I'm taking a step back from blogging on most of my social media.
It'll be my birthday on June 30th, and in the runup to my birthday I'm planning on doing nothing but reading, maybe ocarina playing, anything but hunching over a laptop, sweating the reluctant words out onto the screen.
There will be a sea change to the scheduling of this blog. From July 2023, it now goes out once a month, on the last Saturday of each month. In the case of the next blog, that will be July 29, 2023 at arou
This post is going to wrap up what we have covered over the past few months. There are a number of TDM titles I have yet to dig through and review ... I do hope nobody minds if I give Mythic Polynesia a wide berth - and I'll be moving on with the next blog post.
I also have news about the blog going forward.
Modern Mythras
We began with an introduction to the concept. It began here.
We moved on to embrace modern Mythras' characters, and the cultures they came from.
We th
This is the penultimate Modern Mythras post, and I intend to wrap up the subject with one last look at Gamesmastering before I summarise everything in the next post - then take a one week hiatus.
In a recent post, I posed four sources of drama and conflict: Person versus Person, Person versus Self, Person Versus Nature, and Person Versus Society. This blog just expands on those four sources of drama, and presents ideas which are intended to draw the players in to the conflict.
Make It
Just a short note on the last two Modern Mythras posts. I'm scheduling them to go out on Sunday 18 June and Sunday 25 June.
And then I'm taking a short break.
Drama is the key to Games Mastering in any Mythras setting. In most fantasies, the goals are pretty simple: there's some healing herb to cure the King who's fallen to some poison, or it's a McGuffin with the magical power to stop some weird storm, or the characters have to drop by some bloody wizard's Black and Evil Tower In The East and kill a guy.
And that's it. It's a Thing, or a Task. Do that, and you get your Experience Rolls.
Modern Mythras is a bit different. There are any numbe
Adventure is adventure, so - according to custom - every adventure should be the same, right? There’s a dungeon, and an evil wizard’s tower, and an army rising up from the East, and only this bunch of idiots stands in their way, and …
So how come adventures like these utterly fail to whip my cream?
Because they’re not really adventures.
They’re computer programs.
Your characters are the code; the mooks, monsters and the final BBEG are just input; and treasures are just output
This blog will be wrapping up the whole Modern Mythras thing with a look at Games Mastery.
The GM's Role
You, as the Games Master, have an enviable task ahead of you. Your job is to come up with a world for the characters to inhabit, enemies to oppose, and a story to keep the players engaged. You are also, as the responsible host for the game, tasked with keeping the players occupied and working together to maximise the shared sense of enjoyment and engagement around the table.
To
The end of this series of Modern Mythras is upon us. I can feel it.
It's just today, May 27th, and the four Saturdays in June. I'm taking a one week hiatus on July 1, the day after my birthday. Incidentally, I'll be taking a one week break from all of my blogs from that day, including The Spiral Room on Wordpress.
Just asking for some feedback from you tonight. What would you like to see included in, among other things, the Mythras Encounter Generator? More cops - uniformed, Detective,
Presenting the next couple of modern characters - the police!
This week, uniformed generic beat cops, and veteran Sergeants.
Beat Cop - https://mythras.skoll.xyz/enemy_template/11327/
Sergeant - https://mythras.skoll.xyz/enemy_template/11357/
The main characters for 1603 are:
Aralla Brightspear, the Proud Huntress, Apostate Sun-Domer, Initiate of Mal (Daughter of Yelmalio and Sedenya)
Rana Allmother, Busybody and Terrible Cook, Charmer of Men and Vingans
Helma Quick-Handed, Herbalist, Healer, Doesn't Get Jokes
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1603: Entering Furthest
A Death in the Camp
The Maboder begin 1603 in temporary camps outside the walls of Furthest, as parties within the city negotiate over where to settle the Tr
Tonight's post is another modern NPC encounter, this time from guest contributor Hannu Kokko himself, designer and developer of the Mythras Encounter Generator!
Say hello to the Typical Modern Period Goon, your basic thug that you can drop in on your characters in any modern game: Luther Arkwright, After The Vampire Wars, Destined and even Worlds United.
Thanks, hkokko!
https://mythras.skoll.xyz/enemy_template/11341/
I maintain a fiction blog called The Spiral Room on Wordpress. Two of my blog's modern setting stories are Den & Lauren and The Chaotician. Here are the main protagonists of these stories, statted up for Modern Mythras.
Den & Lauren
A long-running story of a weird, doomed, but passionate romance between Dennis Thompson, a former student, and Lauren Tanaka, a slightly more mature woman who is married to a Japanese businessman, Isao Tanaka.
Theirs is a passionate, open relat
Exiles of Sartar
I'd like to share reports from an ongoing campaign of Questworlds.
In this campaign, the players are playing as members of the Tenth: a portion of the Maboder Tribe who were deported to Furthest in 1602 to secure peace with the Lunars. Over the campaign, we will explore how the Tenth adapt to their foreign home, as well as their experience returning to Sartar in 1625.
The main characters for the first year are:
Aralla Brightspear, the Proud Huntress, Apostat
Very brief blog post here. I've started creating templates for average people encounters in Modern Mythras.
The tool I'm using is the Mythras Encounter Generator. This can be used to generate a bunch of average people all at once.
This is the first template - New Recruit.
https://mythras.skoll.xyz/enemy_template/11321/
The above is for a new recruit / average commuter / bystander. Your everyday business people rushing around peering at their mobile phone in one hand, a latte
Following on from last week's post, here are three interesting non-player characters to throw into your Modern Mythras game. They can be supporting characters, antagonists, or significant others to the Adventurers.
Skilled Mercenary
Your basic gun for hire, this thug can be brought in to make things blow up, or to make people meet their maker.
STR 14
CON 11
SIZ 11
DEX 15
INT 17
POW 14
CHA 18
Action Points 3
Damage Modifier +0
Movement 6
Initiative Bonus 11
Today, I'm going to give you an antagonist to throw into your Modern Mythras game. Inspired by a creation of Robert Bloch, it is an ancient hunger that never dies.
The Hunger
It has gone by many names, each more infamous than the last. It has fed for centuries. Possibly millennia.
There are stories about it in the Bible: beings possessed of terrifying violence, carving their way through the increasingly-civilised world. It has bathed in the blood of Minoans, taught haruspicy to th
This week, I thought I'd bring in psychics and psionics to a modern Mythras game.
Psionics in modern games tend to be more or less cloned from Traveller. Your character must find a psychic (or "Psionics Institute"), get tested, roll their PSI rating, then get trained, and randomly pick from a small range of Talents - Telepathy, Clairvoyance, Telekinesis, Awareness (basically Mysticism from the Mythras Core Rulebook) and Teleportation. And that's it.
M-Space has its Psionics section. Wo
This is the 100th post for this blog, and we are at a crossroads.
Many paths are open ahead of us now. I can list some roads down which to travel, and I can think of others. But these are the ones off the top of my head.
1. I can wrap up my take on Modern Mythras with a look at how to integrate psionics, a look at GM'ing, and some scenarios and vignettes. Between all of these, I can get us to my birthday at the end of June.
2. I can review selected titles which have already been p
Last week, we opened with a look into how magic can be called up in a modern Mythras setting. Now, it's time to look at the kinds of workings magicians can call up, either to bamboozle the players or something the players can do themselves.
So this week, we will be looking into the grimoire of a young witch called Agatha, who's reading Philosophy and Economics at St Charisma's Finishing School, in a fiction setting called Night Chess.
Here are two of Agatha's friends. Meet Bob and
Magic is tricky to implement in any roleplaying game. Implementing it in a modern game is problematic, to say the least.
First of all, let's address the main issue that very few game designers have actually come from a profession which practiced magic, either of the stage variety or of the occult variety. Not many workplaces send out advertisements saying that they are hiring wizards and witches. There aren't many people on LinkedIn who pursue occult interests - or if they do, they keep it
