Jeffs Gameblog

My buddy Pat came over again yesterday.  He had to help us eat the huge supply of fresh sweetcorn my Dad had supplied us.  Nothing like fresh sweetcorn from the farm you grew up on, nothing in the world.  We talked about Savage Worlds and all the neat ideas we had for it.  Pat is seriously considering running the forthcoming adventure book Necessary Evil in which the PCs are supervillains.  I like the idea of playing NE, but am saddened by the fact that I may not get to be a player in it with my best bud Pat.  I think we would make excellent partners in crime.  Pat also had a great Victoria horror one-shot idea he calls Shaka Cthulhu.  Finally, we ruminated about structuring a series of one-shots in the same manner as Hong Kong Action Theatre, in which adventures vary wildly in terms of settings and subgenres but you keep the same PC from session to session.  The basic paradigm is that the PC roles are sorta like actors that migrate from one movie to another.  For example, in session 1 of the campaign you might do a sci-fi horror adventure inspired by the Alien series of movies.  My PC, Ace Hardslab, is cast as the space marine sniper, thanks to his studly Shooting d10.  After that adventure is over maybe we'd do a little quasi-historical romp in which my guy is cast as Lord Hardslab, the finest archer in Darbyshire.  One of my favorite parts about this method as used in HKAT is that the players rotate GM duties and you get to use your own PC as one of the villains.
 
One interesting sideline from all of the SW conversation was that Pat finally helped me realize why I like SW so much better than Big Eyes, Small Mouth and its descendants.  BESM puts almost all the nifty mechanics in a big lump o' powers sitting in the middle of the book.  SW is much more digestible to me.  This  little epiphany clicked so well for me that I now wonder if maybe I can safely sell off BESM and Silver Age Sentinels.  They're just not for me, I think.  Of course, this raises the old dilemna that I still have with regard to the HERO System:  Does it make sense to keep the supplement when you are dumping the corebook?  You can have my copy of Aaron Allston's Strike Force when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.  Similarly, it would be painful to dump Ninja Hero.  I think S. John Ross's superfabulous Uresia: Grave of Heaven probably belongs in this same category.  I guess I'm afraid that mere moments after selling my HERO and BESM corebooks I will suddenly find a group that wants to play nothing but Ninja Hero and Uresia.  Should the heavens somehow align in such a way that this preposterous turn of events comes to pass, I guess I may just have to use another system.  Savage Worlds looks sufficiently ninjatastic, and Uresia could go several routes: BESM d20, straight D&D of various sorts, SW again, etc, etc.