Firebreathing Kittens

A priceless watch goes missing, and the Firebreathing Kittens are the likeliest culprits! Join Tracey and Hefty in this Blade Runner ttrpg mystery adventure as they try to uncover the real culprit and discover something even more important in the process.

A priceless watch goes missing, and the Firebreathing Kittens are the likeliest culprits! Join Tracey and Hefty in this Blade Runner ttrpg mystery adventure as they try to uncover the real culprit and discover something even more important in the process.

An abandoned guardhouse, blood and broken glass.  What befell Plant 4D, and what awaits Deli and Wilford within? Working for Packing Peanuts is an actual play podcast of The Walking Dead RPG.  

An abandoned guardhouse, blood and broken glass.  What befell Plant 4D, and what awaits Deli and Wilford within? Working for Packing Peanuts is an actual play podcast of The Walking Dead RPG.  

How To Play The Walking Dead   Hi everyone, this is a special how to play episode of Firebreathing Kittens podcast. I’m the game master for an upcoming session using the rules for The Walking Dead. This episode is a summary of what I learned after reading the rule book. Hopefully this will be a handy guide for how to play for my players, will help me organize myself, and will be useful for you listeners, too, who are looking to play your own The Walking Dead game at home.   I’ll organize this how to play guide into sections. Game category Skills Pushing and stress How to attack Armor Cover Moving Dueling Sneak attacks Brawling Leadership Swarms Threat levels Single walker attack Fighting a swarm Sacrifice someone Relieving stress Dying Healing Helping allies Jargon Building a character   Game category. This is the official tabletop roleplaying game of the famous TV show, The Walking Dead. You are role playing as a character in a world where society has collapsed. An unidentified malady has spread to all living people, infecting everyone. Anyone who dies, regardless of the cause of the death, is reanimated into what is called a Walker, an undead shambling corpse driven by a compulsion to consume living flesh. If one of the living gets scratched or bitten by a walker, they will succumb, quickly becoming one if the bitten limb is not amputated. Your character can kill an individual Walker, but never enough of them to make a dent in how many there are in the world. It’s not safe out there. You might be able to clear the Walkers from a small haven, such as a roof top, so you can sleep. At your haven you can store food, water, medicine, and other resources, maybe collaborating with a close knit group of fellow survivors. But in a world with no law enforcement, can you trust the people you meet? They might be robbers eyeing your limited food, or murderers, or cannibals, or could simply make too much noise and attract a Walker swarm, a gathering of the undead so numerous that they overrun anything in their path. How long will you survive in this roleplaying game before you become one of… the walking dead. To describe the mechanics in five sentences, this is a game where you will roll six sided dice, also called d6. You succeed when you see at least one six in the dice you rolled. You can push to re roll failures, which adds stress dice. If you get a one on a stress dice, something goes wrong. Weapons deal a set number of damage depending on the weapon, and all characters have three hit points.   Skills. When your character tries to accomplish something in the game world, you might roll dice to see if they are successful or not. A good game master will call for a dice roll any time the character failing could increase tension, make the situation much worse, or make the game more exciting. How do you know how many dice you will roll? Find the skill that best fits what you’re trying to do, and the attribute associated with that skill. The number next to the skill, plus the number next to the attribute, are how many dice you get to roll.   Here is an example skill roll. Rick is trapped, surrounded by Walkers on all sides with no way out. Glenn’s player wants to help Rick. She proposes that Glenn sneak through the Walker filled streets, find a car without being detected, hot wire it, and drive it back to Rick to pick him up. Because the first part of her plan is sneaking, and because if that fails that dramatically changes the outcome of this plan, the game master calls for a roll. Glenn’s player looks at his character sheet. The number three is written next to the stealth skill, and it’s one of three skills under the agility attribute, which has the number four. With three dice from the stealth skill and four dice from the agility attribute, Glenn’s player rolls seven dice total. There are very good odds that at least one of them will be a six. The player rolls and the result is… two sixes! Excellent. Glenn’s stealthy sneaking through the streets was successful, he found a car with no Walkers around. For the extra six, the game master rewards Glenn’s player with a little something extra, such as asking her what color the car is. She says orange. Sweet. The next step will be hot wiring it.   Pushing and stress. In The Walking Dead, a roll isn’t necessarily over if you don’t get any sixes. You can choose to push. Pushing is when you pick up all those dice, add one point of stress to your character, and roll again. For each point of stress, you add one more special dice to the pool. This special stress dice could be a different color than the other dice, or have different symbols on its faces, or can be rolled after the other dice on its own, or could be rolled in a different location on your table, etc. Anyway, to push, you pick up all those failed dice and re roll them, and also re roll as many extra dice called stress dice as you have points of stress. This is another chance to see a six. If you get at least one six as a result, congratulations, your skill roll succeeded. From now on, you’ll roll as many extra dice on all rolls as you have points of stress. If you’ve pushed once, you have one stress, and roll one extra dice. If you’ve pushed twice, you have two stress, and roll two extra dice. Now here’s where keeping track of which dice are the stress dice matter. If you get a one on specifically a stress dice, not your regular dice, then the one on the stress dice means you’ve quote, “messed up”. When you mess up, the threat level on page seventy nine raises. For example you didn’t notice a Walker until it got close enough to attack you, or you were loud enough to get the attention of a Walker Swarm, etc. Something goes very wrong. Stress stays with you until you do something to relieve the stress. This includes narrating a roleplaying scene with your anchor, narrating a roleplaying scene with another character, and resting. When you sleep a full night’s rest, roll two dice and relieve the lower number of stress.   Here is an example of pushing. Glenn is at the car he found. There aren’t any Walkers around. He’d like to try to hot wire the car, so he can drive it back to where Rick is trapped and rescue him. Hot wiring a car is the tech skill. The player looks at Glenn’s character sheet. There’s a zero written next to the tech skill, uh oh. But the tech skill is under the wits attribute, which Glenn has a four in, whew. Glenn’s player will be rolling four dice. She rolls the four dice and gets… four, one, two, two. Yikes, there aren’t any sixes. Glenn’s not going to be able to hot wire this car because he doesn’t have any tech skills. But wait! She can push! Glenn’s player adds one point of stress to his character sheet. This means all future rolls will be made with one extra dice, a stress dice. She picks up the dice and rolls them, and then rolls one extra dice to represent the stress dice. Three, six, two, one, and the stress dice is a… five! Excellent. She narrates how the first time, the car’s engine turns and sputters, sputters, sputters, and fails to roll over. Glenn was about to give up, rather than risk the noise of the engine attracting Walkers. But then he remembered how he knows, based on his knowledge gathered while working as a pizza delivery driver before the outbreak, that this road is a dead end surrounded by the tall concrete walls of a warehouse. There’s not likely to be many Walkers, kept out by the anti tresspassing architecture. It’s safe to make a bit of noise here. He tries the engine again, symbolically re rolling. And gets that six! The engine rumbles to life, the car starts, and Glenn drives away, off to rescue Rick. Huzzah! Because this is a training guide, let’s also discuss what would have happened if Glenn’s player had gotten that six and also gotten a one on the stress dice. The rule book calls this succeeding and also messing up. Yes, the car would have started. And also, something would have gone terribly wrong in a different aspect. The game master gets to choose how. For example there’s the classic attract a swarm of Walkers result, or the classic you didn’t notice a Walker was about to attack you result. You might run out of bullets, get lost, break an important item, or get injured. Or the GM can do something creative, like, Glenn didn’t know the previous occupant of the car had seen the zombie apocalypse, panicked, and hidden in their trunk, not realizing they didn’t know how to open it. Days trapped in the hot trunk had led to their demise, until they had reawoken, undead, but still trapped. Grumbling in zombie speak, the former car occupant now thumps their head softly into the roof of the trunk, shaken and stirred by Glenn’s speedy driving, as Glenn whips around curves and flies over speed bumps, off to rescue Rick, unaware he’s bringing a Walker companion along for the ride. Depending on the scene and how creative they’re feeling at the moment, the GM might ask the player to pick and describe how they messed up.   How to attack. Attacks in The Walking Dead are basically skill rolls. Your weapon will come from the list of gear. Each weapon gives you a specified number of extra dice you roll, and does a set number of damage if it hits.   Here’s an example attack. Rick is trapped. He’s surrounded by Walkers. His weapon is a Colt Python .357 Magnum revolver. You can see the revolver’s stats on page 74 of the rule book. They can target enemies a short distance away, they give the player two extra dice on their ranged attack skill roll, and they deal two damage if they hit. Rick has three in the ranged combat skill and two in the agililty attribute. Three dice from the ranged combat skill plus two dice from the agility attribute plus two dice from the revolver equals seven dice overall. The ranged combat skill says that for every extra six you get, you can increase the damage you deal by one. Rick gets two sixes! That’s g

Welcome to a special episode of Firebreathing Kittens. This is our rules discussion where we talk about how we felt about the rules we played in the past few games, for summer 2025.  We’ll discuss the ttrpgs Tales From The Loop, DC20, Sexy Battle Wizards, Tiny Pirates, Into The Odd, Fudge Lite, Dragonbane, Outgunned, Black Powder and Brimstone, and Coriolis the Third Horizon. 

Norbert, Newson, and Belle are hurled across the galaxy and must find their way home armed only with companionship, a little knowledge, and an accelerator cannon. Just Trying To Pay Rent is an actual play podcast of Coriolis The Third Horizon. 

Norbert, Newson, and Belle are hurled across the galaxy and must find their way home armed only with companionship, a little knowledge, and an accelerator cannon. Just Trying To Pay Rent is an actual play podcast of Coriolis The Third Horizon. 

How to play Coriolis The Third Horizon.  Hi everyone, this is a special how to play episode of Firebreathing Kittens podcast. I’m the game master for an upcoming session using the rules for Coriolis The Third Horizon. This episode is a summary of what I learned after reading the rule book. Hopefully this will be a handy guide for how to play for my players, will help me organize myself, and will be useful for you listeners, too, who are looking to play your own Coriolis The Third Horizon game at home.   I’ll organize this how to play guide into sections. Game category Attributes and skills Icons Initiative Action Points Armor Critical success Distances Ranged combat particulars Reactions Movement and encumbrance Partial damage Zero hit points or mind points Darkness points Building a character     Game category. Coriolis is a tabletop roleplaying game set in space. You can crew a space craft, explore the horizon by traveling to new star systems through portals, unravel secrets such as who built the portals, plot and scheme with factions over power and influence, pray to the icons, and carry out missions. But beware the Dark between the Stars, an unspeakable corrupting force in the intersection between civilization and the endless nothing of space. All of the dice used for Coriolis The Third Horizon are six sided dice, also called d6. You roll the number of dice your character has in a specific skill. If one of your dice rolls a six, you succeed at what you were trying to do. Coriolis has well described combat rules that players who enjoy Dungeons and Dragons will find interesting.   Attributes and skills. Your character has four attributes: Strength, Agility, Wits, and Empathy. Each attribute has a few skills, which are ways you can apply that attribute during gameplay. The strength attribute has the skill of melee combat. The agility attribute has the skills dexterity, infiltration, ranged combat, and piloting. The wits attribute has the skills observation, survival, data djinn, medicurgy, science, and technology. The empathy attribute has the skills manipulation, command, culture, and mystic powers.   Every point you have in an attribute or skill gives you a six sided dice, also called a d6, that you can roll. For example your observation skill is two and your wits attribute is three, so you roll five dice total when you observe. If you roll all the dice but none of them show the number six, that roll was a failure. Read the skill’s failure text out loud for your game master to interpret. If you get one six on one dice, that means you succeeded. One six is a limited success, so you will read the skill’s wording out loud to find out how that specific skill is limited. For example it might take longer than expected or the information gained might be brief. Extra sixes beyond the first one give you cool bonus effects, which vary depending on which skill you used. You can exchange each extra six one for one for a bonus effect. If you roll three sixes, that means you got a critical success. Each skill has words explaining how a critical success is awesome and how you get an extra bonus because of the critical.   There are 16 possible skills you can put points in. Half are general skills and the other half are advanced skills. Anyone can roll a general skill, but you can’t roll for an advanced skill unless you have at least one point in it. One notable advanced skill is command, which can be used to heal a stressed out ally whose mind points have been depleted to zero. You can’t roll for command to help your friend unless you have at least one point in it.   Here is an example skill roll. The airlock is closing. Sabah tries to hurl herself towards the airlock to make it through before it closes. The Game Master calls for a dexterity roll to see if Sabah gets through the airlock or not. Sabah has one point in the dexterity skill and three points in the agility attribute, so that means she rolls four dice total. If zero of the four dice show a six, she failed, and the airlock closes before she can get through it. If any of those dice show a six, she succeeds and makes it through the airlock before it closes. If one dice shows a six, that is called a limited success. For the dexterity skill, a limited success is described as, quote, “Limited success: you manage to pull off the maneuver, but just barely.” End quote. Every extra six beyond your first might let you pick a bonus effect from the dexterity skill’s page, if it has bonus effects. Some skills do, some skills don’t. Dexterity doesn’t have any bonus effects for extra sixes, but the manipulation skill, for example, does. If three of the dice show sixes, that’s a critical success. For dexterity, the rule book says, quote, “Critical Success. You succeed with flawless skill, and you achieve some unexpected, positive side effect, like helping a friend or creating an obstacle for an enemy. The GM decides the details.” End quote. This example of a skill roll shows you that the more dice you roll, the more likely you are to get a limited success, get bonus effects, and get a critical success.   Icons. If your skill roll isn’t successful, one option you have is to pray to the icons, if that’s a thing you want to do. Praying to the icons can only impact skill rolls, not combat rolls. It’s an instant prayer your character can do that doesn’t take any time out of your other actions. You simply declare that you’re praying to the icon associated with the skill you’re rolling, and you can re roll all your failed dice that weren’t sixes. The rerolled dice now might become successes. If you prepared a prayer to that specific icon beforehand earlier in the session, then praying to that icon not only lets you reroll failed dice, but you also get either a plus one modifier which means one extra dice, or if you prayed in that icon’s chapel, then a plus two modifier which mean two extra dice. Every time you pray to an icon, though, the game master gets one darkness point.   Let’s begin talking about combat rules by starting with initiative. Initiative means turn order. When combat starts, each player rolls one d6, and the game master rolls one d6 for each enemy or group of enemies. The number on the dice is the character’s initiative score, and sets the order that people act in the round of combat. People who rolled a six can take their turn before people who rolled a five, who can take their turn before people who rolled a four, who can take their turn before people who rolled a three, etc. If two people both have the same number, roll a second dice and the higher number goes first. After everyone has gotten to go once, that ends the round, and it’s time to start a new round in the same initiative order as before.   Raising and lowering initiative. There are ways to raise your initiative score. There’s a talent called Combat Veteran that lets you roll twice and keep the higher dice result. Some weapons and certain skill bonuses can also raise your initiative score. If you are performing an attack in a way your GM accepts would surprise the enemy, add two to your initiative. Sneak attacks. To perform a sneak attack on an unsuspecting target, roll the number of dice you have in your infiltration skill and the skill will tell you how to interpret your success or failure. If you wait somewhere to ambush a target and they walk up to you while you remain stationary, you get a plus two to your infiltration roll. Sneak attacks also get modified by the range you are away from your target. Roll only once, and then increase or decrease your sneak attack’s initiative based on distance using table 5.2 on page 86. Lowering initiative. You have the option of choosing to lower your initiative score if you’d like to wait and see how things unfold. For example if you rolled a six for initiative but aren’t sure if these new arrivals are friends or foes, when it comes to you, you can choose to delay until a new lower number, such as a two. Your new score remains your permanent initiative for the rest of the combat.   Action points. At the start of the round of combat, you get three new action points. You can spend your action points to do slow, normal, fast and free actions. Unspent action points do not carry over to the next round.   A slow action costs all three action points. For example, administering first aid is a slow action. Tinkering with a gadget is a slow action. Activating a mystic power is a full action, and takes all three action points and your entire turn.   Normal actions cost two action points. For example, a melee attack in close combat is a normal action. Firing a shot on a ranged weapon is a normal action. Reloading your weapon is a normal action. After a normal action, you still have one action point left for your turn.   You can spend one action point to do a fast action. Some example fast actions are sprinting a short distance, defending, taking cover, dropping to the ground to make yourself harder to hit, getting up off of the ground, drawing a weapon, picking up an item, parrying in close combat, and making an attack of opportunity in close combat. These fast actions all only cost one action point. Note that you can’t attack while you are prone on the ground. While prone, you need to spend a fast action to stand up before you can attack. Quick melee attacks with a light weapon or unarmed also count as fast actions instead of normal actions, although they get a negative two modifier to the attack roll, which means rolling with two fewer dice. Movement is also a fast action. You can move as many meters as your movement rate for one fast action, which costs one action point.   The last category of actions are free, they don’t cost any action points. Some example free actions are when you quickly shout to a comrade, and when your armor protects you against an incoming attack. Those free actions can still be done even if you don’t have any action p

Rock The Boat is an actual play podcast of the Black Powder and Brimstone system. Ships are disappearing off the Crescent Steps and there are rumors of a sea beast.  Deli and Hefty are on the job to restore the safety of the shipping route. 

Rock The Boat is an actual play podcast of the Black Powder and Brimstone system. Ships are disappearing off the Crescent Steps and there are rumors of a sea beast.  Deli and Hefty are on the job to restore the safety of the shipping route. 

Using the Outgunned TTRPG mechanics, Belle, Muriel, Arik, and Muse stop a bar fight and wind up involving themselves in a car chase, high seas heist, and fight against weresharks guarding Atlantis. What more could you want? 

Using the Outgunned TTRPG mechanics, Belle, Muriel, Arik, and Muse stop a bar fight and wind up involving themselves in a car chase, high seas heist, and fight against weresharks guarding Atlantis. What more could you want? 

Join Oliver, Alastair, and Divan as they use the Outgunned mechanics to rescue a lost boat of seamen from a watery grave and learn of secrets hidden in the deep.

Join Oliver, Alastair, and Divan as they use the Outgunned mechanics to rescue a lost boat of seamen from a watery grave and learn of secrets hidden in the deep.

How To Play Outgunned   Hi everyone, this is a special how to play episode of Firebreathing Kittens podcast. I’m the game master for an upcoming session using the rules for Outgunned. This episode is a summary of what I learned after reading the rule book. Hopefully this will be a handy guide for how to play for my players, will help me organize myself, and will be useful for you listeners, too, who are looking to play your own Outgunned game at home.   I’ll organize this how to play guide into sections. Game category Skills Distances Gear How to attack Grit Conditions Time Out Reloading Death roulette Gambling Cover Adrenaline Spotlight Rides Chases Helping allies Double difficulty Weak spots Re-rolling Extra actions Heat Building a character   Game category. Outgunned is a cinematic action role playing game. We’ve all seen movies where heroes crawl through air ducts, keep a runaway bus above a minimum speed, face off alone against a dozen goons, look to the camera with a dashing cut on their cheek, a hero who walks in slow motion towards the camera while everything behind them explodes. That’s the type of game Outgunned is, and that’s the sort of hero you will be roleplaying as. A hero is someone on a mission who lives dangerously and is one of the good guys. Central to the theme of Outgunned is the idea that the hero is racing against time, making split second decisions with great consequence, never stopping to look back. There’s no rest for heroes. Your goal is to carry out your mission, whether that means avenging your dog, finding your kidnapped loved one, clearing out a bank vault, or something else. Mechanically, you will accomplish this by rolling multiple six sided dice, also called d6, hoping to get not high or low numbers, but matching results of two of a kind, three of a kind, or even four of the same number across multiple dice. Gear such as your weapon give you more dice to roll. Feats during character creation let you reroll failed rolls when attempting certain types of actions. If the going gets tough, you can spend the limited adrenaline and spotlight resources to pull off something really cool in an an epic scene.   Skills. When you want your character to do an action that has the risk of something going wrong, you will pick the relevant skill on your character sheet. You will roll as many six sided dice, also called d6, as you have as a number in that skill and attribute. There are five attributes: brawn, nerves, smooth, focus, and crime. Each attribute lists four skills under it.   You can and usually will pair the skill with the attribute it’s listed under, but you don’t have to. You’re not required to combine the attribute that’s directly above a skill on the character sheet. For example, the know skill is under the focus attribute on the character sheet. If you are at a fancy cocktail party before an opera and are trying to make a good impression on the mayor with your sophisticated knowledge of opera, you can roll the smooth attribute with the know skill. The know skill is listed under the focus attribute, but you can use the smooth attribute because it better fits what you’re trying to do.   Success on a skill roll. In Outgunned, success is determined by whether or not you got multiple dice of the same number. It doesn’t matter how high or low the number is. A one isn’t bad and a six isn’t good. Getting two ones or two sixes is what you’re looking for.   There are four difficulty levels: basic, critical, extreme, and impossible. A basic difficulty needs two dice to have matching numbers for you to succeed. For example, two twos. If you get a basic success after rolling the dice, you are eligible to reroll your dice that weren’t part of the combination once. A critical difficulty is cleared with three of a kind. For example, three twos. An extreme difficulty needs four dice to have the same number to pass. The impossible difficulty requires five dice to show the same number to succeed. What happens if you get six dice of a kind? If that ever happens, which it probably won’t, six dice of a kind is called a Jackpot. If you roll a jackpot, you become the Game Master, who is called the Director in Outgunned, for one turn. Players can roll nine dice at most. The probability table for how likely a player is to succeed at each of the four difficulty levels for rolling two through nine dice is on page 67.   Here is an example of a roll at basic difficulty, where two dice need to be the same number for you to succeed. Let’s say you are sneaking through an air duct quietly, infiltrating the compound stealthily, when suddenly a spider crawls on you. You try to stay as still as possible, because if you react loudly, your enemy could hear you. Roll as many dice as you have in nerves and cool. The Director says this is pretty basic. With two dice in nerves and one in cool, your odds of getting two dice to be the same number when rolling three dice is 45%. So there’s about a fifty fifty chance the spider crawls on you and you scream loudly, revealing your location, and a fifty fifty chance that you stay quiet.   Here’s an example of a roll at critical difficulty, where you need three dice to show the same number to succeed. It’s a time out and your friend’s arm is hurt. You offer to bandage them up. This requires the focus attribute and heal skill. You have a three in both focus and heal, and roll six dice. If three dice show the same number, you successfully healed your friend. On 6 dice, you have a 37% chance to succeed at a critical difficulty roll. With a reroll you would have a 75% success rate.   If you’re not certain what attribute and skill to roll, ask yourself how what you’re trying to do could fail. What is at stake here and what are the consequences of failure? Here is an example. You are driving at top speed towards a bridge when you see that the bridge is rising and a gap is opening over the water. What could go wrong? If you chicken out and stomp on the brakes at the last minute, your car might not have enough speed to clear the gap. Or if you drive poorly, you might launch the car into the river instead of onto the second half of the bridge. Because your nerves and driving skill are what could make the situation fail, roll nerves as your attribute and drive as your skill.   Distances. Outgunned’s distance ranges are melee, close, medium, and long. Melee range is within two meters. Close range is between two and ten meters. You can run ten meters with a quick action. Medium range is ten to fifty meters. You can use a full action to run medium range. Most weapons can hit medium range targets. Long range is fifty to three hundred meters. Out of range is anything beyond three hundred meters, which usually requires a special weapon like a sniper rifle to reach.   Gear. In Outgunned, your character will have at least one weapon from the gear table, something like a pistol, revolver, assault rifle, bow and arrows, or even rocket launchers. Every gear weapon has stats that explain how many dice you get to add to your roll when using that weapon at different distance ranges. A +1 at close range means you get one extra dice when you’re aiming at a target in close range. A minus two at medium range means you roll with two fewer dice when you’re aiming at a target in medium range. An X at long range means the weapon cannot be used against long range targets. If there’s a G next to the range, the G stands for gambling, and means the weapon could hurt you and your allies as well as your enemies. Use the gambling mechanic when attacking with that weapon. About melee weapons. The rule book says that melee weapons rarely make a difference, which makes sense when you imagine a baseball bat versus a rocket launcher. So there aren’t any stats in the gear table for melee weapons. During melee attacks, you simply roll your brawn attribute and fight skill.   How to attack. Attacking uses your skills, just like the other rolls. For example if your spy is firing their silenced pistol at a target at medium range, you would roll as many dice as you have in the focus attribute, for this spy that’s two in focus, plus as many dice as the spy has in the shoot skill, for this spy that’s two in shoot, plus the number of dice you get from your gear for that range. The silenced pistol gets zero extra dice at medium range, but it doesn’t alert the enemy or reveal your position. That’s two plus two plus zero equals four dice total. How many dice you need to see match depends on the enemy’s difficulty. This target has a basic difficulty, which means two of the dice you roll have to be the same number to succeed. Rolling four dice gives you a 72% chance of succeeding. If you fail to get two dice that are the same number, that’s the end of your action. If you succeed and get one pair, the enemy loses one grit. If you succeed twice, like if you get two sets of matching dice, then the enemy would lose two grit. Grit in Outgunned is similar to hit points in other games.   Here’s a second example attack. The villain is escaping in an armored limo. The ride has a critical difficulty setting, meaning three dice have to match to succeed against it. It has no armor left, and is spewing black smoke and screeching as it peels away. If you make this shot, the tire will burst, the wheel won’t be able to turn anymore, and the limo might even blow up. You have one chance to fire your weapon at long range to take out the tire before they get too far away to be hit. You can attack by rolling as many dice as you have in the nerves attribute, plus the dice in your shoot skill, plus the dice in your weapon at long range. A character who has three dice in nerves and two dice in shoot would roll five dice. If you’re wielding a rifle, you don’t get any extra dice at long range, but unlike people who have a shotgun or a throwing knife that have an X at long range, your rifle is allowed to

Juneau and Muriel help unravel Newson’s past while fighting off deadly plants. Will Muriel’s elemental magic kill them all? Bodies Botany and Bleeding Hearts is an actual play podcast of Dragonbane.

Juneau and Muriel help unravel Newson’s past while fighting off deadly plants. Will Muriel’s elemental magic kill them all? Bodies Botany and Bleeding Hearts is an actual play podcast of Dragonbane.

How to play Dragonbane   Hi everyone, this is a special how to play episode of Firebreathing Kittens podcast. I’m the game master for an upcoming session using the rules for Dragonbane. This episode is a summary of what I learned after reading the rule book. Hopefully this will be a handy guide for how to play for my players, will help me organize myself, and will be useful for you listeners, too, who are looking to play your own Dragonbane game at home.   I’ll organize this how to play guide into sections. Game category Attributes Skills Pushing Conditions Dragons, demons Boons, banes Initiative How to attack Zero hit points Sneak attacks Actions and reactions Armor Weapon durability Movement Terrain Encumbrance Resting Magic Building a character     Game category. Dragons, demons, and player characters of fantasy races. Magic, mystery, and adventure. Dragonbane is a tabletop roleplaying game designed in the mirth and mayhem roleplaying style. Mirth and mayhem means there is room for laughter and a pinch of silliness, and also brutal challenges for adventurers to face in combat. Dragonbane is a translated and updated version of the Scandinavian game Drakar och Demoner, first released in 1982. Its main author Tomas Harenstam intended Dragonbane to facilitate fast and furious play, with less prep time than other d20 based ttrpg systems. Players embody characters whose professions give them specialized skills and weapons, to roll four, six, eight, ten, twelve, or twenty sided dice to fight against enemies such as harpies, minotaurs, giants, manticores, griffins, wights, trolls, and of course, dragons.   Attributes. Your character has six attributes: strength, constitution, agility, intelligence, willpower, and charisma. The character’s ability to do everything from wield their weapon, to sneak undetected, to barter with a shop keeper, to how many hit points they have, is derived from their numbers in these core attributes. You’ll determine those attribute numbers by rolling dice during character creation, and I’ve gone through an example of character creation at the end of this how to play guide to show you how attribute points are rolled. But basically, the higher the number, the better your character is at that thing. Here’s an example of the attribute number ranges. A five in the strength attribute would mean you’re not great at lifting or carrying things. Your inventory would be scant, and you’d get over encumbered easily. A ten is pretty average for an attribute. A sixteen in the strength attribute means you’re really strong, and are way better than a regular person at brawling and axes.   Skills. Every Dragonbane character has a number in thirty skills. Some example skills are the agility attribute based acrobatics skill, the charisma attribute based persuasion skill, the intelligence attribute based languages skill, and the strength based brawling skill. To see if you succeed when doing one of your skills, roll a twenty sided dice, also called a d20. If the dice result is the same as or lower than your skill level, you succeed at what you were trying to do. If the dice shows a number higher than your skill number, then you failed.   Here is an example skill roll. You want to spot something hidden. Your spot hidden skill is a 14. You roll a d20. If the dice is a 14, 13, 12, 11, etc, down to 2, you see the hidden thing, yay. If your dice is a 15, 16, 17, 18, or 19, you don’t see the hidden thing. The higher your skill number, the more likely you are to succeed. If you fail, that might impact the story. Not only do you not see the hidden thing, which could allow an enemy to deal extra ambush damage to you, but also it might cost you more time, risk, or gold to achieve your goals. Failure never stops the story completely, but it is expensive to some of your consumables.   Pushing. Failing a skill roll doesn’t have to be the end. You could choose to push, which means gaining a condition in exchange for rerolling the dice. To push, first explain how the condition you’re choosing to gain results from the action you’re performing. You can’t choose a condition you already have. And then roll your dice again. Whether or not your new roll succeeds, you have gained that condition. A small note, if the first dice was a twenty, a demon roll, it can’t be pushed.   Conditions. There are six conditions, one for each attribute. The conditions are: exhausted for strength, sickly for constitution, dazed for agility, angry for intelligence, scared for willpower, and disheartened for charisma. For as long as you have the condition for that attribute, roll it with bane, meaning roll two dice and keeping the higher of the two numbers, whichever is worse. You can recover from conditions by resting.   Here is an example of pushing to gain a condition. You went fishing as part of a diplomatic delegation with a prince. The fishing roll was an 11, and you have a 10 in fishing, it’s a failure of a fishing trip. The prince is getting pretty frustrated because you and him haven’t caught anything and it has been hours. You’ve been out since the crack of dawn, and it’s getting hot, a trickle of sweat runs down your skin, and the flying bugs are swarming, and it’s really unpleasant here on the water with no shade. If you two could just catch one thing, you could go back in to shore and the fishing trip would have been a diplomatic success. The happy prince would be more likely to continue the marriage negotiations with you, lots of good stuff, all hinging on this one rod and reel. So you decide it’s worth it to push. You name a condition, sickly. You explain how this condition results from the action you’re trying to do. The action is that you are going to bait the hook not only with those fancy designer reusable lures, but you’re going to actually bait the hook with a live bait. It’s gross and you feel a bit sickly, but the live bait gives you another chance. You roll again. A nine! Success! You and the prince finally catch something, turning the fishing trip into a good day. The giant pike you pull on board is an excellent platter on the royal dinner table tonight, facilitating smooth communication between the political parties. However, if someone sneaks poison into your portion during the dinner tonight and you have to roll a constitution attribute check to see if the poison hurts you or not, the sickly condition bane means that you would have to roll two dice and keep the worse, higher number.   Rolling a dragon. When you roll a 1 on the d20 dice, that’s called rolling a dragon. It’s good. You want that to happen. In combat, rolling a dragon is a critical hit. You can choose from one of three combat effects for rolling a dragon: doubling the number of dice rolled for your weapon’s damage dice, or immediately performing a second attack, or if you’re doing piercing type damage you could choose to ignore armor on this attack. Outside of combat, rolling a dragon is also great. It can be interpreted a number of ways by your game master. One example is that if you were making a perfomance check, you impress not only the target but also everyone around you. A crowd gathers because of how cool you are. A second example is that if you were doing a seamanship skill check to navigate the ocean, not only do you succeed and the reach the port successfully, you also shaved off twenty percent of your travel time, arriving early. An action can be performed faster than usual when you roll a dragon.   Rolling a demon. When you roll a 20 on the d20 dice, that’s called rolling a demon. A demon roll can’t be pushed. Outside of combat, like on a skill roll, rolling a demon means the roll not only fails, it also has an additional negative effect such as you damage yourself or someone else or an item, or you make a fool of yourself in front of everyone, or you make a lot of noise. In melee combat, rolling a demon means you miss your target, you cannot push the roll, and you roll a d6 to see which of the negative effects on page 46 happen. The d6 table is: one drop your weapon. Picking up a dropped weapon costs an action. Two the enemy gets a free attack that can’t be parried or dodged. Three your weapon gets stuck and requires a strength roll that takes an action to pull the sword from the stone. Four you accidentally threw your weapon, and have to go move to it and then spend an action to pick it up. Five the weapon gets damaged and attacks with banes until it’s repaired. Six you hit yourself with your weapon. That was the melee combat effect of rolling a demon. The ranged combat effect of rolling a demon is on page 49 and is similar, with appropriate differences such as a ranged demon roll can make you run out of ammunition, and have to get more before you can use your ranged weapon again. For magic users, rolling a demon means you will roll a d20 on the magical mishaps table on page 60 to see if your character is now dazed, or suffering a strange magical effect such as vomiting frogs every time you lie, or that any gold or silver you touch now withers into dust. Rolling a demon when casting magic can result in summoning a literal demon.   Boons and banes. A boon means that you roll two dice and keep the lower one. That’s a good thing. A bane means that you roll two dice and keep the higher number. That’s a bad thing. For example if you have a boon on your myths and legends roll, instead of rolling one dice and trying to get equal to or lower than your 10 skill number, you get to roll two dice. If either dice is a 10 or a 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, etc, you succeeded and remember that myth or legend you were trying to recall.   Initiative means turn order. At the start of a round of combat, everyone draws from a deck of cards whose cards are numbered one to ten. Number 1 can go first, number two can go second, etc until number 10 goes last. A round of combat, where everyone gets a chance to perform an action, lasts for ten se

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