Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Magic Gems





I have been playing Torchlight 2 and I really like all the socketed items and the way those work. To that end I have been playing around with the following magic item idea for my D&D game.

Magic Gems

Magic Gems attach to magic weapons and armor. Only 1 gem can attach to any given item. Effects of multiple weapon gems and multiple armor gems do not stack. Once a gem is attached it cannot be removed without destroying the item.


Orange Gem - Exploding Fire

Weapon - Weapon does 2d6 fire damage on a successful hit. If either fire damage die rolls a 6 roll another d6 and add this to the total. If this die rolls a 6 add another die. Continue this until no die rolls a 6.

Armor - Resist fire. Take 1/2 damage from magical fire based attacks. If save for half is allowed damage is reduced to 0 with a successful save. Also, if enemies roll a 1 on their to hit roll when attacking you, the attacker takes fire damage as shown for weapon above.


Yellow Gem - Chain Lightning

Weapon - Weapon does 3d6 lightning to primary target on a successful hit. The lightning then arcs to the closest additional enemy target (if one exists) and does 2d6 damage to that target, and finally arcs again for 1d6 lightning damage to a third and final enemy target if one is available.

Armor - Resist lightning. Take 1/2 damage from magical lightning based attacks. If save for half is allowed damage is reduced to 0 with a successful save. Also, if enemies roll a 1 on their to hit roll when attacking you, the attacker takes lightning damage as shown for weapon above.


Blue Gem - Freezing Ice

Weapon - Weapon does 2d6 ice damage on a successful hit. Further if the 2d6 damage roll is "doubles" the target is frozen solid until the beginning of your next turn. A frozen target has their Armor Class reduced by -5 and all attacks on a frozen target inflict double damage. If a frozen target is reduced to 0 HP while frozen they shatter doing 2d6 damage to everything within 5 feet of the exploding corpse.

Armor - Resist ice/cold. Take 1/2 damage from magical ice/cold based attacks. If save for half is allowed damage is reduced to 0 with a successful save. Also, if enemies roll a 1 on their to hit roll when attacking you, the attacker takes ice/cold damage as shown for weapon above.


Red Gem - Blood Stone

Weapon - Weapon does 1d6 vampiric damage. You heal a like amount.

Armor - Regeneration. Regain 1 HP every minute.


White Gem - Holy Pearl

Weapon - Weapon does 2d6 holy damage on a successful hit or 1d6 holy damage on a miss. No damage is done if the unadjusted roll to hit is a 1.

Armor - Resurrection. If you die, you are resurrected instantly to full hit-points. This destroys the Holy Pearl which shatters and cannot be used again.


Black Gem - Shadow Onyx

Weapon - Shadow Weapon. Grants proficiency of the weapon for anyone with a Dexterity of 13 or greater. Makes the weapon a finesse weapon. Double the characters Dexterity bonus is applied to attack and damage rolls with the weapon.

Armor - Shadow Armor. Grants proficiency of the armor for anyone with a Dexterity of 13 or greater. Makes the armor light class armor. Double the characters Dexterity bonus is applied to Armor Class while wearing the armor.



Buying Magic Gems

There is a fair (30%) chance that a magic shop has Magic Gems for sale ... Roll d20.

01-14 = 0 gems available
15-17 = 1 gem available
18-19 = 2 gems available
20 = 3 gems available

Type of Gem found ... Roll d12.

1-3 = Exploding Fire (orange) 1000 GP
4-6 = Chain Lightning (yellow) 1000 GP
7-9 = Freezing Ice (blue) 1000 GP
10 = Blood Stone (red) 5000 GP
11 = Holy Pearl (white) 5000 GP
12 = Shadow Onyx (black) 5000 GP



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Friday, November 09, 2012

Dave Bezio's X-plorers





Next in my series of reviews in the, "Great things come in small packages!" category is: X-plorers by Dave Bezio.

I own the PDF and print versions of X-plorers and let me start by saying, if you own a free version of the game, it's well worth your money to upgrade. This book is gorgeous! Art, layout, editing, everything in the Brave Halfling Publishing edition of this game is excellent and professional. X-plorers' production values are second to none. It scores a perfect 5 out of 5 for style and presentation. And at a petite 39 pages, X-plorers is the epitome of quality over quantity. This is how every RPG should be done.

X-plorers is a science fiction themed space exploration RPG. The game feels like a good balance of science fantasy and space opera and I think it could handle anything from Star Trek to Firefly to Starship Troopers to Star Wars inspired star-faring adventure pretty well.

Characters are defined through four primary attributes that range from 3 to 18 and familiar terms like initiative, armor class, saving throws, and hit points, all work as you'd expect. The four base character classes are good fits for the genre and the skill system looks to be perfect for the OSR feel the game is shooting for.

Basically skills work like old school saving throws. You have target numbers based upon your character class. As you level up the target numbers go down making the skill checks easier to hit. Clean, simple, very old school. It makes the game easy to play, easy to maintain. It's the kind of thing I want at my gaming table.

The rules include space ship and world design, space combat, psionic powers, alien creature and robot design, everything you'd want to see in a scifi RPG with the possible exception of cyber-punk style trimmings, but I feel like that's really a separate genre anyway.

The next time I want to run a SciFi RPG, I will definitely turn to X-plorers. It can easily handle anything a more complex game like Traveller can do with a fraction of the book keeping.

Get X-plorers HERE ... It's awesome!



Regards,



Jeff



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Friday, November 02, 2012

The Future is Now





Tablets are changing the way we use, think of and experience computers. I think about my iPad and the computer displays on Star Trek and it makes me realize that the future is now.

This post will be a bit of a departure for me. I have mentioned my passion for my iPad and today's release of the iPad mini has me surfing the web reading about tablets ... So, I decided to share links to some information that I found interesting. If you have an interest in tablets ... Take a look!

http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/software/47305-windows-8-part-one-rebirth/

http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/software/47309-windows-8-part-two-modern-ui/

http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/software/47313-windows-8-part-three-desktop/

http://www.trustedreviews.com/ipad-4_Tablet_review

http://www.t3.com/reviews/ipad-mini-review

http://reviews.cnet.com/google-nexus-7/


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad