Just a short update this time. I’ve not been blogging too regularly since the start of the year, but I’ve tasked myself with posting at least once a month – even if it ends up being literally the last day of month, like today. I think some discipline is good, to keep things going and justify continuing to pay for the site. Happily I’ve got enough of a back catalogue now that I’m still getting a fair amount of hits, and it’s gratifying to know there is content here people are still finding useful. Continue reading
Author: mpduxbury
Mini-Review: The One Ring
Licensed RPGs are a tricky thing. It’s not always easy to capture the spirit of a property in a format that’s enjoyable to roleplay. Particularly egregious failures tend to linger in memory – the 1984 release “Middle-earth Role Playing”, for example, had most high level player characters flinging thunderbolts with nary a care for Tolkien’s subtle, low-magic mythology. Cubicle 7’s take on the Lord of the Rings phenomenon is equally distinctive, but in a good way. In this game, journeys are arduous, evil is insidious, magic rarely seen but powerful, and companionship amongst friends a greater power still. This is as Tolkien as fantasy roleplaying gets, right down to the exclusive use of masculine pronouns throughout the game text. (Perhaps authenticity isn’t always desirable when adapting something 70 years old.) Continue reading
How to Build Soundtracks for Your Roleplaying Game
I blame Will Hindmarch. It was his article for the Escapist, which I read over six years ago, that set me down this track. It started with a couple of sessions of experimentation, before it became the mantra I always live by. For every game in an RPG campaign I run – and every one-off game, where I can get away with it – I have a soundtrack that plays alongside the game. Continue reading
Mini-Review: Ten Candles
Horror RPGs are difficult to run because they live and die on strength of tone. The suffocating dread of an excellent horror game delivers a cathartic thrill unlike anything else in the hobby… but when mishandled, it’s fodder for unintentional comedy. Ten Candles is a fantastic game because generating atmosphere is its first priority – it’s dark, thematically and literally. Best of all, it’s a game where you get to set things on fire. Continue reading
Mini-Review: Becoming
Character advancement is a staple of roleplaying. Character deterioration is less common. Fiction is replete with heroes who lose everything to achieve victory, stories with pathos, so cathartic to roleplay. Becoming fulfils that niche by upending the concept of the “player party”, underlining the tragic loneliness of the sacrificial saviour. What does that mean in practice? One PC. Three GMs. Continue reading
Ferrymen: Galactic Factions Redux
A couple of years ago, I sat down with the players in my ongoing hard sci-fi Fate game Ferrymen, and agreed on a direction that we wanted to take the campaign going forwards. The players all agreed that after thirty-odd sessions of building contacts and making a name for themselves, it was time for their actions to start counting on a galactic political stage. I put together a ruleset for controlling galactic factions and waging political conflicts, which can still be reviewed here.
Since then, we’ve played enough games with those rules in play that I have a good understanding of their limitations. Continue reading
Force and Destiny Minigame: Podracing
Recently in my Force and Destiny game, the PCs found themselves needing to raise a lot of money in a short amount of time. Inevitably, it was decided that the best way to achieve this was to enter (and bet on) an illegal podrace. Continue reading
Mini-Review: Atomic Robo
Atomic Robo is a great webcomic. Fate Core is a great RPG system. A Fate adaptation of Atomic Robo should be a slam-dunk, but the result is somehow less than the sum of its parts. Most of the Robo-specific rules innovations don’t work properly, and whilst the core system at its heart works just fine, I couldn’t really recommend this product over Fate Core vanilla even if someone was specifically running an Atomic Robo game. Which is a shame. Continue reading
Review of 2016
There are plenty of more socio-political aware blogs providing commentary on the atrocity that was 2016. I don’t have much to add to that, only to say that, even disregarding international events, personally this has been the worst year of my life.
I played some cool roleplaying games though 🙂 Continue reading
CAMELOT Trigger: Armoured Human NPCs
Tournaments, duels and frank exchanges of views are a staple of the Arthurian romances – as much as, if not more than, full military conflict. In the universe of CAMELOT Trigger, the Emergent might be the ultimate enemy, but that doesn’t mean that human knights don’t have plenty of reasons to clash.. Noble houses manoeuvre around one another, and beyond the Round Table, pirates and brigands take advantage of the turbulence to prey upon unwary travellers. And then there are those truly villainous souls who willingly serve MerGN-A herself…
Last time I provided a few Emergent NPC statlines for GMs to use in their games. This time I want to expand that range to include human adversaries. In each instance, I’ve provided an archetype of human opponent, then an example character who fulfilled that role in my campaign (with stats!). Continue reading
