#050 - What’s a pirate’s favorite cast member to kill off in the first season?

Man, how different would the pilot have been if Sisko could have just made a couple of saving throws? The Prophets are all like “the humans are non-linear” and then Picard is all BAM, NATURAL TWENTY and then the Prophets are like “oh, cool, we get it, wormhole friends forever”, show over.

And yes, I think it’s a big stretch to suggest that young Wesley Crusher wouldn’t have grappled realistically with mortality after the death of his father a few years back, but this seemed funnier. Sue me.

In real world RPG news: there is a pretty neat new game coming out, designed by my brother, called Attack the Darkness. It’s a streamlined synthesis of pen-and-paper combat mechanics and card-based deck-building, where you construct a character as a set of cards and then combine tactical movement in the randomly-constructed dungeon with clever combination of the random hands of cards to beat the stuffing out of various nasties and search for treasure. Playable solo, even better with a few players, and you can run it with or without a dedicated GM thanks to some baked-in monster behavior rules.

It plays fast, like a combat scene where Riker actually shuts up for a minute, and the card combinations (sort of an adjective+verb model for modifying various attacks, dodges, spells, etc in a variety of ways) are fun and funny. He successfully Kickstarted production for it last year (you can see more detail about the game over on that page), and he’s now finalizing materials for a small commercial print run. It’s pretty exciting!

So if this sort of thing is your sort of thing, and you’re in the market for a big box full of sassy combinatoric combat fun for a flexible number of players or want to have a go at being the GM trying to murder said players, get yourself a copy of Attack the Darkness. Yeah? Okay! Good.