EPT dungeon level in progress

Started designing an EPT dungeon level tonight based on the map "Temple of the Weeping Moon". I hope it comes out worth posting.

Variant Character Creation for Empire of the Petal Throne

I have still been mucking about with EPT at a low level. After that character creation experiment a few weeks ago, I came across a blog post in which the author talked about stat roll mirroring as an approach to use instead of something like 4D6 and drop lowest for D&D. I forget the author or blog, but he called it twinning. Under this scheme if you don't like your rolls, you can subtract ALL of them from the max roll possible + 1, no picking and choosing, and get that set of inverted rolls.

 Another way to add some flexibility between the roll X stats and assign the rolls as you like and roll for each stat in order is to write down an ordered set of rolls and then pick any stat as the first stat and apply them in order starting there, and wrapping around at the end of the list until all are filled.

 Taking these two together, there are nine percentile rolls to make to set up a starting EPT character, the six basic stats, original skills, professional skills, and starting Kaitars. Throwing the last three in there as an additional minor help. It is nice to have a good skills roll, and Kaitars may be a handy "dump stat".

 For example:
Here is our template:
STR
INT
CON
PSY
DEX
COM
Original Skills
Professional Skills
Kaitars
 With percentile rolls: 34 12 13 90 75 73 35 96 55
 Interesting mixed bag there, the average is 53.7, so not going to mirror it.
Let's say we want a Warrior, and are more interested in attributes than skills.
So we start with the 90 for Strength
STR 90
INT 75
CON 73
PSY 35
DEX 96
COM 55
Original Skills 34
Professional Skills 12
Kaitars 13
 This character will be a peasant or other relatively untrained fighter at first, but has a good attributes profile for a non-caster and will be good once levelled up.

 A high professional skills character that might be decent from these rolls:
STR 73
INT 35
CON 96
PSY 55
DEX 34
COM 12
Original Skills 12
Professional Skills 90
Kaitars 75

 Rescuing one of the lamers from the previous set of roll-ups, need to roll three more:
Dorik hiAkaliyalalu
STR 07
INT 19
CON 21
PSY 96
DEX 02
COM 49
Or Sk 45
Pr Sk 19
Kai 13

This is a perfect character to mirror the rolls, subtracting each from 101:

Kirod hiAkaliyalalu
STR 94
INT 82
CON 80
PSY 5
DEX 99
COM 51
Or Sk 56
Pr Sk 82
Kai 88

That's very powerful as is, or could be slid some to improve the PSY stat if planning to be a caster.

Tried out Dominions 4

My son David has been following the computer game Dominions 4 for several weeks lately. It is a complex fantasy themed classic turn based 4X game, heavy on game, light on graphics and glitz. He was extolling to me its depth of play so I took an interest too and bought us a couple copies in the Steam sale. Last night he gave me a tutorial on the basics of play in which we played Ulm, a heavy armored kingdom, on a midsized map in the middle period. We played for about four hours, and had fought several battles and captured one "Throne" by the time we had to stop. It was interesting. I now have a handle on the basics, but he assures me we have only scratched the surface, and I can see that from all the stuff in there I have already seen but not done yet. So far, it has been a fun game and I could see playing quite a lot of it. I look forward to playing against him once I have a bit of a handle on strategy.