I don't want to, it's that I just am not sure that I have the time to do it.

I have worked at Comic Book World since November 1999 and it has always been the plan that my wife and I would purchase the store from her parents one day. Her parents retired in November and a busy job got busier and since there aren't any in-person Pop Culture Conventions, those people lucky enough to have jobs are spending it locally, so we are busier than ever (and I'm not complaining). On top of that Collectibles have EXPLODED, I was hired during the firs Pokemon boom and at one point my job involved going to Wizard of the Coast's website and ordering Pokemon TCG boosters directly from them for 8 hours a day on a dial up and these days about 1/4 of my day involves finding Pokemon TCG boosters again. I don't know how long it will last but I'm going to enjoy the ride.

The blog isn't going away but it's obvious that what I've had to say on here is different now and I'm trying to figure that out.

I'll be seeing you.

Frustrating RPG Design

I've been interested in RPG designs which often leads me to pick up a PDF of a game just to see how it was designed. I've recently done that with Ruin Master from RiotMind which is a bit of a blend of the OSR and Basic Role-Playing, but there are some places where they seem to pointedly ignore some of the recent innovations to the family of D100 games created by Chaosium's RuneQuest and Call of Cthulhu.

Let me reiterate that these complaints are merely based on my opinions and this might be the game you have been waiting your whole life for.

For one thing, many of their bonuses and penalties are multiples of 5 and in my experience, many people are intimidated by double-digit arithmetic so why not keep their penalties (and bonuses) in increments of 10? If you are going to stick with multiples of 5 then why not use a D20 (which I believe they did with Trudavang).

I was also surprised that Ruin Master uses a version of the old Resistance Table which I have seen replaced with a blackjack-style solution where the highest successful roll wins.

Additionally, when casting spells you have to spend Magic Point and roll your Magic skill but receive a -5% to the chance per Magic Point spent. I get the impression that this is a low magic setting, but why require so much math? If you don't want magic to be prevalent don't provide spells we are all familiar with from every edition of DnD. For reference, a person's Magic skill at character creation will be from 40 to 60%.

I completely grok that everyone has specific tastes in their games I just don't see the point of making things so challenging to use Magic and fill the game system with, in my opinion, unnecessary complexity.

Apparently, I'm not Ruin Master's target audience and that's okay. Its a gorgeous book and for the right group an interesting streamlining of The Design Mechanism's Mythras and Chaosium's Magic World and RuneQuest: Glorantha.