Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Spaceship Cards, Retroclone Guide, Hexcrawl Format Advice & The Safety Dance

1.

Now these I saw at the drug store for like cheap.95 and it's 2 decks of cards all made of Star Wars vehicles. Each card is a different vehicle, so that's 104.

1-I did not know there were 104 Star Wars vehicles

2-I did not know there were so many you could get 52 good guy ones and 52 bad guy ones (and there are, I looked)

3-And this is not meant as an RPG product but it is pretty much perfect if you end up needing random vehicles in a sci fi game. Like: trash-heap planet, scavenged-vehicle racing, starcrawl like "What is that coming toward us"etc.

Stuff someone's stocking.
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2.

List of D&D retroclones and what they are retrocloning.

Fun and confusing genealogical chart of the same, (last I looked, 13th Age was not yet on there as a descendant of 4e D&D). It's a bigger and downloadable version of this:




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3.

Now this, this is...just...it's...wow...

Check it out.

Ah, Story-Games.com, don't ever change.
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4.

Jack of Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque was asking what was so special about the Carcosa format, so...

I feel like I've said this before, but...for those who don't know, here is a page of the Carcosa hex key. Things I love about this format you can see here:

1. Each hex is keyed, so even if what they put in there is lame, you can write something in
2. References to other hexes both exist (essential to make a hexthing worthwhile) & are in another color
3. LOTS of space in the margins to write in your own stuff
4. Stats and descriptions are minimized so you can take in the whole hex at about the speed you'd read a fortune cookie in-game


Things I love about this format that you cannot see here:

1. It's the ideal size for a game reference book--slightly larger than a paperback novel, slightly smaller than a hardback one.
2. It has a map in an obvious place (the endpapers) that is easy to read and find and everything is on that map
3. It's a book, not a pdf, so it's easy and convenient to write stuff in.


None of this is rocket science, but few people have managed to do it. The bar for hex products is low low low.



SOMEONE REDO THE MAJESTIC WILDERLANDS LIKE THIS!!!!!

5. PS, I think there's still space on Thursday for Warlords of Vornheim over Google+ so sign up. If that link doesn't work, write to me and ask to be added.

2 comments:

Adam Dickstein said...

1. Bet I could name every one of 'em.

3. Awesome.

5. I want to do this but free time is so damn limited this week. Maybe next time.

Patrick Mallah said...
This comment has been removed by the author.