There were nine gods; that much is certain. But a void in the common knowledge burns brighter the more scholars study it. The fact is that two gods are lost to the ages. Their names purged from all ancestries’ memories. Their imagery vandalized, destroyed, or stolen. And yet, some texts from eons ago still mention these gods; though never by name. Not men, nor elves, nor dragons can make sense of this lack of information. Why were these gods purged from existence? Is this a punishment? Will they ever be known again? Scholars have wondered about those questions for centuries. Still, they hope that a new text, relic, or ancient location shall soon be unearthed and that it may hold the key to understanding the forgone past.

There were nine gods; that much is certain. But a void in the common knowledge burns brighter the more scholars study it. The fact is that two gods are lost to the ages. Their names purged from all ancestries’ memories. Their imagery vandalized, destroyed, or stolen. And yet, some texts from eons ago still mention these gods; though never by name. Not men, nor elves, nor dragons can make sense of this lack of information. Why were these gods purged from existence? Is this a punishment? Will they ever be known again? Scholars have wondered about those questions for centuries. Still, they hope that a new text, relic, or ancient location shall soon be unearthed and that it may hold the key to understanding the forgone past.

Stable Diffusion is one of the best AI Art Generator programs out there today, and best of all: it’s free. All the images shown here were generated on a Windows 11 laptop with a 6Gb Nvidia 3070 graphics card using the NMKD desktop SD app. The variations were achieved by downloading various models/styles from Hugging Face.

Intended to coincide with the Dune 2021 movie, the much-anticipated Dune RPG from Modiphius has now been released while the movie has been delayed. How does it relate to the movie and what is it like? Here’s an initial review.

Game System

Like previous 2d20 system releases from Modiphius, such as Star Trek Adventures, John Carter and Conan, Dune has the same basic game mechanic as those earlier systems: to attempt a task, the GM sets a difficulty level, the player rolls 2 or more d20 against the sum of two relevant attribute values, and the number of successes from that roll determines not only whether they succeed but how well.

Having survived an attempted assassination from an unknown adversary (who seems to know a lot about Leo), our Heroes (capital H) head out into the Grasslands with the dwarves of Hog Enterprises, only to find that it is no safer than the city (and probably much worse).

The Marut

The sun has barely started to colour the sky to the east of the Violet City on the second day of Redmonth, when our Heroes (capital H) gather at the industrial unit rented by the dwarves of Hog Enterprises. They met Nezod Smeltgut and Alfobeth Hardbrew a few days earlier when they were hired, but now meet the rest of the company:

This first session of Ultraviolet Grasslands using Cypher System started off well enough, after a few weeks of planning and a Session Zero that built the characters, but fell flat when the GM (me) was hit by a power cut and lost all network connectivity other than Discord on my cellphone. But hey, these things are sent to make us stronger. The second session went a little better, so here’s the write-up for both.

OK, this started as some fun with me messing with my friends heads in a series of Facebook posts while I was rewatching the original Star Wars trilogy, but it grew so out of hand I thought I’d expand on it here. To mess with your head.

The Premise

It’s simple: Star Wars didn’t really happen the way it did in the movies. Sure, there was an evil galactic empire that overthrew a good-natured republic and killed off a whole bunch of space-wizards in the process, but that was in the prequel trilogy and I’m not going to go there because while they’re kinda watchable movies they’re also pretty bad as far as the details and canon consistency are concerned, so I’m just going to focus on the original trilogy: A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi.

When it comes to science-fiction roleplaying games, Traveller is granddaddy of them all, and it has it’s own setting (the Third Imperium) that’s been around from day one. Outside role-playing (but supported by several different games over the years) you have universes such as Star Wars, Star Trek and, more recently, The Expanse. But what other “universes” are there out there for adventuring, what kinds of stories might they inspire, and what RPG systems suit their particular style of story telling.