In his review of the Epoch horror RPG, Lowell Francis remarked that horror is an especially hard thing to pull off in RPGs, because most of the tactics used to invoke it in other, passive mediums (books, movies etc.) do not transfer very well over to the active roleplaying environment. One such tactic integral to horror is loss of control…. Read more →
Logged on Google+ today and it looks like the Marvel Heroic Roleplaying game has been cancelled, with Margaret Weiss Productions announcing that it’s surrendering the license due to the sourcebook line not bringing in enough money. Bad news indeed, especially for Marvel fans. While superhero games were never my cup of tea, I did have fun with the original FASERIP… Read more →
Yesterday’s post about skills got me thinking about their use in RPGs. Today I’d like to share some basic thoughts and suggestions on how to get the most out of them in your game. A lot of game systems (dare I say most of them?) use a combination of attribute and skill to find out how effective a character is… Read more →
There’s an old saying: “You can have the biggest gun in the world and it won’t mean squat if you can’t shoot straight”. Ok so it’s not really old or even a saying, in fact it’s something I just came up with, but the point still stands. In the savage world of The Frontier, good gear is only one –… Read more →
The new World of Darkness is an efficient and flexible ruleset that can be used to run a wide variety of “modern” campaigns, from horror to espionage. This series of reviews examines the various sourcebooks published for the “generic” World of Darkness line and their usefulness in running your own homebrew settings. Skinchangers Werewolves (and other werebeasts to a lesser… Read more →
Since I’m spending a considerable amount of time each week reading RPG blogs, I thought I’d make a list of the ten most interesting posts of the past week. This will probably become a weekly feature. Here it goes then, in no particular order: Neil Ellis and Keep Rollin’ Sixes both comment on Raise Dead/Resurrection as it pertains to DnD…. Read more →
There are OSR games, seeking to emulate the glorious days of the 80s. And there are OSR people, who are still stuck in the 80s with everything that entails. Just have a look at this latest round of idiocy. The guy looks so much out of time that for a moment I thought he would ask people to support BADD… Read more →
Roll-under game systems (those were you have to roll under a target number, usually an attribute or skill value) are some of the oldest and most common in existence, even though they’ve become a bit old-fashioned in recent years. Popularised by Chaosium’s BRP d10p system used in Call of Cthulhu and other games, they are used in many diverse games,… Read more →
Over at Forbes, Eric Kain does a preview of Luke Crane’s and Thor Olavsrud’s upcoming Torchbearer, a tabletop dungeon-crawling RPG. While the game is still in development – they’re hoping for an August release at GenCon – it seems that it will be based on a simplified version of Mouse Guard (itself a simplified version of the Burning Wheel system)… Read more →
One of the things I enjoy most in RPGs is reading about clever mechanics and how their application during actual gameplay. My blood boils whenever I hear “the rules are not important”, which I consider just an excuse for poor design. Sure, RPGs are ultimately about storytelling and interaction, but like with almost any other human activity having a sound… Read more →
