Dino-Pirates of Ninja Island

In the words of the founding genius, JPL:

Ninjas, pirates, and dinosaurs. A fantasy Asia, filled with warring island nations. Samurai mounted on domesticated raptors. Bigger dinosaurs hunted by quasi-Polynesian tribesmen. Dueling factions of shadow warriors. Privateers and bucaneers battling the servants of the Imperial Navy. Fallen kingdoms deep in forgotten jungles. And I call it...

DINOPIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND!

Scratch Factory is your as-official-as-this-sort-of-thing-allows home for all things DINO-PIRATE. The first product, an introductory adventure (complete with sample PCs, all ready to go) has already been released: THE SLAVE QUEEN OF THE RUINED CITY. This adventure showcases many of the key themes and ideas of this fantastic pulp adventure setting, including all the basics of any DINO-PIRATES adventure:

  • Dinosaurs
  • Pirates
  • Ninjas
  • Monkeys
  • Robots

It's all there, we promise! And we assure all customers that we will hold to this list of essential ingredients, and that every DINO-PIRATES adventure ever published by us will include every single one. That's a promise, kids, and you don't get many of those you can count on in this world.

 

Latest Notes

Some commentary on gaming we've posted recently:

So Many Games

GenCon 2011 really showed for me what different games can do.

A variety of game systems produced amazingly fun stories in the world of DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND, as I and three of my favourite DMs in the world ran our ambitious little "con-paign" THE JADE THRONE.

Four days, seven games, across four different game systems. How'd it go? Fantastic, which surprised me. I honestly didn't think it was going to work out, which is one of the reasons I most wanted to try it. For me, GenCon is a chance to push RPGs to the limit. You're surrounded by thirty thousand of the most enthusiastic gamers in the world, imaginative people who have come to Indianapolis looking for chances to do what they can't do with their home games. The perfect place for DMs to try out things that demand a lot of their players.

Or their settings. I wasn't at all sure that the proposed games of our mini-event were going to work well in this setting, but they did.

Feng Shui and Mutants & Masterminds, perhaps not so surprising. Old School Hack has turned out to be a reliable generator of hilarious awesomeness. But Leverage? A game designed to very faithfully reproduce the idiosyncratic story-telling style of a TV show about con men and thieves?

Yup, it worked just great. The REFORM SCHOOL NINJA GIRLS set out to confront Jihanna the Demon, infamous pirate queen, and as you might guess, wrapped things up with explosions, screaming bad guys and catapult-launched hang gliders.

DINO-PIRATES is a broad, pulpy setting, in the full sense of "pulp" as a "shapeless mass". It's about adventure, thrills, and delight, but the stories that take place there can come in all sorts of flavours. Different game systems produce different kinds of stories. Some, like Feng Shui and Leverage, are meant to emulate specific story-telling modes. Others, like Old School Hack, encourage certain kinds of events or situations. All of which mesh perfectly with DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND, which was designed from the start to support all kinds of stories and story-telling.

I've taken to running some DPoNI games using what I now think of as the "classic" rules; the ones based on Green Ronin's True20 game, and some with Kirin's fabulous Old School Hack system. I loved how the Leverage game went, and so I'm working on a Leverage hack for the NINJA GIRLS. DPoNI is never going to be a game the way Dragon Age is a game, or even Dungeons and Dragons -- it's too messy and unselective about what it includes. I think of that as a strength rather than a weakness.

We'll be posting the full story of THE JADE THRONE in the next few weeks (I hope), and we have even more ambitious plans for next year's GenCon conpaign. Zombies! Maybe. Or possibly lizardmen.

The Jade Throne: A DINO-PIRATES Event!

This year's GenCon in Indianapolis will be hosting an exciting event:

The Jade Throne



This is a first for me, and I think for most of us participating -- a GenCon-specific DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND mini-campaign, with four GMs participating, running four separate game systems (at least) across six or seven gaming sessions. We'll have Leverage, Mutants and Masterminds, Old School Hack, DPoNI: The Animated Series and Savage Worlds all in effect. Good friends (and awesome GMs) Matt, Jody, Kennon and James are all running sessions in this never-before-attempted (by us, anyway) feat: to run a multi-session story over the course of "The Best Four Days in Gaming".

We don't know if it's going to work out. We don't even know how exactly it's all going to end -- we're leaving lots of room in our plans for players to throw us curveballs and introduce all sorts of trouble. We'll be making things up as we go, for sure.

Fortunately, low-prep games like Old School Hack and Leverage make it easy to "roll with the punches" and we're anticipating this will turn out to be tons of fun. If you're coming to GenCon, check out the announcement and sign up for any of the games that look appealing to you.

Old School DINO-PIRATES!

Wait, how can there be old school DINO-PIRATES? We haven't even really established the first school, much less the new school to come after so that there can even BE an old school.

Nevertheless, it's here. Our friend Kirin has produced the rather awesome game Old School Hack, and it's a whole ton of fun packed into a mere 26 pages (including five pages of cut-out displays, a cover and seven character sheets). This is truly a game you can pick up and just run, right off the cuff. It's a lovely bit of game design.

And Kirin has done us all the very great favour of releasing it under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license, so anyone who wants can create their very own works based on it.

You can see where this is going, can't you?

Yes, there is a DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND version of Old School Hack now available. Choose from the Swashbuckler, the Sea Dog, the Ninja Shadow, the Ninja Sword, the Shaman, the Hunter and the Sorcerer -- all with their own powers and abilities. Imperials, DINO-PIRATES, ninjas and natives all in the mix. We tweaked the armor rules a bit, since heroes in DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND are more swashbuckly, less clompy and stompy.

The DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND setting isn't tied to a particular mechanic, and the rules aren't meant to model physical laws. Rather, the rules (both the "classic" DINO-PIRATES and these Old School rules) are meant to provide a structure in which interesting stories are likely to happen. So why not supply multiple rulesets? If you like one more than the other, that doesn't make you a bad person. Try 'em both!

All you need to do is download the original Old School Hack rules from Kirin's site, then download the DPoNI substitution for the DINO-PIRATE-y classes and abilities. Then yaaaarrrrr! You're ready for adventure among the islands!

Slimmer, Faster

One of the reasons there isn't a downloadable version of DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND is that I'm still wrestling with the final ruleset. It's been one of those projects where the idea expanded to take on a variety of cool ideas, but in a couple of years of playtesting, the most obvious need is to have fewer rules.

So a bunch of things are going away. Nothing very core, but a few key things that will, I hope, really help to cement the rules (and in doing so, the setting).

Reputation: I really liked the idea of reputation being an alternate form of wealth, but it just made for a complex set of rules that never, ever got used. It's gone.

Adjustable Powers Stats: You used to be able to drop the number of ranks you put into a power, so you could bump your Resilience Roll. Too complicated. Even just explaining it was complicated. So it's gone. Your Power stats are all static now, but there's a feat you can take, "Resilient", that gives you a bonus on your Resilience Roll. Simple.

A Bunch of Feats: There were a number of feats that just made things complicated without being very useful -- stuff like "All-out Attack" that just made for MORE math at the game table, and again, that nobody ever used. And "Leadership", because I've always found that one annoying.

Also a Bunch of Powers: Some powers likewise got the boot. For example, Harm, and Pain. Harm is wrapped up in a new power called Pressure Points to mimic the common wuxia ability of "blocking energy flows" or whatever whangdoodle they call it when somebody goes tap, tap, tap on someone else and they drop down dead or freeze in place. So you can use that to either injure or paralyze someone. Pain went away because I find the Mental Grapple ability of Mind Link accomplishes the same thing (screwing with someone's ability to act with YOUR BRAIN) just fine.

And Then Just Some Tables, Too: We threw out all the Role progression tables and just included the formulas required for each progression. The formulas are simple enough and the tables annoying enough that hopefully that won't slow anyone down.

We've also explored a completely different ruleset, and will have postings and things about that, too. Stay tuned!
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