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
I thought I wouldn't get into magic systems in my Modern Mythras blogs, but recently I've been watching some old classic movies such as The Devil Rides Out and The Wicker Man, and they reminded me of something which can have its place in a modern Mythras setting.
The Occult.
Here's the thing. Magic systems in all roleplaying games suffer from one plain, boring fact.
They aren't magic.
I mean it. Nothing since the original TTRPG has ever come close to the heart stopping terror
Roleplaying game adventures have been shown to benefit greatly from structuring them like stories. This has not always been the case. The earliest released tabletop RPG scenarios have been straightforward "dungeon delves," where the characters have focused their attention on purely tactical concerns such as the effectiveness of their combat skills, the optimisation of the damage they inflict, and so on.
Structuring an adventure like a story allows you to run individual dungeon delves - or,
Character generation can be done in a number of ways. One of them involves the tables listed in Mythras Core - including the Background Events and Family tables - but there is another method.
Lifepaths.
Originally created for Traveller, Lifepaths - which were focused on careers in that 2D sfrpg - can be useful methods to allow a character to develop a little history to them, beyond the Background Event table (a modern version was published last week in this blog).
Each Lifepath sh
Let's look into your characters' back stories.
There is a point to looking into the back history of the player characters in a modern setting. Backgrounds can set stakes for the Games Master to leverage; but they can also serve to ground the player characters in the setting, making them part of the setting, belonging to the story.
Here is a modernised version of the Background Events Table from Mythras Core. These are for inspiration purposes. You can either pick, or roll, your backgro
Imagine, now, a chargen session from a fairly standard fantasy roleplaying game. Pseudo-mediaeval background, all swords and horses, the bad guy's a sorcerer who wears a silk frock and lives in a tower at the edge of the country, they always look like this guy -
and has Wrack:-
and we need serious characters to take this guy seriously.
So here's the conversation.
Player: Okay, that's the characteristics and attributes rolled, er, culture, profession, skills, oh yeah
Let's look at Backgrounds in our modern Mythras game.
What do Backgrounds look like in the main Mythras game? Let's look at the Core Rulebook.
Background Events
Background Events are notable things that have happened in the character’s life before he began his career as an adventurer. Some are formative; some are fortunate and some are unfortunate. Background Events are optional, but using them adds to the character’s history, and can be used by creative players and Games Masters as
One topic has been dominating gaming for the past few weeks. I thought I'd drop a short blog post to address this situation.
OGL 1.1.
On a personal note, this matter bothers me. As a gamer, Games Master, and product developer, I quite enjoy the whole experience of gaming. I've been using roleplaying games to explore all manner of topics, from diplomacy to sexuality to, frankly, NSFW stuff which I have kept away from public consumption.
Many of the games I enjoy carry the OGL licen
So I'm back, with more ramblings on modern day Mythras. This first post of 2023 is short. Here's a summary of some of what's to come this year.
Backgrounds - Where your character comes from is as important as where they are now.
Lifepaths - An option, creating your characters through a lifepath a la Traveller.
Origins - Borrowing from Scott Crowder's option for character generation as presented in M-Space Companion.
The Arcane - Exploring different paths of occult power, incl
