The Geeklet finds her first funny dice!

A week or so ago, I took my daughter -- who is two-and-a-half -- to the FLGS. Without prompting, she picked out this percentile ten-sider. I didn't intend to buy it for her, but she carried around and wouldn't put it down, so I took it as a sign.

She calls it her "Rollin' Ball." I think that bodes well for a dad who learned to play RPGs on d10 games like Marvel Super Heroes!



TRAILER: ROGUE ONE: A Star Wars Story

Scroll down for trailer

Rogue One is apparently the beautiful, beautiful love child of Star Wars roleplaying games, video games like Battlefront and Dark Forces, and those novels and comics that focus on background characters.

It's basically everything you've ever wanted in a Star Wars movie that didn't feature the Skywalkers.

• Criminals given a second chance to become heroes? CHECK!
• Swordplay and martial arts without Jedi powers? CHECK!
• Secret interstellar spy missions? CHECK!
• Black armor shadow troopers? CHECK! OMG, CHECK!
• MAN VS. AT-AT? Wait, WHAT? HOLY $#!% CHECK!

Where's Wedge?

So far it looks like they're sticking to their original premise of "Oceans Eleven steals the Death Star plans". I'd say there's even more of a Dirty Dozen influence. My guess is that they're going to do more character-focused trailers as the release date approaches.

And I SWEAR they time traveled back to 1983 to get the actress who played Mon Mothma--she's a ringer for sure! And Felicity Jones appears to have the double dose of Solo-style cockiness, plus the combat skills to back it up.

One thing I'm hoping for is some sort of space battle. After all, Rogue Squadron is the codename for the greatest starfighter team of the Rebellion! And if the opening crawl of A New Hope is any indication, there's, uh, hope that could actually be in store for R1. Here it is, with a little highlighting of the relevant part:

It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire.

During the battle, Rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire's ultimate weapon, the DEATH STAR, an armored space station with enough power to destroy an entire planet.

Pursued by the Empire's sinister agents, Princess Leia races home aboard her starship, custodian of the stolen plans that can save her people and restore freedom to the galaxy....

Certainly sounds like we're going to see some sort of space chase--maybe leading right into Episode IV! What do you think? Sound off in the comments!

This all makes me want to get another look at the Star Wars WEG adventure we ran for Saturday Night Space Opera last year and give i t a fresh coat of bantha hair.


Without further adieu:

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story debuts December 16, 2016 in the US.

More info:
IMDB listing

Wanna hunt dinosaurs on Venus tomorrow?

Sounds like an April Fools gag, but no--we're serious! I mean, uh, kinda. I nearly forgot to get the word out about our first themed month for Saturday Night Space Opera. Throughout April we're winding the wayback machine to 19th century with some STEAMPUNK adventure!

Here's the first game, set for tomorrow night:

Note: Please be aware this is a BYO blunderbuss event.

Here's the mission brief from GM John Till:

ALL ABOARD: your ether flyer is now departing! Anyone can survive the Red Planet with its languid ancient cities and canals, but only the bravest and most adventurous (or foolhardy) head to the humid, prehistoric jungle hellworld of VENUS!

6:00 pm / Saturday, April 2

Source Comics + Games

 CREW WANTED:

• No previous experience with Ubiquity necessary
• Dice and character templates provided
• As always, this event is FREE

RSVP now and let us know you're coming!

You also can RSVP on the SNSO Google+ Community page. Click the image below:

All our steampunk adventures for April take place amidst the etherways of space. Check out the full schedule on the Saturday Night Space Opera site. So will you be joining us for some otherworldly, Victorian-era escapades?

A: INDUBITABLY.

TRAILER: Latest X-Men Apocalypse trailer is a lightning bolt of fun!

Seriously, 14-year-old me is name-checking every X-men character in every X-comic he ever read and liking what he sees.

Space Magic in Rad Astra

First, a confession...

This is one of those posts that I initially dread writing. Mainly because I over think it. I've been mulling over ideas for space magic for a loooong time. Problem is I'd read spellcasting rules for other games as inspiration and that would just end up as an exercise in disappointment once I realized it wouldn't work in a rules-light game like X-plorers (the ruleset I'm currently using for Rad Astra) or other similar systems.

I'd decided a long while back on how I wanted the character class to work, but that didn't give me much of a clue about how to structure the underlying system. Until I decided to just let go and use X-plorers as my divining rod and snip off ideas from other sources without (hopefully) borrowing from them whole-cloth. Either way, this stuff still needs to be playtested.

This is a long winded way of saying, I'm not entirely sure this will work, but it's a start. I had originally planned to run a new spells system and space warlock/wizard class at Con of the North in 2015 but I was still hashing out details. So maybe consider this the first in a series, with this first post explaining how magic works (in a broad, rambling sense!), and an upcoming post will outline how the new class works.

This is all to say, it's going to take me a few tries to get this right. All right, let's begin...

How Magic Works in Rad Astra

In the beginning of spacetime, before the birth of the old gods and the plucking of the universal filaments to create the vibrations that would give way to the multiverse, there was only... the Krackle. The original source of all things that cracked, sputtered, spit, and hissed with raw power. Pure and potent, it's energies were first discovered by the eternal titans of the cosmos. Not only did they weave eternal geometries it into galaxies, star clusters, and nebulae, but likewise did they pour its essence into the "reverse" of spacetime fabric: hyperspace, astrality, and the dark dimensions. Hence, its application is unlimited. It can be pooled or tapped and called forth, fueling cosmic and arcane might. But those gifted mortals who seek to tame the blood of the universe are cursed to crave it evermore!