HoF Print on Demand version in the works!

So the repertoire of Audio Samurai Games is growing, and the more I write, the more I come up with great ideas. I think they're great, anyway, and so do my gaming buddies. But offering just electronic versions of the games we make isn't enough. Not for me. I dream of one day lining one of my sagging, overburdened bookshelves (I really should look at getting another one) with hard copy versions of my own games.

PDFs are convenient at the gaming table, with bookmarks and hyperlinked references, but nothing quite captures the genuine feel of a true RPG experience like a hardcover edition of the game your playing, sitting within reach of all the players. Or better yet, one for everyone.

The artwork in the hard copy books is appreciated more, I believe, as PDFs are usually just used as references. It is much easier to look up something when the chapter is bookmarked, or there's a link to the table in the contents. I think having a hard copy version of HoF is just a pride thing, but it's something I'm working towards.

I've been using the opportunity to take a good hard look at the state of the game, also, not just reformatting and adding new artwork, but going through each and every rule and notation to see if it can be tweaked just that little bit more. I've made some changes, and found some stuff that SHOULD have been changed but wasn't (I'm looking at you, reference to Second Wind in Creature Features section!) and on the advice of some of my regular players added tutorials to some chapters with pictures to better explain the use of Effects, activations of Talents and how to Trump during combat.

So it's taking a little longer than expected to get the printed version ready, but as I'm now about 30% done I've come to realise that I should not rush through this regardless of how excited I may get about holding the dead tree copy in my hands.

For anyone who's interested, here's a link to what's been done so far, just so you can compare with the PDF version and see what I'm talking about :)

HoF - Print on Demand WiP

Monsters of Karth

Another Add-on for Hands of Fate goes live!

Finally finished the Monsters of Karth booklet for the Hands of Fate RPG, and there's some amazing artwork from Joe Calkins, Cerberus Art, and a few others from the Golden Age of RPGs. As you can see, the cover work looks fantastic!

I had purchased an art pack from Cerberus Art and guessed there would be 2 or 3 pictures in there that I could use, as is usual with an artpack that I pick up, but was very impressed with a lot of the work therein. The pictures were from the artpacks Cerberus Stock Art: A Decade of Fantasy and Cerberus Royalty Free Clip Art Pack, and are of excellent value. I drew a ton of inspiration from these pictures, and was pleased to find that almost all of my monster entries in the book were able to have pictures matched from the art packs.

More on the book itself;

• Several Dragons!
• More Orc and Alfari enemies
• Ogres and their war against the Bolfi
• Tons of Undead, both corporeal and incorporeal.
• Wild Men
• Many creatures from Karthi myths and legends
• New Armour and Weapons, plus a new Animism Spirit of the Wilds!

So, what are you waiting for? GO GET IT!!

Why a Dungeon?

So, I was thinking the other day while writing up stuff for the Monsters of Karth add-on for Hands of Fate and I came across a question that I asked myself and I don’t think I’ve been able to satisfactorily answer. So I’ll write down my thoughts and see where they take us.

Thinking of ideas for dungeon themed monsters, while trying to steer clear of clichéd D&D critters, I thought about what a dungeon means in my games, and are they really something that makes for fun gaming still? My games tend to be more story related, with encounters based around what the party discovers while acting out their characters, and I realised that I haven’t run a good dungeon crawl for a long time. I feel that simply laying out a labyrinthine structure and populating it with monsters sounds like an unimaginative way to spend my precious game time, that the story elements that would be strongest in this gaming environment would be reduced to questions like “What’s through the next door?” or “What does this lever do?”.

This may be enticing enough of a plot for many players out there but the storyteller in me begs for more of an element of mystery and excitement than mapping rooms and killing the bad guys in them. One or two rooms after the first and the party falls into a careful, methodical approach to opening doors (listen checks, trap checks, magical trap checks and then carefully opening the door). Yes, I realise I may be over-simplifying the process and that there are plenty of exciting dungeon crawls out there, especially for the Old School Gamer , but it’s a thought that keeps nagging my creativeness, that doesn’t see the fun in just running room encounter after room encounter. There isn’t enough character interaction, enough character building, or enough ROLEPLAYING for me.

So I struggled to come up with critters for my dungeons, simply because I find encounters out of dungeons to be far more complex and story driven than simply ‘because the monster lives in this room’. There must be a story related reason why the encounter occurs.

This is important in a game like Hands of Fate, and a few others, because it doesn’t reward players with a bounty of xp for each monster slain. It rewards the players on good roleplaying, on furthering the storyline, and for collaborating with the GM to create fantastic stories. A horde of mad Orcs killed to the last gives you just as much xp as a duel with a single, dangerous foe. The game doesn’t need multiple combat encounters, it needs a story. Combat, while fun, can bog down game play significantly; especially if you run with groups of 4+ players. This is one of the reasons why I wanted Hands of Fate to be fast paced, and the result is a very deadly combat system where the players are rather nervous when facing off against a GM controlled character or monster, one well timed dagger thrust to the goolies and it’s goodnight, Sunshine. Combat means a deadly encounter, for one side or the other, and there are consequences for letting a sword thrust go unchecked, even if the party has a healer.

So far, we’ve had great success in wilderness encounters and city borne combat, with a small dungeon crawl that was mostly puzzle solving Indianna Jones style more than room clearing. We’ve done a cave crawl to clear out an Orc lair, but once again, it was mostly just a few rooms with story elements in between. I think the ‘Passing the Narrative’ mechanic makes room mapping and maze running obsolete, as a player who thinks up a good way to use their character’s skills can gain the Narrative off the GM and hand wave the maze away, saying that the party navigates the passageways for a while until they hear an approaching patrol. For raiding fortifications, the party can come up with battle plans ahead of the fight, and they end up choosing where the encounters occur.

I dunno, maybe I just don’t get dungeons.

It's ALIVE!!!!!

It's official, folks, Hands of Fate is now live on RPGNow.com and available for purchase. For the avid readers here ( I know theres at least 2 of you ;) ) I have a special discount link for you to use to get the PDF at 25% off:

Hands of Fate Core Rules 25% Off!!

This link will work for a couple of months so take advantage of it now. Also to those of you who have already purchased it, I thank you, PM me with your Customer ID in rpgnow and I'll see that you get a special discount on future products.

Next:

Hard at work getting the first few suppliments completed, The Guide to Karth is ready for download, only there is little artwork. I did plan on getting some artwork for the various areas however it's proving to be too expensive to get what  I wanted so instead of putting in shitty hand drawn stuff I did myself I'm leaving it blank. It's available to download off this site (in the Downloads Page) and will be up soon on RPGNow.com.

Monsters of Karth needs more work, this is something I'd love to get artwork for on the critters, but once again my budget is not being very productive. I'm keeping my eyes peeled for good, cheap drawings, so if anyone has a good hand at this sort of thing I'd love to take a look.

Other Suppliments - Ars Academia has been started, but is far from finished; Return of the Weaver adventure has first chapter finished, but needs lots more work; others have not been started yet.

Stay tuned for more information!

State of Play

Happy 1st of May, HoFers!

Today's blog is an update on the State of the Game so far, and intentions for up coming work.

My partner and I have returned from our holiday to Thailand safe and sound, and ready to get back into things. First up; changes!

Wounds have had a slight revamp, in that only PCs may take wounds. This is to represent consequences to combat, even in victory, and we've left NPCs with simply larger Hands to compensate this. We figured that only non-player character big enough to warrant anything greater than the fast creation rules in the Game Mastery section of the Core Rules will most likely be created as a fully fledged character using the same rules as a PC, Wounds and all. Also, being knocked down to 0 Hand or less only generates a Light Wound, escalated in the case of filled Wound severity.

Damage has had a revamp. We weren't happy with the way Maximum Damage was handled. We found that even with a limit put in place equal to the Aptitude governing the combat style (POW for Str, INT for magic or CNG for Ref) the damage output was still too high. The rule in question was for when suits matching the skill being used were able to ignore the Max Dam limit. For example, Swords use the suit of Spades, so if a Damaging Trump had any Spades in it, they did not count towards the Max Dam set by the sword wielder's POW Aptitude. This has now been changed to only a Dramatic Lead can increase the Max Dam, and only by 1. The other methods for increasing Max Dam remain the same; ie Dual Wielding and Two Handed Attacks.

Magical damage has had a similar overhaul; where before the Core Rules stated (pg67) that each card that was higher than twice the target's POW, or a Diamond, is a Damaging card, we have removed the Diamond statement. Now, a caster may exchange 2 Aether of a successful damaging spell per increase of 1 to Max Dam. So an Aether 8 damaging spell may cause 6 Aether in damage with a +1 to Max Dam. Dramatic Leads on the castng Skill checks also add 1 to the maximum damage.

These changes, although small in detail, affect a larger scope of the game. The issue of balance is probably one of the most important aspect of a new game, one we hope we are working towards resolving. 

On another note, we are planning the next phase of high end game testing, possibly this weekend. We had toyed with making various builds using 75xp, 100xp and now 150xp. The characters built are advanced enough to be true wrecking balls in any combat, and the enemies they can face would squash any lesser combatants. However, what we've been unable to test so far, is how they fare in a story situation. Do the spread of skills they garner enough to allow them better manipulation of the game world, or are we spending too many points on Talents and Attributes? 

Also, I am making available the first suppliment to the Core Rules, Monsters of Karth. Although this is far from finished, it shows some fine examples of what you can achieve using the Creature Features presented in the Core Rules. Go to the Downloads section of this blog, or the direct link to the Drop Box location for it. Enjoy!

More info to follow....

Storming the Library

Sunday's game session was a special entry into our group's game history. We gave a trial run to using Terraclips for our dungeon layout. We used the Dungeon Rise - Dungeon Essentials set and I must say, even with a little bit of extra time needed to set up, this was awesome. We played down at Good Games Hurstville, my local gaming store, amoung about a dozen groups playing their own games, mostly card games. The set up was quite cool, and we had a few people come over and check us out while we played.

The photo below is of the final fight of the chapter, after a few puzzles and traps and a relatively easy fight against some giant spiders, they discovered a library deep within the buried crypts. There were a few skeletal archers guarding a spectral figure that was using the library (or haunting it) and the fight ended up being a fine example of planning and teamwork. We got to see some experimentation with creative spell casting and combining effects from multiple casters to achieve results. I felt that the rules we were testing were capable of supporting the various tactics used by the players, and that the few issues we raised were able to be corrected with minor adjustments to the established guidelines.

The issues we encountered were:

• Although the Core Rules do not have a section on combined casting, it is one of the additional elements being planned for release in one of the spell casting supplements.
• Talents are not being activated enough to make a difference to gameplay (only about 1 every other game) due to the cards required to activate being hard to gain. A solution is to incorporate Jokers into the decks to act as Wild Cards, having a value of 10 and being any Face Card required.

Moving forward to Release!

Another round of tweaks and proof reading done! This time we've introduced the mechanic of Wounds. This added a level of survivability to our characters, but also consequences of battle that last. These Wounds come in three categories; Light , Moderate and Severe. Each level soaks up a set number of damage to the Hand and in it's place you get a penalty to Play until the wound heals. This can take up to 4 weeks for a Severe Wound.

The different categories of npcs (Mook, NPC and Major Character) take different amounts of Wounds; A Mook can take no Wounds, an NPC may take a Moderate and a Major Character may take the full gamut.

Our latest game was a fun, Colin and Adri joined me at the local gaming store which just opened up. Good Games Hurstville had plenty of room for lots of people to gather and play their favourite games, and although their stock on hand was a little limited, they still had some golden products to check out. The staff, particularly Jamie, were very friendly and I'll definitely be coming back again. Their displays were of particular note, and have introduced to me Terraclips. I do believe I'll be scooping up a set or two of these amazing set ups.

Check out the store, and coming in and support local gaming at it's finest.

http://www.goodgames.com.au/stores/nsw/hurstville.html

On a related note, here is an example of play from Saturday's game:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/d1z07dum9h6sxzt/Example.pdf

Game on!