Grim Tales in Play?

[Desdichado]

Absolutely. And damme I wish I'd had this book when I started Barsoom, ...

Absolutely. I had just recently started a campaign with my own chimeric set of d20 rules to emulate the type of Conan/HPL/WFRP game the Grim Tales was perfectly suited to do already. Rather than convert midstream, I'm left cursing my luck on my poor timing.

 

[S'mon]

My first impression of Grim Tales was that it was mostly a reprint of d20 Modern, only with cooler art. Since I don't own d20 Modern (although I've looked over a copy, and the SRD) that's not necessarily a bad thing, but I was expecting much much more fluff on designing 'pulp' settings, and less crunch - a lot of the crunch is either d20 Modern SRD reprint or looks very complex (the CR-assessment bit, say). I'd have expected a 'pulp' game to be _simpler_ than standard d20, not more complex.

Hmm. I made a bit of a mistake ordering an "as new" copy - "as new" apparently means "the glue holding the pages to the spine has come away but the book has not yet fallen apart, being still precariously attached to the covers but likely to fall apart when handled..." *sigh*

That's a separate issue though. The art is nicely flavourable. The very brief appendix on 3 sample pulp settings looks ok.

A little-changed version of d20 Modern though seems a not particularly great idea for a pulp game; and if I wanted d20 Modern I'd have bought it to start with. At least it doesn't have d20 Modern's cringeworthy "Bugbear Systems Anyalysts" 'urban arcana' stuff, though.

I feel I may be missing something. Say I wanted to run a 'Buck Rogers' type pulp-fantasy-sf game - one of the campaigns I've been considering. How does Grim Tales help me to do this?

 

[S'mon]

One thought I've had is that if I just remove the word "Hero" from all the class names, that immediately eliminates a big chunk of WoTC-cheesiness. 'Fast' 'Tough' etc are fine as character class names. "Hero" is not a character class in my book - "heroes" are made by deeds, not stats.

 

[JoeGKushner]

My first impression of Grim Tales was that it was mostly a reprint of d20 Modern, only with cooler art. Since I don't own d20 Modern (although I've looked over a copy, and the SRD) that's not necessarily a bad thing, but I was expecting much much more fluff on designing 'pulp' settings, and less crunch - a lot of the crunch is either d20 Modern SRD reprint or looks very complex (the CR-assessment bit, say). I'd have expected a 'pulp' game to be _simpler_ than standard d20, not more complex.

I feel I may be missing something. Say I wanted to run a 'Buck Rogers' type pulp-fantasy-sf game - one of the campaigns I've been considering. How does Grim Tales help me to do this?

And you've read over the whole book? I thought my initial impression was slanted because most of the character creation material is very similiar to d20 modern and that the unique elements of the book would come out as I continued reading. (Damn real life for sidetracking me!)

 

[jonrog1]

My first impression of Grim Tales was that it was mostly a reprint of d20 Modern, only with cooler art. Since I don't own d20 Modern (although I've looked over a copy, and the SRD) that's not necessarily a bad thing, but I was expecting much much more fluff on designing 'pulp' settings, and less crunch - a lot of the crunch is either d20 Modern SRD reprint or looks very complex (the CR-assessment bit, say). I'd have expected a 'pulp' game to be _simpler_ than standard d20, not more complex.

I feel I may be missing something. Say I wanted to run a 'Buck Rogers' type pulp-fantasy-sf game - one of the campaigns I've been considering. How does Grim Tales help me to do this?

Well, not to run to GT's defense, but only a casual look at D20 Modern is no basis for comparison. As -- I like to think -- one of the more aggressively rule-bending-for-pulpiness DM's around here, here's a brief summary of what's different:

Just better, cleaner writing than in any WOTC product in the last three years. I mean, seriously, I love WOTC, but that stuff's impenetrable. GT is no my rule system of choice just for clarity's sake. Probably more important to me than other people, but ...

Better talent trees and better designed feats, including ones relating to metamagic and item creation, but also including vehicle pursuit and combat and specific firearms fun.

A damn fine vehicle combat system. My Scarred Lands party is about to get a faceful of this -- it's designed to work with any generic vehcle stat concept.

The best EL system ever. Ever. And CR's broken down so you can individually tweak monsters and ALSO add abilities freely as cyber or mutations with no need for level adjustment. That CR assessment system is something you can skip altogether, by the way, if you want.

Better armor rules, good action point variants (and many variants to all rules, btw), none of the unpleasant nonlethal combat goofiness.

The best low magic system. Ever.

The basic classes are expanded in ways which allow you to duplicate -- with talents -- most any character class from fantasy RPG.

Now, admittedly, this is more of a toolbox than a pulp-specific setting. It's a tool for BUILDING something in the Pulp tone.

How to do Buck Rogers type pulp SF with GT? Well, you can build any role I can think of in a pulp setting with the basic heroes, and adjust any race you want to build with the CR system. Dogfighting in your spacecraft can be achieved easily with the vehicle rules. Firearms (ray guns) are built into the rules much more smoothly ... to be honest, I'm not sure what you were looking for. I believe Wolf was looking at "pulp" as a play tone, not a play style, by which I mean gritty heroism relying on skills, not magic.

As far as a "style" book for building pulp campaigns ... hmmm .... maybe I have my first after-retirement project lined up.

 

[S'mon]

OK... so Grim Tales is primarily **PC-building** "crunch", d20 Modern only tweaked and maybe better, plus some self contained systems aimed at the GM - vehicle rules, CR rules etc - which could be used in any d20 game, in fact they look a lot like d20 magazine articles.

Toolbox... ok, it's a toolbox. Lots of potentially handy bits & pieces. Leaving aside the PC-generation stuff, it contains a variety of tools, such as the low-magic system, which again are self-contained systems that can be 'plucked' for any d20 game.

What it's not: it's not a guide to running pulp action-adventure. From my read-through so far, it contains zero GMing advice on building a pulp setting.

The tough thing is thinking what I could actually use it for. To run low-fantasy pulp I'd likely use the Conan RPG I paid for. To run post-apocalypse I'd use Redline, which I paid for, but maybe bits from GT might be useful. Hmm...

I have the old GDW d6-based game "Space: 1889". Perhaps Grim Tales would be suitable for a d20 Space 1889 game?

 

[S'mon]

OK... so Grim Tales is primarily **PC-building** "crunch", d20 Modern only tweaked and maybe better, plus some self contained systems aimed at the GM - vehicle rules, CR rules etc - which could be used in any d20 game, in fact they look a lot like d20 magazine articles.

Toolbox... ok, it's a toolbox. Lots of potentially handy bits & pieces. Leaving aside the PC-generation stuff, it contains a variety of tools, such as the low-magic system, which again are self-contained systems that can be 'plucked' for any d20 game.

What it's not: it's not a guide to running pulp action-adventure. From my read-through so far, it contains zero GMing advice on building a pulp setting.

The tough thing is thinking what I could actually use it for. To run low-fantasy pulp I'd likely use the Conan RPG I paid for. To run post-apocalypse I'd use Redline, which I paid for, but maybe bits from GT might be useful. Hmm...

I have the old GDW d6-based game "Space: 1889". Perhaps Grim Tales would be suitable for a d20 Space 1889 game?

 

[BryonD]

If you are looking to own a custom rule-set for each specific genre, then you may not be the target audience for GT.

I don't own Conan or Redline and I am very happy with the toolbox I have that can assist me in playing low magic fantasy or post-apocolyptic or old west or 1920s Mob/PI or ... or ... or..... All without spending more cash or teaching my players how the rules changed this time.

I also think you are not judging GT accurately by tying it to D20Modern. Yes, the 6 core classes are adapted from D20Modern. But there is nothing at all implicitly modern about those classes. Modern needed a class system that was more flexible than the "job" based D&D class system. GT recognizes that the flexible aptitude based classes can be applied to any genre. And it goes further even than that. For example, the concept of "class skills" are gone. You get core skill and non-core skills that are tied to the character concept, not the classes. There are tons of little things throughout the book that may frequently not be obvious on casual inspection.

Anyway, not trying to convince you that you are wrong. But I do think you may have missed some details. And I get the idea that this may be because you aren't seeing what you WERE looking for.

GT offers three core elements (as I personally see it):
1) A flexible D20 engine ready to handle most any genre
2) An assumption that the characters abilities make them heroic, not their gear AND
3) Low to no magic

If there is something specific you are looking for outside of that, you may or may not find it, and therefore you may be dissappointed.

But the book does an extremely excellent job of doing those three things, in my opinion.

EDIT: oops, left out an important word...

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

Both jonrog and Bryon gave what I consider the essential "defense" of the work.

As far as your copy goes, if you want to send me your broken-spined book, I will be happy to replace it for you with a new copy.

You can reach me at support@badaxegames.com to work out the details.


Wulf

 

[DanMcS]

As far as your copy goes, if you want to send me your broken-spined book, I will be happy to replace it for you with a new copy.

See? That's service.

You could probably just have him tear out the title page and mail it to you, along with 40% of the original price...

And, hey, Jon, straight from your pen to my wallet, you write that style book right quick.