Gelatinous Cubed

First and foremost I asked my players to specifically not come up with characters for the campaign until yesterday's session - I'm well aware that some of them have been rarin' to play certain things and that's fine, but I didn't want any characters built in a vacuum like they usually are.

The session started off with some pretty intense explanation and history of the Eberron setting, some of my players being completely unfamiliar with it. Doing this I was able to get something of a read as to what parts people got jazzed by and what they didn't. I laid out the map on the gaming table and using it to illustrate the different countries, the history of the continent, the culture of each, the disaster of the Mournland (Eberron's own Hiroshima), but mostly in general terms.

Then I pointed to the player's starting country (Aundair) and start getting more specific. With a stack of post-its handy, I started laying out some of the elements of the campaign that might be relevant to a character's story, I could quickly jot a name or description of it down, and then stick the post-it near it's "location" on the map, like so:

• "So down by this village are the floating towers of the Arcane University, and you can see them from miles around."

So I've raved a little about Red Box Hack on here before, but I've been lucky enough now (the DM of our current 4e campaign is on temporary hiatus) to actually run a session or two of this fun little system.

Red Box Hack is a sort of "reimagining" of Original D&D, only with some story-game elements and set in a more wuxia asian-themed world. Like OD&D it has levels, hit points, and classes (seven: four human and three non-human), and XP is gained through killing monsters and getting treasure. It's simplified quite a bit (the entire game is only 23 pages), and is extremely and entertainingly pick-up-and-playable.

It's also free and open to tweakery. I've been working on a Red Box Hack "hack" for most of the summer now, but I figured I should probably actually playtest the thing some if I was so damned excited about it.

The adventure started off with a bang aboard a sandship skimming over the surface of a broad desert on its way to the town of Brokenfalls, known as "the town on the edge of forever", as it was being hijacked by desert bandits riding giant wasps. Once we got a feel for the combat system and the use of Awesome Tokens, things seemed to flow quite nicely.

Rest assured we've got some good stuff bubbling up under the surface here at G-cubed, but as a site very interested in all the great and cool stuff being built, shared and collaborated on by the RPG fan community in general (and D&D fans in particular), we're pretty disappointed in the somewhat underhanded legalese that Wizards of the Coast has attached to its Fan Site Kit.

It's that time of year again.

If you're a fan of role-playing games, any roleplaying game, you should do this.

Voting on the ENnies ballot can seem a little confusing at first. "I haven't heard of any of these games!" You might find yourself thinking, "What do I care about some fan-voted awards?"

Vote at the Ennies!