What's all this then?
SinisterGame has been shocked to life as a place to promote and try out new role playing game aides and mechanics. We want to shine the spotlight on certain parts of the story and let the players explode into a godlike display of awesomeness! The emphasis (I think) will be on game aides that can be applied on top of an existing game system to add or emphasize some element of story telling.
As gamemasters and players we are all involved in telling stories. As gamers we are also involved in a bigger conversation about HOW we tell stories. This site is just a small part of that conversation where I've been inspired by other GMs and offer back my own ideas on how to make gaming more fun.
These Sanity Decks are a way to add a more descriptive cue to your character's typical, everyday, spiral into madness. Each character gets a deck which consists of 5 themed cards (cleverly numbered 1 through 5). Each card represents a progressive step along that theme with an associated Aspect that acts as a cue on how the character might start behaving.
These Extended Challenge cards are meant to visually represent the ladder of individual tests that characters may face in order to tackle some larger challenge. Many games make use of extended challenges (FATE, Spirit of the Century, D&D 4e). I won't go into how to run an Extended Challenge since those games cover it in detail, but what's missing is some sort of visual cue to the players to let them know how far along in the challenge they are and how far they have left to go...as well as the consequences of their failures. My goal with these cards was to provide that cue.
Battle of Wills is a clear rip off of clearly inspired by the Duel of Wits mechanic in Luke Crane's Burning Wheel. The idea for both of these mechanics is to provide an interesting way to resolve social conflicts that encourages roleplaying througout the scene.
Battle of Wills is designed to be a generic mechanic that can be applied to any game system that has social skills used for task resolution (skills like 'Intimidate', 'Bluff', and 'Diplomacy'...coughD&Dcough).
Sins and Virtues is a tool to help you flesh out NPC personalities on the fly. I like letting my players take ownership of certain NPCs in our game. This works especially well if that NPC will be recuring during your story. John Wick calls this idea 'The Living City' in one of his articles from Play Dirty. The trick is giving your players enough of a cue to breath life into those NPC with little or no preparation. I try to make that easier by providing them with this deck of 60 cards.
In a Wicked Age is a great roleplaying game by Vincent Baker. One of the morsels of pure genius in this game is the idea of an 'Oracle' which lets you apply the game system to any genre you can imagine. There's a ton of fan created oracles here. Surprisingly I did not see an Oracle for the new Battlestar Galactica TV show. Given the character driven themes in that show along with the paranoia of sleeper cylons, I figured I'd be a great opportunity to whip one up.
I got the idea for Spirit of the Century/FATE plot cards from the FATE Yahoo Group. At one point Fred Hicks posted a number of game aides for a Call of Cthulhu/FATE conversion, including a series of Plot Cards. I thought this was a great idea so I decided to steal it for my Firefly game.
