When my friend Ahimsa Kerp (cofounder of Knight Owl Games and coauthor of Black Blade of the Demon King, The Chaos Gods Come to Meatlandia, and the recently kickstarted Worm Witch: The Life and Death of Belinda Blood) left Korea, he asked for some RPG books to be passed on to me, and Blood & Bronze was one of those. It’s an OSR game, as unabashedly as the title suggests, dating to 2016 in the “Transatlantic Edition” in the case of the book I’ve just read. (Transatlantic because this is apparently a Swedish RPG.) There are some in-depth reviews of …
Category: RPG
Ghostbusters, Spooktacular
I’ve posted here much less than I used to, but I also should note that I have heaps of posts commenting on RPGs I’ve accumulated and read over the past few years. I didn’t want this blog to become overwhelmed by them all—and some of them are kind of over-detailed—but… well, I think I’m going to start posting them (with “read more” links a paragraph or two in), because, I’m not posting much of anything else here, and because who knows, maybe other people will dig them. I’ll get around to those sooner or later, but for now, I wanted to …
Blades in the Dark, Round 2: The Rescue of Belle Brogan
We had our second session of Blades in the Dark earlier this week. Good time, though I am still trying to figure out a better approach to playing: my characters tend to be a fair bit more confrontational, while others tend to play theirs in a more cagey manner—and you can guess who racks up the stress by doing that. Not that I want to revert to a more cagey approach to play, but I think it might be good if I can wrap my head around the sneakier, trickier stuff, and the tactic of standing back and waiting for …
Blades in the Dark, Session 1
A few weeks ago, I got my copy of John Harper’s Blades in the Dark, but I set it aside because I was reading the copy of the Numenera rulebook that my friend Justin Howe loaned me an embarrassingly long time ago. However, by happenstance it turned out that Justin and I realized a Blades in the Dark game would be possible when someone I know on Twitter, M.R. (@ageekinkorea) expressed an interest in playing. So last week, I grabbed the rulebook off the shelf and, slowly, started reading it. I don’t have a great handle on the system yet, …
RPG Quick Shots
This post contains some thoughts on a few shorter RPG books I’ve read lately: The Derelict: A Tale of Terror for Call of Cthulhu by Sandy Peterson Beasties: A Manual of New Monsters for Your Original Edition Game by Thomas Denmark Caves of Shadow by Monte Cook Fate Accelerated by Clark Valentine with Leonard Balsera, Fred Hicks, Mike Olson, and Amanda Valentine If that doesn’t appeal, this may be a post to skip.
She Bleeds by Elizabeth Chaipraditkul
Update (20 April 2019): I’m not sure why I never posted this, but anyway, I just discovered this among my draft posts. Maybe I was planning to publish thoughts on all four of the Gen Con LotFP books at once? I’m not sure, but anyway, I’m busy and the other Gen Con books (which I have, but which I haven’t looked at yet) will have to wait, so I’m putting this out there now. Original Post (20 January 2019): This is a quick look at Elizabeth Chaipraditkul’s She Bleeds supplement for Lamentations of the Flame Princess. As the back cover text reads: …
Reading The Warren by Marshall Miller (and a new World Playset: Deck 17-R01)
This post is a brief overview of an RPG I managed to read through, but not yet try out, called The Warren. It’s a story game about… you guessed it, intelligent rabbits, sort of a RPG adaptation of Watership Down and stories like it. (Did the cover art above give it away?) This post includes short explanation of my (honestly sketchy) familiarity with the family of games it belongs to, an overview of what I found interesting in the game’s design, and a free (but not yet playtested) “World” playbook I designed for the setting, and a pretty wacky one …
Montsegur 1244
Montsegur 1244 is a freeform story-game that came out about a decade ago. I read through it once in 2012, but gave it another, closer look earlier this week, and thought I’d say a few things about it now.
Reading The Gaean Reach RPG
I’m somewhat familiar with the Gumshoe RPG system: I’ve played a short campaign of Trail of Cthulhu, and skimmed several core rulebooks using the system—Trail of Cthulhu, Nights Black Agents, Ashen Stars, and Cthulhu Confidential, all of which I own copies—but I haven’t had a chance to read any of those rulebooks in full or run a Gumshoe system game. In fact, until recently the only Gumshoe gamebook I’d actually read in full was Gareth Ryder Hanrahan’s Lorefinder book, which essentially is an extended Gumshoe hack designed to be bolted onto Pathfinder (and other D&D-styled traditional RPGs), in order to …
The Intelligent Sword
Everyone knows Stormbringer, the sword wielded by Elric—even people like me, who’ve barely read any of the Elric stories. Stormbringer is notorious in part because it’s the prototypical “intelligent sword” that old-timer RPG fans remember being a big deal in 1st edition AD&D. Now, there are rules for intelligent magic items in 5E, of course, and there’s certainly precedent in fantasy literature for intelligent or sentient magical objects that aren’t swords—the Lord of the Rings features one prominently—but I feel like the “intelligent sword” trope has kind of fallen by the wayside… at least, it felt like that when the trope came …