Category: RPG

Before the Storm

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A few weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to participate in a playthrough session of Joanna Piancastelli’s Before the Storm, which is the final final game in Pelgrane Press’s  storygame collection Seven Wonders. I should have written up the session at the time, because now some of the details of the session have slipped away from my memory, but I’ll focus on my impressions of the game as a system and an experience, rather than the plotline that unfolded during our particular session.

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Wildsea and Brancalonihack

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So Wildsea is… wild. It’s essentially a FitD game but with the multi-playbook character building of Spire. The setting is bonkers, the character types are bewildering and fun, and the best thing is that the mechanics are flexible enough to accommodate all types of characters. For example, my character is a gau “char.” In normal people language, that means it is a fungus-humanoid and the ship’s cook. A lot of my character’s personal contribution to the game is cooking, and its personal quest is to be a kind of Darwin-meets-Julia Child, wandering the world and documenting recipes and cooking methods …

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Isle of Joy Kickstarter Concludes, “Soundtrack” in Progress

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The Isle of Joy Kickstarter concluded last night, after a couple of really stellar days. I was impressed with how many people decided to back the project in those last days and hours, and I’m grateful to them all. People managed to unlock a lot of nice stretch goals—including colour maps!—and as was announced in the last announcement for the campaign, I’ll be making a collection of tracks titled Songs from Isle of Joy to release as a special bonus for all backers. (More about that below.) Anyway, I’m really excited for our backers to get their copies and I …

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Lessons from the Isle of Joy: Backstory

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This post is, yes, me trying to convince you to check out my latest RPG project, the Isle of Joy over on Kickstarter right now. However, since I’m not used to selling my stuff, I am going wrap the sales pitch in bacon some short essays on actionable related to RPGs. Maybe they’ll be things most GMs have figured out for themselves, maybe not, but I’d like to share what I got from the experience of designing and playtesting the book.  Today, I’m going to talk a little about backstory, especially the difficulties in establishing a mysterious backstory. 

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Monster Man: “My Favorite Monster”

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For those who are interested, I appeared on James Holloway’s podcast Monster Man for a “My Favorite Monster” episode, and you can hear it here! Along with promoting Isle of Joy Kickstarter, I also talk a bit about why I love using spirits in RPGs, and a bit about what living in Korea did to my conception of spirits and how they could work in games. As always, James was erudite and thoughtful about the topic.  For me, this was pretty wild: I’ve been listening to Monster Man since sometime late last year when a good friend recommended it to …

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