Savage Worlds

 Among my friends, it is no secret that I love the tabletop RPG Savage Worlds. It is just crunchy enough to satisfy the D&D heads out of my players in building their characters, but it has a system easy enough that game prep is a breeze compared to things like D&D and GURPS.

(In fact, the podcast host of Happy Jack's RPG Podcast sayf GURPS is to LEGO as Savage Worlds is to DUPLO. I cannot disagree with Uncle Stu on this one.)

Savage Worlds is a setting agnostic system, and there are many settings that it can be played with.  One day I will go through the ones I have played and comment on them, but for now just trust me while the system shows its strength with pulpy adventure, by adjusting a few settings rules it does anything pretty well, even Call of Cthulhu type stuff.

Right now the Savage Worlds I am running for my friends is a fantasy homebrew that I ported over from D&D 3.x (yeah, I could have translated it into Pathfinder - even the Savage Worlds version of Pathfinder - but I was not interested). It's a world that has some history to it and often I just make hooks that are there just for the PCs to explore a new facet of the world. My players are awesome nad have made the following characters,

Chibb - A nose picking halfling that has friends all over the city

Urghat - An Orcish Paladin who can finally cast healing spells while raging.

Tilly - A mute half elf who is a deadshot with a bow

Calden - A mage and basically the straight man of the group. All the PCs work for his father.

Ayimyr - A homicidal, genocidal, island elf with a "death frisbee." The player channels Rosa Diaz from Brooklyn Nine-Nine dialed to eleven.

Together these adventurers deal with caravans, explore ruins, plot to assassinate dragons (well, one of them does), and generally have a hatred of Hobgoblins, who are an accepted race on this world. (And for some reason the PCs call them Herb Gerbs.)

Chib has picked another person's nose so stealthfully they didn't notice. Urghat has convinced Orcish bards to rejoin the tribe. Ayimyr has made Dryads stutter and cry just by talking to them.  Calden sighs a lot and casts balls of fire when needed. Come to think of it Tilly seems to jjust go with the flow.

I don't like D&D because a combat with a dozen combatants can take an entire session, or really even if it doesn't just long enough that it bores me. Savage Worlds we decided to do a stress test of the system.  We had a combat that went on between two huge ships with over 80 combatants.  It worked out quite nicely, though it was Calden's fireballs that helped weed out the weak quite easily.

What amazes me is how little combat we do otherwise.  The characters interact with the world, and honestly half the time I don't have a plan. Urghat is really into food carts, for example, and has caused all sorts of adventures just from food carts.

I must remember to talk about reality hopping avatars in a future post.