I recently posted about the fiction and nonfiction I red in July/August here. That’s only half the story, though: I also tore through a bunch of RPG books this past couple of months—mostly at the end of June and going into August—and that’s what I’m going to discuss in this post. (I’ve split this the two posts up because I know some people are more interested in reading about RPG books, and some aren’t at all.)
Not long ago I received my copy of Momatoes’ game The Magus (“Oracular” edition), which I backed on Kickstarter. It’s a gorgeous print edition put out by Nessun Dove (though it’s also available via itch.io) and seriously, I have very few gaming books I think are more beautiful. Hell, I think I have very few books of any kind that are. It also came with an oracle deck and that, too, is just gorgeous as well as full of tons of interesting, compelling prompts. The thing is, it’s a solo game, and I have a terrible track record with solo …
My turn to run a game has come up with my Sunday night group, and out of the options I offered everyone to choose from, the big winner was Mythic Bastionland. I’d fortunately just read the whole thing, and also had recently gotten a chance to play a one-shot of the game with my other group, GMed by the inimitable Jeremy Tolbert. After that, I felt like I had a pretty good handle on the game and that I could do it justice. I really admire a few things about the design. For one, it has the same kind of …
I’ve created another RPG thingie! It’s an unofficial, unlicensed supplement titled Further Strangeness: Twelve New Knights, Seers, and Myths for Mythic Bastionland. I got a kick out of reading Mythic Bastionland, Chris McDowall’s new game, of which the majority of the content is two-page spreads laying out the information on Knights (potential PCs or NPCs), Seers (NPC sages), and Myths (which are basically adventure materials). It was fun homebrewing these up, and quite a challenge trying to come up with things McDowall hadn’t quite covered in the original set of 72 of each. Some are a bit close, but I …
So, over the weekend while I was waiting for my summer class’s students to turn in their final writing projects, I put together my entry for the Appx. N Jam. If you’re not on itch.io, you’re probably unfamiliar with this “game jam” concept: basically, someone suggests a themed creative project and people can join it and submit their own take on it. Some have prizes (like the Appx. N Jam does), some don’t. Come to think of it, if you’re not deep into D&D lore, you might also not know about Appendix N, to which the jam’s name refers. But …