Saurondor

Ok, so I'm working on some Aztec themed maps and I'm building a collection of icons from the Fejérváry-Mayer  codex. Most of the images are 200x200px and some, such as the Aztec world are ar...

http://saurondor.blogspot.com/2017/12/fejervary-mayer-codex-icons.html

Wow! That's quite a term there on the post title, LOL! If you're a player from the 80's like myself you certainly remember seeing or at least listening the song "Take on me" by a-ha and of co...

http://saurondor.blogspot.com/2017/10/are-we-step-away-from-3d-augmented.html

Last post I introduced the Black Swan System and it's resolution mechanics based on a skill system that maps to a particular 3d8 die roll. Instead of adding more dice, the skill mechanism allow...

http://saurondor.blogspot.com/2017/06/character-progression-in-black-swan.html

The Black Swan System is the roleplay game engine I developed for Itza (a prehispanic roleplaying game) that picks up from the red-blue dice mechanics used in Saints and Sinners. It builds on t...

http://saurondor.blogspot.com/2017/06/black-swan-system.html

The pochtecatl is a strong person indeed, a long distance trader, a wealthy man, sometimes a warrior, sometimes a priest and at other times a spy. He will travel the vast expanse of Itza, going ...

http://saurondor.blogspot.com/2017/01/trade-commerce-and-merchant-guild-in.html

As you probably guessed by now the currency is cacao beans. So yes, your character pays for things with chocolate. Cacao beans is the common everyday currency with which things are paid for ...

http://saurondor.blogspot.com/2017/01/money-and-trade-in-itza.html

So I finally got around to watching Rogue One and if you haven't seen it you might as well stop reading here. Take this as a spoiler alert. Ok, so you're still here. Good. First thing I ha...

http://saurondor.blogspot.com/2016/12/roleplaying-rogue-one.html

The wayob is the animal spirit inside every character in Itza. As a character you are born with it, and you can learn to tap into the immense power it can grant you, but such power also poses gr...

http://saurondor.blogspot.com/2016/09/wayobs.html

The hardest part of writing Itza was boiling the player's handbook into two sheets of paper. That's it! Four pages going from 1 to 4. Get your stats, write your character out, understand the ...

http://saurondor.blogspot.com/2016/08/youre-on-need-to-know-basis.html

As a modern warfare game you can imagine firearms and damage take a center roll. Yet surprisingly damage is something that's rolled less often than you might expect. You and your opponents will...

http://saurondor.blogspot.com/2015/11/firearms-cover-and-damage-in-weapons.html

Plastics, polymers, and ceramics. These are all the future materials. What are all these metal borgs, androids and air-filter-for-eye-wear things on my sci-fi episodes? Ridley Scott nailed it...

http://saurondor.blogspot.com/2015/11/metal-is-so-uh-un-cyber-punkish.html

Game storylines are quite complex things. You start at some point in the story and begin to move forward. One action takes you to the next and options seem to unfold in front of you. You take o...

http://saurondor.blogspot.com/2015/11/storyline-distances.html

Christopher Columbus never made it across the Atlantic. He drowned at sea or fell prey to mutiny which in turn led his ships astray. Whatever his fate, he never made it back to Spain. Europe nev...

http://saurondor.blogspot.com/2015/11/huitzi-3021.html

Huitzilopochtli, patron god of war to the Aztecs (Mexicas), was born fully armored and armed from the womb of Coatlicue, herself the goddess of fertility, rebirth and goddess of life and death...

http://saurondor.blogspot.com/2015/11/huitzilopochtli-3021-ad.html

Pyramids in Mesoamerica are not solid rock structures meant to be climbed for the purpose of worshiping some god. They're living structures that grew over centuries and have layers upon layer...

http://saurondor.blogspot.com/2015/10/seven-temples-of-underworld.html

Today is back to the future day. What did we get in the last 30 years? Well we certainly did not get the hover board which was the one key item I really wanted to have today! The shoes, well tha...

http://saurondor.blogspot.com/2015/10/got-and-got-not-in-past-30-years.html

"That can't be; that's inside the room.", a epic quote from aliens that reminds us that there can always be something behind the wall or above the roof that we forget to account for when we dung...

http://saurondor.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-dungeon-within-dungeon.html

Let's defuse a nuke! Succeed and you're a hero and the story goes on, fail and you TPK and cherry top the pie by royally fucking up a whole city. Roll! Tension, thrill, anticipation, dice and...

http://saurondor.blogspot.com/2015/10/clear-and-present-danger.html

Why do exploding dice seldom explode on low values? We're all used to d10s exploding on 10 and so forth. Question is, why don't they explode on 1s? More so, what's the value of them exploding o...

http://saurondor.blogspot.com/2015/10/exploding-dice-on-low-values.html

Some game have die rolls that represent really terrible or really awesome outcomes, you know, the dreaded 1 or desired 20. Usually these values are at the extreme end of the game's dice distrib...

http://saurondor.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-value-of-unexpected.html

High above the mountain ridges of Itza stands the fabled cloud city of Coatmixtitlan, the city of the snake clouds or to be more precise the matlapallicoatl or winged snakes, known to us as dra...

http://saurondor.blogspot.com/2015/09/coatmixtitlan-cloud-city.html

I've come about a great deal of conversations involving fudging dice, how bad it is and the process of limiting it by mechanical means. For example game rules that explicitly limit fudging by ro...

http://saurondor.blogspot.com/2015/08/fudging-dice-in-times-of-industrialized.html

We know monsters such as the T-800 terminator unit are made of hyperalloy . The hyperalloy is said to be "a durable metallic alloy of unknown composition", but lets face it metal is a rare elem...

http://saurondor.blogspot.com/2015/08/metal-robots-make-no-sense.html

WotC needs to sell D&D toys. As part of Hasbro WotC can and should make D&D action figures. Take a look at the image on the right, just a fraction of my Star Wars black series collection. All i...

http://saurondor.blogspot.com/2015/02/d-needs-action-figures.html

I let my steampunkish spirit guide my bike ride this weekend. Took my steel horse (or should I say aluminium horse) for a ride down the tracks from Texcoco to Teotihuacan.  I ride by Tula...

http://saurondor.blogspot.com/2015/02/on-steel-horse-i-ride.html