Jason has created a character sheet for Great Ork Gods, you can find it on the download page, if you're interested.

I anyone else has anything for Great Ork Gods they'd like to share, please e-mail with them and I'll see what I can do.

Yay! These forums aren't completely pointless!

Edited by author 05-03-2004 02:43 PM
Yesterday, I ran Great Ork Gods for my usual gaming group. Player lowdown:

Donald Edwards: My dad. Computer Programmer. Used to play D&D and some online games about 20 years or so ago. Has since played about a year of Changeling, and a smattering of other games with our troupe. Currently running a Rifts campaign. Very analytical, but has the sense of humor of a coyote.

Katherin Edwards: Mom. Stay-at-home type. Not too sure about her ancient history with RPGs, but she's also played a year of Changeline and a smattering of other RPGs with our troupe. Tends to learn slowly.

Moon Hawk-Watches: Fiction writer and veteran. Used to be in the SCA. Not much experience beyond our troupe, but very creative and willing to add details. Also opinionated.

Karen Sanders: Moon's girlfriend. Stay-at-home type. No RPG experience before our troupe got together and dragged her into the games because she was there and interested. Still uncertain of what she can and should be doing in games. Tends to follow others' lead.

Rhiannon Edwards: Me. The youngest of the group. Also the GM of this particular night of gaming. Yeah, I game with my family. Your point? About to get a job in a friend's new gaming store, I've probably got the longest gaming record in the group at 5 years. I'm also the most familiar with a wide variety of games and systems.


As a twist, I decided that this game of Great Ork Gods was to be sci-fi (envisioning Ork trying to shoot laser rifles and such), thus I used the scenario in the book, but adapted it to a space station during a major celebration. People everywhere, chaos ensued. After the game, I had everyone write a paragraph synopsis of impressions, feelings, and favorite moments... Here's what they had to say:

Moon Hawk-Watches: "Interesting... FUN!! Simple character construction gives more flexibility to players, but puts more responsibility on GM to decide what is, isn't, possible to characters.
Action Turn - Be more specific in separating 'God declared difficulty' from 'Spite play'... i.e., when player takes action, difficulty of action ('God declared') needs to be more specifically determined by character's inherent capacity...
STRESS MORE 'Spite assignment'
Pretty straightforward..."

Donald Edwards: "A bunch of Orks wandering around a space station fighting with elves, dwarves, halflings, and humans is a bit of a trip.
Need to create some benefit for using spite.
Another player's character was bribing goblins, which was fun to watch."

Katherin Edwards: "This game has easy character generation.
Game Master must have good imagination to keep it interesting.
Much like D&D but with options for many styles of genre.
Best moment was utilizing the goblins and the limited brain mentality."

Karen Sanders: "This game was fun and easy to follow even by me who is a very inexperienced player.
The goblins were fun to tease, fairly good tools, and unthreatening. I really enjoyed it."

Me: For a good chunk of the game, some of the players where basing the difficulty of their Gods' rolls on whether they wanted the person to succeed. Since the players were mostly working together (much less snarky than most games I've read about), this inevitably made rolls easy, so less character death. Very little Spite got spent. After talking to them about the God chosen difficulty during a break, they figured it out and chose for seeming complexity of task.
I really enjoyed running the goblins and adding personality to them. I had the players giggling with my goblin voices, and loved the looks on their faces when they found that goblins had gotten into the engineering room and took out all power to the station. That's when Katherin's character started bribing the goblins with glow sticks (raver goblins)since she couldn't figure out how to use them without busting them open and sending glow stuff all over the place (yes, her ork spent most of the game glowing).

All in all, about 8 hours of silly voices, smacking things around, throwing furniture, fleeing humans, killing guards and generaly orky fun.

Edited by author 04-20-2004 05:51 AM
Goddamnit, I know a load of you are reading this, leave some feedback!

Over 300 folks have downloaded Great Ork Gods now, roughly 100 have of which have the beta-2 version.

There will (if all goes to plan) be a slightly modified 'beta-2' release this weekend, containing further corrections, some rules clarifications and a few rules tweaks that have come from the feedback I've got so far. Please keep that feedback coming so I can keep improving the game.

I'm going to play again myself tommorow night, and I want to test out the new ideas in play before putting out the new version.

Sign up to the mailing list if you want to kept informed.

Edited by author 02-25-2004 03:51 PM

This game was so intensely funny to play that everyone who ever wanted to burn down a village or slaughter the helpless all the while trying to remember what your friend's name was... well you must play this.

:)
gk3

With feedback like this, who needs marketing blurb! Thanks Loki!

Incidently, over 100 people have now downloaded Great Ork Gods.

Edited by author 02-24-2004 03:07 PM
Our first playtest was three hours of non-stop laughter, backstabbing and cruelty. If you're looking for a *great* beer'n'pretzels game to play with 3-4 friends in an evening, GoG is your game.

Character creation is mandatorily restricted to 10 minutes, the rules take under 5 minutes to learn, and anyone who has ever played short-lived, sociopathic maniacs in other, more staid roleplaying games will immediately glom on to the tone and indeed, the entire point of the game. It's a freewheeling, fast-paced combination of competitive, cooperative and indiscriminate destruction of plucky Dwarves, graceful Elves and other irritating fantasy stereotypes (including your fellow Orks).

If you've ever wanted to hold other Player Characters' lives in your fickle little hands... if you've ever wanted to barbecue a Halfling... if you read Tolkien and rooted for Snaga...

Kill your friends, kill your enemies or kill yourself trying--play Great Ork Gods.

Edited by author 02-20-2004 09:02 AM
Welcome to the Great Ork Gods messaging forum/topic/thing.

Please leave your questions, comments and feedback here.

Cheers,

Jack.