The time has come fellow gamers to Vote for the RPG products that you've been playing and enjoying for the last year. Catalyst Games, makers of both Shadowrun and Battletech, are up for a number of awards including Best Cover Art (Eclipse Phase), Best Interior Art, Best Writing (Eclipse Phase), Best Production Values (both Shadowrun and Eclipse Phase) and MORE!

Pinnacle, makers of the Savage Worlds system, is also present in a number of categories as are some of the Savage Worlds licensees, like Triple Ace Games for Hellfrost.

So, Click HERE and help your favorite companies know how you feel.

I got a chance to sit down with a group this past weekend and run through an adventure using the FantasyCraft system from Crafty Games. The adventure was a simple one with pregenerated characters. With 6 player we had a nice mix of classes to fill out the party.

"Tired from a long adventure the party sought refuge in a fortified inn along the road to their next destination. You enter into a smokey, crowded room with a buxom serving wench dodging grabbing hands while serving drinks. There's a table in the corner she says as she bustles past"... Yep, a nice quiet place to rest... And so the adventure began.

Having created character sheets for Sundered Skies, I decided to go through some of the other character sheets that PEG has available for download for various Savage Worlds settings.
The first one done was mostly just a cut-n-paste of the form fields from the Sundered Skies sheet. The next sheets done were for Weird Wars. Both the Wild Card sheet and the Troop sheet are done. The most recent sheet, Slipstream, took a bit longer due to the way it was laid out. I finished it, both pages worth, this evening.

An interesting idea was brought up on the Savage Worlds forum about the possibility of adjusting the system so that instead of wild card characters rolling a d6 as the wild die, what if the wild die was the same as the trait die being rolled. This got me thinking, and since I'd already done up the chart and tables for rolling the normal way, how hard could this be.
Turns out, not hard at all. About 15 minutes with excel and voila, here is the chart.

Updated Feb. 24

Another slow week, so I decided to bone up on some of my D6 knowledge by working my way through creating a nice, big spell list. I got a few spells done (about halfway through the A's) and decided to share the beginnings of it. Half the list of A's are placeholder sections to help me speed up a bit when it comes to creating the spells. In some ways it would be nice to have a little program to help handle the basic calculations (less prone to minor mistakes creeping in if the computer does the addition, subtraction, etc...). I did refind one little, well, wouldn't call it a gem, but a definite diamond in the rough, the D6 System - Wizard's Little Apprentice. This had been a little html/javascript based page that had been up on the old West End Games site, but don't appear to have survived the conversion.

Updated January 10th

"A shattered world. A thousand floating islands. A constant glow of madness. Sundered Skies begins where every other world ends.

The people of the Skies survive, tested by an unimaginable apocalypse, struggling daily against ravenous beasts, sky pirates, and the effects of the inescapable voidglow! But the fate of the Skies is in danger! The magic of the glow is not the only taint in this unforgiving realm. Dark forces conspire to bring the Skies to the brink of an even greater catastrophe. Can you survive long enough to discover the secrets of Sundered Skies?"

Updated December 25, 2009

Merry Christmas...

I spent some time and took and created a version of a Shadowrun character sheet that is fillable in Adobe Acrobat and Acrobat Reader. Most of the file is complete, but there are still a few sections that I haven't gotten to as yet to make editable, like the cybernetics page at the very end. This sheet is based on the one by Ismo version 2.1.
I recently found another SR4 Character Sheet to begin modifying from Super Spy Studios. This is a basic sheet designed for characters that can fit on two pages. Or just keep filling out and printing the additional "back pages".

After doing the data collection for the D6 Probabilities with the presence of the Wild Die I thought I'd take a look at the Savage Worlds system and see how the probabilities show up for the open rolling of a D6 with a second die worked out.

No surprise, the results show a fairly linear falloff for the initial values (up to around 10 or 12 depending on the size of the second die rolled with the D6) with a lessening of the slope after that point (almost a sharp turning inflection point).

So, this problem keeps coming up again and again in various forums dealing with the loved and, for the most part, forgotten system from West End Games, D6 System. The problem is the presence of the "Wild Die" that was introduced in Star Wars 2nd Edition. As usual, there isn't a whole lot of grey space in this debate... or shall we more accurately say "Love/Hate".

I created a small perl script that takes in the number of iterations and the number of dice that are part of the roll and outputs the list of target numbers that were rolled, how many times they were rolled and what % of the rolls do they represent. The script takes into account the result of the Wild Die. I settled on 1,000,000 iterations as it seemed to give a consistent sample response when run several times.

updated Aug 6, 2009.

A friend of mine is wanting to start up a new Shadowrun game, so I thought I'd be helpful and make a few PDF sheets editable like I did for Shadowrun 4th Edition sheets. This first one is the Shadowrun Companion Character sheet that can be found at Catalyst Labs Shadowrun Site. This is the first of 6 files from that location.
Got the second sheet up. This one is the basic SR3 sheet. A few fields might need a bit of adjustment for size or placement, but it shared enough in common with the SR3 Companion character sheet that I was able to copy and place the fields from it into this one.