Augmented Reality – a Toolkit for Adding Detail to 5150 Games

I’ve gotten to the point that I can’t play a game unless it tells a story. I guess that’s why I’ve never been an avid card player or why I can never get into chess or dominos. A short look at my blog posts will find that they are more story than AAR, After Action Report or Battle Report.

There are times, however, when my story gets stuck and could use a nudge to move it forward. My roll for an involuntary encounter results in a Confrontation encounter as an example. It’s early in the game, my character hasn’t made any enemies, so who does she encounter? Or it’s a Raid where my character is supposed to steal or recover an item. What item and why and from whom? I’m in the financial district, what kind of buildings are there? Some of these details can be found in the rules and sometimes they aren’t and you want a more detailed game as to what can happen – I’ve heard people say they want more “crunch” in their games.

Well, have I got just what you need (a phrase uttered by nearly every goblin in World of Warcraft). If you like a gritty Cyberpunk feel to your games, there’s an inexpensive toolkit called Augmented Reality, a Holistic City Kit for Cyberpunk Roleplaying Games. Augmented Reality is by Geist Hack Games, it is a “pay what you want” PDF with a suggested price of $1.99 on DriveThruRPG. It is a book/file full of useful tables to help add additional detail to your encounters.

In addition to tables, Augmented Reality has three drop down grids. These are grids which you can drop dice on to select a building, NPC, or hackable asset. The number appearing on the dropped die links to a table which can give you an instant characteristic. You even have the option to not use the drop down mechanism as each grid has a 2D10 option in the appendix.

In addition to the drop down grids, there are 65 tables with everything from what smell is coming from an alley to the location of a tattoo on a streetwalker’s body. Want to find out what a corpse has on it’s body? Yep, there’s a table for that. Perhaps the most useful are the tables of available jobs and tasks.

The tables are set up for use with a d10 or a d100 – a d100 is actually 2d10 where on d10 is used to represent multiples of 10. Charts for jobs, items, and characteristics are usually the d100 types. Charts for categories of things, such as types of law enforcement, types of gangs, and types of nightclub entertainment are usually of the d10 variety.

The one thing you will not find is a name generator, you’re still on your own to come up with names for characters, businesses, nightclubs, etc. Anyway, I’ve seen enough to begin using Augmented Reality to flesh out my games and load PEFs with some interesting NPCs.

The Paint Desk

It’s the start of a new year, so I set the count to zero and started painting on January 1st. I try to paint one hour a day – on weekends and holidays I paint two or three hours a day. Anyway, as of noon today (January 5th), I’ve painted a total of 34 miniatures. Twenty-four of the figures are something I’ve never painted before – 6mm. Believe it or not, 6mm figures are actually quite easy to paint. Why 6mm? Well, my Rally Round the King project for Thucydides in 28mm had stalled. I still have a little over a hundred of 28mm Classical Greek figures to paint and purchase. I’m not getting any younger and as much as I like to paint, I want to play some games as well. So, I’ve chosen to do the project using Baccus 6mm figures. I discovered I can paint 16 6mm figures in the time it takes for me to paint a single 28mm figure. Here’s this week’s breakdown:

The Corner of Miscellany

As always your comments, suggestions and criticisms are greatly appreciated (and something I look forward to!).