Posts Tagged ‘savage worlds’

Savage Worlds with Aspects Revisited

In the comments of my old post about Savage Worlds with Aspects, LordOrlando asked me if I could share my experience using this system. It was a well timed question, as my wife and I are just reworking how we approach aspects in our new Savage Worlds campaign. I thought my response would get pretty long – and I was right – so I’ve made it a brand new post, rather than just a comment on that old post. So, here we go. Continue reading…

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Savage Worlds Moonlighting Downtime Mechanics

Some games get pretty ridiculous, with characters going from farmers to gods in a matter of in-game months. Sometimes, for various reasons, you want to have a few weeks of in-game downtime between or during sessions. Apocalypse World has a great mechanic for this and I’ve altered it to make a Savage Worlds version that we’re now using in my 1-on-1 city-based home game. I’ll present the mechanics, then a little explanation on the design.

Moonlighting

Whenever there’s a stretch of downtime in play, or between sessions, choose a number of gigs to work. Choose no more than the number of dice you have in Smarts. Describe a gig then roll your wild die and the relevant skill, like Fighting for protection gigs, Stealth for picking pockets, or Investigation for academic research.

  • On a raise, you get profit from the gig you chose; if you get multiple raises that means exceptional success, perhaps extra pay, recognition or connections.
  • On a success, you get profit but with some complication (or failure but you got out of it clean: no profit, no fallout, no hard feelings).
  • On a failure, you failed the gig and suffer some fallout, like lingering wounds from a protection gig gone wrong, fines or jail time for criminal activities, and maybe someone is mad at you.
  • On snake eyes, double ones, you can’t roll for any more gigs this session and your failure was a fiasco: someone is definitely mad at you, you’ve probably lost something you care about, and the trouble is immediate.

The GM should discuss any profit, complications or fallout with you. If you didn’t roll snake eyes, you can now roll again for any remaining gigs.

Continue reading…

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Savage Worlds Race: Satyrs

Savage Worlds again, while I’m on a roll. Here is a race for all you savages out there. Satyrs! But not as you know them.

Physically, they’re humanoid goats, not goat-legged humans. In fact, they look exactly like this. In addition, they’re much meaner and gruffer than satyrs are generally thought to be and have a bit of a darker edge – like all fae should!

I created them to serve as grunts and enforcers for the more important fae in my world, but also as a playable race with adventuring motivation built right in. Also, if you don’t like dwarves, or just want a break from them, these satyrs can fill their role quite easily.

If people want, I can also get a PDF of this together for you. For now, let’s meet the satyrs!

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Savage Worlds with Aspects

In the Demonsea campaign I’m running for my wife, we’re using Savage Worlds. It’s a great system, and one of my new favourites. I like the Hindrances and Edges, but we found that choice there can sometimes be a bit limited and the ones my wife had picked for her character ended up not being very relevant. I know we could have changed them or made up our own, but that didn’t really excite us.

Instead, when we went to advance her character again we decided to try ditching Hindrances and Edges and incorporating Aspects, from FATE-based games like Spirit of the Century and The Dresden Files RPG. Now, I know this may be blasphemy to some, but we wanted to give it a shot. I’ve read a lot about SotC and DRPG, but haven’t yet had the chance to run either, so this was also like a test-run for using Aspects.

If you’d like an offline copy of these house rules, you can download a PDF here.

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Zodiac: Pandas vs. Tigers

Low on time to prep our group’s regular Pathfinder game this week I decided to run an intro game of Savage Worlds. I asked my wife “What should you guys fight tonight?”. She listed off several things that were inherently unfightable before finally jokingly suggesting “Pandas!”. I suddenly recalled seeing this image of an armoured red panda recently and my Zodiac campaign setting was born!

Little did I know that vengeful blade-fisted tigers, panda whirlwinds of death (not in the way you’d think, either) and spirititual resource wars were soon to rear their awesome heads!

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Tarsis – Goddess at the Gate

I’ve recently been thinking about threshold or liminal gods. It’s a strange concept to have an entire god – or several – dedicated to doorways. However, liminality also refers to being “between” places, times or states. I have created Tarsis – Goddess at the Gate – as an attempt to create a coherent threshold deity for use in roleplaying games. I’ve also included rules for using Tarsis with the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and with Savage Worlds. If you find this article interesting, I suggest reading up about Hecate, who Tarsis is heavily based upon.

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Savage Worlds License

This game references the Savage Worlds game system, available from Pinnacle Entertainment Group at www.peginc.com. Savage Worlds and all associated logos and trademarks are copyrights of Pinnacle Entertainment Group. Used with permission. Pinnacle makes no representation or warranty as to the quality, viability, or suitability for purpose of this product.

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Minigames: Knifey-Dicey

I recently had an NPC ask a PC if he’d like to gamble, but I hadn’t thought of the game they would play. Before I knew it I was saying in character as the NPC: “So, have you ever played… knifey-dicey?” On the spot, we came up with some quick rules for this two player minigame.

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Demonsea: Setting Sail

Fact one: demons are awesome. Fact two: everything is better with pirates.

Combining them is an obvious move, yet I can’t think of a campaign setting I’ve seen that was dedicated to this concept. Hence, my new campaign setting: Demonsea.

I’ll be using Pyres of Vam as a place to preview material from Demonsea, so that readers can follow the development of this brand new campaign setting. But for now, read on to get the first sneak peek at this swashbuckling, demon-slaying world of mayhem and adventure!

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March Fo(u)rth for GM’s Day

March Fourth has become known as GM’s Day in the roleplaying community. It’s a day to celebrate Game Masters and thank them for their hard work, convoluted plots, devious villains and all the fun times you’ve had with them. GMs and players alike will be interested in the celebrations happening over at DriveThruRPG, the Internet’s largest RPG download store. They’ve take a fourth off many of the products on their site until the 8th of March. That’s 25% off!

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WHAT YOU'VE GOTTEN YOURSELF INTO

Pyres of Vam is run by Mockingbard and his alter-ego(maniac) Vam. It focuses on tabletop roleplaying but you'll find other things here too.

Mockingbard loves roleplaying, worldbuilding and stories. He posts setting ideas, session recaps, gamemastery tips and the like for fun, for himself and to get his creativity on.

Vam posts from the villain's point of view: debunking monster myths, providing adventure ideas for villains, and helping fellow villains and dastardly GMs deck out their lairs and complicate the lives of filthy adventurers.

We write this stuff because we like it :) Hopefully you'll find something you like here too.