The following is an old Setting Mashup that me and Silver Countess came up with on a whim WAAAY back in 2004, I’m reposting it now as a little bit of nostalgia… and an example of a remarkably amusing combination:
I was having lunch with my girlfriend in a Japanese restaurant one day when she looked at me as said with a perfectly straight face, “You know what would be cool? A modern-day Rokugan with Sentai teams!”
I don’t know if it was something in the Sushi or the Miso Soup, but deep inside me, a gong rang in enlightenment.
—-
It is the year 2004.
Rokugan is a progressive nation, having opened it’s borders to the gaijin and subsumed the foreign technology and making it their own. It has been centuries since the forces of the Shadowlands have been sealed away in a dimensional rift formed by the cooperation of the Empire’s most powerful shugenja.
But now, that rift has been breached. Fu Leng is slowly gathering his strength, sending out his forces to slowly repopulate his army, using vile Oni to spread evil over Rokugan once more.
All is not lost however, for the blood of the Thunders still runs true. While the Clans have long since disappeared, their descendants still carry with them the mark of heroes.
—–
The Thunder Rangers!
Red Lion!
Star athlete and daring leader of the team!
Blue Crane!
Ladies man and the fastest member of the group!
Green Dragon!
Mysterious loner that speaks words of wisdom.
Orange Phoenix!
Intelligent girl with a heart of gold!
Purple Unicorn!
Tomboy biker chick that never misses a shot!
Together, they are the team that fights 30 foot Oni and their fierce Bakemono footsoldiers!
When danger strikes, they summon The Emerald Champion! Secret Giant Mecha designed to protect Rokugan from all threats, from the Shadowlands and beyond!
—-
Of course, none of this would be worth it if we didn’t have additional characters.
Black Scorpion:
Ally or Foe? This Wildcard seems to display the powers inherent with the Thunder Rangers but serves his own selfish ends!
Grey Crab:[spoiler!]
Replaces Blue Crane after he gives up his life to save the rest of the Thunder Rangers in a battle against Kyoso no Oni.
February 27, 2009
My group’s resident optimizer clued me in to the nature of Extended Spellcasting in Mage: the Awakening early on, when I noticed that he was going pretty much all out on crafting as much as he could, enchanting various weapons, summoning spirit allies and preparing various other spells well into the wee hours of game time.
Lot’s of nMage rules-y talk below:
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February 26, 2009
The Mage: the Awakening corebook should be famous for Chapter 3: Magic. Now that I’m about to start running again, I find myself poring over this chapter again and again, scribbling down notes, as well as cross referencing with the excellent Tome of the Mysteries.
If there’s one thing about the game that I have to give credit for, it’s the spellcasting system. It’s not easy. It’s not intuitive. It’s not even perfect. But what it is, is something that does the job well enough to avoid the crazy debates that used to devolve into straight out arguments back in the Ascension era.
Mage has always boasted of having as system capable of handling any kind of spell, without the need for set spell lists. This new edition stands by this claim, sporting a spellcasting system that can handle pretty much whatever you can think of, while being limited enough to stay within the confines of the new World of Darkness power levels.
Some of the fans of the older edition claim that it’s been depowered, and I agree. The new power scale for nMage is notably less powerful than oMage, but it is this lack of reality bending might that highlights that what Mages do isn’t normal, nor easy. In some crazy way, it feels more grounded, more plausible, and more occult.
Of course the downside now is all the little clauses and special cases in the rules that I have to pay attention to. I’ve got my Notepad file open, and I’m taking down my own “must remember” cases. I feel like I’m back in school again. It strikes me as kind of fitting that a game about people who pore over ancient knowledge to unlock secrets of the hidden world has me here, poring over the dense third chapter, working harder to unlock every facet of this incredible game.
February 25, 2009
After talking to my players, (and exposing them to the TV series “Fringe”) it looks like my rpg group is looking forward to playing nMage again. Despite it being scheduled to take place a few months from now I find myself pretty hyped up about it.
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February 24, 2009
Deadlands continues with the team finding the wreckage of a river boat on their journey up the Mississippi to Memphis. Seeing the ship, Amos and crew decide to investigate, first drawing out a corpse of an affluent looking person before noting a strange metallic object under the water. Amos and Cookie decide to swim down to retrieve the artifact, ending up on a tussle with a strange fish/man hybrid that Dr. Stein perforates with his super gun.
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February 23, 2009
I’m currently working on compiling a soundtrack for my Mage: the Awakening game, and I must say that it’s a lot harder than it looks. Especially for someone like me without a lot of musical knowledge. I’m a casual listener, rather than a real collector of music. That said, these are some of the tracks I’ve compiled so far, oh and if for some reason the Youtube player doesn’t show up, click on the track names for a link to their videos on that site
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February 18, 2009
First of all I’ll admit that I do tend to have a lot of weird influences hit me from time to time, resulting in all sorts of pet projects. This current project is partially inspired by Rv’s excellent setting document detailing the world of Illyria. I’m the first to admit that I’m a lazy GM when it comes to setting design, I tend to end only in the immediate NPCs and vicinities of the characters, resulting in a very claustrophobic environment that leaves me clueless the moment the players step out of these constraints.
So what am I going to try today? Well, for starters, I’ll work with what I know best, a modern day setting, and one for a Superhero campaign. I feel that I know the subject matter well enough to start putting things down to paper right away. Furthermore, it’s also a setting with an open attitude to all sorts of weirdness and character types, which might prove to be more forgiving to me when I start working on it.
I don’t have anything written down just yet, but here’s the outline of the setting document that I’m looking at.
- History
- Locations (General Areas / Districts / Places of Note)
- Organizations and NPCs
- Other Heroes/NPCs
- Villains (sans stat blocks)
I’m also looking at addressing different scales of Superheroics, ranging from Street-level vigilantes to Teen Heroes to Full-fledged supers and even beyond that to Justice League scale high weirdness. I’ll see if I can include a whole lot of plot hooks within each chapter as well, just to make it workable.
For the purposes of this effort, I’ll have to fall back to my default of using the HERO system for game specific terminology, but I’ll try to avoid anything too system specific so that other people can use this setting as well if it strikes their fancy.
February 17, 2009
Five weeks of Deadlands, and we’re moving into the much delayed Character-centered sessions. This week’s session centers on Nines “Nine Lives” McGee.
The session opens on the ship with Nines leading the team towards a small settlement of Native Americans, to look for the shaman named “Plays-With-Fire,” who was meant to give him more information about the black case that Nines had with him when he began his new life as a captain.
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February 16, 2009
For once in my nWoD gaming career I have the sudden, irrational urge to run a Vampire game, despite knowing nothing about Vampire aside from the stereotypes and generalizations. Maybe it’s nostalgia to the days of my youth… maybe if I do run this I’ll make sure to mention that my players encounter a group of teens playing a rousing game of Star Frontiers while I’m at it too.
February 12, 2009
Due to some rather hectic RL workload, Philipine Gamer will be intermittent with it’s posting for the week. Rest assured that I’ll be back and blogging as soon as possible when this crazy work week and it’s accompanying projects are over.
I won’t have a post today, but I’ll see if I can come up with something in the wee hours of the morning tomorrow, just before the workday begins and my mind is consigned to the Information Architecture Salt Mines. 
February 10, 2009
