So I don’t have a long history with roguelike video games. Not to twist the knife for any geezers in the audience, but I was not yet born when Rogue was first released. I’ve played plenty of games that take place in dungeons – Diablo, Diablo II, Path of Exile, just to […]
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve put 15k words into a playtest document for Quintessence, and today I got to a span of rules I’ve seriously dreaded writing. The 4e brawler build of the fighter class is about the only version of grappling rules I think I’ve ever seen in […]
One of the last projects I worked on for MFV.com has just been released on the App Store. The Quarriors! app is a transliteration of the Quarriors! dice-building game. I strongly recommend both games, but especially the one that I worked on. Ahem.Quarriors! WebsiteQuarriors! on the App StoreI hope you’ll […]
I’ve mentioned Birthright a dozen or more times over the past few years of writing this blog, especially while playing around with SIFRP hacks, but I’ve never written a detailed post of why it deserves its place in the canon of D&D’s settings. If it weren’t wedded pretty heavily to its […]
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been playing a new iOS game called Oceanhorn: Monster of Uncharted Seas. I play a lot of things I don’t care about, and this isn’t a dedicated review blog, so if I’m bothering to post a review, then spoiler: I liked it. It’s not a […]
Dear Design Diary, While I was away for Thanksgiving, thanks to the unflagging support of Kainenchen, I started working with some ideas for a new fantasy roleplaying system for tabletop. I particularly want something that borrows a bit more from the style and substance of LARPing, without sacrificing usability. When […]
There are a lot of lessons of good game-running that carry over between tabletop and live-action gaming. This post, though, concerns itself with an area in which the two are quite different. As usual, I’m talking about a certain band of LARPing, not all LARPing. (There are almost no statements that […]
This is my third Anniversary Post for Harbinger of Doom. Its predecessors are here and here. In these posts it is my custom to talk about the games I’m running and playing, since I otherwise largely abjure blogging about matters of normal life. Much like when I started this blog […]
It’s been a long time now since I first cracked the cover of Skyrealms of Jorune and began my detailed examination of this famously strange game. It’s been a pretty slow news week on the D&D Next front, what can I say? So here we are, in Chapter Two (Creating Your […]
With a lot of my posts about game design, I talk separately about how things work in tabletop games and live-action games. When I came to the topic of lore skills, I first discussed how they work in a number of local LARPs, because I feel like LARPs have a […]