role playing

The Dick Tracy Pulp Era Role Playing Game

The Dick Tracy RPG brings the classic comic book detective to life. When I was a kid, my dentist had a couple of books with Chester Gould’s complete Dick Tracy strips, and I used to look forward to going to the dentist twice a year so I could read them.

In this RPG system you create characters eight attributes, skills and advantages / disadvantages. Action is resolved with a 2d6+attribute+skill versus difficulty system. Tasks are rated according to a five point difficulty level. The system also has stats for characters such as BB Eyes, Breathless Mahoney, Flattop, and of course, Dick Tracy.

I’ve often thought that these wonderful characters would make great miniatures.

Dread Roleplaying Game

Dread is a role playing game that uses an innovative mechanic — a Jenga game — to resolve actions and build tension.

There are both free and paid versions.

Seventh Sanctum Random Name Generators

Back in the heady days of first edition D&D, there were a lot of small companies publishing books that essentially were nothing more than lists of names, treasures, monsters, etc. During a game, you used these lists to randomly generate filler for your adventures.

The Seventh Sanctum is essentially a computerized version of these old random generator books. There are random generators here for just about anything you can imagine: pirate ship names, character names for a variety of settings, superhero powers,, equipment lists, dark rituals, several evil sounding name generators, a magical girls, a martial arts move generator, and more!

I spent way too much time playing with this one.

Habitation of The Stone Giant Lord

Habitation of the Stone Giant Lord is a D&D module created by a twelve year old in 1982. Talk about Old School. It has been scanned in all its graph paper and typewriter glory.

It reminds me very much of the large notebook of dungeons I made in my high school years — which I still have today. Perhaps I should scan and post them.

Visual D&D Loot Chart

loot_chart

Kelvin Green’s blog has this terrific visual D&D loot chart. See the larger image at the blog.