Masters of Umdaar: The Starblades of Su’ul (from universe 3858)

Dave Joria’s Masters of Umdaar, which I recently got an opportunity to run as a campaign at long last, includes a starter adventure called The Starblades of Su’ul. In it, the player characters, the Archaeonauts, set out to find one of the eponymous legendary swords before it can be claimed by Kaji-Sa the Bloodmonger, who is collecting the blades and already has one in her grasp. It’s a great adventure, fun to play and wonderfully evocative of the aesthetic (there are Lazer-Wolves!).

The adventure can stand alone, but it can also serve as the first session of a longer campaign, in which the players race Kaji-Sa (or other villains) to find the rest of the Starblades. It’s a fairly popular way to start an Umdaar campaign; it’s certainly how I did it!

The funny thing is, I’ve never seen any stats online for the other Starblades. In fact, it’s rare to see anyone stat up any relics that the Archaeonauts might uncover, even though people share heroes, monsters, and villains aplenty (check out #Umdaar and #MastersOfUmdaar on Google+, or the Elektrokhan, Facemonger, and Scorpotaurs from Dave Joria’s own Tangent Artist Tabletop blog), and even the occasional cliffhanger-style trap. But no relics, and no Starblades. I wouldn’t have minded some examples as a leaping off point when I was preparing my campaign.

So in this blog I present the Five Starblades of Su’ul (from at least one of the alternate universes of Umdaar, let’s call it 3858 why not), and some other resources that I used to run my campaign of Masters of Umdaar. I’d love to know if you find it useful!

32: A Step into RPGs Retrospective

The piece of TMNT fanart I liked most but didn’t use in my TMNT RPG blog series.

This month is the 32nd since I started this blog. It is also, by a weird coincidence, the month of my 32nd birthday. I realised this too late to turn RPGaDay into “31 posts in month 31 while 31”, but nevertheless I’m feeling a bit reflective.

Here is a look back at some of my most popular blog posts, the top 11 posts on the blog based on average views per month (vpm) since publication.

There are a lot of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in this list. You’ve been warned.

RPGaDay 2017, Day 15: Which RPG do you enjoy adapting the most?

RPGaDay is an annual celebration of tabletop roleplaying. This is the first year I’ve tried to do it.

Which RPG do you enjoy adapting the most?

This one’s easy: the game I enjoy adapting the most is Fate Core, and the related games under that banner (like Fate Accelerated Edition and various Fate Worlds and Adventures). The mechanics are straightforward and their purpose is transparent enough to see what each bit does, so it’s easy to chop and change and be confident how your changes will affect the narrative of your game. The Fate System Toolkit is great for this, and there’s a huge community online of people who are constantly taking the game apart and doing interesting things with it.

As evidence of my interest, I’m going to highlight my version of TinyFate (a minimalist Fate hack based on the work of Rob Donoghue) and the Fate of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (a TMNT hack based on PK Sullivan’s The Three Rocketeers).

I have some hopes for Cortex Prime in the future, though…

RPGaDay 2017, Day 9: What is a good RPG to play for about 10 sessions?

RPGaDay is an annual celebration of tabletop roleplaying. This is the first year I’ve tried to do it.

What is a good RPG to play for about 10 sessions?

To be honest, 10 sessions sounds like a pretty ideal campaign length to me. I’ve played some campaigns that were longer and some that were shorter, and I’m happy to have done so. But I think 10 is long enough to do pretty much anything you want with a character without being so long that you get bored of the conceit. It’s about the number of sessions we had in our excellent CAMELOT Trigger campaign, for example.

So I guess my answer is: pretty much anything not designed for a one-off. But if you’re looking for recommendations, give CAMELOT Trigger a try.

Fate of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: They played my game!

Hey everyone! Someone played my game! And they recorded themselves doing it! And they had fun!

Remember when I wrote a one-shot Fate adventure featuring the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? Well Allen Holloway, who has a YouTube channel called Check For Traps, has organised and run a live-streamed version of that adventure with four other roleplaying YouTubers. I am unreasonably happy that this has happened. I didn’t know any of these people, but somehow they found my stuff and liked it enough to run a game with it! And they had fun!

I found out about this game after talking to one of the players about his TMNT Fate game on Google Plus, but I had no idea it was based on my work until I actually watched the video. In fact, this is the first time I’ve heard for sure that anyone has actually run anything that I made. To get to watch it on top of that is a treat!

Will Cortex Prime light our darkest hour?

It’s Optimus Cortex Prime, geddit?

The Kickstarter for Cortex Prime is currently live, and it’s doing rather well. It funded in 36 hours (I helped!), it has just passed its third stretch goal, and it still has 12 days to go.

Cortex Prime is the latest iteration of the Cortex roleplaying system and, more immediately, the successor system to Cortex Plus, which gave us games like Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, Leverage, Firefly and my favourite Smallville. (I’ve blogged about Smallville a lot. Have a look.)

This seems like a good time to talk about my feelings for the new game. In short, I’m looking forward to it. My last Cortex Plus game, the X-Men drama Worthington Academy, wrapped up last year. I had no intention of running another one, but just before the Kickstarter launched I was starting to get the itch for a new Cortex Plus Drama campaign, and so Cortex Prime showed up at just the right time.

But what do I think about what I’ve seen so far?

Fate of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Part 4: Unleashing the other strangeness (long-running campaigns)

This fanart by Ryan Wilton shows how the TMNT look in volume 4 of the comic (by original creater Peter Laird). Front row, left to right: Donatello, Leonardo, Michelangelo. Back: Raphael.

This is my fourth and final blog post about adapting Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT) to the roleplaying game Fate. I’ve previously discussed systems (part 1), player characters (part 2), and written a one-shot adventure (part 3).

Now I want to talk about how I’d run longer TMNT campaigns.

As I mentioned last time, the shorter your campaign, the tighter and less fantastical your TMNT game should be. For a one-shot, I focused on a simple rescue tale with a single villain. But the TMNT franchise is a vast kitchen sink world (with, for example, ninjas, mutants, mad science, aliens, robots, magic, time travel, ancient civilisations, ghosts, Lovecraftian monsters, parallel dimensions, and superheroes), so in this post I’m going to explain just how bonkers I’d want to get if my players and I were committed to a significant number of sessions.

For one thing, they’re not teenagers any more…

Fate of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Part 3: When the evil Shredder attacks (one-shot adventure)

In this third part in my series about adapting Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT) as a roleplaying game, I outline a one-shot adventure and a handful of featured NPCs. (In part 1, I explained why I was using the system from The Three Rocketeers, a World of Aventure for Fate Core. In part 2, I produced character sheets of the four main characters to use in a campaign.)

Although I made a big deal about making the character write-ups flexible enough to apply to multiple versions of the characters, in this post I largely throw that out of the window in pursuit of a different goal: streamlining and simplicity. This involves featuring one main threat (the Shredder), focusing on one main plot hook (Splinter is kidnapped), and cutting out everything that doesn’t support these (sorry, April).

Fate of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Part 2: Heroes in a half-shell (player stats)

In my last blog post, I said that I’ve been pondering how to run a roleplaying game based on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT). I want my game to have the four main turtles as player characters, and getting those characters right is vital for the game to work.

In this blog post, I adapt the four titular protagonists of the franchise to the rules of The Three Rocketeers, the World of Adventure for Fate Core that I am using for the TMNT game. Write-ups for these heroes, in the form of proto-PCs (incomplete characters that can be customised by players), are included at the end of the post, along with PDF character sheets. Feedback is welcomed and encouraged!

Fate of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Part 1: Introduction to Rocketeering

I have a big soft spot for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT). I grew up watching the old 1987 Fred Wolf cartoon (“Heroes in a half shell! Turtle power!”), and fell back in love watching the 2003 4Kids! cartoon. I’ll defend the 1990 Golden Harvest film as a cinematic gem until the day I die.

For years, I have been thinking about how I’d go about running a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles roleplaying game. I’m probably never going to run a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles campaign, since I only run games in person and I don’t know many roleplayers who are fans of TMNT. But that’s never stopped me from thinking about it and now, finally, I know how I’d go about setting up such a game.

In this series of blog posts I’m going to set out the process by which I would adapt TMNT to a roleplaying game. In this introductory post, I discuss game mechanics and explain why, for a shorter campaign featuring the four turtles as PCs, my prefered system is The Three Rocketeers, an aspects-only variant of Fate Core. In later posts, I’ll present character sheets for the turtles (part 2), lay out at one-shot adventure and stat up some major antagonists as NPCs (part 3), and talk about how I’d set up a longer campaign as a GM (part 4).

I hope that any GMs and players who are interested in a TMNT game will be able to follow what I’ve done and use it to play something that kicks ass. (And if any of my roleplaying friends want to play such a game, please let me know so we can make it happen!)