Character Creation Challenge 2026 2a: Buffy with ICONS - Giles

Character Creation Challenge 2026

PC groups for games I would do with different systems

Buffy The Vampire Slayer with ICONS Assembled Edition

1a: Buffy Summers

2a: Rupert Giles, Watcher

An occult scholar pretending to be a school librarian, dedicated to training and aiding the slayer, generation gap be damned

Character Creation Challenge 2026 1a: Buffy with ICONS

Character Creation Challenge 2026

PC groups for games I would do with different systems

Buffy The Vampire Slayer with ICONS Assembled Edition

I was always going to start here.

I’ve run Buffy for years, and used Cinematic Unisystem for a few other settings too.

A superhero game for a plain-clothes superhero kinda setting.

Arthur Adams cover for issue 1 of Dark Horse Comics Buffy

ICONS is a pretty light 2D6-based superhero RPG influenced by the original Marvel Super Heroes. Using the second Assembled Edition as the first edition PDF isn’t available separately.

It defaults to random character generation, though it has a points-based option. 45 points each, 1 point per for Attributes, Powers and Specialties, Extras 1 per point of the base power, Limits countering that cost.

1a: Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Buffy Summers, high school sophomore and, as of a few months ago, Vampire Slayer.

Character Creation Challenge 2026

January Character Creation Challenge 2026

RPGnet thread

Having managed the January Character Creation Challenge since it started, I wanted to do something.

Okay, I’ve got an idea! Possibly a terrible idea, but should work for the first couple weeks at least.

Having done one system per day the first time, two years of groups with a few systems and two years of just one system... not going back to doing one system per day. So groups again.

But I’ll push myself a little more this time by creating groups for settings I could play or run but using different systems for them.

I have a lot of systems, and several go-to systems for particular games, often their base or a licenced game, but I’ve played and run conversions here and there too. Not these ones though.

Public Domain Day 2026

Public domain from 1930 or so! Miss Marple! Nancy Drew! The full version of The Maltese Falcon!

No sign of a cheesy slasher film where Miss Marple killed all the victims, but give it time.

And The Shadow! Though only as a radio host.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year as and where applicable!

Hogmanay

Next sunrise will be in another year. Happy Hogmanay and best wishes!

Things of the year 2025

Film of the year: Sinners

TV of the year (new): Daredevil Born Again

TV of the year (returning or new to me anyway): Star Trek: Prodigy

Album of the year: Hayley Williams, Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party

Song of the year: Florence + The Machine, Everybody Scream

Gig of the year: Chappell Roan

RPG of the year: I didn’t actually try new RPGs this year :/

Happy birthday mum!

Helping

Just asked for structure advice for a game. Kinda proud. And a little scared.

Science!

Today in cyberpunk, a man wearing a remote control suit for a walking robot manages to kick himself in the balls with it.

Epiphany

I have finally seen a Startplaying advert that I find tempting.

An Angel game.

20 Buffy plots from Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party

Happy birthday to Hayley Williams!

Her new album Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party (content note: swears) contains several tracks that I would fit into a Buffy The Vampire Slayer soundtrack, and the traditional title idea jam:

Action Santas

Due to TV, in one case weirdly quickly presumably because of some media synergy, I watched Violent Night (2022) and Red One (2024) on terrestrial TV.

Violent Night is pleasingly willing to say its obvious massive influences out loud. Santa not knowing how his Christmas magic works himself takes away some of the stakes, though. It has me wondering if it started as a straight Die Hard With A Guy In A Santa Suit script that got smushed in with an Actual Santa Action Movie idea. I also feel one or both of the henchpersons who discover it’s Actual Santa should take it as a sign to get out of there.

Red One never has stakes, as obviously the plan isn’t going to work like it maybe could at least in part in Violent Night. And I guess the reveal of Santa being Actual Santa couldn’t be hidden for more than five minutes, which undercuts the mundane antihero’s reaction to the setup. Also the North Pole has delivery drones and stuff. I can see why people singled out the visually fun Krampus castle sequence though.

Adventure Calendar 2025: Fairytales

The complete collection of adventure ideas and plot hooks and a few items based on folk and fairytales

0: Fairytales

1: The Snow Queen

2: Cinderella

3: Jack And The Beanstalk

4: Jack Tales

5: Dick Whittington And His Cat

6: Puss In Boots

7: Snow White

8: The Pied Piper Of Hamelin

9: Peter Pan

10: Sleeping Beauty

11: Beauty And The Beast

12: Little Red Riding Hood

13: The Three Little Pigs

14: Goldilocks And The Three Bears

15: The Princess Bride

16: Aladdin

17: Ali Baba And The Forty Thieves

18: Sinbad

19: The Little Mermaid

20: Rapunzel

21: Midwinter

22: The Town Musicians Of Bremen

23: The Frog Prince

Addendum: The Emperor’s New Clothes

24: The Nutcracker

Season’s greetings!

Christmas

So here it is... (The Cure covering Slade)

The Room In The Tower

A Ghost Story For Christmas: The Room In The Tower by E. F. Benson is by far the closest adaptation Mark Gatiss and crew have produced. Especially if you turn it off when the frame story takes a hit.

Nicely creepy, particularly the slow silent nightmare scenes.

Empire behind the scenes article

Adventure Calendar 2025 24: The Nutcracker

Adventure Calendar 2025

24: The Nutcracker

I decided to end on The Nutcracker as I started on The Snow Queen, a story very familiar from ballet - in this case the ballet is the best known version, particularly in the US as a standard holiday show for many companies.

The eponymous Christmas gift, a soldier-shaped toy with a practical function, leads gingerbread men and assorted toys in the defence of a family home from an invading army of mice (often later changed to rats to seem less adorable) with the aid of the girl who got the present. So we have toys come to life, intelligent animals, and an epilogue about the Land of Sweets. It’s Toy Story versus Tom and Jerry with a stopoff in Candyland.

Plenty of settings have a suitable Weird Level for magic toymakers and dolls sword fighting with giant mice, so no trouble coming up with an adventure hook there.

The Nutcracker

The PCs are drafted in to help a toy reunite with its owner. This may also involve a mouse king.

But also...

The Show Must Go On

The PCs have to help with, protect, or otherwise ensure a high-profile artistic event takes place. During the Cold War, ballet was one of the cultural forms still used for international outreach and there are examples with defections and espionage, so this would be suited to a spy game too.

Adventure Calendar 2025 Addendum: The Emperor's New Clothes

Adventure Calendar 2025

Addendum: The Emperor’s New Clothes

The basis for the only other fairytale Disney animated feature, which is not getting its own entry here as it barely uses it because yeah, there’s not enough material to cover very much. Ha ha.

I see you

A regular joe joins a very Native American coded tribal society of nine-foot animal-senses people with an empowering bond with their environment and fights a human megacorp looking to exploit and despoil it.

Avatar is a Werewolf: The Apocalypse game.

(Note that I don’t think this is actually how it developed, unlike my genuine feeling that the creators of John Wick are at least familiar with Vampire: The Masquerade. It’s just one way genre stuff does pop culture Native American environmentalism, probably with things like Dances With Wolves influencing both.)

Adventure Calendar 2025 23: The Frog Prince

Adventure Calendar 2025

23: The Frog Prince

Boy gets cursed to be a frog, persuades girl to kiss him and change him back. Kind of like Beauty And The Beast but he’s pitiful instead of terrifying. Being turned into a small unimpressive animals also brings in threats from nature and the human world, like being miniaturised. How would the PCs cope with suddenly being the size of their figures?

Honey I Shrunk The Party

The PCs have to be miniaturised to sneak in somewhere and retrieve or plant something. Maybe to deliver a Christmas present? And... who had the de-mniaturising gadget?