Dark Tomb: Bloodthorn Island

On a quiet Thanksgiving day, my nephew Daniel joined Matthew, Nathaniel, and me for the second installment of the Dark Tomb series of super-tiny cooperative fantasy boardgames. Matthew and I reprised our roles from the first campaign -- a rogue-type for him, a ranger-type for me -- while Nathaniel opted for a warrior-type instead of the spellcaster he had used in the first one, and Daniel chose a cleric-type. In this campaign, we needed to procure a ship, travel to a distant island, and defeat a powerful draconic foe. We got the ship easily enough, but things went haywire soon after we set sail, as we ended up triggering all the monsters too quickly and they came swimming in hot pursuit of our vessel. Thanks to some clever use of items and Nathaniel's character's ability to reflect damage back at foes who hit him, we managed to survive the journey to the island. That final segment started off auspiciously, but the final boss turned out be a handful. Fortunately, it moved very slowly, so we were able to scamper away and come up with a plan. Matthew and I softened it up with ranged attacks, then Nathaniel allowed himself to take a huge hit so he could reflect damage back at the dragon, and finally Daniel finished it off with a powerful harpoon gun we had assembled from items scattered across the island. What a fun way to pass the time until Thanksgiving dinner!

It's a Thing of Beauty

Really digging the Cypher System. That is all.

Dune: Prophecy

Dune: Prophecy debuts this Sunday, November 17, on HBO and Max. Here's to another amazing journey into the "Dune-iverse"!

Cypher System

Recently the boys got me thinking about running a campaign set in my Vanguard universe, a sci-fi setting that has its origins in my very early childhood and has remained with me to this day. Most of my modern-setting campaigns -- from the cyberpunk Cyberwars (early 1990s) through the superheroes of Tales of the Ternion (2022) -- are essentially prequels of the Vanguard story. 

I've been looking around for an appropriate game system for this campaign, and gave the Alien RPG serious consideration, along with some d20-based systems. The boys, Nathaniel in particular, have broken the TinyD6 system (damn their incredible math skills!), so I needed something a bit more robust. I landed on Monte Cook's Cypher System, and now I'm kicking myself that I didn't find it sooner. This would have been the perfect system for all non-fantasy campaigns in my Front Porch multiverse. We could have used it for Tales of the Ternion, Doctor Who, Dark Enigma, and so many others. Well, better late than never! The Cypher System is now the official game engine of the multiverse.