Two warriors

The black orc leader was awestruck. Never before had he seen such cohesion. The two warriors fought as a single creature, complementing one another's fighting styles. The armored soldier’s massive sword swung in wide arcs like a deadly pendulum, the steel humming grimly with each deadly cut through the air. He would have been an easy target, each of his attacks granting openings for the warboss' thugs, were it not for his smaller companion. The lithe form danced around the giant of a man, keeping his blind spot secured. Clinging to the big one like a living shadow, the weak spots were filled with quick flashes of metal that promised swift death to those bold enough to get too close. Poor bastards died before they even met the ground, the warboss thought darkly. He watched with begrudging respect the deadly dance thin his numbers within mere moments, and soon only a few of the two dozen raiders remained. The rest lied scattered around the two warriors; orc bodies mangled with wounds both big and small while neither human had suffered a scratch. The ones still alive hesitated, their wide-eyed stares darting between their leader and the superior fighters. The warboss swallowed bitterly. His confidence had been decimated along with his troops and now he faced a decision between dying at the hands of these two and running away. Neither option was to his liking.

Writer's comment: Here's another oldie I came up with one day. It's more like a description of a situation, but still. I hope you like. :)

The wait

It was torture, unbearable. The sound of silence echoed in the hall, settling on the anticipants like a thick blanket. It weighed on the dwarven soldiers heavier than the any armor.  No one dared to move, for even the slightest of shifts sounded like an avalanche in the royal hall. Barolf swallowed. His throat was dry and his breathing heavy. Sweat streamed down his skin beneath the armor he wore and his muscles ached. He wasn’t the only one, either. His comrades stood beside him, breaths heavy while they clutched their weapons and shields. The city had fallen quickly, faster than anyone had expected. Only the castle remained impenetrable against the invasion, although Barolf was not sure how long it would remain so. He and his platoon had barely managed to retreat to the great hall, the invaders’ breath hot on their heels. They huddled against each other behind hastily built barricades, eyes fixed on the massive barred double doors, waiting. Even the royal hall’s statues of past kings seemed watching the entrance in silent anticipation.

The first slam startled the soldiers, strong enough to buckle the iron-barred doors. Barolf snapped back to the present and he tightened his grip on his sword. His helmet chafed and his heart was pounding. Another slam shook the giant doors, the massive blow ringing louder and more powerful this time from the surrounding stone. Barolf licked his dry lips as he watched wood and metal bend, the doors spitting splinters like broken teeth. A new impact followed almost immediately, whatever assailing the entrance seemingly having realized it was giving way. Barolf’s eyes spread as the third impact snapped the thick bar holding the doors closed like a dry branch.

“Hold your ground, shield-brothers! This is where we stand and fall! They will not get through!” the commander ordered, a command Barolf barely heard. His heartbeat filled his ears and he was frozen in place, his attention fixed on the entrance that was now cracked open. He had every reason to be worried, as a second later the doors began to open. The crack spread painfully slow and Barolf’s mind went cold from what he saw.

An immense form revealed itself behind the doors. Vaguely humanoid in shape, its massive arms worked the entrance open with effort. A huge head pushed through the opening, its visage skull-like and bestial. The head could barely fit between the doors where five dwarves could stand shoulder to shoulder. The monstrosity’s face drew into a hideous snarl as it eyed the huddled defenders, filling the royal hall with a guttural growl.

The commander bellowed and a row of dwarven cannons before him opened fire. The weapons roared and the monster’s head exploded in a cloud of fire, taking the full force of the attack. The beast toppled and its massive body disappeared from the open doorway. An instant later smaller black forms burst through the entrance, a wave of creatures with wicked claws, sharp teeth and gleaming red eyes flooding in and at the group of soldiers. One could still make out their dwarven features, now hideously malformed. They moved with shocking speed as the monsters spilled into the hall, growling, snarling and howling in their mindless bloodlust.

The wait was over, Barolf thought as he and his comrades braced for the impact.

Writer's comment: This is a little something I wrote a little while ago. I wanted to create an atmosphere of tense anticipation that ends with with explosive action. I hope you enjoyed reading!

Safehouse Blues: Prototype cards and playtesting

Another few months, another update. :D

I've not been sitting on my hands, rest assured. As you know (or hopefully remember :P), my card game Safehouse Blues is still under work, and there has been some development during the handful of months since my last update.

First of all, the game card prototypes are done, and have been used for playtesting. The players taking part have been relatively interested and eager to play; Suggestions, ideas and general discussion of the game during and after play were a nice proof of that. Even though the playtesters were my friends and brothers, they're mature enough to give me honest feedback. XD

In any case, here's a sample of how the cards are placed:

A sample setup for a two-player game.

A close-up of a player's setup: Rations cards in Food Storage (middle), equipped gear in the equipment area (left), Nasties at the Safehouse Front (top), radiation tokens (right) and health marker (bottom). Each player has a maximum of five Resource cards in hand, also (not pictured).

A close-up of Nasty and Resource decks with their respective discard piles. Nasties are drawn at the beginning of each round, and Resources whenever a player decides to go scavenging.

As a bonus, here are some of the Nasty cards I have drawn so far:

Tarion Chronicles: Playing materials -Part 1-

Well, looks like it's been a while since I bothered to update this blog. Time to do it now, then!

So, what have I been up to in regards my game projects? Well, a bit this and that, but mostly about my RPG system, Tarion Chronicles. The rules themselves are in a workable condition, only in need of testing. I also came to the conclusion that reading text itself from big text files is boring and time-consuming, so I got the idea of making some playing materials that helps both the players and the GM find info faster for specific things. You know, something you can hand out and share without having to dig up the rule files themselves and browse through pages to find what you need.

So, being the creative bugger I am, I made status ailment tokens and spell cards. The former are distributed to player characters whenever they suffer a specific condition or gain an enhancement (or "buff", if you prefer the proper gaming term =P) to something, and the latter are given for spellcasters for quick reference.

STATUS EFFECT TOKENS

From left to right Blind/Deaf, Bleed, Curse, Poison/Disease/Nausea, Charm/Drunk, Stun/Stagger/Fatigue (info in finnish)

The front of the token has the icon itself, and the flipside the needed information on how the status affects the character. As you can see, some of the tokens have more than one status effect on them, the info separated and flipped to avoid confusion.

There will be more tokens than the ones pictured above. These are negative status effects, more of which will come later along with positive effects.

SPELL CARDS

A handful of low-level earth spell cards.

The spell cards were relatively easy to make. Once I got the basic layout of the card down, all I needed to do was to edit the text in each card. The cards are printed on paper and then slipped into card sleeves. Spells of each element will have card sleeves with matching colour. (I couldn't find brown ones for earth spells, so orange will have to do :P).

As for the layout of the cards, there's all the needed info:

Top: The name of the spell on top left, the rune circle (level) and element on top right.

First row: Spell's AP (arcana point) cost, casting time and range.

Second row: Area of effect, duration and required ability check.

Third row: Special effect

The rest of the card is reserved for the spell's description and information other than listed above.

If my calculations are right, there will be around 300 cards for spells in total; Six elements with each containing around 50 spells (And that doesn't include combination spells and priest prayers. Yeesh...^^; )

Myeah, I guess that's all for now. Thanks for reading, if you got this far. More to come later! :D

Tarion Chronicles: Character sheet -PART 2-

Right, so. In an earlier blog post I talked about the development of my RPG system Tarion Chronicles' character sheet. In this post I present you the third (and last) page; Inventory and spells.

Page 3 - Inventory & spells

Page 4 - Spells

There are some major changes I did to the previous, aside from combining inventory spells (see version 2.0 in my earlier post). I gave the page a more visual appearance, separating things like money and wealth, known elements and other spellcasting-related variables, and spells themselves as their own respective areas. 

Money goes into the treasure chest on the upper left corner; known elements, spellcasting ability score, spell failure chance and the amount of known spells are marked on the spellbook under the chest; and spells take up the lower half of the page. Inventory I decided to keep table-like in appearance. I might edit it later to resemble a backpack or something similar, but that isn't a 100% necessary.

Then there's the separate page for spells, if the player ever learns more than the ten on the inventory page.

That's it for now. More updates later. The next one will most likely be about Safe House Blues.

Thanks for your time. :)

Safe House Blues: General rules and Nasty card layout

While still working on Tarion Chronicles' character sheet, here's an update regarding the "smallest" of my projects. In this update you'll get a look on the gameplay in general and what the Nasty (enemies) cards will look like.

Dem rulez

So, as mentioned before, Safe House Blues is a post-apocalyptic survival card game for 2-6 players. Each player strives to be the last one standing after others have perished due to perils of the world torn asunder by nuclear war. In other words, this is a competitive game of cards where players must focus on keeping themselves alive the longest.
Each turn players must decide to do one of the following:

1. Fight Nasties. Creatures of ill will are drawn to Safe Houses like moths to flame, and players must fight off Nasties like bandits, mutants, zombies, and irradiated rat swarms. This is done by using ammunition, mines, chainsaws or other similar Equipment.

2. Clean up Safe House. Dangerous Irradiated Sludge seeps into Safe Houses occasionally, and players must clean up their havens from time to time to prevent precious Rations from spoiling and turning into more Irradiated Sludge. This can be done by using Equipment such as radiation suits, shovels, safety gloves, lead buckets etc.

3 a. Scavenge for supplies. By doing this, players draw Resource cards as a sign of finding supplies to survive another day. Resources include useful items such as Equipment and Rations, but players might also stumble into Irradiated Sludge. Nasties at a scavenging player's Safe House won't deal damage to him during that turn, but Irradiated Sludge can spread and ruin Rations.

3 b. Sabotage other players. This is similar to scavenging for supplies, except the player draws less Resource cards and in return plays a Sabotage card on another player to make his or her life more miserable. The sabotaged player may play a Resource card to prevent a sabotage attempt, possibly even turning the attempt against the saboteur. Example sabotage cards are 5-Finger Discount, Chunk o' Meat, and Sludge-A-Pult.

This process is repeated every turn until all but one player have lost all of their health tokens at the end of the final turn.

Nasty card layout

The monsters of the game will play an important role in the survival of the fittest, attacking players each turn. Here's how such cards will look like. 

As an example Nasty, I'm using one of the ooziest of creatures, the BOOM Dog. This feisty little puppy has been mutated into a fur(r)ious beast bloated with Irradiated Sludge.

As for the card layout, the idea is that the player is viewing the Nasty from behind a semi-boarded window of his Safe House, the ruined city he struggles to survive in viewed in the background as the Nasty itself prowls at the haven.

At the top the name of the Nasty is located. 

At the bottom are the rules of the creature's behaviour.

Next to the Nasty rules is a symbol of what the creature does. The symbol of radiation represents the spreading of Irradiated Sludge, cards which the player must draw when the creature's effects come into play. Another symbol, open jaws and a splatter of blood, represents damage the Nasty deals. Some Nasties deal either damage or spread Irradiated Sludge, some do both.

Tarion Chronicles: Character sheet

As my first proper update, here's some development on my RPG ruleset's character sheet.

There have been several iterations over time, each different in their own rights. Unfortunately, I don't have all of them saved, but I'll share the ones I managed to dig up from the depths of my RPG folder.

Version 2.0

Page 1 - Statistics

Page 2 - Equipment & Inventory

Page 3 - Spells

Here you see version 2.0. This was done using Microsoft Office Word, a task which almost caused me several nervous breakdowns. The program's table functions were quirky, to say the least, and more than once I had to edit a section I thought was finished to accommodate a completely different change I was originally after.

In the very first version, the page layout was in portrait form (the paper standing on its narrow side). It was a classic alignment and the character sheet worked that way, but I decided to go for something a bit different and made a landscape version of the sheet. I like it this way. :3

Version 3.0

Page 1 - Statistics 

After having had enough of Word's functionality issues, I decided to switch to an actual graphic design program, with what I had complete freedom to make the page layouts as I wished. 

Thus, Word made way to Adobe Illustrator. A choice I should have made from day one...(hindsight is the best sight. Also, the most useless :P). 

As you can see, the results are quite different from before (sure, it doesn't look all fancy and hi-graph, but it was helluva easier to pull this off). At this point, I didn't have the second or third page redone yet, as I focused more on getting the first page look right.

Version 3.1 - Final

 Page 1 - Statistics

Now this here is how the first page looks like currently. The design is pretty much done, and I'm happy with it. Sure, it could use a bit more colour and flair, but I felt like keeping it relatively simple. It's easier on the printer, too. :P Maybe after some test game sessions I'll add more decorations. Who knows.

The overall layout is similar to version 2.0. This is because I liked that layout better than the 3.0 one. The latter is a bit too cramped on the left side, more so than in 3.1. It was worth the try, at least.

Version 3.1 - Final

Page 2 - Equipment & combat statistics

Compare this to the 2.0 version and you can see the similarities and differences. One of the biggest changes was the removal of the inventory part at the bottom, to dedicate the whole page to equipment and combat stats in general. There're places for hit points, magic points (called arcana points, in this system), defense, damage resistances and movement speeds along with a nifty graph for magic item placement.

While I've marked this as the final version, there might be changes to it in the future. It's not very likely, though.

As for the third page, I don't have anything worthy of showing yet. It will be dedicated to inventory, wealth and spells, that much I can tell. I'll post more about that later, when I get the design more or less done.

That oughta be all for now. Thanks for your attention! :D