Author Archives: craggle

About craggle

Despite being born tone deaf in one ear, Craig has risen above his disadvantage to achieve the lofty position of spending most of his free time mucking around on the Internet, tinkering with RPG rules, and failing on at least seven occasions to finish writing a novel.

The Gang’s All Here – City of Heroes’ Trolls

Posted on April 10, 2012 by craggle

Introduction We’re back again with another post in our Gang’s All Here series offering thematic groups of Marvel Heroic Roleplaying datafiles, ready to drop right into your game. This time we’re presenting another group based on enemies from the City of Heroes … Continue reading →

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The Gang’s All Here – City of Heroes’ Outcasts

Posted on April 5, 2012 by craggle

Introduction The superhero MMOG City of Heroes can provide an excellent source of ideas for a Marvel Heroic Roleplaying game, or a whole setting for those looking for something with a little less “history” than the Marvel-verse. Under the new … Continue reading →

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Potter-ville – House Rules, part 1

Posted on February 17, 2012 by craggle

Every version of Cortex Plus does such a tremendous job of capturing the feel of the licenses, from mechanics simulating literary and dramatic devices through to the naming structures and conventions.  For Harry Potter, we have the four Houses of … Continue reading →

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Swords and Situation Generators

Posted on January 11, 2012 by craggle

Situation generators can be a useful tool when you are struggling to come up with an idea for a game, if you have a lack of time and need to come up with a plot in a hurry, or if … Continue reading →

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Small Spells – A Discussion of Scope for “Potter-ville”

Posted on December 30, 2011 by craggle

From small spells do mighty enchanters grow. So Harry Potter was the winner of the recent poll I held deciding on the next Cortex Plus project (although it was tied with Battlestar at one point, so that may well be … Continue reading →

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Building a Better Labyrinth – A Maze Mechanic Idea

Posted on December 28, 2011 by craggle

I’m of an age for whom most adventure gaming on the computer was of the text-based variety. A particularly large portion of these games seemed to feature some variation of a maze at some point and looking back on it … Continue reading →

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Leveragin’ the Black – Situation Generator

Posted on December 23, 2011 by craggle

A little stocking filler for Firefly RPG fans this festive season, and a wrap-up of the Leveragin’ the Black series: – Floundering for that germ of an idea to spark your next epic adventure in the ‘Verse?  Or maybe you … Continue reading →

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Mechanics Musings – As Tiers Go By

Posted on October 12, 2011 by craggle

Mechanics Musings will (potentially) be a new, infrequent series of posts where I throw around a few thoughts on various game mechanics and see where they go.  Today’s post was mostly inspired by the articles discussing skills hosted on the … Continue reading →

Posted in 4e DnD, Exploration, Gaming, Mechanics | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Leveragin’ the Black – Stressin’ the Story

Posted on October 6, 2011 by craggle

Rob Donoghue introduced an idea on his blog using Stress tracks for tracking ideas other than “wounds,” such as Insanity for a game of eldritch horrors, or an Enemy Alertness track shared by the players for stealth situations.  I’ve really taken … Continue reading →

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Leveragin’ the Black – Stressin’ The Rules

Posted on October 5, 2011 by craggle

One of the innovative ideas that the Smallville RPG brought to the table was to have five categories of Stress that characters could suffer from: Afraid, Angry, Exhausted, Insecure, and Injured.  For Serenity Plus, each character also has five Stress … Continue reading →

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