Penny Thought Exchange

20/04/2024

Need feedback for first release/minor updates
It's not what was planned as a "first release," but it seemed like the easiest adventure I've written to rework quickly into a publishable form. Of course, it took a lot longer as I kept finding things to alter or ideas to add!

I need commentators and proofreaders. Any help you're willing to offer will get your name on the front page as a thanks. The module will be released for free once finalized. Anyone interested in reading through and offering suggestions, fixes, and so forth? Let me know! I'll send you a PDF or a link to a Google doc, your choice!

So, please let me know if you'd like to check this out! Anything you want to help with or "contribute" will be appreciated!

A synopsis: a cavern and mine dating to prehistoric times, reputed to be haunted by a banshee, has led to death and suffering each time anyone has attempted to reclaim it. Now, goat-headed fomorians and other horrors are flocking to it to serve the dark being that has revealed itself. As their numbers swell, aided by a spying bandit cultist and his unwitting accomplices from town, the number and power of monsters in the area has increased, ruining trade and travel, yet due to a calamity in a nearby town, the influx of needy individuals has continued. This unfortunate situation is made the more sorrowful for the many desperate refugees that have been lost to the vicious creatures whose frequency and strength have grown. As if all this is not enough, the falling of a star has unleashed a terror from beyond. Trade, travel, and pilgrimages have been all but cut off; economic disaster looms as the number of needy continue to increase; cultists set traps, goblin tribes kidnap and enslave, something that fell from the sky devours all in its path, and all the while, fomorians gather together and plan for a war to retake the land that was once theirs.

10/11/2023

I commonly use music during my games, with audio tracks planned for different scenes. I love using handouts and aids in general, and will record audio clips of monologues, sound effects, and so on. Once in a while I'll even put together some sort of video clip.

In 2015 I was running a supers game using the DC Heroes system, and set in Baltimore City. I like to introduce new groups using the module The King of Crime, though modified, not only for Baltimore City, but because my setting is a combined DC/Marvel universe, among other things.

The King of Crime is a fun module that can be used to introduce a group of rogues to your new heroes as a modern iteration of the Secret Society of Super Villains. It's a re-playable module, as it has a number of crime scenarios to choose from or randomly select, and sets up a theme that you can run with to create your own criminal plots.

Towards the end of the adventure, the new, secret leader of the Secret Society of Super Villains has grown weary of the PCs foiling his plans, and disrupts a news broadcast with a terrorist threat to be carried out if the heroes don't skip town. I really enjoyed making the video, though looking back, I can see mistakes I made, things I should have done better, and the audio levels are really off - the news broadcast is low compared to the villain's monologue, but maybe he wanted it to be really loud and jumpscare his terrified audience.

I hope you enjoy, and are inspired to make short video and audio clips of your own to enhance your games!

09/11/2023

During playtesting of the Ignota RPG in 2018, the PM(Planet Master, the game's cute term for GM) ran an adaptation of Dungeonland and The Land Beyond the Magic Mirror. The picture, above, was commissioned to celebrate the conclusion of the adventure.

I was playing a character named Lili, a namail - a fish person. Lili was a necromancer, of a type the game calls a necrokis. One of her magic items was a pretty pink bowler that gave her the appearance of a skeleton - you see her to the left, on one of the giant crabs with two skeleton guards. The giant crabs, too, were undead, raised by Lili as mounts. Quills are a unique series of magic items in Ignota, granting various bonuses based on their color when placed in a hat.

The necrokis is the "dark" version of the necromancer, since they animate dead bodies as servants and feed off of souls for mana. However, Lili only fed off of evil individuals, and generally only animated the wicked, unless she was animating the victim of an enemy to use against that enemy, in which case she justified it by stating that she was giving them the opportunity to avenge their own deaths.

Lili went off on a journey and it has not yet fallen into the knowledge of the wise what became of her afterwards. So far as is known, her home is currently in the care of her friend Daayan, a rakshasa witch. On Ignota, rakshasas are not inherently evil and can be of varying cat types.

Daayan, Lili, and Kratr were my favorite Ignota characters. Sandiga Backen, a gurdte(rodent) martial artist who eventually became the Benevolent Dictator and Queen of Oz(seriously!) certainly gets a runner up status. Note that she gave herself the title ironically(though she really did take the Wizard's place), as she was a rather comical individual. If you figure out who she was modeled after, you'll know why...!

08/11/2023

Got this pin in yesterday. I thought it was cute.

05/11/2023

First session was a blast!

Zolfatara says:

My faithful retainer Janet and I followed our new, shady druid "friend" to Penhaligon to meet a potential party in preparation for meeting a mysterious raven, Warrior To No Mortal Master. He's apparently to make a deal with us, one that he already made with the party I'm possibly joining.

There was a statue there of a rather impressive heroine named Morgan. An apple vendor charged me for three apples he shouldn't have even harvested yet to tell me about her, and he basically mouthed off about women being unable to be heroes. I obviously misheard him though, as when I asked him to repeat himself he went back to talking about apples. If I see him outside of civilization I'm going to punch him in his Adam's apple.

Oh, and the party I'm joining has died and come back and might be immortal? I don't know. I tried to ask them about that, along with their quests, but they gave me a jumble of things. We have to find one of the party member's cousins, gnomes are evil, and they're helping orcs of all things? Well, my cousin Kratr is rumored to have gone to Norwold maybe to join up with orcs, so I guess they're not all bad? Gnomes though... I know all about them. As I told the party, gnomes go crazy and they gnaw on your ankles like pomeranians. Especially those ones that hang out in people's gardens. Stalker behavior.

Anyway we set off to explore this gnomish dungeon. While camping outside overnight, I noticed a bunch of different owls perched in a tree some 40' away, about 20' up, all watching us intently. I awoke another party member, a cleric, and we went to investigate. When one of the owls began screeching, I ordered Janet to shoot it. The owls attacked us, but after a few minutes of fighting I was able to smack a bunch of them down and turn them into owl paste with my greathammer - Janet and the cleric helped! The cleric called on her Immortal, Halav, to drive the evil away, which is what made the owl screech to begin with! Good one, Halav! What did I ever do to you?

We then realized, after beating down owls, that there was some weird woman whispering in the party member's ear that was looking for his cousins. Gaviston? Gravelson? I'll ask him his name again later. Anyway, we almost killed the witch but she turned into an owl and flew away!

The next day, in the dungeon, we found the spiral stairs down which led to a door with no way to open it - trapped to drop a bunch of stones atop us, squashing us into paste like the owls, if someone pushes on it! We went outside while the thief worked, and looked around for clues or hidden entrances. I thought that some standing stones outside, with reliefs of trees on them, might be a clue to which pins in the door needed to be depressed and by how much, but I was barking up the wrong stone... uh, tree. They just represented the seasons, as the party had already figured out before.

After a while, I decided to call down and see if the thief needed any help. He ran up around that time by coincidence I guess, and said he had an idea(I knew I smelled smoke) and ran back off after getting some iron spikes off someone. Janet and I followed him down, when huge blocks fell, missing both of us by inches! Good one, thief!

Continuing to explore, we encountered some weird, fat-bellied zombies that explode if you dispatch them! The cleric drove a bunch off by calling to her Immortal - I guess that guy is good for something after all because it worked, and most of them ran away! Me and a couple others shoved the remaining zombie as far as we could so that our missile people could shoot it down without its bone and gore shrapnel injuring us or grossing us out!

Well, I wanted a challenge...!

03/11/2023

I wrote up a character background for a BECMI Mystara game I'm joining tomorrow. I recently suspended a 7-8 year campaign in Mystara I was running using heavily modified(homebrewed) 2nd Edition AD&D rules. I'm looking forward not only to getting to play in Mystara myself, but getting to play BECMI again, in particular, getting to use my POD R͟u͟l͟e͟s͟ C͟y͟c͟l͟o͟p͟e͟d͟i͟a͟!

The character, Zolfatara, is related to one of my favorite characters in another game, a homebrew system called I͟g͟n͟o͟t͟a. The character in that system in named Kratr. This is the "Red Sonya" to my "Conan," not that either character is modeled on either of those two. The background was only supposed to be a few paragraphs but I got carried away!

Art is not mine and is being used for a personal game only. The oc tag only reflects the story and personality. Art is for reference.

29/10/2023

Speaking of dice, everyone knows the classic dice bag. I suspect that more gamers have used Crown Royal bags to store dice than have actually tasted Crown Royal.

I like to use other things than bags for dice storage, especially if I have a bunch I really want to organize. One handy solution is a fishing tackle box. You can find all different sizes and styles, and often at discount places like Ollie's or even thrift stores. There are all kinds of storage devices that can be utilized not only for dice organization but for your other favorite little items, like your good luck charms and miniature tape measure and what have you.

Art storage boxes and pencil cases can be pretty cool too. I got a new set of dice and organized them in this, an "ArtBin Quickflip," which I purchased at either a discount outlet or a thrift store, as above.

There is a center piece separating the two sides, and one has more room than the other.

I like to have at least 5 sets of dice because I hate re-rolling them! This container keeps them well-organized. So, I have my main dice set - whatever I'm using at the moment. These are my new ones, so obviously I'm favoring them, though usually this time of year I'm using orange and black sets!

Other side is thinner and less... manueverable, but works well nonetheless. If you get confused about how you're opening the case, you can make all the dice on one side fall out! It's difficult to do, but I'm a ditz...

Some games ask for "wild dice." Other times, I want a distinguishing die - say I'm rolling an attack cycle such as claw/claw/bite, and I want one of the attack dice to be a different color to account for the bite. So I put one extra set of dice here, again whatever I feel like. The blood-spattered ones are fun, but unbalanced!

Lots of games use d6s exclusively, or call for sometimes, if not often, rolling handfuls of them. So I put some extras here, choosing these old Warhammer Winds of Magic dice because they're cool, and two Illuminati! dice from the Steve Jackson card game for the same reason!

I also include a scatter and misfire die, as they can be used for lots of things. Check out the website for some rules for them! I also keep a d30, which can be used to roll days of the month, as well as supplements like the d30 Sandbox Companion and the d30 DM's Companion, both of which, incidentally, I cannot recommend enough. A d24, good for, among other things, rolling an hour of the day, such as to determine when a random encounter takes place. A d16, which can be used to give characters wildly varying ability scores by rolling a d16+2 and avoiding the bell curve. A d7, which can generate days of the week, and a d3, which I just like because I enjoy having a die with 1-3 printed instead of dividing a d6 by 2. It's not because it's difficult, I just like using it.

Any cool or fun methods you use for dice storage? Recommendations or tips? Let me know!

29/10/2023

Using Alternate Dice in RPGs - Let’s Start Doing That Again!
https://www.pennythoughtexchange.com/using-alt-ds-in-rpgs

New ways of generating numbers... alternate rolling methods... incorporating new die types into your game... let's do that!

Check out our section on using alternate dice in RPGs. There are currently rules for the use of scatter and misfire dice for missed grenade-like attacks.

Do you use these or other alternate dice in your games?

Using new methods of rolling, alternate ways of generating numbers, and incorporating new dice types into your game - let's do that!

28/10/2023

For playtests of PTE products in development, pictures, reviews, anecdotes, commentary, gaming tips and more, check out Penny's RPG blog, "1-50th of a Buck from Penny," at http://www.tumblr.com/1-50thofabuck !

28/10/2023

Statistically Accurate Character and Crime Generation Tables for Baltimore City and Greater Maryland for RPGs - use for supers or any modern RPG to generate statistically accurate characters and random crimes.

28/10/2023

A radio commercial for a product that would be very useful in many fantasy worlds!

Also found at: https://youtu.be/9Eq0QEwvIO0