Skyland Games

When is it time to emerge from your cave and start playing in person?

Well, by now we’ve all been through it. Right when we started to think that we were going to get back in the saddle here at Skyland Games, the pandemic hit. And it persisted. And it persisted. In some ways, we had more time than we ever had before to write and reflect, and review ways to game more successfully online, but I’ll be damned if we just could not bring ourselves to do it.

Things were pretty dark. We all know that. Is it surprising to be unmotivated in all that? No. So please forgive us our long absence. We have slowly started to feel a little safer making our way out to game in person, and we’re currently running one online game and one in-person game for those who crave the in-person interaction and can handle the risk of possible infection, limited though it may be. We gathered in person as well at Free RPG Day which was this past weekend, all of us meeting at our FLGS The Wyvern’s Tale for some DCCRPG (you may be able to soon get a free PDF of Goodman Games’ offering Danger in the Air — click that for details). It was great to see things return to a semblance of normalcy from the before times.

It raises the question, when do you know you’re ready to return to in-person gaming? Here are some suggestions.

PARTY VOTE

Decide whether or not you’re going to require the vote to be unanimous, or majority rule. If you’re going with majority rule, you’ll want to discuss whether or not people voting against are going to honor the vote or have to abstain. If so, you might want to consider some of the other options below. But to run an anonymous poll among your friends is easy and can be accomplished with some free websites like Xoyondo. This can take the pressure off of some of your friends who might feel like they’re spoiling someone’s fun or pressuring others to do something their not ready to do.

STAY VIRTUAL AND CRY ABOUT IT

Until the virus is gone, which it looks like may be never, you can stay virtual. Yes, it may be a poor simulacrum, a shadow of real gaming, but you have to admit there are some advantages. You save gas money which as of this writing is hitting close to $5/gallon. You can use that huge catalog of virtual tokens you got from Forgotten Adventures, load up Roll20.net and start up DnDBeyond.com and you’re playing in minutes. And when you’re done, you can go upstairs and go right to sleep! You can still use all those great virtual resources you gathered during the pandemic, many of which are probably easier and faster than trying to unreliably do math in your head.

If there is one thing the pandemic did for us as gamers, it was making us figure out how to successfully game virtually. If you’re playing online, take the time to set it up right. We’ve never been fond of the in-app video chat with roll20, so we use a separate Discord server. It’s free, works fairly reliably, and accommodates good audio and passable video I’m told, though I’ve never used it that way.

I think video would probably enhance the online experience, but enough of us run these games on potatoes disguised as computers so we don’t push our luck.

It’s a good opportunity to get together with that old gaming group from college, or maybe hook up with some players that have moved away. And there is always the dark depths of various LFG pages you might wade into. Tread lightly.

HYBRID

I have recently accepted that some of our players may not ever want to play in person again. Also some players have moved away and are never coming back. Our player that moved to Canada really wants to stay in the game, or at least games that were going when he left. To accomplish this, I’ve actually found that it can be rewarding to have as many as are willing to play in-person get together in the same room, with a table mic for the distant player.

I recently required this rig to accomplish just that. Blue Yeti makes a powerful mic, this setup clamping to the table and hovering boom-style over the action so you don’t have to work your miniatures around it. If you couple that with a video table, the GM can use that to mark where players and monsters are and stream that same image to roll20, to which the player can log on and play.

I have a fairly serious setup. This may not be for everyone. But we played theater of the mind for decades! And failing that, a well positioned facetime shot or screen shot can get the same feats accomplished. There may be technical frustrations however, so get it set up before your players show if at all possible.

We did something like this during the pandemic lull of 2021 when a few of us were vaccinated and thought everything was fine, but others knew better. That mixed group was significantly more fun than just being straight virtual, where interrupting each other kept us from playing our characters and telling our jokes as timely as we would have liked. But hey, those days of virtual play were iron rations. They may not have been good, but they kept us alive, didn’t they?

In the end, do what you can to keep your people together. These guys might be more than just gaming buddies, they might be your Found Family, and no one wants to be left out. It didn’t occur to me how rushing back to the table might make some people feel left out until it was too late, and I regret not weighing it a little more before we sat back down. Best we can do now is accommodate those that need to play it safe, and hope we get to a point where we all can sit down at the table again and kill orcs in person, like the gods intended. Except Gruumsh, that still pisses him off.

MACE West is less than a month away! The annual western addition of Mid-Atlantic Convention Expo returns a bit earlier than in previous years (February 28 – March 1), but in the same space at the DoubleTree in Asheville, just outside the Biltmore estate.

Registration is already open. Get your tickets, sign up for games, and I’ll see you there!

I’ll be running DCCL Acting Up in Lankhmar, as well as two slots of my FFG Star Wars adventure that picks up immediately where the Mandalorian TV season 1 ends (spoiler warning if for some reason you have failed to devour the first season of Mandalorian).

After watching the last few episodes a few more times, I would still like to stat out IG-11 and Kuill, but they are both pretty much irrefutably dead after the last episode. One could argue you could rebuild IG-11, but his self-destruct device was purpose-built to avoid capture and his design being copied. The only reason Kuill was able to rebuild him earlier in the show was thanks to Mando’s well-placed headshot.

The pre-gens for my table of Mandalorian Season 2 will be: Mando, Cara Dune, Greef Karga, The Armorer, Paz Vizla (Mandalorian heavy), and the Child. Today I’ll share my build for Carasynthia Dune of Alderaan.

I considered making her a Soldier Heavy from Age of Rebellion, but went with Soldier Commando instead. Especially considering the addition of Paz Vizla, who is most definitely a Hired Gun Heavy, Commando seemed like the best choice for her. Added to the core Solider skills of Athletics, Brawl, Knowledge (Warfare), Medicine, Melee, Ranged (Light) and Ranged (Heavy), Commando adds another Brawl, another Melee, Resilience and Survival. The skills alone do well to describe what we have seen on the screen so far. The talents only further support Commando as the best choice for Cara. As a human you can take two non-career skills, and I chose Gunnery and Cool. I’m building these pre-gens out with initial XP+200. I used her initial 110 as a human to increase her Brawn up to 4 and Agility up to 3. I eventually purchased the talents to get to Dedication and increase her Agility to 4.

As one may expect, there are plenty of ranks of Grit and Toughened in the Commando talent tree. I purchased a few of those, as well as Point Blank which adds damage to Ranged attacks at short and engaged range. Durable reduces crit results suffered by 10. Armor master increases soak by 1 when searing armor. Feral Strength adds 1 damage to Brawn and Melee attacks. Perhaps most thematically, Heroic Fortitude allows Cara to ignore effects of crits to Brawn and Agility until the end of the encounter. On balance, I think this build fits quite well for what we’ve seen from Cara on screen so far.

Her equipment posed a few interesting challenges. Most notably, her heavy rifle does not appear to have appeared in the Star Wars universe before. The power cell is similar to the RT-97C from Battlefront, but it is under the rifle which features two barrels and a carrying handle she uses to stabilize it while firing. To stat it out, I started with a Heavy Blaster Rifle and added an Augmented Spin Barrel, Forearm Grip, and Optimized Energy Cell. The one from the show doesn’t actually spin, but mechanically it just adds one base damage while providing an additional barrel. The Forearm Grip reduces the difficulty for engaged range heavy checks, and the Optimized Energy Cell accounts for the massive power cell and ensures she will rarely run out of ammo.

I gave her Rebel Heavy Battle Armor (Soak 2) which when you add her 4 Brawn and Armor Master gives her a very beefy 7 soak. Beyond that, I added a simple blaster and a vibroknife as backup weapons. In the show her pistol has a cool looking scope on it, but I didn’t find a weapon modification that described that well and fit on a pistol.

Once I stat out the rest of the PCs I’ll post them here. As of this writing, there are still a few slots left for the tables I’m running. There are a ton of great gaming events happening all weekend: board games, historical wargames, and even a greek pantheon themed LARP. See you at MACE West!

I spent some time over the holidays digesting the new Genesys Core Rulebook from Fantasy Flight games. As an avid fan of the Star Wars system that basically uses the same core mechanics, I figured I would enjoy FFG’s adaptations of those same concepts to other settings. The short version is, I was right! This will be my go-to system for creating unique settings, or adapting popular worlds (and IPs!) that either don’t have an RPG of their own, or the licensed RPG leaves a lot to be desired.

In my experience, other one-system-fits-all RPGs like Savage Worlds, FATE, or GURPS were OK, but failed to be really satisfying. Since you have to be able to do everything, they tend not to do anything exceedingly well.

Genesys uses the narrative dice system from their Star Wars line with very few modifications. While the symbols on the dice are different (and some could argue more clear) if you have the Star Wars dice you can certainly use those, and do not have to buy new dice. The terminology is the same: Success/Failure, Advantage/Threat, Triumph/Despair, Boost/Ability/Proficiency dice, Setback/Difficulty/Challenge dice etc. The one omission being the Force die. Destiny points are called Story points in Genesys, and you start out with a static pool of one point per PC in the player pool, one point in the GM pool. I personally will likely house-rule this and include a roll of the force die to see whether the winds of fate are blowing for or against the PCs. Having a larger pool of destiny/fate/story points is more fun in my opinion.

This book packs a lot of great material in its 256 pages, for a very reasonable MSRP of $39.95. The system has certainly benefited from years of refinements in designing an entire shelf worth of Star Wars supplements. Sections of it read like a design guide for creating balanced skills, talents, species, and items. It offers insights in to the design process and provides a pretty elegant way to design a skill tree that feels both familiar, yet provides the tools and guidance to customize your setting.

Included are some basic profession archetypes like Laborer, Intellectual, and Aristocrat which could be adapted to any of the outlines of included settings like Fantasy, Steampunk, Space Opera, Sci-Fi, Modern and Weird War. All of the included settings have brief sections on possible species/races, items and adversaries. While not being exhaustive, they certainly cover the main tropes for each genre that provide the blueprint to allow endless expansion.

One section that got a significant overall is Social Encounters. Star Wars was moving in this direction with a lot of the more recent sourcebooks for socially-focused characters, but Genesys takes it a few steps further. As part of a social encounter (and potentially during combat using social skills!) PCs and NPCs can trade verbal barbs that actually cause strain damage equal to uncancelled successes similar to typical combat checks. An opponent is defeated once you exceed their strain threshold. All PCs and Nemesis NPCs have a Strength, Flaw, Desire, Fear, and Motivation that can be learned or accidentally revealed during the course of the encounter to the advantage of their opponent in future rounds. I think the key to successfully running these will be to allow the story to drive the mechanics rather than the other way around. PCs will still need to be fairly clever and creative in their social maneuverings, but the dice and motivations may be a fun way to represent or even inspire the ebb and flow of these encounters.

There are also a few optional rule sets that make more sense in some settings than others. The vehicle rules/combat are very similar to Star Wars with very few additions. I did notice an additional range band added beyond extreme: Strategic range. This could be used in a variety of settings, but is defined by not being able to see each other with the naked eye, but only through some other means: sensors, spyglasses, radar etc. The magic rules are fairly unique and will be a pretty big departure for those used to playing wizards in D&D or similar systems. Spells are defined in broad strokes, allowing PCs to flavor them as they like, or as would be appropriate for their character. Examples include Attack, Augment, Barrier, Conjure, Curse, Dispel, Heal and Utility. Spells are divided into three main skills: Arcana, Divine, and Primal. Casters can also add special effects by increasing the number of difficulty dice. Turn a fire bolt into a fireball by adding the Blast quality and one difficulty die. Empower an attack to do damage equal to twice the characteristic linked to the skill for two extra difficulty dice. Bigger, badder spell? Harder to cast. Very elegant.

My only complaints are mostly aesthetic, which is a first for FFG RPGs. I knew going in we weren’t going to have the incredible art that drives the Star Wars universe, but the original art we do get are basically just sketches. I get its a toolkit/blueprint but not only does it look rough, it is much more sparse. At least give us a lot of it if its going to take a quarter of the time. Beyond that, the headings and subheads are in a very compact all-caps font in two shades of blue. Gross. Ideally, the various setting-specific books will have their own layout and design team, because this book is below par.

That being said, I would highly recommend picking this one up in print or PDF! One benefit of not being under the yoke of the Disney/Star Wars license is modern digital formats! For an example of what can be built using the system, check out the Fallout theme over at d20 radio.