Category: RPG

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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Finished! Trine 2

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I normally don’t post about computer games, and think of the “Gaming” section of my blog as being about tabletop RPGs. However, both Mrs. Jiwaku and I have enjoyed Frozenbyte‘s Trine 2 quite a bit, so I’m going to make an exception: By “quite a bit,” I mean the degree of enjoyment, not the amount of play: it’s taken us  ages (and I mean, months on end) to finish the game, but that’s because we’ve rationed it to sessions of about an hour at a time, of only occasional frequency. Still, it’s been great fun playing together, and working out how …

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