D6xD6 RPG

#RPGaDAY2023 Day 8: Favorite Character

Lester
Some fantasy characters from the early 1980’s

At last! A fairly easy topic!

Back in the early 1980’s, when I worked in a factory, had few children, and the future was far distant, I actually had time to paint miniatures for my characters. (I’m not saying they were very good, but at the time they seemed so.)

Raedel Pinehaven

That guy in blue up front is the earliest I remember playing, a half-elf sorcerer thief, and the gal in purple just behind him, Mistress Goldleaf, was an elvish NPC, a full mage he developed a crush on. (The unpainted figure in black is a recent sculpt of him, a gift from my old friend and GDW colleague Steve Maggi.) Since that time, Raedel has shown up here and there as an example PC sheet in one of my own RPGs. Needless to say, I’m fond of him.

Twill

Originally the Pictish warrior just to the right of new Raedel, Twill went on to become a burglar, a second story man in various campaigns by various GMs, and sometimes in solo play since. He had a code of honor that basically cast himself as Robin Hood, though he was pretty much the only person on his “give to the poor” list. He once burned a merchant’s house down for having sent some bully boys to rough him up after one successful caper.

Petit Louis, Vampire

I no longer paint minis, so he isn’t in this lot, but per Dracula his image couldn’t be captured anyway. Let’s pretend he’s there but we just can’t see him.

Artist’s Conception of Petit Louis, Vampire

Louis is a bastard son of Louis 14, and was a courtly sycophant by necessity. He’s a small guy (hence “Petit” Louis), vampirized at age 17. And despite the new supernatural powers, he’s amused that feigning obsequiousness to the posh provides a convenient source of both blood and high fashion. Having only recently left the “court” of Donald Trump, Louis has been hanging out in Hollywood, grooming a starlet by whispering a word in the ears of a few movers and shakers. 

Currently he’s hiding out somewhere with his own little retinue*, recuperating from getting his ass kicked in a bathroom stall by a paparazzo dogging the starlet’s heels. (I had a series of really poor dice rolls, starting with failure to mesmerize.)

You can probably tell that this is my favorite character, originally statted out in the D6xD6 “Fear the Light” setting, now in the “Dracula’s Get!” setting for the Bookmark HP RPG. He’s shown up in a few TikTok videos a year ago, and will likely do so on YouTube Shorts soon.

* Retinue: Bethan Troise, Starlet, Lover; Aaron Burdex, “Techretary”; Danile Mclachlan, Driver; Dane Mclachlan Bodyguard, Danile’s brother

Kindle Fire RPG Adventure Contest

Lester

Through an ordering error on my part, I’m in possession of an unneeded, Woot refurbished, 16 GB, red Kindle Fire HD 8 Tablet (7th gen). The OS is fresh, ready for connection to a new owner’s Amazon account, but I’ve preloaded the tablet with PDFs of every published Lester Smith Games RPG title: D13, D6xD6, D6xD6 Dungeons, and Bookmark No HP RPGs, plus all their supplements.

I don’t need the tablet. What I do need is adventures for those role-playing games.

So I propose a trade.

A trial by contest. Send me a publishable 1,000-word adventure (or longer) by 30 April (2023), and I’ll choose one as winner of this Kindle Fire with the complete LSG RPG library of PDFs. All other publishable adventures will receive the same PDF library, sans Kindle Fire.

By “publishable,” I mean that if in my judgment I can edit into shape, and it hasn’t been published elsewhere, it’ll count.

In return for the prizes, I’m asking for all rights to publish the adventure online and/or in a compilation, with your name in the credits.

That’s all there is to it. Please knock my socks off. Thanks!

From DC, to D13, D6xD6, and BNHP

Lester
Photo by Stefano Pollio on Unsplash

What with Halloween just 13 days away, I’d like to share a tiny bit of Dark Conspiracy RPG history and of personal pitch.

My goal with DC was, as you may know, to create a setting into which any horror story could be fit. Details I needed to achieve that goal—cyberpunkish urban sprawl, anachronistic rural regions, areas of bleedthrough from hellish dimension, and a rationale for beneficent aliens becoming inimical, for example—slowly amalgamated into a distinct personality of DC’s own.

But not everyone likes the DC mechanics, the inhouse system ported over from Twilight: 2000. Note that the T2K rules did play their own role in shaping DC’s character as a combat-heavy game of meet the monster; get your asses kicked; learn its weakness; come back better armed and kill it.

For GDW it made sense to have a shared system for all of its RPGs. (Well, until Space: 1889 broke ranks.) And the other reason is I wasn’t yet a mechanics guy. My two contributions to the inhouse system were to add experience rules (in Traveller: 2300, which got me hired in the first place) and to push for a change from d10 to d20. Adding an Empathy stat and trimming the T2K weapons list to suit DC were more a matter of developmental editing.

But since that time, my design skills for game mechanics have grown. Even earning an Origins Award! In RPGs, I’ve developed a passion for minimalist precision. For universal mechanics that dependably but unobtrusively support play. Even, say, hmm, I don’t know, maybe Dark Conspiracy adventures?

So here’s the pitch. If you love DC as a setting, but not the mechanics, I have three options to sub in for them. First, D13 is specifically designed for horror, any type, a bit more brutally than DC, but with push-your-luck paranormal abilities rules suitable for DC’s Empathy stat. Second, there’s D6xD6 (d6xd6.com is the core rules), and come to think of it, Chuck McGrew’s use of it in Don’t Look Back 3e could handle the DC setting right out of the gate. Lastly, there’s the Bookmark HP RPG, a deceptively simple system that has been called “an epiphany in game design.”

Each game system has its own unique take on dice mechanics; all three with dependable math under the hood. So, if you love the world of Dark Conspiracy, but aren’t a fan of its mechanics, why not give one of these three a try? Links in the sidebar.

Julia Baily, Spiritualist, Bounty Hunter

Lester
Photo by Taylor Brandon on Unsplash

I’ve been delving deeper into solo gaming the past few years, including solo role-play, which falls into two categories.

Category one is programmed adventures for systems like GURPS, RuneQuest, etc., and lesser known RPGs such as Risus. You may know these as “pick-a-path,” “which way,” or “choose your own adventure” books. I have quite a few of those adventure books on my shelves, unplayed, because who wants to refamiliarize themselves with a different RPG just to use them?

The solution has been to play them with on-the-fly conversion to a flexible system I’m familiar with: my D6xD6 RPG.

Category two is oracle-based adventuring, using a card deck, a set of dice tables, or other randomizers. There are plenty of great oracle systems out there, usable with pretty much any RPG you like, some of them with their own rules built in.

But for this, I’ve been using my Bookmark HP RPG, because the 1-10 scale is intuitive and character design is quick and easy, supporting storytelling without getting in the way.

And I’ve started a YouTube series exploring both categories, most recently the adventures of an Old West bounty hunter named Julia Baily, guided by the ghosts of murder victims. Check out the various videos for an introduction to the various programmed adventure settings and oracle systems, some musings about role-playing in general, and of course a bit of demo of my RPG rules in action.

Let me know what you think, with comments there or here. And thanks!