Wednesday, December 21, 2022
Reading Grant Morrison's The Invisibles In 2023
Sunday, December 18, 2022
Where To Find Me
With the birdsite circling the drain, I am not posting there, accepting new followers or any active use of the site. If you want to follow me on social media, you can try the following sites.
Mastodon https://mas.to/@dorkland (I have an account, but I don't use it actively)
Tumblr https://tumblr.com/dorkland
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/chris.helton/
Discord Christopher Helton#1676
Patreon https://patreon.com/dorkland
I am not currently as active on all of these sites, mostly because I am trying to figure out how to use them. Mastodon has pretty much replaced my Twitter usage, and I am currently mostly Tumblr for looking at art people are sharing. But these are the places where I will publicly interact with others.
Monday, October 31, 2022
Some Action-Heroes FAQs
With the release of the ashcan edition of Action-Heroes by Outland Entertainment over at DriveThruRPG there have been a few questions that have floated around the internet and come to my attention, so I thought I would make a post of some of these questions to point people towards. I don't know how frequent these questions have been, but they have been asked about the game.
The ashcan is no longer available for sale now that the Kickstarter has launched.. The ashcan has everything that you need to play a game of Action-Heroes, but it isn't the complete game that will eventually be available on Kickstarter and retail. The final version of the game will also have a series of appendices that outline an alternate magic system for the game, go over some collaborative setting-building rules for groups that want to create their own worlds from scratch, and a series of examples that take you through the process of building powers and special abilities for your characters in the game.
Action-Heroes is something that I have been working on for a long time, and has its origins in a system that I was asked to build for a licensed tabletop RPG that didn't come to fruition, so the rights to the system stayed with me. It is a simplified and streamlined version of one of my earliest professional game designs, and I think it is a design that represents where I am today as both a designer and game player/GM. It uses a simplified ruleset that is augmented by the ruling of the GM, and the needs of the players, that come up during play.
Saturday, September 24, 2022
The Shape Of The DCU To Come
Over at Newsarama, one of their writers talked about how many of the story seeds dropped by Scott Snyder at the end of his run of events at stories over at DC Comics didn't all pan out as expected. All of this is completely speculative on my part, as I have no idea where things are going to land.
This is what happens when 1) publishers rely too much on a treadmill of events to sustain interest, and 2) the architects of the big events don't stick around to sprout the seeds lain by their events. As Scott Snyder lead the DCU through Dark Nights, the No Justice Era and then into Death Metal, successive stories picked up what was being laid down because the writing architect was there threading the needle through the events and story arc. Then with Death Metal, Snyder laid out the after effects of his massive run...and then went off to do creator-owned books.
Wednesday, September 07, 2022
Chaos World Explainer
Cover mockup featuring stockart by Claudio Casini |
I have always said that I am not a big fan of fantasy fiction. That doesn't mean that I don't like it, but that my tastes in it are fairly limited. I am a big fan of the fantasy, and science fantasy, of British author Michael Moorcock, and to a lesser degree the works of Robert E. Howard (particularly Conan).
Most of my interest in Howard came from the Marvel Comics adaptations of his works and characters when I was a kid. I love a good fantasy comic, and books like DC's Warlord also inspired me.
All of these inspirations flowed into my writing and developing Chaos World. The game itself has gone through a number of incarnations and systems over the years. Some people who have followed my blog or social media throughout the years may remember my early playtests of a game I called Demon Codex back in the G+ days. That was an earlier version of the game that I wanted to make. There have been a lot of inspiration from an old school Swords & Sorcery RPG that I am a fan of threading through the various incarnations of the game as well.
Tuesday, August 23, 2022
Safety And Tabletop RPGs
Photo by Serge van Neck on Unsplash |
I have been gaming for a long time. I first started playing D&D back in 1979, when I was still in elementary school. I would have been a couple of years older than the characters in Stranger Things (I grew up in a small town in Indiana, too). When I was a kid in the 70s and 80s things were different. The general idea of dealing with things that were uncomfortable or dangerous was that you "sucked it up" and dealt with it.
Honestly? That's not a very good way to deal with things that can be potentially traumatic. So I think that one of the better advances that has come along in tabletop RPGs has been the development and increasing popularity of using safety tools in gaming.
I haven't always been a fan of using safety tools while gaming, but I have seen the light. At this point I think that safety tools should be a part of your RPG's text, if you're a game designer. My Action-Heroes game (currently out in an ashcan edition PDF from Outland Entertainment) uses safety tools. My upcoming paranormal romance RPG, called Paranormal Friction, will have safety tools. Both games start at the same basic point with them, and Paranormal Friction puts on another couple of layers of tools.
So, what are safety tools?
Monday, August 01, 2022
Action-Heroes RPG Is Out In The World
Ahead of the Kickstarter to fund the printing of the physical book, we have finally released the Action-Heroes RPG into the world as a PDF (Note: Now that the Kickstarter is live, the ashcan is no longer available). This ashcan release is a playable version of the game, with all of the rules needed to play and a preview of the art that will be in the final book. The final book will have a full color wraparound cover as well.
Action-Heroes is the culmination of years of work in developing this system. I was running it at conventions in the Before Times, and I incorporated the feedback that I received into what has become the final text.
When I started up my game development Patreon during the early days of the pandemic, I started reworking the text into a game that I wanted to play (really, not making me all that much different from the many other game designers out there). I have posted some new material that I am developing for future releases for Action-Heroes as well.
In my background as a gamer, I have leaned heavily on "generic" games that can be used to realize a multitude of settings and character types, and this carried through into Action-Heroes. I took the lessons that I learned during years of running games like GURPS, Champions/Hero System, Heroes Unlimited, and the big gold book of Basic Roleplaying and combined them with evolving game design ideas and made them into something that I could run without things breaking down at the table.
Sunday, June 19, 2022
Top Cow's Sara Pezzini, The Witchblade
Witchblade and Sara Pezzini are copyright and trademark Top Cow. |
Tuesday, June 14, 2022
Cyberforce's Stryker For Fate
I have a weak spot for a lot of the early Image comics, to the point that I want to make a role-playing game that's an homage to the comics of that era. I am going to periodically post conversions of characters from the comics on posts here on my blog. The eventual mechanics of the game will be based on the Fate Condensed rules, for which you can find an SRD here.
This conversion is not official, nor is it meant to challenge any copyrights or trademarks owned by Top Cow.
Sunday, March 20, 2022
Hello!
Hello! Some of my older posts have been bringing people here to my blog, and I thought that I would point out that I am not very active here currently, unfortunately. I keep threatening to blog again but I don't end up pulling the trigger on it. Next year is the 20th anniversary of the blog, so who knows what might happen leading up to that.
Enjoy your visit, there are a lot of cool posts to discover from when I was a lot more active here. Check out the "popular posts" section down below, on the left, for posts that people have liked, for one reason or another.
Thank you for dropping by!