Category: Roleplaying

  • Alien

    Alien

    Free League have turned their Year Zero Engine to the business of making an Alien roleplaying game. Now, I love the Alien series of movies. Well, OK… I love the first three. Which is good, because the timeline of the RPG encompasses that period. On the other hand, I have an uneasy relationship with the…

  • Playing for the Fun

    Playing for the Fun

    On Free RPG Day, I bet there were people who visited there Friendly Local Game Store and walked away with tabletop roleplaying games in hand but haven’t run a session since. They’ve watched all the episodes of Critical Role and loved the idea of Dungeons & Dragons, or watched all the movies and wanted to…

  • Free RPG Day 2018

    Free RPG Day 2018

      Behold the misbegotten and combined Free RPG Day acquisitions of the Baldowski Scavengers and associated benefits of being a Free RPG Day GM. Having started the day with a glorious pork belly and maple syrup pancakes crowned with a fried egg. (Seriously, glorious isn’t quite up to the task of describing the experience… When…

  • Stranger Tales

    Tales from the Loops provides an odd playing experience in our group. We had our second session this week and it felt weird – not in-game weird, but play experience weird. We have made slow progress on the plot line, but at the same time the role playing experience has been fuller and richer than…

  • The Crown and The Anchor

    I’m almost done with reading Johnstone Metzger’s entertaining Old School The Nightmares Underneath; I’m working through the section on creating the Nightmares themselves. People’s nightmares literally fuel the creation of Incursions from the outer realms into the real world, the Kingdoms of Dreams. Chaos seeps into the land of Law, nibbling away with insidious intent. Negative emotions…

  • Numenera: Live from Norwich

    Numenera: Strand proved a useful touchstone yesterday for kicking off an adventure in the Ninth World. I always answer any questions the players have about the situation that their characters find and the world around them, but Numenera: Strand was a neat way of setting the scene and the tone. A 10-minute video with just enough…

  • Blocks, Cookies and the King of Spain

    Blocks, Cookies and the King of Spain

    For me, attending UK Games Expo in the past has meant preparing and running five or six games – and probably misjudging that prep until the last moment. This year I chose to run only three games and opted to focus on adventures – or, at least, set-ups – that I have run before. For…

  • Gallifreyan Games

    The Doctor Who RPG needs to be played. I need to run it more often – and take the time to get into the nuances of Cubicle 7‘s Vortex system. Simple post really. While the reception to the last series might be mixed – and I can’t think of a single creative realisation in any…

  • Quick Doctor Who Characters – Part 2

    I ran The Blood of the Zygons this last weekend for Doctor Who (Vortex system) and I declare Quick Characters a workable option. Not flawless, but workable. I introduced the base game mechanic (2d6 + two character scores) and got going with the adventure. When the time came for some action, I laid out the…