Review: Temporal Probability Agency: Agent's Handbook

With my duties as RPTools Bard consuming most of my time these days, I requested Derek aka The Savage Duck take over and do some reviews until things settle down a bit over at rptools.net. Here's his first effort, the Temporal Probability Agent's Handbook. I think you'll enjoy it. - RK ATHEY


Publisher: Apathy Games
Product: Temporal Probability Agency - Agent’s Handbook
Type: Modern Campaign Setting with Sci-Fi elements
Price: $4.99 - download


Agent’s Handbook


You are minding your own business, walking home from the park. Suddenly, the TPA contacts you with an urgent assignment and the TPA pays well. The Agency needs you to go to Bob’s Records tomorrow at noon, strike up a simple conversation, and keep it going for 5 minutes. That’s all, just 5 minutes. That seemingly innocuous task will save three lives and pay $1,000. Sure, the assignment is supposedly sent from the future by a computer named Daisy but, still, it's $1000.

The Winner is Seppe!

Here's the MapTool screen shot showing the winner.

Congratulations Seppe. I'll be in contact soon to get your DriveThruRPG emails address so I can send the prize pack to your in box.

Thanks to everyone that participated. We hope to run another such contest in June.

Cheers,
The Savage Troll

And The Winner Is.......

We had 10 commenters on The Savage Troll since the May contest announcement. One of those outstanding looking individuals who've proven their worth by reading this little corner of the time-crunched blogosphere will win the DriveThruRPG prize pack.

Here are the commenters:


1 - Lowell Francis
2 - Granger44
3 - Scarecrow
4 - onlinedm
5 - crazybear
6 - Arkhein
7 - Seppe
8 - Geek Gazette
9 - Bastian Dornauf
10 - Anonymous aka Sir Not Appearing in this Picture

To be eligible for the prize you must also be a blog follower via Google Friend connect. So of the 10 above, seven meet that criteria. 

1 - Lowell Francis

2 - Granger44

3 - crazybear

4 - Arkhein

5 - Seppe

6 - Geek Gazette 

7 - Bastian Dornauf

To determine the winner, I rolled a d7 in MapTools, copied a screen shot, printed it, and put it in a hermetically sealed envelope kept in a #2 mayonnaise jar under Funk and Wagnall's porch. At noon today that screen shot will magically appear on this blog. 

Tune back in a noon today for the answer you've all been waiting for!

Last Day for the "Comment and Win" contest

Today's the last day for a Savage Troll follower to leave a comment for a chance to win the DriveThruPRG prize pack in our "Comment and Win" contest. I'll announce the Winner on Monday.

Check here for the rules.

Good Luck,
Troll

DriveThruRPG's "Tell Us About Your Character" Contest

DriveThruRPG has a new contest with great prizes! Simply submit your favorite character to contest@onebookshelf.com and a panel of three celebrity judges will decide who wins.

The Rules:

• You must have a DriveThruRPG.com account. It's free, so make sure you're signed up. OneBookShelf, Inc. employees and publishers may not participate. All ages welcome.
• Your entry must consist of two parts - the character presented in your choice of game mechanics, and a brief biography of no more than 400 words. Naturally, you must include a name. As well, don't go crazy with the stats part; anything past the half-page mark is too much. Any system and any genre is perfectly acceptable (though it needs to be "Safe for Work," please).
• No images, please. The judging will be strictly on the crafting of the character and the bio.
• All submissions should be sent to contest@onebookshelf.com.
• Judges will select Finalists based on creativity, effective written descriptions, and how compelling the character is. Humor is fine if it fits, but dramatic narratives, "Action Figure Stat Card" style, and any other approach is also strong.
• There will be two levels of screening before Finalists are chosen. The first level will be handled by a team of Gaming Commandos under the expert leadership of Sean "Big Irish Gamer" Fannon. The top dozen entries will then be submitted to our Triad of Terror, who will then submit the Top Five Finalists. All Finalists will win something, but the results of fan voting will determine who gets the top prizes.
• The contest gets officially underway on May 19th, with the last day of submissions being two weeks later, June 2nd. Finalists will be posted for fan judging on June 9th, with the votes tallied and winners announced on June 16th.

The Judges:

• Fred Hicks, creator of The Dresden Files RPG and Spirit of the Century, and one of the brilliant minds of Evil Hat Productions. Careful here - if you don't entertain him, you will receive some very negative Aspects.
• Eddy Webb, writer and designer for Deep 7 and Z-Man Games, and the main man behind everything White Wolf is putting out these days, is a fine professional and a great gamer... and very likely your worst nightmare if you don't make him smile.
• John Wick, legendarily "indie" long before anyone was using the term, is the magnificent mind responsible for the creation of L5R, 7th Sea, Houses of the Blooded, and much more from John Wick Presents. Fail to amuse, and you may well appear as someone killed horribly in his next work; no, wait, that would be cool, so you wouldn't stand such a chance.

ViewSonic gTablet

The Prize:

• The Grand Prize Winner will receive a ViewSonic gTablet with 10" Multi-Touch LCD Screen, Android OS 2.2, perfect for carrying and reading our products on. As well, their character will be custom illustrated by Bradley McDevitt, top-notch artist for Postmortem Studios!
• Our First Runner Up will receive a $100 Gift Certificate for DriveThruRPG.com products! Second Runner Up will receive a $50 Gift Certificate, while the remaining finalists will each receive $25 Gift Certificates.
• On top of all this, each character will be featured in the "Bring It to the Table" feature in the weekly Newsletter.

Check out the Contest Page for more details. Good Luck!

Review: White Plum Mountain Tile Set

Product: White Plume Mountain Tile Set
From Red Pub Games
Price: $0.50
Author: Steve Wachs
Artist: Steve Wachs

I love this concept. Red Pub Games took an old TSR AD&D module and made a tile set out of time. The doors attached to the rooms can be bent up to give the map a nice 3D effect. The 32 pages of maps, however, will keep you busy cutting for a while.

Space 1889 Pregen Character Paper Minis (Free)

Our friend Scarecrow has been at it again. He's created a new set of paper miniatures for use with Pinnacle's Space 1889 pregenerated characters.

You can download the PDF from his Crow Stuff page.

He has other Space:1889 paper minis as well that you can find on the Pinnacle Forums.

The characters above are meant for Space 1889: Red Sands, Their stats are available on the Pinnacle download site for free at 1889 Red Sands PreGens.pdf

Thanks Scarecrow for making this available to the Red Sands players.

Related Links:
Space: 1889 on The Savage Troll
Review of Space: 1889 Red Sands

Announcement: New Member of MapTools Staff

The MapTool Gang of 3 decided to add a new member to their group: The Bard. They placed the  following advertisement on the RPTools.net forum.

We have an immediate need for an individual with strong enthusiasm for MapTool (and RPTools in general) who is willing to join the project team as our Director of Public Interfacing (herein referred to as "The Bard"). The job will entail periodic discussions with the developers regarding the future of MapTool and acting as the team's public persona. The former will include input on such things as usability, opinions on graphics layout, ideas for features, and so forth. The latter involves interacting with users to provide a positive first experience for them. This includes, but is not limited to, demo sessions showing off the basic features of MapTool (such as VBL, drawables, and basic token manipulation), gently promoting the use of MapTool on other forums (ENworld, Paizo, DDI, and so forth), and other public relations functions as may be deemed useful by either The Bard or the team as a whole.

Since this blog has a tradition of spreading the word for MapTool, I applied.  I am proud to announce  I was selected as The Bard.

What does this mean to you, the Savage Troll reader?

It generally means this blog will become a bit more MapTool centric and less Savage Worlds centric. We'll be spreading our wings to other game systems to show how they can use MapTool to bring their by-gone friends back together and speed their gaming via MapTool automation.

It might also go the opposite direction with new MapTool content posted on some, yet-to-be-created space that specializes in MapTool content. Were that the case then this blog would become more about game reviews and interviews and less about mapping and MapTool. I'm just not sure yet.

Regardless of which direction this blog goes, my new job means that you, the reader, have more input on the direction of MapTool. Since I now sit at the design table, I'll have an opportunity to voice your concerns and ideas to programmers of MapTool.

What does it mean to me, The Savage Troll?

Well, for one thing it means a new name on many of the forums I frequent. Thanks to an elven smear campaign picked up by a willing media, trolling isn't consider a good thing. Please leave a comment if you think of a better pseudonym for me. It also means I'll be running a lot more demo games. Please let me know if you have any interest seeing MapTool in action. It's a fast, flexible tool that handles any RPG that uses maps and dice.

What's next?

I'll be forming the MapTool Bard's guild. I need folks active on gaming forums, GMs, graphic artists, bloggers, and active social media folks to become MapTool Bards to help spread the word and bring feedback to the RPTools staff. Send an email to bard at rptools.net or leave a comment if you're interested in helping. This is a big job and I'm going to need a lot of help.

Here's to keeping it virtual.

Regards,
Keith Athey aka The Savage Troll

Review: Anderia Map (Free)

Product: Map of Anderia

Rule System: Generic
From: Britannia Game Design LTD.
Price: Free
Artist: Andrew Cowley

We come across free stuff from time and like to let our readers know about it. The map of Anderia is free from DriveThruRPG.com and should be usable in any of your Virtual Table Tops like MapTool or as a handout for your players. Thanks for Britannia Game Design for making it available.

To extract the Map for a VTT, import it into GIMP, select the the map region, then Image->Crop to Selection. The map has a 100 pixels per inch resolution and is about 15"x15" so you'll need to scale it down if you want to print it for a handout.

Space 1889 Paper Models (Free)

Mayhem in Paper is a web site devoted to 3D, Space 1889 paper models. It has over 30 kits of liftwood ships, iron clads, forts, mesas, and tanks. VTT users could easily GIMP these into Savage Worlds chase tokens.

You can find more of these gems at Squirmydad's Page-o-Creations and Ramblings under the download section.

Related Space 1889 Links:

Space 1889 - Red Sands Review
Space 1889 Links Page
Space 1889 on The Savage Troll
Space 1889 Pregen Characters (The Savage Troll)
Space 1889 Pregen Character (Pinnacle)
The BIG Space 1889 Product Bundle - contains every Space 1889 product from GDW for $50

May Giveaways @ DriveThruRPG.com

Thanks to everyone who visits our little corner of the time-crunched blogosphere. DriveThruRPG was kind enough to give its reviewers discounts to pass along. This month, they offer a 20% off on the following products. Simply use the following coupon code at checkout: MayDaysAtTheDriveThru2011


If you want the complete set of games for free simply be the following three people all at once

1. Have a DriveThruRPG.com account. It's easy and free.
2. Be a follower of this blog using Google Friend Connect and add your picture to the list of beatific blog followers under "BECOME A FOLLOWER. WIN STUFF" section in the side bar to the right.
3. Be one of the people leave a new comment on any post before May 21st, 2011. I'll randomly pick a winner from all the commenters. 

Review: Map of Berem Town (Free)

Product: Map of Berem Town

Rule System: Generic Fantasy
From: 1191 AD Publishing
Price: Free
Author: Domagoj Rapcak
Artist: Domagoj Rapcak

This free, hand-drawn map for a generic medieval fantasy setting has one feature I wish all map makers would learn: PDF layering. In this case the PDF allows the descriptive text to be turned off for printing a player view. I wish the location numbers were on separate layers as well but that is a minor quibble.

The map of Berem includes sixteen points of interest including:

1. Town Entrance
2. Riverside Inn
3. Town Hall
4. Playground
5. Smithy
6. Marketplace
7. Windmill
8. Temple
9. Alchemist
10. Barracks
11. Lord’s Manor
12. Tavern
13. Harbor
14. Lake
15. Monastery
16. Tower

I like this map a great deal. It's pleasing to the eye and lets the GM make the map his own. Kudos to Domagoj Rapcak and 1191 AD Publishing for making it available for free.

This map is free from DriveThurRPG.com.