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See More »As part of Samhaine’s ongoing tests of all kinds of indie-gaming systems, we recently played a very enjoyable evening of Don’t Rest Your Head. I played Corwin van der Hoyt, a crosstown courier who worked for some kind of shady people; he was a Mirror’s-Edge style thrillseeker. Ever since the […]
Shortly before our most recent Dust to Dust event, we released rules for wizard dueling. In this post, I want to talk about some of the design considerations that drove this project, some of the ideas we set aside, and some of the problems that we didn’t discover until after […]
I’ve been playing Echo Bazaar pretty constantly since I started a couple of months ago, and it’s what brought this to mind for me, but Samhaine pointed out that Smallville did the same, and as I thought about it I realized that it’s not a new idea, I just happen to […]
I’ve been working on creating a decent crafting system for tabletop games for as long as I’ve worked on this blog, and then some. I’ve discussed some of the hurdles to doing so before; the things that make crafting interesting in MMOs don’t apply in tabletop gaming. There are big […]
Samhaine has recently been posting his GM-side analysis of Technoir, and I’ve been talking about it more or less nonstop in my posts, so here’s my actual post discussing it. In the second session he ran, I played Thornton “Pierce” Kimball, an investigator who had been working for Minnesota’s Big […]
There’s been a lot of talk lately about skills in D&D 4e. Sarah Darkmagic’s last two posts (here and here) are a working summary of the current round of this discussion, and I can’t say enough good about some of Rob Donoghue’s posts on this topic, though you’ll have to […]
Way back in June, I worked out the first few powers for a Roux Swordsman character class and suggested additional attack descriptors that might lend more of a cut-and-thrust feel to 4e combat. Today, I’m working on the Rowan Berserker school, also taken from King’s Gate. They fight with shields […]
About a year ago, Wombat Warlord and I spent a good bit of time working out ideas to add a robust and flexible magic system to Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying, because we liked the core of the system enough to adapt it to other fantasy settings. In particular, […]
From March of 2009 to March of 2010, the Monkey King ran a campaign of Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying for a group of six players, eventually expanding to seven. I’m not sure at this point how many sessions we played, but I would guess that it was somewhere between 15 […]
At present, the tabletop systems freshest in my mind are Arcana Evolved (a cousin of D&D 3.5), D&D 4th edition, Technoir, Mage: the Awakening, Over the Edge, and to a lesser extent A Song of Ice and Fire RPG. This odd melange of systems and genres naturally leads to a […]
