Grapevines & Geeksites (#RPGaDay 2017, Day 4)

August is RPGaDay month. Yep, a month solid of RPG-related posts, answering these questions:

Today’s question is this:

Which RPG have you played the most since August 2016?

That’s easy to answer.

I ran a Lamentations of the Flame Princess game in Daejeon from sometime in early spring 2016 until just before Christmas of that year. My game setting used some variant abhuman classes—the Revenant, the Changeling, and the Dagonian—and some houseruled variants on the new magic system that was being playtested during the period. The campaign site is at a subdomain of this site, specifically obtenebrations.gordsellar.com.

LotFP was a great choice for me, because the ruleset is in its essentials (especially as presented in the Rules and Magic book) a variant of the D&D Basic system, which I internalized so long ago, and so deeply, that I was able to hit the ground basically running when I returned to GMing. Also, I dig the books that Raggi publishes: they’re consistently beautiful and high-quality, and set the high-water mark for book publication quality in the OSR field, whatever you might think of the aesthetics of the content.

In my own game, I basically playtested the module that is forthcoming from LotFP (set in a brewing monastery in Belgium), and then sort of chained together other scenarios of my own devising—a bizarre witch’s tower linked to the monastery, an extended flashback to the newly-discovered ruins of an underground, horribly enchanted Roman bathhouse beneath the city of Bad Aachen, and a brief and brutal session of terribly unprepared characters wandering amid the Urals, trying to find their way down to the safety (ahem) of the valley. I haven’t written any play reports, but I do have the scenarios written up, and one of those things—guess which!—is something I’m collaborating on with Ahimsa Kerp.

Besides that, I really haven’t run much much at all, and I can probably name all of the other games I’ve played since August, though they’re nearly all board/card games rather than RPGs. 1 But the other RPGs I’ve had a chance to play include one-shots of Fiasco and Numenera. I almost managed to get people to play a one-shot session of Dread, but somehow it unfortunately didn’t happen. Maybe if there’s time I’ll try book something around Halloween this year, and see if it works out.


  1. Let’s see: Chinese poker, Cockroach Poker, Hive, Paranoia: Mandatory Bonus Fun Card Game; Don’t Mess With Cthulhu, Cthulhu Gloom, Da Vinci, Dixit, Outrider, Congkak, and some Korean tile game involving worms. Maybe I missed one or two in there, I don’t know…I played a lot of Skull & Roses at one English cafe last year—like, several games a week. Hive, too. Oh, and we played a few rounds of Exploding Kittens with my nephews in Canada, too.

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