Cathulhu

Last Saturday I attended a “mini-con” in Seoul and had a great time. I got to play in two games, one of which I’ll discuss briefly today—in part because the other, I’ve been playing elsewhere as well, and would like to sum up my experiences with it in terms of both sessions. (And the other playthrough is currently awaiting its concluding session.)  The game I’m discussing today is Sixtystone Press’s Cathulhu, by Ingo Ahrens, Adam Crossingham and Daniel Harms. It’s a BRP-derived game, featuring a percentile, roll-under system and a hilarious set of skills as well as special “tricks” that …

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Reading the Numenera (Core Rulebook) by Monte Cook

I know I’m pretty late to the party, but I’m trying to take notes as I read different RPG books, in part to sort of collect my thoughts about them. Numenera‘s already got a new (backwards-compatible) edition, so I’m really behind the curve, but I’m behind the curve on everything these days, and if I let that stop me, I’d never post anything here. So, here are my thoughts on the Numenera core rulebook, loaned to me long ago by my amazingly patient friend Justin Howe. 

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“The Peppers of GreenScallion,” and More

This entry is part 68 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

Among the many wonderful things included in the June 2019 issue of Clarkesworld, you may find two things of interest to those following Korean SF, or my own work as a cotranslator with Jihyun Park. The first is a translation of Myung-Hoon Bae’s “The Peppers of GreenScallion,”translated through the efforts of Jihyun Park and myself. It’s a story about war, systemic failures, bureaucratic nonsense, food, and love. We’re very proud of it, especially given the fact that it turned out to be a lot more fiendishly subtle than we originally realized: little things throughout proved challenging to translate, including an …

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Readymade Bodhisattva, “The Flowering,” Los Angeles/Riverside, and More

This entry is part 67 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything to the SF in South Korea series on this blog, but that doesn’t mean that nothing’s happened in the field. It’s just that:  My interests have broadened out from SF to other forms of speculative or “genre” narrative (and, in a big way, to include tabletop RPGs in general), and a lot has happened in many other narrative genres and different media within Korea.   I’ve been a little less involved in the informal Korean SF world since 2013. We were abroad for a while, and then we had a kid and moved …

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At Last, A Use for Scapple

I’m not sure how I ended up with a license for Scapple: I think it was thrown in with my Scrivener license, though it may have been included in some bundle of Mac software. What I am sure of, though, is that I didn’t find a use for it until recently. That’s on me, of course: I probably could have used it while plotting out the novel I redrafted last year, but it never really occurred to me. However, that’s changed with a project I just finished working on, a freelance RPG-writing project. It’s one of those deals where there’s a clue …

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