Showing posts with label Apocalypse World. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Apocalypse World. Show all posts

Thursday, March 16, 2017

Vampire Powered by the Apocalypse


Well, I know. There are already some works for doing vampires with the Apocalypse World engine, at least two that I know about.
One is the extensive add-on for the Urban Shadows game, made by +Tommy Rayburn, his add-on is huge and detailed, and is excellent for playing a World of Darkness campaign using the Urban Shadows game. You can find it here. In my personal opinion, though, this can be better exploited in a mixed game, with werewolves, vampires, wizards, hunters, and so on. Because that's the nature of Urban Shadows.
The other game is Undying, by +Paul Riddle. This is a vampire game, powered by the apocalypse. It looks quite interesting and it seems to explore the predatory nature of vampires quite well. I've never played a diceless game, though, and I would have to find a willing group to test it someday. Needless to say, this game is an original commercial product that has nothing to do with the World of Darkness universe. You can buy Undying here.

Monday, July 25, 2016

Stranger Things, and back again

New Netflix series Stranger Things is all over our social media circles right now. And when I say "our" I mean us, the role-playing gamers. So here I am, returning from a really long hiatus, writing again about this strangers things we love!

I knew nothing about the show until I opened my Netflix account the day it premiered and saw it there on the home page. I sometimes put series on while working on my computer—I have two monitors set up—so I clicked it with no expectations and thinking of using it just as background noise while I worked.

What a big surprise!

The first couple of minutes I saw this typical lab scene where something has gone terribly wrong and poor "Scientist Number 1" dies a horrible dead. OK—I thought—seen it before. So I kept working while watching. But next, there are these kids playing D&D in a basement and, obviously, that instantly caught my attention! I stopped what I was doing to focus on the scene, and I cracked open with laughter!

Sunday, June 7, 2015

Why Powered by the Apocalypse?

Maybe you already know it, maybe not. I'm in the process of writing a Powered by the Apocalypse role-playing game: Nahual. I'm Mexican, so this is a Mexican game, based in the universe and works of (also Mexican) artist and graphic novelist +Edgar Clement.

Just recently I had to ask myself (for reasons not important to this post), why I'm powering my game by the Apocalypse? The answer I picked was straight and short, so now I'm trying to expand it here.

First I'll say that I've been wanting to write this game since around 2005 or so. My first idea was to use the d20 Open Gaming License, but back then it was just an idea, no words where put together at all.

I guess the reason I never sit down myself to start writing the game was that it felt odd. I thought about the classes for the game, of course I had to. And what about races or something similar? Then the levels, how skills and feats and all that crunch will help represent the universe of nahuals and angels and devils that Clément is (still) developing. As I said, it just felt odd.

Then I moved to another town, new job, things changed. The idea was left on the pipeline for a while. Then again I decided to continue. It was around 2012. I had found some of the material from The Forge forum. Theory about role-playing games, how system matters, etc. So I decided to create my own brand new system. Except that, despite all the theory and stuff I had read, my main gaming experience was D&D 2E and 3E, Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu and the old World of Darkness games. So my "brand new system" was just a mirror/shadow of some of the concepts/rules presented by those games, specially the WofD.

Then, I don't remember exactly how, I found out about this indie game called Apocalypse World, by this author named +Vincent Baker, and the comments I'm reading on the internet are quite interesting, and then I saw Mr. Baker talking about game design in a convention in Finland! (via Youtube of course, I've never been to Finland) And I was like OMG!


And then I got my PDF version of the Apocalypse World game, and THEN is when I knew this is how I wanted to make my Nahual role-playing game based on Cléments works. But why?