Into the Fray

Greetings, all. This is my new Volcano Base. Well new, because that's what I also called my page at livejournal. I mostly used that account to write about OGL/GSL related stuff. Now, much like that issue, my lj account seems like so much water under the bridge. But I noticed a few people are putting some interesting stuff about gaming et cetera up on blogger, and I thought I would join the "fray".

So where to begin? How about keeping it simple and talking about my gaming life? I run ("GM") a variety of role-playing games (RPGs) with a group of friends locally, and also play with an extended group of friends at various gamedays and conventions.

My latest RPG campaign, which I recently started, is a Fantasy Craft game set in Green Ronin's Freeport setting. I'll probably throw a few details of this little venture up on the Secret Volcano Base.

Fantasy Craft is role playing game by Crafty Games. It is a d20 based engine, but one a few generations removed from Dungeons & Dragons Third Edition. Though there have been quite a few games in this mold, Fantasy Craft is the one that intrigues and excites me the most, for reasons I will probably discuss in future posts.

Freeport is a fantasy RPG setting by Green Ronin. The settings focal point is the city of Freeport, a city in a fantasy world with a long history of being a pirate haven, and riddled by supernatural cults. The original setting (and the adventure that introduced the city) were for "D20 Fantasy" (aka, Dungeons & Dragons 3e product by third party publisher).

However, Green Ronin has put out an updated version of their setting first in a mechanics-free format, though supplements providing NPC stats and other mechanical details for some game systems: D20* (wink wink D&D 3e), True20, Castles & Crusades, and Savage Worlds. Of course, as I am not using any of those, I'll have to come up with my own mechanical details. Due to various reasons, that's not as horrible as it might sound. But that is something I'll post more about soon.

* - Actually, after the old D20 logo and D20 System Trademark License was sunset, a variety of third party D20 publishers selling through RPGnow pulled their products down, others removed the D20 logo and reposted their product sans logo. In Green Ronin's case, they re-branded all their D20 products on RPGnow as "3rd Era" proucts. So if you are looking for the D20 Freeport Companion on RPGnow/DTRPG, you'll find it under the guise of the 3rd Era Freeport Companion. (You can still find a print version of the D20 Freeport Companion at Amazon, but they only seem to have a few copies left at the time of this writing.)