Basic Roleplaying . Net

Alex Harding is one of the characters in my Thursday game: a brash, cocky and invincibly cheerful thief and con-artist. Nineteen years old, she has never know anything but the blasted world after the scouring. The following is written by her player, Laura Tucker:

Okay, if I’m being really honest about it (and this is just between you and me) I have to admit that it is kind of my fault that we got caught up in this job in the first place. Of course, there are a number of mitigating factors. I don’t think we can blame the existence of bars and taverns on me and I know I’m not responsible for the brewing of sweet, sweet wine. You also can’t really hold me accountable for the blathering of snitches or for the fact that the New Sarum guard don’t really have a sense of humour or an ounce of generosity in their entire bodies. I really should have kept my mouth shut though. I mean, I know the Prince takes a dim view on provisioning expeditions into Salisbury. It stirs up the polymoths, which makes everybody’s life miserable, and, while I know the ends justify the means, not everybody seems to understand that.

So there we were, me and Jasper, in a cold, miserable, damp cell waiting to be tried for indiscretions we hadn’t even committed yet! Jasper’s my partner by the way. He used to be a soldier until he met me and realised there were actually far more interesting things to do in life than guard caravans in the Prince’s name. He complains. A lot. On the plus side though, he’s a good man to have around in a fight and has even managed to wriggle us out of a few sticky situations in the past. Not this one though. We were headed to trial and it didn’t look promising. Of course, I could have got us out of the cell in a second with the chicken bone I stole from the madman in the other cell, but getting out of New Sarum would have been tricky and we’d have ended up on the road with no weapons and no gear, with winter biting at our heels. Even I’m not that good!
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So reading too much Tribe 8 recently, and a discussion with Ben Monroe about a “Stress” mechanic for RuneQuest III, lead me to a new campaign setting, currently in use for my Thursday evening game:

July 2nd 2014, 12:17:32 GMT. In the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland, a unique collision event occurs. At the Great Circle of Mortimer’s Crossing, in the realm of Shistaval, Queen Mab of the Houses of the Exile attempts a great weaving to escape the oncoming night.

Two events collide. A door is unbolted, briefly, just as a battering ram is applied to the other side…

The scouring expands at near light speed, with a depth of some 700 milliseconds. Inside the wave front space, time, matter and energy have different properties. After its passing, things are almost as they were before. Almost.
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Well, bit the bullet finally, after another month (near as damnit) of distractions and sidetracks (health issues, work and trying to keep my faltering current game going in the midst of various personal crises (one of the players is undergoing a trial seperation from his partner, one of the other players is in the midst of moving…)). Finally posted the two parts of the essay on Stormbringer rules additions / variations I originally wrote some three years back for the Stormbringer zine that never was. Much of what is in them is shortly to be superceded by the new Basic Role Playing core book but that’s life I guess, and I still hope the project and firearms rules will be helpful to GM’s.

Also, finally, “The Multiverse and how to get Around it” sees the light of day. Howard wrote the original as a draft chapter for an Eternal Champioin book that never happened, and I approached him about reworking it for that Stormbringer ‘zine project, which he generously agreed to. The version presented here is the one that would have seen print if that project had happened.

And, last but not least (certainly in my thinking), I have finally got the home page and submission guidelines for Uncounted Worlds up (and probably full of typos, knowing me…).

Things are finally moving…

Well, things have finally quietened enough at work that I’ve been able to spend a leaisurely lunch break fiddling with the site, and guess what? I finally traced the setting that was mucking up paragraph formatting when I was trying to post stuff back before March decided to be a horrible month!

So it’s onwards and upwards - time to get some content up here and start seriously pulling things together for Uncounted Worlds issue one.