The Eyeball Kid's Module and House Rule Page

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Twilight: 2000, for those you who only started gaming in the nineties, was this seriously cool by-the-numbers military post-apocalyptic game, published by the now-defunct Game Designer's Workshop. Players took the role of NATO (or, hypothetically, Warsaw Pact) grunts three years after the onset of nuclear war; the game started at the point where the nuclear and technical arsenals of pretty much both sides had been exhausted, and 'World War 3' had degenerated into units of raggedy (but well-armed) deserters fighting over scrounging rights and the last can of dehydrated cheesecake in Krakow. Very... downbeat, non? You're just trying to get home, really, but there are hundreds of kilometers of wasteland between you and the less-nuked parts of Europe where a port might just be functioning, the French and Belgian border guards have a shoot-refugees-on-sight policy, and even when you get to the US you have little more than a country in the grip of a military-vs.-civilian civil war to look forward to.

Well, 'T2k' has its moments, nonetheless, and I'm considering running a campaign this year, but the first thing I had to do was bring the game's timeline up to date. I mean, Europe going to war over German re-unification just doesn't sound as plausible a decade down the line, does it? While writing this revised timeline, I was reminded that global war is never really as far away as we think... the right combination of events, and it'll be like 1939 all over again, with ordinary people wondering how the hell things got this bad while they buckle on their gasmasks. Damn!

Update: You can get almost all of the T:2000 books in .pdf format over at DriveThruRPG, at very reasonable rates indeed. The main rulebook is even being given away free this week (19 Jul 2004), so go snap it up while you can.

Deadlands is the RPG on which I've done the most serious work in terms of campaign depth and intricacy. I've run three games in the last three years: Lands of Mystery (Feb '98 - Apr '99), Deadlands 99 (Aug '99 - Dec '99), and Gone to See the Elephant (Dec '99 - Feb '00).

The following resources and articles are available on (or via) this page:

• Knudsen's Surprise - A gizmo for those Mad Scientists who need more than an ace up their sleeve
• On Bad Luck Mountain - a scenario which has been accepted for publication by Heliograph
• Heart of Steel - a Deadlands and Castle Falkenstein scenario, also published by Heliograph
• My campaign setting notes for 'Gone to See the Elephant - Deadlands: 1855'
• The revised, and streamlined, combat system I worked out for that campaign
• Lincoln, Veteran, and Second Ford - Three ready-to-play boomtowns
• A character sheet for the literary character, Sir Harry Flashman

Pinnacle also published the following three pieces; however, since their website was redesigned links to them have disappeared and I take it that this means I can put them up here again.

• As Cold As The Grave - a Deadlands 'Lite' scenario I wrote for GENCON 3 (.zip file)
• All That Shimmers - a two-part scenario I wrote for the official Pinnacle web site
• Three original Western relics - a pair of sixguns, a holy chalice, and a huckster's top hat.

I've also published several Deadlands adventures on SJG's great magazine, Pyramid: check them out there!

If you've ever played or run a game involving a member of an organised crime family, a hitman, a Wise Guy, or someone who models him- or herself on the ancient samurai, don't go to your grave without reading this book. It's that simple.

Ghost Dog is not just a groupie RPG for fans of the movie. It's got too much detail for that. It uses the movie to illustrate the use of various skills and advantages, provides stats for the major characters, and briefly summarises the plot, but apart from that it is its own creature. Of crucial importance in this regard are its exceptionally detailed chapters on the history and philosophies of the Mafia and the samurai alike, discussions of the notions of obligation to one's superiors that are an integral part of both groups, and information on what the Mafia actually does to make money. Were you aware that the Mafia are reputed to be the largest smugglers of CFCs in the world? Or just what the point of 'controlling the unions' is? This book will tell you. In that sense, it's almost as much of a stand-alone sourcebook for any modern game as it is a game in its own right.

An interesting addition to the standard What is an RPG? chapter are rules for one-on-one play; that is, with a GM and one character. As the author points out, once you're out of school or college, it gets harder and harder to get a group together; with Ghost Dog, if all your friends but one have gone home for Christmas (or whatever), you can still play. Nothing we didn't know already, of course, but its refreshing to see the creators of an RPG put some thought into 'Who might actually play this?'. Game play is handled using the same Tri-Stat system as Guardians of Order's other RPGs (Tenchi Muyo!, etc.), and is 2d6 based. You can check out more info on the game at the Guardians of Order site.

My evil master plan for Ghost Dog was always to use its super-sexy system as the backbone for an Unknown Armies game. The two are pretty similar as it is; the only real difference (apart from the dice used) being that in GD, skills are added to stats before the roll, and in UA they aren't. It's a minor thing, but I've always enjoyed 2d6-based systems (see the rationale below if you'd like to know why) - so, I gave it a brief pop and saw how it went. Here's the stuff - more to come!

• Coversion notes (so far) - includes an expanded Attribute list which should fit any GD game
• A character sheet for the crossover game (another version here)
• A sample adept character

Ah, D&D. I used to get these occasional masochistic episodes in which I would agree to write the AD&D modules for roleplaying tournaments while I was at 'varsity, despite the fact that (unlike most roleplayers of my length of service), I've never really played or run AD&D. According to the tournament organisers, this was one of the reasons they trusted me to write the modules in the first place.

• Six Fathoms Deep has a strong maritime horror feel. AD&D 2nd Ed, 4 players only.

After 3rd Ed came out, however, my regular gaming group and I got back into D&D with vigor, with a Forgotten Realms campaign run by Austin Chamberlain.

• My last character in that game was Morgann White-Eye; we decided to play by "Iron Man" rules in this campaign, and hence all character stats are rolled on unmodified 3d6; bear this in mind when you get to his Con of 3.

• The Warped Barbarian, a variant on the Frenzied Berserker prestige class from Masters of the Wild which I worked out and intended Morgann to pick up for a while. Readers of 2000AD will recognise some of the concepts pretty quickly...

• To cope with a group of players that travels an awful lot, we have on occasion used two sets of characters; our original, high-level party and a smaller low-level party for games when some of us were away. Corbie Indigo was my character for the low-level game; Croon Haxxor was my high-level character.

• Our group's standard operational routine for day-to-day travel.

• Balok Two-Knives was my first, slightly ill-fated, character in this game. A reformed street-thief from Ithmong, he was just getting on top of his new status as an adventurer when he got on the wrong side of a drow fireball.

• Hanno the Hungry was my second attempt at D&D character creation. My basic concept was a skinny, hard-drinking, dropout from the Wizard's College in Myratma. During the two sessions in which he appeared, his most noteworthy contribution to the action was massive, and unpredictable, impulsiveness.

• Otchka Manhunter, character number three, was generated in response to simple curiosity; if I created a character who was visibly 'going evil' in front of the other PCs, would they (a) realise in time, and (b) try to stop him? The answer was, 'yes and no'. They certainly tried to stop him once he'd actually become a worshiper of Cyric, but not before... basically, as soon as he showed up on the party Paladin's Detect Evil. Grrr! How the hell are you supposed to have any kind of moral ambiguity under an alignment system where evil is a binary state? Well, anyway, the big showdown made for some excellent roleplaying all round (Otchka invoking Cyric, Kerick invoking Tyr, bolts of lightning, party split down the middle, swords drawn...), so even if it wasn't the long-term success I thought it might be it was still worthwhile.

• Recently, having moved to Grahamstown to do a year of teaching at Rhodes University, I was taken under the wing of the 'Bowfingers' - cool, a group with a nickname! - in a fairly high-powered Forgotten Realms game run by Warren Schmidt. My initial character, Skitch of Blackhill, was a devious wizard with an extensive array of unusual skills, a fondness for dead folks, and an aptitude for backstabbing and flashy rapier tricks. After Skitch stalked off into the Moonwood after an intra-party dispute, I replaced him with a shaggy, somewhat bipolar Holy Liberator/Barbarian/ex-Paladin called Therell, also known by poor folk across the Silver Marches as 'The Watcher of the Ways'. Therell got, ah, chopped in half... damn blackguards... and his replacement, a fey'ri sorcerer called Stendril Aelrothi got killed by a banshee's howl, so I was on my final set of characters - a mismatched pair of half-orcs (Crack-Knuckle the Tunnel Stalker, a grim-faced cleric, and Krull, his pious rogueish minion), when my time in Grahamstown came to an end. The stats for this motley crew will get posted as soon as I can find the time to convert their Excel character sheets to passable HTML.

• There's more information on the setting, as well as some of my ideas so far, on my SLA page.
• I've also created a post-apocalyptic campaign setting called Sea of Blood, (complete with a ready-to-play adventure called Kick the Can) which is set in the far reaches of human space around Warworld Tosca IV.

These documents are aimed primarily at SLA Referees. If you're a player in a SLA game, then these links are not for you.

I wrote a send-up Zombie Horror module for FF in 1995, called Zombies Ate My Headlight. It can accomodate anywhere between three and six players and can be downloaded, along with the handouts and character sheets, here.

Through fair means and foul, I recently completed my collection of the books for the Dragon Warriors RPG, written by Dave Morris and Oliver Johnson back in the 80s.

Dragon Warriors is great. Unlike most gamers who started round about when I did, my first game wasn't D&D; it was the game system that came in a slim paperback book that my parents bought for me one afternoon in 1986 when they went to the bookstore and couldn't find any Fighting Fantasy books. Heh. I think I scored. Anyway, my friends and I played Dragon Warriors for a good three years before discovering D&D, and to have the books in my hands again is such a heady trip down memory lane that I may just have to run a game sometime soon. In anticipation, I've created a resource depository which will hopefully fill up with ideas and game nuggets as time passes. There's also more info on the game itself in there.

AFMBE is a set of rules for running survival horror games based in one of several 'Deadworlds' - settings where, for various reasons, the dead have risen from the grave to prey on the living. The official website does a great job of dangling this game in front of one like a juicy brain on a hook - check them out. Moaning, decomposing fun is also available in the following flavors -

• Check out the Disgruntled Postal Worker, Elvis Worshipper, and many others over at my Archetypes page.
• Alternately, and if its NPCs and the assorted minions of Norm-ery you're after, try my Norm Generator.
• Like Sneezing Fishhooks is a page containing my house rules for the effects of tear gas, pepper spray, etc.
• House rules for using a 2d6 roll for Tests and Tasks instead of a d10.
• I wrote a Zombie horror module for a local con in 1995, using the Fighting Fantasy system; the module (entitled Zombies Ate My Headlight) is further detailed in the Fighting Fantasy section of this page. I'll be re-tooling this module for AFMBE as soon as time permits.
• Another module, entitled Thirteen Ways to Die... Choose One, is available on the AFMBE website.
• A brilliant random zombie generator, created by another AFMBE fan, is available on his site. Try it out!

RISUS is a free roleplaying game with a highly fluid and elegant system. In other words, it's the best damn beer-and-pretzels game under the sun. The documents below are various rules patches (or, rather, supplements, because RISUS don' need no steenkin' patches) I've created for the RISUS system. You can get RISUS itself over at the Blue Room; a link is also included in each of the documents below.

Musketeers and witch-finders, conquistadores and galleons. It's the 17th Century, and it's right here. Includes rules for musketry, attacks made from horseback, old age, armour, and all-new faith, sorcery, and witchcraft rules.

Welcome to SQUEEK!, the RPG of doooooom. Will that be smoking, or nonsmoking? Right this way. RISUS and Jhonen C. Vasquez in a sugary, malty, Ice Sucky-stylemix perfect for close-up or ranged assault, by Seth Williams.

	Fly through the air, firing a pair of Uzis. Take a full clip from an AK and walk away without a scratch. Win a duel with a tank. Fight enemies who can do this as easily as you can. Play The Innocent Must Die!
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