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A free roleplaying game: Lost Heroes is available online right now

Mark Cunningham — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 08:00:43 +0000

The big creative project I’ve been chipping away on for ages is finally online (though so much left to do). I chucked it up last night after (literally) months of procrastinating. It’s a roleplaying game, intended for pen and paper, though what I’ve put online is only the setting which is feck’in huge. Mostly because I’ve spent time doing a lot of reading of mythology for it.

It’s called Lost Heroes and I’ve talked about it a few times here. It’s going to be a fudge based game (Fudge was what FATE was originally based on). The setting itself is the modern day, except the “ancient” gods and pantheons didn’t go away. (I put ancient in quotes, only because some of these pantheons still, or now have resurrected, active religions). It includes Angels and Demons, the Norse Gods Aesir (Odin, Loki, Thor and so on and not the DC’s superhero Thor character, which is such a deviation from the original mythology), Celtic Gods (Lugh, Donn, Morrigan, etc.) and Greek Gods of Olympus (probably my favourite). Anyway you can go download it right now and read it for yourself. It’s certainly still needs work, but I am proud of it.

Now though I’m unsure what the next steps are. I’m currently still researching the system though I do have an older draft of it and tons of notes and ideas. But what do I do with what I have put online? (Suggestions on a postcard, or, you know, just comment below). I’ll probably submit it to a few choice communities but I don’t want to spam it around too much.

Review part 1 of my Custom Dice

Mark Cunningham — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 20:02:34 +0000

As part of winning these custom dice, I have to do a review of them. However I haven’t gamed in months, certainly not since I received the dice. So instead I’m doing a “part 1” of the review now, which is, in a sense, a bit weird as it’s my design on the dice! Part 2 will come when I actually get to game.

My Fudge Dice

So in lieu of not actually gaming with them, I grabbed my big bag of dice and compared them to my other fudge dice. I bought a set of 16 dice from Grey Ghosts years ago. Comparing them physically the dice are all the same size. Of course my new dice are printed rather than engraved like my current fudge dice. Just rolling them randomly on the table together I notice no difference in them.

Visually there is certainly no problem in picking out pluses and minus when you roll a bunch together. In fact I think it’s easier, the pluses and minuses on the printed dice are bigger, check out the slightly fuzzy photo below:

I think though that my little Cthulhu icon on the blank side feels quite contracted on the dice compared to the other sides. But that may be an artefact of the design more so than the dice itself. However the quality of the print is impressive. The detail is quite vivid (though you may not be able to tell from my bad photography).

The original design, in case you've forgotten!

Certainly if you wanted to get some icon on a dice, this would be a be a great way to do it.

I’ve rubbed them and rolled them, and so far, none of the print has come off. So it seems quite sturdy. I have been keeping them in my big bag of dice these last few months and no damage to the print at all from being tossed about.

Overall I’m quite happy with them, hopefully they’ll prove to be my “lucky” dice. I think they’ll be kina cool too if I go to cons with them, though I’m generally not big into showing off my geek status. I managed to meet up with my roleplaying group and showed them the dice, which got a good “ah cool!” from everyone. So that’s a decent objective measure there.

My Cthulhu/thedeadone Fudge Dice!

Mark Cunningham — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 22:18:21 +0000

So I won a competition from dicecreator to get my own custom dice, which rocks. So I spent an afternoon working on the design. I’m sure you’ve seen my the Cthulhu-inspired image on the front of this webpage (and it doubles as my twitter icon) but if not, here it is again.

I thought this might make a cool face on one of the dice, so I went about re-working it a bit, using my trusty lightbox. I’m sure I could have done the re-work on the computer exclusively but I still like to use pencil and pens. It’s more satisfying somehow, at least for me.

I removed the background, filled in his wings which highlighted the tentacles much better. I was keeping in mind how it would look on a small dice.

I wanted “Fudge Dice”. Fudge dice has two faces with plus “+”, two with minus “-” and the final two blank. Keeping the Cthulhu theme, the minus and plus have to be tentacles!

I cheated though, I drew one half of a tentacle and then using my lightbox built up a minus and plus.

But, I won two customised dice and didn’t want to waste the opportunity with just one design! Using some themes from stuff I did for Lost Heroes RPG and the same technique as the tentacles, I came up with theses:

Now with my two designs, I sent them.

And I got the results in my hand right now:

I think they look rather cool myself!

(I’ll write up my initial impressions in another post)

thedeadone gaming dice?

Mark Cunningham — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 21:01:13 +0000

I came across dicecreator via twitter. He makes these exceptional custom dice for gaming such as these amazing Fudge dice (image on the right). And during some testing of his equipment he decided to use my twitter icon as a test for some dice:

Which, to use the American vernacular, is awesome!

Anyway, he recently ran a competition and guess who won? Me!

So now I get to design my own dice, one black and one red both six-sided. My first thought was to use some of the “icons” I created for Lost Heroes, but these might be too complicated to fit nicely on a dice. Also, they wouldn’t be very practical in a game.

So my thinking turned to Fudge dice, perhaps with one of the “+” symbols is replaced, one would be the Lost Heroes main icon and on the other dice, a slightly modified version of my twitter icon. The actual + and – symbols I’d customise too, thinking for one a stark pointy sword shapes and for the other tentacle like. Hopefully over the next few days I’ll get down to do some drawing and see what comes out.

I’ll post the results here anyway. Also means I need to game in the next while!

Magic Character add-on idea

Mark Cunningham — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 19:33:41 +0000

While working on the Fudge One Month Adventure Challenge (I’m not going to finish it in time, but that’s not really the point), I had an idea for a RPG magic system. I was thinking about how to put the entire system on a single page for the adventure I’m writing, including a magic system and I wanted to keep it simple to understand. A brief discussion on the mailing list and it got me thinking about what magic should be in a roleplaying game.

I know, this is a big can of worms and everyone but everyone has an opinion about what should a magic system be or how it should feel etc. But this is about what I think magic should be like in a game, not anyone elses and my feeling is that magic should be strange, weird and mysterious. Of course this is completely at odd with the mechanical/systematic nature of roleplaying systems and settings. You need magic to be some what systematic otherwise it is nothing more than random rolls on a table. I also think magic users should be different to everyone else, they should see and react to the world different. They live in a world-view that’s is alien to the average joe, that’s what makes them magic users. Be that world-view spirits and demons or UFOs and aliens.

World of Darkness’ Mage does this by using “paradox”. When you use magic that breaks reality, you’re character gains paradox points, which build up until they explode in some weird (and fun) way. Paradox backlashes (as they were called) were often the most fun part of playing Mage, basically when magic goes wrong. Ars Magica magic does something similar with Twilight, where a magic user can botch and enter a state of madness and come back, sometimes with a flaw or sometimes with a great insight to an element of magic.

My idea is rather simple and I think you can slap it on top of nearly any systematic magic system. I’d like to hear if people think they like it or not. As a magic user gets better at magic, they also move further from reality or the rest of the world’s understanding of reality. At each pivotal increase in understanding (i.e. each increase in magical ability beyond the first), they gain a “rule”. This rule can be determined randomly using tables, the GM may decide it in secret and the player has to figure it out in game or the player and the GM can design something together.

The first rule affects the way they do magic It could be that when they perform magic, all the plants nearby die, windows show distracting what-if visions to the magic-user, etc. But they also gain some special advantage, such as being able to generate fire without a source, have a much looser restriction on magic casting times, etc.

The bigger the increase in magic, the bigger the effect or scope of the rule and it’s consequential advantage. At the highest levels, it just goes off all the time, the magic user can’t never pass through a doorway, because they’ll end up somewhere else or they cover up statues because if the magic user sees the eye of a statue, it comes to life.

If they choose to stop using magic, and stop practicing it, the rules will fade away over time, but if they ever try to use their magic again, all the rules will come back.

But to offset it a bit and offer players some control, the player should be able to spend their XP to add conditions to any of these rules, to lessen their effects. They can’t buy out the rule but they can restrict it’s scope. They could add a condition such as “never on Tuesdays”, “not when I’m wearing blue”, etc.

With this sort of system, magic characters become strange and mysterious. No two will be alike and they’ll act strangely to average joes. But they’ll also be fun. I’m very tempted to flesh it out into a full system and add to my lost heroes rpg. What do you think? Would this add an element of mystery and fun to a plain vanilla magic user character?

The Day of Fudge is on for the 6th June!

Mark Cunningham — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 11:00:10 +0000

I mentioned briefly in my previous post about “the Day of Fudge”. Well, it’s official. On Saturday, 10 GMs (members of the community) volunteered to run a Fudge game, on the 6th June, in a public place for non-Fudgers. In fact there is more than 10 GMs, many more have been enlisted outside of the community and there are groups in Spain, Brazil and France! It’s more like a “distributed” FudgeRPG con.

The whole thing was the idea of Patrick Benson, intended as a sort of grassroots/viral movement. And the new community answered the call. Patrick requested that 10 people from the community volunteer before the last day of January and it seems to have paid off, all coming together at 6.30pm on Saturday, Jan 31st (a nice dramatic ending there)! Ann Dupis of GreyGhost games has also promised goodies to all the GMs who take participate which is amazingly generous.

Sadly, I won’t be doing it myself for various personal reasons – unless there is a bunch of Irish-Dublin based gamers who want to try Fudge, who also happen to be reading this blog. But to all the GMs participating, I applaud you!

The State of the Fudge

Mark Cunningham — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 17:26:11 +0000

I meant to write this up a while back, but I haven’t had the time to do the dutiful blogging. I’m working during the day, coding free software in my spare time, and the in evening I’m writing/working on Lost Heroes RPG (for Fudge). And then of course my free time is spent with the kids and family.

I’m not sure if this post should be done here or over on the blog I’ve put together on Lost Heroes RPG website, seeing that website is more dedicated to Fudge than my personal blog. But lets do it here for the moment. Since the Fudge community was re-born in the September of last year, it’s rolling along quite well. Activity seems to be up across the board!

If you’ve been using my Monster Fudge RPG feed, you’ll have noticed that activity is strong on both the Fudge Forums and the Yahoo Mailing List. And only last week, we now have a facebook group too!

One of the most interesting activities right now is the “Day of Fudge“. Basically get 10 GMs from all over the world, on one day, to run a game fo Fudge in a public place for people new to Fudge. It’s a great idea. There is at least one Spanish GM and one Brazilian GM in the list.

Also, recently enough, there was a topic on what fudge projects are people activily (and not) working on. Besides my own Lost Heroes game, there is number of interesting projects going on from Heroes of Oz (Wizard of Oz RPG), a spy-game, Power Extreme (a the Fudge supers RPG), Strange World (Carnivore Games), Cacería de Bichos (a spanish generic/bughunt centred sci-fi FUDGE game) and a few more besides. Excellent work. As well as that Pablo Jaime Conill (zonkpj) has just written up a 7 page article on fudge for a Spanish fanzine.

And since the new yahoo group started there has been several web chats including ones host by Ann Dupis and Brad Yonnie (of Now Playing), which is great way to bring the community together despite physical distances.

Sadly there seems to be some doubt over the fate of old Fudge Wiki, Fudge Factor archives and the old FudgeList archives. These are a great legacy from the old days of the community and it would be a pity to lose this content. The new community doesn’t seem interested, at least not right now, in having a one wiki to rule all of Fudge. Every project seems to have it’s own space carved out of the intertubes for itself. For the moment, the legendary content remains in the hands of the previous owner Carl. My personal preference would be to see the content in a new form, like a PDF book, but alas I seem to be the only one.

But overall, it looks like Fudge is rolling a Superb these days!

lostheroesrpg.com live!

Mark Cunningham — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 11:17:37 +0000

Okay, so not earth-shattering news. I’ve finally done something with the lostheroesrpg.com domain and setup a blog and a custom theme. I’ll be releasing Lost Heroes Roleplaying Game there.

I was a bit afraid that I might be duplicating/crossposting content between the two blogs and I was looking at all sorts of solutions to do it. But practically it’s not going to happen. The purpose of lostheroesrpg.com will be a platform for promoting and releasing my Lost Heroes RPG project and there will be no worries about having to cross post, though I may “borrow” content from thedeadone.net for lostheroesrpg.com. In fact, the first thing I did was copy the WordPress theme I created for here and modify it.

I’ve already added the feed for it to the Monster FudgeRPG feed but does it qualify for the Irish Gaming Planet feed? (Probably not).

So what font did I chose for Lost Heroes?

Mark Cunningham — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 21:08:44 +0000

After all the votes were in the font used in “Option 2″ was the winner. More than a few people said they’d have voted for “Option 6″ if I modified it a bit, but after playing with that font for a while, it wasn’t working. Anyway, until I spend money on a genuine graphic artist, this is my working logo:

I could spend time messing with effects or by adding colour, but I think for the time doing it simply will be fine. Now all I have to do is setup the webpage!

(Strange… WordPress seems to be stretching the image in the post, but if you click on it, you’ll see the original).

More Fudge Rabbits: Cthulhu, Pink Ninja and Spy-ish

Mark Cunningham — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 22:45:49 +0000

And some more Fudge Bunnies… including a pink bunny with two Sai as requested!

The Cthulhu Bunny

Pink Ninja with Sai Bunny

The Spy Bunny

thedeadone.net » Fudge

A free roleplaying game: Lost Heroes is available online right now

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