Holiday Interlude 2017 #1 - Turkeysaurus Rex

Image Source: http://ninaslevy.blogspot.com/2014/11/turkeysaurus-rex-with-pilgrim-for.html

Long time readers will be familiar with my crazier than usual (at least for me) holiday interludes. Usually they are posted during the week between Christmas and New Years but given the current cadence of posting and the fact that the last issue of Kamandi releases the Wednesday after Christmas I'm going to be tossing the Interludes out earlier. Also this affords me the chance to expand a bit outside of Christmas stuff...

Holiday Interludes

• 2014
• #1 - Gingerbread Dragon
• #2 - Gingerbread Ninjas
• 2015 
• #1 - Octoclaus the Santapus
• #2 - The Ginger-mech Man
• #3 - Krampus
• 2016
• #1 - Frostborn Snowmen
• #2 - Reindeer

Name: Turkeysaurus Rex

Level: 8 (TN 24)

Health: 30 • Armor: 1

Damage: 10 with its foot claws, 6 with its serrated beak

Movement: Short

Modifications: Defense as level 6 due to massive size.

Combat: Turkeysaurus Rex attacks with both its serrated beak and its wicked foot claws each round, usually splitting the attack on different targets when outnumbered.

Interaction: Run. The Turkeysaurus Rex is an irritable apex predator that just happens to taste delicious when roasted and served with various veggies and gravy. Engage them at your own risk, or the risk of your dinner making you their dinner.

Use: Recently the outward expansion of the various Christmas holiday forces have begun to impinge upon the lands of Thanksgivingsville. The natural habitat of the Turkeysaurus Rex is now being threatened and as an apex predator the Turkeysaurus Rex has begun to expand its hunting grounds. As it turns out the Turkeysaurus Rex finds Gingerbread Ninjas especially delicious...

Loot: Eating a meal of the freshly roasted flesh of a Turkeysaurus Rex will force the eater into a 10 hour rest that will recover all pool points. Leftovers of the flesh are always a recovery cypher for a random pool of level 1d6+1 that restores its level in points.

GM Intrusion: The Turkeysaurus Rex caws loudly and summons 1 or more additional Turkeysaurus Rexes. 

Nuts & Bolts #141 - Review: Kamandi Challenge #10

Kamandi Challenge #11 is out today! So let's discuss #10. Spoilers henceforth.

Prior issue reviews:

• Review: Kamandi Challenge #1
• Review: Kamandi Challenge #2
• Review: Kamandi Challenge #3
• Review: Kamandi Challenge #4
• Review: Kamandi Challenge #5
• Review: Kamandi Challenge #6
• Review: Kamandi Challenge #7
• Review: Kamandi Challenge #8
• Review: Kamandi Challenge #9

Vitals

Published By: DC Comics • 31 pages • $3.99 • full color • Art: Shane Davis • Words: Greg Pak

What's In It?

Spoilers ahead folks last warning!




OK, where were we? Oh, right, the room and Kamandi, now alone, when the robot comes for him. It turns out that these robots are cataloging and stuffing the mutant animals of the world. Kamandi grabs a weapon and escapes, stealing a jet ski from another robot and fleeing over the open ocean. Of course this is our opportune moment to get SHARKS. WITH. UZIS! Yes, that's right a gang of punk/biker inspired sharks with uzi's and assault weapons saves Kamandi from the robots giving chase.

Kamandi then washes up on shore of an island with a massive technological tower deep in the jungle. The sharks, unable to go on land, request that Kamandi go there and kill the person who controls the robots trying to wipe out all the animals. With the help of some cat allies Kamandi makes his way to the tower, determined to stop the killing. There he is cornered by still more robots (who are surprisingly weak against gunfire) before he is saved by his battle-armor wearing mother. They quickly catch up and we learn that Kamandi was left in the Command D bunker while his mother and father fought in the "Android Wars."

When Kamandi suggests they hurry before the base's commander finds them we get the reveal and turn that will (I hope) drive the last two issues of the series. Kamadi's mother is the commander, and she fully intended to wipe out the mutant animals from the Earth.

I liked this issue. I didn't love it. It wasn't perfect, but it was good, and I enjoyed the reveal, even though it was hardly a shock considering the battle armor Kamandi's mother was wearing, all jacked up elbow and shoulder plates adorned with spikes. As advancement to the story of the series this is the turning point episode (oh god I hope) where we transition from an episodic romp around the globe in search of Kamandi's parents and the series will (I assume) finish with a pair of more serial stories wherein the very fate of the Earth is at stake.

The art in this issue is good. The action is clear and easy to follow, and the designs are interesting. It's not especially amazing, but it's quite good. The story is a bit drawn out, there's a couple of combats with robots that while they convey how well guarded this facility is. Unfortunately they also draw out the actual story advancement, almost padding out the issue in a not so great way. Overall this is certainly not the high water mark of the last issue, or even some of the first few issues earlier this year, but is is good, and it does introduce the beginning of the end and set the stakes for the last two issues.

Rating: 80% - The end is nigh, and at last we are seeing just what the denouement of this series will look like..

Nuts & Bolts #140 - Hacking the Cypher System - Re-rolls Royce

So it's time to talk about re-rolls. The most common (I am guessing) use of Experience Points in Cypher System games. I have a secret, a dark one: Sometimes I really hate re-rolls.

Failure is interesting, or it can be. It's not always interesting, which is why re-rolls are a good thing, but sometimes failure is interesting, and when a re-roll does away with that it's a little sad. Likewise re-rolls can rob a GM of intrusions. Players like this because they don't always see GM Intrusions as good things. GMs don't always mind, but sometimes a great idea slips away due to a re-roll (or gets implemented as a paid Intrusion).

So I've started toying with the idea of changing not the re-rolls (they do more good than evil in my opinion), but the underlying XP. At GenCon I got to try it out for the first time. I used beads instead of XP Cards. There were black beads, white beads, and glow in the dark beads. They were skull shaped, and I used them in my After the Bomb homage game. I had a small black bag that I carried the XP Skulls in and had players blind draw from. Unlike regular XP the different beads had slightly different effects.

• The skull white beads worked just like normal XP, they were there to provide a baseline.
• The black skulls were "burnt" XP, you could use them normally, but regardless of the final roll the GM (me) got to invoke GM Intrusion, these were a kind of risk/reward item. 
• The glow in the dark skulls were "radioactive" XP, and they were awesome. These XP re-rolled the dice just like normal, but regardless of the total the player got a Major Effect as though they had rolled a Natural 20. These helped balance the black skulls.

Mechanically the players had just as many XP for re-rolls as they would in a normal game, but when spending for re-rolls there were options based one what kind of XP the players had in hand. We only got to play for a short while, and I haven't yet tried it again (gaming has been spotty since the summer), but I really liked how it worked, and the players seemed to as well. It's the same, but just a little different and offers both risk and reward to players. 

As GM you can even play around with how many beads of each you include. Maybe you do 6 white, 2 black, and 2 glow. Or maybe you do 3/3/3 in equal ratio. You could even do something like 6 white, 1 black, 3 glow or whatever distribution you wanted. Go heavy on Major Effects, or heavy on GM Intrusions. You can even change the distribution between game sessions to help inform the play of the next session. The sky's the limit, and the options are yours to use or not.