Modos RPG | Adventure Log | Obsidian Portal

Welcome to your Adventure Log!

A blog for your campaign

Every campaign gets an Adventure Log, a blog for your adventures!

While the wiki is great for organizing your campaign world, it’s not the best way to chronicle your adventures. For that purpose, you need a blog!

The Adventure Log will allow you to chronologically order the happenings of your campaign. It serves as the record of what has passed. After each gaming session, come to the Adventure Log and write up what happened. In time, it will grow into a great story!

Best of all, each Adventure Log post is also a wiki page! You can link back and forth with your wiki, characters, and so forth as you wish.

One final tip: Before you jump in and try to write up the entire history for your campaign, take a deep breath. Rather than spending days writing and getting exhausted, I would suggest writing a quick “Story So Far” with only a summary. Then, get back to gaming! Grow your Adventure Log over time, rather than all at once.

View

FEB/2013

It's a buoy!

Weighing in at 1.07 MB, the free rulebook is afloat and kicking. You can find links to it in the Wiki section.

But the REALLY exciting part is that there’s a fan-creation Skyrim rules module coming hot on its heels…

View

NOV/2017

Falkreath - who invited this guy?

Skyrim

Skyrim mod – not final, but in rough draft – took to the air today. No kinks so far…but there are more rules, draugr, and online players out there. Let’s see what happens…

View

NOV/2017

Draft rules, Book of the Dragonborn

rules
skyrim

I think I covered everything that needs to be in the rules here. This, obviously, doesn’t include the Lists (spells, perks…). Do you see anything that needs tweaking?

Rule	Name	Description and Dependencies
100	Damage pool perk	The perks that increase damage pools, Tough, Endurance, and Mana, are awarded once per character level.
100	Earned Skills	To earn another skill point, a PC must roll 20 on a contest in combat, and the subsequent progress/damage die must roll a number higher than the character’s current number of skill points for the skill used. For a non-combat contest, a 19 or 20 is required. Taking half disqualifies a roll.
100	Encumbered	Characters take a -4 physical penalty when they carry weight in excess of their Physical score times ten, or body armor along with a number of any items equal to their Physical score.
100	Level Determination	A character’s level is equal to the square root of his earned skill points, rounded down.
111	Locked Skill	(removed)
113	Character Level	A character has a level that acts as a general measure of his influence. Each level grants a damage pool perk, standard perk, and attribute point. A character’s first standard perk must be racial perk.
200	Sprinting & Climbing	Strenuous actions, like sprinting and climbing, cause d8 mental (stamina) damage.
300	Damage, elemental	Elemental (physical) damage ignores armor. 103, 105, 206, 210, 309, 316
300	Disease	A character that suffers an attack Pro by a diseased opponent may make a defense contest after combat to resist the disease’s effect. On a Con, the disease takes effect, and must be removed by potion or healer.
300	Helmet modifier	A helmet that is one step better or worse than a character’s body armor grants +1 or -1 to the protection roll. A helmet two steps away (or missing) changes the protection die by one type. Wearing d4 armor without a helmet reduces protection to d4-1.
300	Paralysis	A paralysis attack allows the victim to make a non-action to defend. If the result is a Con, the victim can use actions only to defend against the paralysis. A Pro ends the paralysis effect.
300	Poison damage	Poison damage ignores physical protection and begins in the same action as the attack Pro that causes it. Poison does one point of damage per round for a number of rounds equal to its rating, at the beginning of the round.
300	Poison resistance	Poison resistance reduces the number of rounds over which a poison attack deals damage. Poison damage can be reduced to zero in this way.
300	Power attack	All characters can use the Special Move perk, but must add the amount of additional damage to their Stamina pool. Characters cannot make power attacks that are greater than their remaining amount of Stamina.
300	Regeneration	Natural healing of one point of damage accelerates in steps: daily, hourly, per four minutes, per minute, per round, and per action. 105, 106, 107, 309, 310, 311, 314, 315
300	Stagger	A character may use a physical non-action to resist being staggered. On a Con, the character loses one action. A character without actions remaining in the round cannot be staggered.
300	Weapon speed	Weapons add a bonus to initiative contests as follows: Tiny/Unarmed +3, Light +2, Medium +1. A magic staff is a light weapon for this purpose.
312	Damage pool	Characters track the damage that they collect in damage pools by attribute: Health for Physical, Stamina for Mental, and Magicka for Metaphysical.
314	Disabled	When a character takes more physical damage than the damage pool can store, he becomes Mostly Dead. This character is severely limited in his activities and generally cannot take Physical actions. If the character performs an action that causes more damage than the character has Stamina or Magicka, that action is automatically a Con. 103, 105, 106, 107, 206, 207, 312, 313
400	Magic resistance	A character with a magic resistance rating reduces the damage of each magic attack by the rating, or adds the rating to defense contests made against magic.
411	Power duration	All power effects are instantaneous unless the power is marked as Maintainable (M). A maintainable power lasts until the indicated amount of time passes, from the following scale: action, round, minute, four minutes, hour, day.

View

NOV/2017

Perks: from Skyrim or from Modos 2?

I spent a good chunk of the day converting, well, blending Skyrim perks and Modos 2 perks for the new module. There’s not a lot of tinkering needed, which makes sense considering how inspirational Skyrim was to the game. The big change was in percentages: Skyrim uses them, Modos 2 doesn’t. You can’t increase your d6 roll by 30% without some ugly number rounding going on.

Fear not, I found a decent solution, and maybe as importantly, I left plenty of room for GMs to customize (since we all play the game a little differently).

View

DEC/2017

It's Beginning to Look a Lot like Christmas

Here’s hoping to have the Skyrim module complete and under the Christmas tree by the 25th. I think Skyrim’s snowy landscape is an appropriate setting for the holidays (especially when you’re stuck in Arizona)!

I’ll be including scaling rules, an effect which you see on “leveled” items and characters. One consequence of this that I’ve seen in online Modos games is that draugr don’t flinch when attacked with low-level daggers and frost spells…

View

DEC/2017

Merry Xmas!

While I don’t know if Santa brought you everything you want for Xmas, I do know this: the Skyrim mod I’ve been working on is going to be done this week, and it puts you right into the freezing snow of Skyrim. So if your area is still brown this winter, or your dungeon master won’t let you become a werewolf (just for the fur coat, right?), get ready to run this mod with Modos 2.

View

DEC/2017

Worth the Wait...?

So, it turns out that the lucky person to get a copy of the Skyrim mod for Christmas was me, and it wasn’t a complete copy. Luckily, I’ve had time to work on it, and it is currently receiving its editorial review. It has been field-tested, and with some Autobot luck, it will be ready for its first release in only a week’s time! (This is important, because I’m trying to run another game with it in only a week’s time…)

View

JAN/2018

Levels of Complexity

module
rules

As I was explaining the game to a new player this weekend, I was going over her character sheet and looking for sections where what-you-see isn’t exactly what-you-get. Fortunately, the complexity build-up occurred in the same sequence as the five standard modules: Core, Characters, Extended Conflict, Combat, and Magic. We used the character sheet layout from here: http://modos-rpg.obsidianportal.com/wikis/charactersheet

In the first section, everything was pretty straightforward. There’s a Bonus listed that you add to contests made with that Attribute, and you write your goal and flaw out, to help make character decisions and earn hero points.

Skills added a level of complexity, because they can add (or subtract) a number to your attribute bonuses. To save time, I recommended adding the skill points and attribute bonus together and writing it next to the skill, since skills tend to be used with just one attribute.

Perks, hero points, and gear were straightforward, since what you see is what you get there. However, there can be a level of complexity on par with skills, since some perks affect your gear (and the Progress you make with that gear), and some gear affects your physical attribute by virtue of being cumbersome.

Magic was last, since the character was a magic-user. The spells (powers) listed there included the Magic Difficulty amount for each spell, which added another level of complexity to the character sheet because they interacted with the skills section, which in turn interacted with the attributes. An easy solution would be to let the numbers flow down the sheet, so that the metaphysical bonus for a spellcasting contest adds up with the magic skill in the skills section, which in turn adds up with the magic difficulty for each spell in the spells section. Then, a spellcaster (being the genius wizards they are) just uses the sum listed with each Spell entry when rolling contests for magic use.

In all, not too many relationships on the sheet. My preference, and a design goal of the game, is to keep things as simple as possible so that playing the game is done mostly as the Guide and players talk to each other, with a limited amount of doing calculations or tracing relationships across a character sheet.

View

JAN/2018

WHERE'S MY SKYRIM!?

or, Putting Out a Finished Product

Producing my Skyrim mod hit a snag last weekend when I realized that my two-tiered system of level-up difficulty made it impossible to hit, oh, fourth level. Previously, you needed some lucky rolls (1/40) and you needed a LOT of skill points to level up. Level 4 required 16, and 5 required 25.

I realized the increasing difficulty of rolling a new skill point made it unnecessary for the skill points needed per level to increase. Now, when you get four skill points, you level up. So, level 4 requires 12, and 5 requires 16.

I also wanted a snazzy crest for the game’s cover, since each of the cities has one. I’ll post it on Twitter here:
https://twitter.com/MichaelTwtr/status/964501066292150273

So the mod is in final edits, again. I’ll post the mod this weekend, and hopefully have my own game lined up for next weekend.

Happy gaming!

View

FEB/2018

Dragonborn Light

Dragonborn Light is a rules module for Modos RPG. Plug it in to start adventuring in Skyrim, the icy northern province of Tamriel.

The new rules convert the base rules to add features like: larger pools for Health, Stamina, and Magicka, scalable gear and opponents, elemental damage, spell durations and dual casting, and tailored conflicts like bartering, lockpicking, climbing, and picking pockets.

In addition, several example conversions are given for perks, spells, and monsters, but you’ll still need an official Elder Scrolls source for access to all of the game’s features. The simple systems provided in the module make it easy to adopt your favorite features from the video game.

Available here:
http://www.enworld.org/forum/rpgdownloads.php?do=download&downloadid=1465

View

FEB/2018