Category: RPG

Two Great Tastes… Wait, Three Great… Er, Four?

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Before I left on holiday, I was reading through Geoffrey McKinney’s Carcosa and wondering what in the world I would do with it if I were running the game with my own group. It’s a dark, bizarre, fascinating mashup of odd subgenres. Carcosa squashes together: Sword & Planet adventure (think Barsoom, say) The Lovecraftian Cthulhu Mythos a dash of gonzo neo-Lost World (in the form of mutant dinosaurs) the classic grey alien and alien tech … and those are just the mos prominent components. There’s also funky dice mechanics, a boiled-down-to-usability version of psionics, an alternate (and very creepy) magic system, and more. Which …

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“Beyond Mere Lotophagi” in Green Devil Face #6

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So, I’ve been pretty busy lately—baby, work, game prep, life—but I figured I’d pop up in and mention that I just got my contributor’s copy of Green Devil Face #6, the recently restarted Lamentations of the Flame Princess zine. There’s a bunch of great stuff in it: a piece on diseases for the Early Modern historical setting by Andre Novoa (author of the recent “The Squid, the Cabal, and the Old Man” adventure), with globalization considered; a nasty monster designed by John G. McCollum; some tables for generating bizarro relics—and also, I think, a clever proof on how much objects illuminate worldbuilding—by Paul Keigh, who …

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Team Sports and Values?

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I always find it funny, seeing parents talk about the value of team sports: they’re always, always people who play team sports as adults, and how they loved playing them as kids. That’s fine, and I don’t contest that a kid can, while playing a team sport, develop his or her teamwork skills, discipline, understanding of the virtue of sacrifice, and grasp of the value of hard work. But… I value those same things, though I didn’t enjoy—and never really played—team sports after elementary school (and even in grade school, I never played them much). So then where did I pick up those values? The …

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Mark Majcher’s Twenty Four Game Poems as a TEFL Resource

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I recently picked up Mark Majcher‘s book Twenty Four Game Poems on Bundle of Holding (which is basically the Tabletop RPG gamer’s equivalent of Humble Bundle). I actually bought the bundle mainly for this book, because it intrigued me so profoundly, and I have to say, I’m glad I did. A “game poem” is basically just a short, simple pick-up game of some kind, for which the rules and mechanics are simple, and the game is focused on a single, straightforward idea, theme, or mini-arc. For example, players might adopt the role of a bird flying around to some purpose, and narrate their flight’s beginning, middle, …

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Partially Recovered: Stellar Region

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This is probably of limited interest to most readers, aside from tabletop RPG fans. (Basically, I recovered (from the Wayback Machine) a snapshot from a time one and a half decades ago, when I was running an online turn-based tabletop roleplaying game–sort of–by email, without all the amazing resources available to RPG enthusiasts today.)

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(non-Platonic!) d14 of Korean Hard-Partying

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Update (17 Nov. 2014): You, too, can enjoy this wonderful die… if you use an Android device and can read Korean, anyway, or if you visit Insadong (and can read hanja). See the update at the end of the post for more details. Original Post: As promised the other day: the Korean d14 from the Shilla Dynasty, used for drinking games. (Yeah, given the popularity even now of group drinking games in South Korea, that’s hardly a surprise.) But the d14 is unusual: it’s a rather bizarre polyhedral die called the 주령구 (Juryeonggu), which I first ran across during a visit to the Anapji palace in …

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Killer Mini-Campaign

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I’ve posted before here about using RPGs as a learning tool with students. One of the things that’s important when you do this is to (a) choose a story structure that emphasizes communicative tasks: your students should have to talk a lot, whereas combat is something they want to avoid, or something that must be coordinated when it’s absolutely necessary. That is to say, pedagogically, it’s better for students to end up having to negotiate treaties or beg for their lives than it is to have them running around doing hack’n’slash adventuring, or dungeoneering of the type epitomized in the phrase, “kick in …

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