The Novelist—developed and published by Kent Hudson/Orthogonal Games—is an interesting and only slightly flawed game. When I heard about it, it was characterized as kind of a take on The Shining—the Kubrick film, more than the King novel—in that it involves a novelist and his family in an isolated house shared by an invisible presence. There’s one big difference: the viewpoint character that you play in the game is the ghost. Well, sort of.
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.)
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 …
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 …
Attention conservation notice: This post will mainly interest those who are curious about my experiences using RPGing in language teaching as a method of generation motivation, focus, and interest in language learning (a topic I discussed in a recent essay of mine published in the WyrdCon 2012 Companion Book).
A sampling of what I’ve been digging into lately. Books: Remember Choose Your Own Adventure books? Remember how those Fighting Fantasy books by Steve Jackson & Ian Livingstone added die rolls and character information to that paradigm? Now imagine reading one and not having to flip from one page to another. Imagine one that takes advantage of all the possibilities of ebooks. Is this new version of Dave Morris’ classic Heart of Ice what you imagined? (I haven’t read it yet, but it’s getting rave reviews, and I plan on checking it out.) R.H. Kanakia presents: a Taxonomy of Readers. I’m …
UPDATE (13 Nov. 2014): I’m guessing this is your cheapest option for polyhedral dice in South Korea now. There are also polyhedral sets that aren’t too expensive, if you poke around on Gmarket. UPDATE (27 Nov. 2012): Got the polyhedral dice. The place I ordered the six-sided dice from took a few extra days to get those dice shipped, but I’m still hoping to receive them in the next couple of weeks. I’d better, since we have some Fiasco games planned for the third week of December. ORIGINAL POST: I have a bunch of dice on order, at the moment. You might …
I’ve been talking about gaming as if I haven’t done any whatsoever in years, but the fact is, in fact I have done some…. just not RPG gaming. One of the games I recently got and tried out is the infamous Cards Against Humanity cardgame, which is available under a Creative Commons License here. (Though if you’re looking to print them up in Korea, see my warning below.) In any case, with a set of cards in hand, we tried out our first game with our neighbor Mark, and then his wife Jin when she got home from work. If …
UPDATE (20 Feb 2022): I’ve very slightly revised this scenario and made it available on my itch.io page. ORIGINAL POST (8 November 2012): I figured I’d share the scenario documents I prepared for Talent Night–the game scenario I’ve been discussing throughout this series of posts–just in case anyone else out there might want to try run the game and liked the idea of our setup. I’m also very interested in comments from anyone who knows the game, as far as feedback regarding scenario design is concerned. I’m happy to learn more or have missteps or goofs pointed out to me. …
Note: this is the second third post in a series. In the previous post, I discussed my long, long hiatus from RPG gaming, why I chose the game Dread for my first game in a decade and a half, and a bit about the game mechanics. You might want to start there. Alright, so I learned a lot of things playing this game: some about Dread as a game system, some about character motivation, some (mostly re-learned, to be honest) about dealing with newbie players. And some stuff not related to any of those things. Some of these may be obvious …