This is an entry in a journaling game I’m currently playing. An explanation, and my first entry, is here. I swear, I sort out a series link for these soon. (And yes, I’m a day behind the prompts. Yesterday was my brilliant wife’s excellent birthday, so I took a day off.)
This is an entry in a journaling game I’m currently playing. An explanation, and my first entry, is here. I swear, I sort out a series link for these soon.
This is an entry in a journaling game I’m currently playing. An explanation, and my first entry, is here.
So, my first real RPG project has been published as of a few weeks ago, and it out in the wild! It’s bananas seeing pictures being posted and seeing the first few reactions to it out there. I haven’t posted about it here because, let’s face it, the blog has lain mostly dormant for years. (Long story, for another time.) But man, look at this book: The adventure is set in a brewing monastery, because, you know, write what you know? Okay, I’m not a monk, but I know a fair bit about beer and historical brewing, and was reading …
Last Saturday I attended a “mini-con” in Seoul and had a great time. I got to play in two games, one of which I’ll discuss briefly today—in part because the other, I’ve been playing elsewhere as well, and would like to sum up my experiences with it in terms of both sessions. (And the other playthrough is currently awaiting its concluding session.) The game I’m discussing today is Sixtystone Press’s Cathulhu, by Ingo Ahrens, Adam Crossingham and Daniel Harms. It’s a BRP-derived game, featuring a percentile, roll-under system and a hilarious set of skills as well as special “tricks” that …
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 …
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 …
Though I’m keeping a low profile and all, I am participating in Clarion West’s Write-a-Thon this year. I signed up a little late, because I wasn’t sure whether I could really get much done during the write-a-thon itself: the timing, as always, is a little tough for me. (The first week of the workshop is always final exams week for most universities here in Korea, and in my current job, that’s followed by a four week long summer intensive course. On top of all that, our kid’s going to be in hospital next week at the end of the month, …
Though I’ve got more serious news I’m still processing, this post isn’t about that. It’s game stuff. Sunday was a kill-two-birds-with-one-stone kind of a day. I was signed up to run the Lamentations of the Flame Princess table at the Free RPG Day event at Dice Latte in Seoul, so I figured I might as well give that adventure I’ve been revising—the one I discussed drafting here—one more quick playtest. The adventure involve’s a wizard’s tower, which was a good fit for this year’s LotFP Free RPG book, Eldritch Cock—a book of demented, cool spells using the same spellcasting rules …
I’m not sure how I ended up with a license for Scapple: I think it was thrown in with my Scrivener license, though it may have been included in some bundle of Mac software. What I am sure of, though, is that I didn’t find a use for it until recently. That’s on me, of course: I probably could have used it while plotting out the novel I redrafted last year, but it never really occurred to me. However, that’s changed with a project I just finished working on, a freelance RPG-writing project. It’s one of those deals where there’s a clue …