Eileene’s trying her hand at the new Dragon’s Age II game tonight, and I’m helping by sitting near to hand and making snarky comments. What little we’ve seen so far looks pretty good, a decided refinement on the original Dragon’s Age: Origins. Gear, especially, requires less fuss: you only have to worry about equipping yourself, […]
When our weekly RPG session fell through yesterday, I turned to the web for solace, reports of actual gaming experience to confirm or contradict my developing expectations (read: concerns) for the FATE system. In the process, I came across Actual People, Actual Play a podcast devoted to playtesting RPGs and reviewing how specific mechanics affect […]
Small press RPGs continue to be printed. Perhaps they’ll never vanish entirely. Happily, one has proven that they can still generate buzz. Some roleplayers are drawn to games that offer ever more spectacular powers to paste onto the same old ass-kicking, some are drawn to intriguing settings, and some—the system geeks—are drawn to interesting rules. […]
Also in my quest for inspirational pulp adventure, I checked out Lost Horizon, not realizing until it was in the DVD player that it was a Frank Capra movie. Yerk. Couldn’t even sit through the whole thing. This was not two-fisted adventure; it was one-fisted, and that for about half a second, in a performance […]
Seeking inspiration as a GM, I settled for Sky Captain and the City of Tomorrow. While not exactly two-fisted pulp adventure from the serials, it seeks to imitate them, and it’s readily available. “Settled for†is the appropriate term: I could recall little of the movie besides not liking it, but thinking it looked pretty […]
Just saw a web page for an RPG titled Maid at maidrpg.com. Player characters are all maids in the service of a single master, who by default is a lonely and socially underdeveloped young man teenage boy, though an old lech or a marble patriarch may be easily substituted. In addition PCs are also exotic […]
I had Sulla’s commentary on what went wrong with Civilization V pointed out to me recently. He gets some important details wrong, especially in his gripes list—for example, you do continue to pay gold-per-turn agreements even after declaring war. I also don’t understand how he can insist at length that ICS is an easy—too easy—path […]
What happened to all those two-fisted pulp adventures? I’m considering running a role-playing game in that vein, but I confess I don’t know the genre all that well. Roleplaying supplements are available for the curious: GURPS Cliffhangers and the FATE-powered Spirit of the Century, for example. But I also wanted to go to the source, […]
Lots of friction in last night’s session. My character, Deacon, is a badass of the “judge, jury, and executioner†school, who views himself as the avenging hand of God. Last night, he decided somebody needed putting down, and saw to it in cold blood. My fellow players had known something like this was coming, and […]
The new campaign is off and running: our five PCs are to usher in a new epoch, whatever that means. I’m guessing that the once-invisible spirits which hover near select individuals and give them superpowers are about to manifest to the entire world. Hard to know for sure, because (A) we’ve only had one session, […]