Last night we played the Beasts & Barbarians adventure "Eyes of the Night".  It comes from the Beasts of the Dominions book.  Of course, using BoL rules 

A friend of ours ran it for us a few (5 or so?) years back.  He ran it with the Savage Worlds rules.  My wife and I wanted to check out the system and he plays that system pretty frequently.   I really liked the setting, but I didn't care for the system much.  Neither did my wife.  (In fact, she refuses to play Savage Worlds again.)

After I ran it last night, I asked her if she remembered the adventure and she said that she didn't really.  I reminded her that it was the one that our friend ran for us using the Savage Worlds rules.  She said, yeah she remembered that... it was totally a different game.   She felt that our BoL characters were just more "heroic", like they should be.

A good Sword and Sorcery adventure!  Boats, pirates, a hidden island, a jungle, and a lost city with a strange exotic foe!  The end of our adventure was pretty good - her character (a one/two time use PC for the time being) dueled the female Pirate Captain and won, she now has a ship of her own again (she lost hers at the start of the adventure!) and a crew to sail the Dread Sea and Endless Ocean again!

Next week it will be "Death's Cargo" also from the Beasts of the Dominions book.  Another pirate/ocean travelling adventure.  I've converted it already and just need to pick out my battle maps and cut out my counters.
 

Last edited by Sigulf (5/27/2023 10:32 am)

Gruntfuttock wrote:

 
Whoever finishes first gets to run next week.

And the race is on!  
Does your wife like GM/DMing?  

I've asked my wife if she would like to give it a try and she replied emphatically - NO.  She says that she has no imagination and doesn't want to even try to do it.  
 

Thank you for the great response.  

I showed it to my wife and she got a kick out of it.  Said that she would think about it.
 

Glad to see you're still having fun.

Yesterday we finished the latest run of the Hyborian games I run for my wife Alison.

Captain Aja finally got back to her home port in Zembabwe after sailing halfway around the known world to Khiatn on a trading expedition - having to deal with: Zembabwean gangsters, terror birds, zombies, cultists, giant spiders, Vendhyan thieves and kidnappers, mad Kambujan royalty and allied Deep Ones, Khitan civil servants, a scheming Khitan admiral and spymaster, the God Emperor of Khitan and his court, assassins, and finally a Turanian noble seeking revenge against her boyfriend.

All this and the need to turn a profit!

Planning an Everywhen monster hunting one-shot set in Victorian London as a palate cleanser, before settling on the next short campaign. 

This (long post) is what I posted on MeWe about using the Tricube Tales setting info for inspiration for games – the Victorian monster hunters idea came from this – as detailed in the post. (I think Tricube’s Sharp Knives and Dark Streets micro-setting might be worth you looking at.)
 
At the beginning of the year, I found something interesting on Andy Slack's gaming blog ‘Halfway Station’. (Actually, his blog is often interesting.) He was using a micro-setting from the rpg Tricube Tales to run a city-based fantasy campaign in a D&D type world, but using Savage Worlds rather than Tricube Tales or any version of D&D. As he explained, “This campaign is based on Sharp Knives and Dark Streets [the micro-setting] and uses the city map and setting rules from that.”
 
If you are ever stuck for an idea for a fantasy, science fiction or horror game, you might find looking at one of their micro-settings a real help.
 
Never heard of Tricube Tales? It’s described on DriveThru as “The one-page RPG that doubles up as a micro-setting.” It’s ridiculously rules light.
 
It’s further described as: “Tricube Tales is a generic rules-lite tabletop roleplaying system designed to be fast and portable, making it ideal for pick-up games. It requires little preparation or bookkeeping, and the main PDF can be comfortably read on a smartphone screen.”
 
You can find the Tricube Tales micro-settings on DriveThru and you can either pay around 50 cents for a setting if you want to support the author, or you can download it for free if you prefer. Unless you are going to run Tricube Tales you don’t need the core rules if you are just using it for inspiration for a BoL or EW game.
 
I thought it might be worth looking at what was on offer, to possibly use as inspiration for EW or BoL games when my own creativity tank is running low. So, I got the main rules to see how it worked and looked at some of the – very diverse – micro-settings.
 
Therefore, I get promotional emails from Tricube Tales. And today I got details of their latest offering, ‘Hunters of Victorian London’.
 
As I might be looking for a palate cleanser after my Hyborian game finishes, and as Victorian London is a favourite of mine (and we’ve not visited it in a few years now) I had a look. It might make a good EW one-shot, I think. With just a few dice rolls on the one page setting page I ended up with:
 
1 A vampire buying up property in London
2 A mummy on the rampage
3 Location: a workhouse
4 Location: British Museum
5 Sherlock Holmes
6 Dorian Grey
 
A few more rolls on the details of the hunt gave me:
1 Reanimated corpse
2 Location: bridge or rooftop
3 Dealing with a police investigation
4 And lastly, a twist: a knife
 
All very generic and obvious, I’m sure you’ll agree, but channelling Hammer Horror films, Penny Dreadful, The Mummy, and Gaslight Call of Cthulhu I very rapidly got the bare bones of a game. In a few minutes I came up:
 
Monster hunting organisation: Is there one? Is it official? Do they recruit in the manner of Delta Green?
 
The vampire is a day walker – he visits the British Museum (BM).
 
The BM has just received a new mummy.
 
The mummy seems ‘wrong or out of place’: Wrong sarcophagus? Wrong wrappings? Odd body?
 
The PCs work for the BM: working on the mummy?
 
Vampire wants to resurrect mummy: Is the mummy a vampire?
 
The vampire was an Egyptologist working in Egypt: He/She fell in with a cult, voluntarily became a vamp for power in the cult.
 
Vampire has a crew – mostly Cairene – in London (everyone speaks ancient Egyptian), and several safe houses – both poor and modest/respectable.
 
Vampire’s plan is to locate and steal mummy: resurrect and ‘restore’ in London and then return it to Egypt and the cult! Will befriend/seduce PC working on mummy?
 
The knife is a magic item – and can control or destroy mummy – or both? Who has the knife??
 
Big Development! – Resurrection goes wrong and mummy escapes! (Monster Hunters recruit PCs?) Both the Vampire and the Monster Hunters will try to recover/destroy mummy while being hindered by police investigation.
 
Other developments: Sherlock – might not use, or the police bring him in to help? Dorian Gray – umm…helps the Vampire for kicks? Or is he a snitch for the Monster Hunter organisation? (They let him alone in return for information on London’s supernatural underworld.)
 
A few minutes pondering about the die rolls using the lists on the Tricube Tales setting page got me the above – enough to develop into an Everywhen game with a little more work.
 
Stuck for a game and deadline approaching? Check out a Tricube Tales micro-setting!