Now Playing

It's been a week of posting rather heavy theory related articles, so I've decided to take a break before starting a multi-part look back at the history of RPG Theory on the web and talk about my own current campaigns.

We attempt to game weekly, however this due to real life concerns tends to be more like bi-weekly if averaged over the year.

What I'm playing hasn't really changed much over the years although the faces have as I've moved from town to town. Currently most of my game time is spent in HERO System in a re-imagined version of Shadowrun, Marvel comics, or a whole cloth comic setting called White Phoenix (again using HERO) GM by another.

These are quite different in character as the Marvel setting makes full use of the concept that points really don't matter. It's called the "Year One" campaign as it stole a idea from the comics themselves (Ulimates series) of doing a complete reboot, i.e. doing it the way we wanted to do it with the characters the way we liked them (which is often very different indeed from official comics).

There's no XP award in this campaign. The characters are what they are and while something may happen that causes changes to the character sheet, it has nothing to do with the common XP leveling.

The Shadowrun campaign is a bastard thing that uses what at first glance is the standard HERO System point budgets. But that's a illusion. Cyberware and the like are gained by pure money while the character's starting points is based upon how much Cyberware they can have installed. So a player who wants a Cyber monster might have 50 points to begin the game (and of bunch of cyberware of course) while someone wanting to play an Adept starts with 125.

XP is awarded in the Shadowrun, but there's a dimishing return applied that is also linked to the starting points. This keeps the XP and Cyberware improvements somewhat in line with each other.

The name of this blog by the way comes from the Shadowrun campaign. Whitehall ParaIndustries is a AA corp in that world that has... interesting behind the scenes influence. The picture in the header was inspiration for their Arcology and headquarters.


The White Phoenix campaign is a flat 800 point budget with no XP.


All very different ways of playing the same core system.

Now and then of course we still play Age of Heroes, my home grown rules for High Fantasy. We brought one of our players a copy of Dark Heresy and he's considering running a game for us, but he's time pressured and it may not happen.