The storm dragons are magnificent creatures hunt the hurricanes of the storm world of Tarl. The Outer Rim planet's binary stars provide a constant source of energy for its moisture rich atmosphere, giving rise to an unending series of cyclones. The dragons constantly ride these storms, hunting the great airbag herbivores that dwell in storms' eyes and battling each other for arial supremacy.
I love Savage Worlds. Half of the guys in my group love Savage Worlds. But part of what keeps the other half from jumping on board, at least for a fantasy campaign, is the lack of a Vancian magic system (aka the "fire and forget" memorization system from Jack Vance's Dying Earth series and popularized in Dungeons & Dragons). I know that many Savage Worlds fans see this as a feature rather than a bug, but it's a concern with the Blackrazors, who have 12+ years of D&D 2E/3E under their belts.
So what would a Vancian magic system look like in Savage Worlds? There are two key elements to a Vancian system: discovery and flexibility. Discovery comes from being able to find spells in scrolls and spellbooks, and add them to your own growing library. Flexibility comes from being able to pick the right spell for the right job, and not being locked down to a pre-determined power suite.
Recreating a Vancian system in Savage Worlds requires you to retain these discovery and flexibility while still working with its default power point system. Here's my take on it.
When I ran my Dungeons & Dragons/World of Greyhawk campaign, I constantly spawned new subplots, new NPCs, and new locations. It was intentional; my goal was to throw a wide net of possible plotlines, and let the players choose which ones to follow. By campaign's end we probably had hundreds of unresolved storylines, but it wasn't a problem because the important storylines – the defeat of the giants in the Grand Duchy of Geoff, the defeat of the orcish overlord Turrosh Mak, the liberation of Obsidian Bay – did reach their climatic ends.
Recently Chris Youngs at Wizards of the Coast wrote an editorial pointing out that people can role-play in D&D 4th Edition just fine without any rules actually governing said role-playing:
Fourth edition doesn't include some of the mundane mechanical elements of character building that 3rd Edition did. For example, certain skills (I'm looking at you Craft and Profession) enabled a player to feel like his character had some sort of grounding in the "real world" of the campaign. Odds were good that you never made a Craft or Profession check in your game, but having ranks in that skill made you feel connected to your character's background. In 4th Edition, those skills are gone. Why? Because we feel like a character's statistics don't represent the absolute truth of a character's story. That's right -- one of the reasons those skills (and other such elements from other editions) are gone is that we felt they hindered roleplaying.
This elicited some "Hear! Hear!"-style posts from gaming blogs:
The proliferation of quick and easy hosting options for blogs and wikis – such as Blogger and the Obsidian Portal -- has led to a proliferation of RPG campaign web sites. But which is best for your campaign? After experimenting with both options for the last few years, I think the answer to that question varies based on the campaign, and how much information you’re trying to share.
In a post about which game systems he'd love to own, my friend (and fellow Dire Paladin) Dr. Checkmate offered this throwaway line: "I would like to see more stuff in the square format of WotC’s Star Wars books and the smaller still format of SWEX. I’m not getting any younger and these books keep getting bigger. Yeesh."
At which point I looked over at my library game shelf, and thought "amen brother." And then I had an interesting thought: of all the games I've played in the last 3-4 years, the ones I've enjoyed most have had a non-standard form factor (non-standard being anything other than the typical 9x11" form factor we've come to associate with D&D).
Megadungeons, epic character deathtraps that have made or broken a thousand RPG campaigns, are staging a comeback. While it's been upwards of 25-30 years since we first crawled into Castle Greyhawk and Undermountain, the Oughts saw the release of Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, World's Largest Dungeon, Castle Whiterock, Maure Castle and now Monte Cook's Dungeon-A-Day.
But is this a good thing?
One area where Star Wars: Saga Edition could use some help are its creatures. There are certainly a number of them out there, particularly the iconic ones from the movies, but the system tends to come up a little short with more mundane critters.
After my third session of Star Wars, I thought back our summer playing D&D 4th Edition, and got to wondering about converting monsters from that book with use in Star Wars. Now I should note that I think that at a fundemental level, Star Wars plays differently than D&D. It's less about dungeon crawls and more about relationships - relationships between characters, between master and apprentice, between organizations. Those were always the main drivers in the movies, and in almost every case the heroes only came up against monsters/creatures as a consequence of the story.
For example, the encounter with the trash compactor beast in A New Hope came into play because Han and Luke were rescuing the princess. Luke's random encounter with a wampa ice beast on Hoth led directly to his vision of Obi-Wan, and his training on Dagaboh with Yoda. Han and Luke were going to be fed to the sarlac because the crossed Jabba the Hutt. Because of this, Star Wars needs fewer monsters (and more NPCs) than D&D, but it's still nice to have choices.
Skill challenges were one of the best things to come out of our D&D 4th Edition playtest. Building on earlier versions that appeared in Spycraft and Unearthed Arcana, skill challenges provided an in-game mechanic for resolving non-combat conflicts and complex tasks.
We used it to handle the exploration a lava tube complex leading to a red dragon’s volcano and an escape from an angry horde of goblins on an ice world. In both cases, we found it really enhanced our game, turning what could have another dungeoncrawl or a case of DM fiat into a dramatic, player-driven story.
It’s a good idea, and one we’ve been eager to use in our Star Wars campaign (even our anti-4E contingent wanted to try it). We did exactly that in our third session (“Chapter 3: The Lingering Twilight”), with equally good results.
One of the problems I’ve found with action points, bennies, plot points, and other similar mechanics is that unless they’re crucial to the game, players tend to forget about them. And even when they are important, keeping track of them can be a challenge as the light-weight chips or tokens get covered up, buried, or pushed out of the way.
Our solution has been to use plastic poker chips, which have the advantage of being large enough to seen and thus, remembered. They’re easy to toss around the table (important for games like Serenity or Spycraft where the points tend to fly fast and furious) and while they can make an annoying sound that grates on the nerves when ground together, mostly they get the job done. Except, of course, when the light plastic chips go rolling off the table, or bounce where you weren't expecting.