Tag Archives: Renegade

Eat My Salad, Halloween

Final victim of Tzim Sha’s trophy hunting spree, the Salad Man nevertheless can provide a handy new archetype to include in your Renegade games. If we’ve learned anything from the travels and adventures of The Doctor over the years it’s that those who die can still crop up later in another form – such are the benefits of time travel. And the occasional bout of Vortex induced amnesia.

Specials

Salad Man (2)
Confident Swagger, Strong Stomach, Eat My Salad Halloween, Too Wasted to Run, Know the Way

Background

Roll 1d6, choose an option or just create your own

  1. Eldest child and a favourite role model at his school (when he attended), he left with 2 GCSEs and got into gardening, a surprisingly lucrative business – but little helped by his addiction to online gambling. He enjoys humiliating close friends – though, at heart, he throws insults out of an inability to articulate his appreciation.
  2. Only child and raised mostly by his grandparents, after his parents split, he enjoyed music and played several instruments. Most skilled with the harmonica, peer pressure at school made him give it up. He started studying long after school through Open University, but struggled to keep focus. His irritating personality seems more defence mechanism than genuine ill-will.
  3. Middle child of a good family, something about his character rubbed his teachers up the wrong way and meant more time in detention or outside the headteacher’s office than in class. Still, when he got out of school, he landed a decent job and a small inheritance from the passing of a favourite uncle. He has his own business, completing home renovations. He doesn’t really trust anyone who seems to know it all.
  4. Bought up well in a steady and dependable family, he struggled at school with dyslexia and ended up leaving before he took his exams. However, determination pushed him and he found varied employment – from retail and handy work, to background acting and cab driver. He struggled with discrimination, but constantly rose above it, bolstered by unswerving confidence in his potential.
  5. While his teachers respected him, his parents never did – favouring his older brother every time. Bullied by his family, he spent all the time he could out with mates on the street or reading books in the local library. He got tough from his home life and canny in the company of friends. He works an ordinary job and spends evenings in the pub, but he has aspirations to be more.
  6. Despite appearances, brash and no-nonsense as he might seem, he has been nervous and hesitant throughout his life. He lost his mother while still young and his busy father sent him off to boarding school; there, he found his best shield was a short fuse and a sharp tongue. Now, by day he writes copy for one of the few surviving local newspapers and by night he watches football and plays the slots down at the local.

Brace for Impact

As a continued expansion of the simple Renegade system, I’m happy to expand the PocketMod core with the revision and release of Brace for Impact, a broadly system-free supplement for creating sci-fi encounters which now includes a brand new Infinity Table.

The Infinity Table adds an essential temporal twist to your adventures, from sleeping menaces and lurking Lovecraftian horrors, to uncontrolled science experiments or utterly innocent actions that accidentally subvert the timeline.

And, to round the book off, an up-sized version of the Renegade rules – in glorious A5, with extra antagonists and a brief guide to both Structure and Motivation when running adventures.

Available now as a PDF through RPGNow and DriveThruRPG.

Also available as a Chibnall-esque bundle with From Unformed Realms, to step up the behind-the-sofa quotient of your monsters!

The Woman Who Fell to Earth

To kick off the new Doctor Who series — and, to be really clear right now, SPOILERS AHEAD! — we have a couple of additions to the Renegade RPG from The Woman Who Fell to Earth that could certainly find immediate use as the seed for an adventure or two.

The Stenza

The Stenza warrior-race, blue-skinned bipedal Conquerors of the Nine Systems, place the honour of the hunt above all else and value trophies as much as they value their lives. The heart of their society rests in the tradition of the hunt, the careful and methodical tracking of a single prey target to the exclusion of all others.

For the Stenza, the hunt matters sufficiently that they train and prepare ceaselessly, to the exclusion of all else, fasting and focusing themselves through rites and ritual. They carry the honour of their family-clan with them in their armour, an item handed down, renewed and maintained.

Stenza perceive status through the outward display of their trophies, a single tooth from every felled opponent embedded (painfully) into the flesh of their faces.

Stenza Warrior: Sub-Zero Touch, Peerless Tracker, Driven By Honour

Tim Shaw (Tzim Sha) represents the worst characteristics of youth in the Stenza warrior-race. With an attention span shorter than his muscular arms and an ego too large to carry far in battle without fatigue, he savours the prospect of leadership too much for tradition to matter.

To that end, the “big blue cheat” has done everything in his power to cut through to the conclusion, skipping the dull business of tracking by sneaking additional support onto the planet.

Tim Shaw: Sub-Zero Touch, Short-range Teleport, Driven Beyond Honour, Trophy Pause

Gathering Coils

To sidestep the tedium of the hunt, Tim Shaw smuggled a Gathering Coil on to Earth, an advanced hive-entity scouting module normally used in small numbers for reconnaissance. The enhanced Coil consists of hundreds of squirming modules contained within a spheroidal gravi-static induction shield, allowing it to glide and levitate within the atmosphere of a planet with a standard gravity range.

The Coil possesses scanning clusters and data nodules designed to handle a rapid absorption of a vast amount of information, drawing on sensory and signal based observation to build a complex database. Tim Shaw used this data to locate his quarry without needing to sully himself in the business of the hunt.

For those unlucky enough to meet the Coil, the visitation seemed harmless at first, but the Stenza leader-apparent had fitted it with DNA Bombs that embedded themselves painlessly into the geno-structure – and would, on activated, annihilate the target in a matter of moments.

Gathering Coil: Hive Sense, Gravi-Static Levitation, DNA Bombs, Unfiltered Total Data Transfer

Adventure Ideas

Skeleton Key. The player characters must track down a long lost member of the royal family of Ixat, the only individual with the means to deactivate an ancient defence system on a rogue planet that threatens to collide with Earth. However, the family are long dead – the last of them wiped out by a disgraced one-time leader of the Stenza – but if they can find him they can access the royal Ixat DNA from a certain jealously guarded trophy.

Insider Dealing. Once a small start-up, Swarm has become a part of every day life with their life-changing search engine. Interacting and intersecting with everyone and everything, Swarm can deliver data with a rapidity no competitor can match. However, truth-be-told, they have the unfair advantage of access to a captured Gathering Coil hive – Swarm has tapped into the modules of the Coil’s quantum database using a crude reciprocal interface. However, the Coil already had a mission – and now the Stenza battle wave approaches with all the information they need to make the entire planet the ultimate trophy.