My second longest ongoing campaign was 13th Age and it’s a goddamn fine system for high power D20 madness. I’m not sure it even needed a 2nd edition as the first was really on the $$$, but designers learn a lot when their designs are out being hammered by the real world and I no doubt that happened even with these seasoned designers (Heinsoo and Tweet). Yes you can make parties of muppets and the art is of the ‘generic fantasy’ extraordinaire (all very 3E style as it has the same artists), but despite this, 13th Age has it where it counts for both player TOYS for their character classes and it is extremely easy to GM compared to ALL other D20 RPG’s in this mechanical weight class. I can’t recommend it enough, though it does not have anywhere near the adventure support of DCC or Pathfinder.
Vanillaware are naughty, naughty sumkas to be sure, with their cute but sexy Odin’s Sphere leading into their side scrolling answer to Diablo, Dragon’s Crown, with the largest breasts on record for a playable character. You’d think a studio so obsessed with giant barbarian woman’s thighs wouldn’t be able to crank out such good games time and time again, but they certainly have in the past and have done it again!
Before I gush all over Unicorn Overlord, I would be remiss if I did not mention that I did not like Vanillaware’s last game, 13 Sentinels, and wished I had never bought it. The story was Soul Nomad and The World Eaters level confusing with the difference being that the story parts completely got in the way of the combat. The early game the sequences where you run around as various characters in frustrating side-scrolling puzzles were so long and arduous as to negate the fun of the tactical mech combat once you eventually got to it, and even then, it was far to short in the mech, and way to long out of it. Even my kids that tend to like those sorts of games on the Switch just won’t bother with 13 Sentinels. Luckily, that is the past as we now have a game from Vanillaware that does the exact opposite: has a story and it gets the fuck out of the way for the joy of the tactical combat!
Unicorn Overlord, for those that may have never heard about it yet, is a modern Ogre Battle, which means it is an RPG with tons of different characters that are organized into battle units. Each of these units ends up having different capabilities in tactical as well as strategic contexts. Characters level up and have light item management (nothing like Dragon’s Crown/ Diablo though) and also grow affinity with their different combat groups over time. Choosing the right battle group for the right job at the right time is critical to success and building out those ‘right’ battle groups is half the fun of the game, the other half is the slaughter parts.
There are so many games around to put time into, why play this over other games? First, it’s absolutely gorgeous. For a tactical battle game, the art, character design and animation is over the top. Player’s have an option to skip battle animations but I almost NEVER do, just to see my plucky characters in all their animated glory.
Second, the core gameplay loop is done extremely well. You unlock new characters during the story and can combine them with existing units, form new ones and then try them out vs enemies or in practice. The strategic aspects of positioning, blocking, the action point economy and special leader/member powers on the strategic map is all just superbly done. As a fan of Ogre Battle/Soul Nomad and the World Eaters style games, I’m going to hazard to say that this is probably already my favorite in the genre.
Lastly: Tits. Everyone loves them. Every man, woman and child on earth. Vanillaware knows this.
Negatives, and there are a few, consist of a bit of chaos and confusion during the real-time strategic portion of the game, where, especially on the Switch, it can be hard to see what unit is next to another unit. I did get into a forever loop situation where two units, both out of action points, were constantly going to fight each other and neither could harm on another. One unit was up against the side of the map so the loser could not be pushed back. Lastly, while this is minor, the main character and his best friend are the most GENERIC anime fantasy characters imaginable, which is odd since Vanillaware typically has such cool designs for the main characters in other games.
While I haven’t finished the game yet (it’s long), I already highly recommend the game to everyone that likes this style at all.
Tactical view of a battle
Some basic tips
Do not line characters up in a row where possible, they will get hit by attacks that effect everything in the row, and your soft-bosom’d witches will get dropped in one shot, and we can’t have that!
Use the 20th level horse guy to help level up your weak dudes. He pounds ass early game– use him.
Restoration deliveries to harbors allow access to islands that have neat stuff on them.
Do not rest if you can help it on the strategic map. Units can defend with 1 Action Point FOREVER, so you can just sit there and get attacked all you want. If your unit is in a resting state when attacked it’s fucked.
Do not set the difficulty to Normal. Go to Tactical at least.
This is only out on consoles (Switch/PS5) and not the PC. Looking for something like this on the PC? Check out Symphony of War: The Nephilim Saga.
I just finished reading the new Onyx Path Trinity Core rules and it looks like they fixed Stunts, albeit too late for Exalted 3.
Years ago I did a post about the really bad design of STUNTS in Exalted 2nd Edition, that was not improved by Exalted 3rd. This wasn’t a review of Exalted 3 as a whole, just a note that the way stunts were designed were a huge problem as it puts the onus on the player to come up with something cool, that may not happened due to the dice being rolled AFTER the description. In 2nd edition, stunts were tied to Mote-regeneration (the stuff that let’s you use your powers) and that turned out to be a very bad idea*. White Wolf was never known for their playtesting ability…
Feng Shui 2’s solution to stunts was the simple and best one– roll the dice, see what happens and if you roll high enough in the situation, then you get a stunt. In Mythras, the opposed combat rolls determine levels of success, which may allow special effects (which are fucking brutal). Lastly, the 13th Age Rogue has a power that gives them one stunt per battle, that ALWAYS happens regardless of the roll of the dice. I like this, but that’s probably because I play using a rogue in 13th Age!
The way it works in the new Trinity/AEON/Aberrant is you make a roll vs a difficulty and then spend your successes to overcome the difficulty first, next spend any excess for effects of your attack. Doing damage to your opponent is considered an effect, for example, as well as tripping, blinding, added dice for your next attack, disarming: all of it are purchased with successes– successes realized and explained AFTER the roll. So if you even up successes vs difficulty, you effectively succeeded, but you don’t have any additional successes for that success to have an effect.
What this avoids are players mulling over more than just their attack moves, but an over-blown description of their attack moves before the dice hit the table to show that it happened. You can declare a ‘medium attack to no specific location’ the same as D&D, but if the dice come up GREAT for you, that medium attack can become a dry gulch to the throat, disarm and knee to the nuts!
Added to this is the ability for characters to do multiple actions during their turn up to their Cunning stat– so punching a mook, grabbing his gun and shooting the kneecaps off a couple of other mooks is entirely possible. With the scaling rules, a character with a 3+ scale difference in skill vs his opponents simply DICTATES what occurs during their combat action. Love it.
I’m not super interested in Aeon (the sci fi game), but let’s see if Onyx Path can pull off D10 superheroes with Aberrant! There are a million superhero games out now, and most of them don’t even compare well to FASERIP, especially all of them made during the “RPG microlite” or FATE years that hand wave all powers into some generic die roll.
While this will likely be missing the hard-edge 90’s conspiracy and nihilism we’ve come to love from White Wolf, after reading the Trinity Core Rules, I bet system wise, it’s a winner.
*for the record: Excellency + Shadow over Water [or Seven Shadow Evasion] + Reflex Sidestep Technique + Leaping Dodge Method. This combo costs 10 XP to purchase, is friendly with Infinite Mastery, allows the character to perfectly defend against any attack, allows the nullification of unexpected attacks and allows the character to break most flurries. Invoke this combo for every single action in combat, using a 2-die stunt to restore the expended Willpower. Thank you Jon Chung: why were you not on the Exalted 3 playtesting team?
You read that right, 13th Age in Minaria— the campaign setting from TSR that never was, and could have been.
For the non old-person, Minaria is the fantasy world created for the Divine Right board game, which many of us had as kids in the 80’s. While the game was a bit labyrinthian for a 9-12 year-old as a hex and counter, the map board was on the wall of my bedroom for at least 15 years. The map and counter art is by Dave Trampier, and is amazing. The Tower of Zards, Invisible School of Thaumaturgy and all the awesome mercenary units (like Hamhara the dragon) were incredibly fertile ground for the imagination as a young and now older mainge.
The mystery is why this was not turned into a Greyhawk style campaign setting by TSR as all the assets were right there– just needed someone to start writing modules for it! There were multiple articles in Dragon Magazine on Minaria and it’s environs. Anyway, time to redress this issue!
13th Age and Minaria are a great combo as the 13th Age world itself is godless and pretty generic fantasy, especially since it has no gods which I’ve always found very strange. While Runequest has a bit too much to do with the gods for me, the 13th Age world just doesn’t seem grounded. The Icons in 13th Age are really just basic concepts and with Minaria, there are oodles of Icons that are far more interesting and engaging than the stock 13th Age ones. Yet on the plus side, you have the amazing 13th Age system, which is probably my most run RPG in the last 5 years or so. While Minaria is not explicitly high fantasy, it has enough of those elements to fit well with the more gonzo fantasy of 13th Age. Minaria and Divine Right are still products of the Gonzo TSR age.
I’m not GMing this one, which is a great break from almost always GMing and I get to play a rogue, so far my favorite class for the game (among many awesome class selections). The fun part about the rogue is that you can bounce around the combat area almost at will, you rarely get stuck, and you can hammer enemies.
I’ve only been in two sessions with the group so far and we are in some rather familiar house by the sea near Port Lork at the moment… and we’ll see where this goes.
Here we go for another fucking Gencon. When oh when will I learn? The overpriced everything, the MASSIVE crowds (and I mean that on every level) and the constant hunt for the awesome thing– when really this year I would be fine staying at home with a bunch of friends and playing a whole lotta ROOT instead.
That said, I’ll be able to see some homies from across the lands (not as many this year are going), and play some stuff that I wouldn’t ever have a chance to, so that’s good. I think until our kids are old enough, gone are the days where a whole shitload of us would ditch the kids for the weekend and go down for all four days. It may be better to go back to what I used to do: drive down Friday, stay saturday and leave Sunday. Ahhhh well, in a moment of weakness and Maat’s prompting, I’m in it for all four days.
Events! I’m in what should be a very cool FASERIP miniatures Free For All battle. I’ll post impressions and the rules and all that shit when I get back from the con. Second I got into the Keyforge tournament, which should be ridiculous. RPG-wise we are in a Mutant Crawl Classics game and a game of Mythras on Saturday morning at 8 AM (let’s see if we make this one).
Most importantly though is the self run SHADOWFIST DRAFT! I got together all my remaining boxes of Shadowfist and we have a few people ready to draft and play. It’s going to be a real shit swarm of decks as we are starting with:
Standard Starter – Absolute DRECK of cards, the lowest of the low. When I look at this stuff, I’m shocked that Shadowfist survived after it’s first Limited run…so much garbage.
Boosters of the following:
Standard Booster – More of the same crap and still no hitters to find…
Empire of Evil – everyone will be hoping for the best with their booster here
Netherworld 2 – good stuff, just need to get lucky
Throne War – great set, but pretty big… so chances are slim
Boom Shaka Laka – in for the LOL’S. Maybe someone will get a good dragon card or…?
This should be enough to get a semi functional deck out of and we have pods of feng shui and foundations. Should be a great time, if we can only get a couple 3-man tables anyway.
So see you after with pics and other nonsense. Luckily I can’t spend much money on anything, so there won’t be the horde of crap I come back with this year. Hoping to find a decently priced John Company, Conquest of Paradise or Fire in the Lake, but that’s it.
Anyway these are not necessarily from 2018, but just books that I took a fancy to throughout the year.
Shinobigami Modern Ninja Battle Game
I finally got the final PDF of the rules and printed them up and have read them cover to cover. If you like Hillfolk or Fiasco, you can see where they got all their inspiration for those games from (this and Tenra Bansho Zero). Looking forward to running this. I have not played this yet, so I can’t truly review the game itself.
Down Darker Trails
While this uses an inferior D100 system to Mythras, Down Darker Trails is an incredible supplement to CoC for the old West. It’s extremely thorough in it’s descriptions of the era and nature of roleplaying in the old west with monsters without getting totally overboard like Deadlands (which is cool too). The adventures in the back of the book aren’t too great, but it would be easy to wing something with this source material. With the rate at which I’m able to run games, this may never get played, but it’s a great read.
Runequest Glorantha/Guide to Glorantha
These are excellent RQ books, especially the Guide to Glorantha which finally laid out to me what the heck is going on. While RQ requires a lot of player knowledge of the setting, it’s much easier to have it all consolidated in a couple of books than all over the place. No matter what system you may choose to run RQ with, the Guide to Glorantha is a must read.
For play in 2018 year, we continued the Lamentations of the Flame Princess campaign, but some of the players got sick of the non-levelling up and general low power level of the game (with silver=experience, it can be rough to level up), so we are going to switch to Mythras after the current campaign arc is done.
My favorite game from 2018 is probably DCC, we’ve had a lot of fun with friends and the kids with the game and adventures. My favorite RPG event of last year was the 2 day 13th Age level 1-6 switching GM’s every 3 hours.
Since Google+ and the OSR movement are going away in a year after G+ closes down, there’s a lot of pre-shutdown nostalgia already for the OSR, though the movement will go on for another year (until the day G+ shuts down for good, then it will be gone outside of Garycon and Gamehole con).
The questionnaire below was posted as a nostalgia piece that bloggers can fill out to have some feels together now at the end and for the posterity of the movement. The OSR had a good run, and G+ was entertaining to say the least.
In terms of content that the OSR produced, there were some good adventures but I think 90% of the ‘hacks’ people put together were in some issue of Dragon magazine from 1978 – 1985 but people were just too lazy to find them and tell the people that what they were suggesting had already been done before.
OSR Guide For The Perplexed Questionnaire
1. One article or blog entry that exemplifies the best of the Old School Renaissance for me:
First one I can’t vouch for as a game, but it LOOKS good. (Remember Dungeon Degenerates? that was well worth the kickstarter price based on the art alone, and was a solid game to boot!). DEUS LO VULT.
this one is around 50$ shipped so it’s not a bankbreaker like the CMON ones…
The second one is a no brainer. Steve Jackson got the license back for “The Fantasy Trip” after many years as an out of print microgame and started a kickstarter to bring it back into print. 30$.
Remember these in the hobby shops back in the day? This is it.
Last weekend I finished running a funnel with the DCC scratch off character sheets. This will be a bit of a review of the sheets and a bit of a review of the new, brutal, way you can handle characters in the funnel if you have these sheets.
First, the sheets are aesthetically pleasing, but they are not made with the best scratch off stuff. I don’t play the lottery or any of that parasitic shit, but I’ve scratched off some stuff in my time and it was better than the sheets– the stuff was challenging to get off without scratching the crap out of the paper underneath.
Secondly, the size of the type in the scratch off areas made it difficult to read the text, especially for the lucky signs and some of the equipment.
Last, I think these should have been a quad of four character sheets and not just one. There is a lot of space on the sheet wasted and frankly 0-level characters aren’t worth a full sheet of paper in the first place!
We followed the suggestion that came with the pack of ’emergent’ stats, that is: when you have to use a stat on a character, you scratch it off the sheet and reveal it. Only when you use a stat do you get to see what it is and what the bonuses are.
While this was fun, a couple of the players felt like they were bit upside the ass by it when their front character turned out to have a 16+ in some stat and they didn’t know and doomed the poor fellow to some trap. Make sure if you do this that you have ample opportunity for tests (PER especially doesn’t come up often).
That said, my funnel turned out not to be a very dangerous one, and with careful play (in most instances), the players came out with multiple characters.
Overall, it was fun to use the scratch off sheets, but they could be better and there were some complaints about reading the entries at times.
We play a bunch of RPG’s and Matt is castigated most of the time for his character names. So much so that he has descended into utter filth or silliness as a response. While I’m used to players naming their characters after other PLAYERS in the game, or some two word combo that turns out to be violent sexual imagery when pronounced, I seek to help matt with his naming problem and wasn’t sure how until I found this post about a neural network generating thousands of ‘fantasy’ names.
Here are some good ones out of the 10K+
Chagg Castlewink
Mira the Bastard
Ravelock Hewclot
Saltroth Dank
Varion Mandrin
Perry Bardwood
Mellock Fistbelly
Rhon Smallthorn
Maedo Balland
Poppy Didgins
Corvish Prinn
Temen Maft
Morrigan Hellioa Forgelock
