Unknown Ponies: Questions, Addenda, and Advanced Rules

1) Unknown Ponies: Failure is Awesome is up to version 1.5. Most of the changes are grammatical in nature, with a few bits added for additional clarity. The link is the same, as every time I update the version I overwrite the old one.

2) Would people be interested if I added stats of the Mane 6, Cutie Mark Crusaders, and other NPCs (Big Macintosh, Derpy Hooves, Mayor Mare etc)? Would you prefer them either appended to the PDF or as a separate download?

3) Advanced Rules: Names and the Cute-ceañera
While many players of Unknown Ponies will have a firm notion in mind of their PC's eventual cutie mark and will name him or her accordingly, there are some players who will find it more interesting and challenging to leave their cutie marks up to chance and role-playing. This however presents a problem when it comes to names.

While some ponies have names which are unrelated to their cutie marks (Pinkie Pie), many more of them do. This is not a problem on the show, as the writers have the ability to decide ahead of time what a pony's cutie mark will be and name that pony accordingly. For a player who wants to role-play the discovery of a cutie mark, this is not possible, and as characters need to be named something, they are forced to either take a generic name or risk choosing a name which will potentially clash once their special talent is discovered.

Correcting this is simple: we take the concept of the cute-ceañera -- a party held for colts and fillies upon gaining a cutie mark, and combine it with the Japanese coming-of-age ceremony known as the genpuku.  When a pony comes of age, she may choose a new adult name (usually related to her cutie mark) at her cute-ceañera, or she may choose to keep her childhood name. Neither is more socially-acceptable than the other; it is entirely a personal choice of that pony.

Silly Guns

This is somewhere between a Monday Gunday and a Wednesday Night Wackiness post. Logically, I should have posted this on Tuesday, but yesterday I was squee-ing my fool head off because of all the hits I was getting on my Unknown Ponies post.

Pretty much like this:



Nota bene:  I am fully aware that many of you are annoyed by my constant posting of pony pictures, memes and videos. What you need to realize is that I feel that exact same annoyance every time you go on about sports, wrestling, NASCAR, or "arrow to the knee" jokes that stopped being funny eight seconds after Skyrim came out. So deal with it.


Okay, so: guns. As some of you may know, the 2012 SHOT Show was last weekend in Las Vegas, and for those of you who don't, suffice it to say that it's a trade show for gun manufacturers. Anyway, one of the biggest splashes made this year were two rifle offerings by Mossberg, one in .30-30 and one in .22LR:

Now those of you who have known me for a while know my tastes.I am a geardo, a compulsive accessorizer, and have an appreciation for the aesthetically funky. But these... oh, but these...

I am torn. One the one hand, these are AWFUL, because no one needs a tactical lever-action anything. On the other hand, they are so resplendently awful they actually back into awesome by way of absurdity, and they do look a lot like the kinds of rifles you'd see on Firefly. So I can appreciate them as silly, over-the-top jokes, and most of the time no one really gets my humor anyway so I'm okay with that.

But still, two things keep nagging at me. For one, that .22LR is slowly growing on me like a fungus. "Hmm, six-position stock," I say, "perfect for those of us with short arms. Those rails are great for mounting bipods or lasers for precision shooting. And by having plastic furniture instead of wood, it's both lighter and weatherproof. And lever-action means my left-handed mother can shoot it without difficulty. And I am quite fond of a tube-feed."

Really, the only thing stopping me is the black color (and the price, of course). Not that I have anything against black; I am quite pro-black, what with my goth tendencies. But tactical black simply does not suit a .22 of any kind. If, however, it were to be Duracoated in a nice camouflage scheme...

The other thing which nags at me is that this is possibly a case of fridge brilliance on the part of Mossberg. Both of these rifles have fixed ammo capacity and cannot, it any way, be made semi-auto. They are the perfect definition of "California Compliant", up to not having a pistol grip. Yet they look tactical, therefore "scary." I wouldn't be surprised if these models were made expressly to screw with California legislators, who will no doubt want to ban them because they're "evil black rifles"... and yet they're 100% compliant, which means that California is basically scared of the color black.

Which would be racist.








The more I think about these rifles, the more I like them, despite them being hideous. And that's just wacky.

WNW: The Growing Dead

"The departure of Frank Darabont has seen The Walking Dead go in a whole new direction. This new intro for season 2.5 seems to shine a light on the character dynamics of this ragtag group of zombie survivors and the impending daddy issues that Laurie's pregnancy is sure to bring."

There may be a commercial that interrupts the first few seconds. My apologies, but I can't do anything about that.




(In cause you couldn't recall, the theme music is from Growing Pains.)

This pleases me

Today, my rules for Unknown Ponies: Failure is Awesome have been linked to by not only Friendship is Dragons, but also by Jeff Rients, one of the gods of the Old School Renaissance.

Unknown Ponies: Failure is Awesome

Ever since I posted about the My Little Pony RPG I ran on New Years' Day, there has been a demand for the rules I used to run the game. It has taken me longer than I expected, but I have finished the first draft and am now putting this out for the Internet Hivemind to digest.

Please read it and tell me what you think. Or, even better, playtest it! Try and break the system (probably won't be difficult). I wholeheartedly welcome all constructive criticism.

The PDF of Unknown Ponies: Failure is Awesome may be found here.