Mandatory disclaimer: if you love the TV show Smallville, you’ll like the Smallville RPG. I don’t like Smallville, so I’ll be approaching this product as if reviewing “Superhero Soap Operas: The Roleplaying Game”, for whatever that’s worth.
Author: mpduxbury
Things Look Different!
Regular readers (or rather, my regular reader) have noticed that the blog looks different than it used to. I’ve been meaning to tinker around with the themes for some time, and with the help of a more artistically minded friend, I finally got around to doing it. Continue reading
I Would Die For You: Death Moves in Monsterhearts
Recently I wrote about the conditions that force Monsterhearts characters into their “Darkest Selves”, the death of that character being one of them. I criticised this approach for its trivialisation of death, and for its contribution to the ubiquity of the Darkest Self condition. Whilst death in a supernaturally themed game doesn’t need to be the end of a PC’s story, it shouldn’t just be a convenient trigger for a roaring rampage of revenge. As Simon Pegg put it: “Death is an impediment, not an energy drink”.
(He was talking about the slow zombies in Shaun of the Dead, but it’s almost relevant.)
As an alternative, I’ve hacked together a series of “Death Moves” for each of the core Skins in Monsterhearts. They are triggered when you take four harm and choose to avoid death, and are a replacement for the “enter Darkest Self or lose all strings” default move in Monsterhearts. Continue reading
Darkness There and Nothing More: My Problem with Monsterhearts
Monsterhearts is a paranormal romance RPG about “the messy lives of teenage monsters” that’s Powered by the Apocalypse. Assuming that the “paranormal romance” part didn’t immediately turn you off, that’s a pretty strong sales pitch, since Apocalypse World remains one of the most innovative advances in tabletop RPG design for the last decade. Let it not be said, though, that Monsterhearts coasts by on the successes of its predecessor – there are plenty of new gameplay options introduced to adapt the system to its new setting, and many of them are implemented successfully. Continue reading
Fate of the Browncoats: Firefly Fate Core Hack
EDIT 28/08/18: Like this post? You might be interested in my follow-up rules for Mexican Standoffs in Fate Core, which is designed for use in the Firefly system hack below!
A couple of months ago I attended Concrete Cow, an event run by the Milton Keynes RPG Club, and was granted the opportunity to run a session of the Leverage RPG. I’d been eager to give Cortex Plus’ Action system a go for years, and picking up the new Firefly RPG at GenCon had only excited me further. Whilst I enjoyed running Leverage, there were elements of the system I was a bit less keen on, and upon re-reading Firefly was delighted to see that they seemed to be addressed within the engine’s new iteration. Certainly I am looking forward to giving the game a try when I get a chance.
This post is not about that game. Continue reading
RPG Kickstarters: Hype By Any Other Name
Three weeks since the gush-a-thon that was my 2015 can’t-wait-to-play list, and yet again I’m selling my soul to the Man. This time though, instead of spouting about games we can only speculate about, I’ve decided to be a bit more practical, and point towards future RPGs that you can support right now on Kickstarter. Continue reading
Diceless GMing in Gumshoe
A few weeks back I started running a short Gaean Reach campaign. I’m still playing in a friend’s second Trail of Cthulhu game, and have previously run a Night’s Black Agents campaign and one-offs for Mutant City Blues.
From the above description, it’s no surprise that I am a fan of Robin D Laws’ Gumshoe system, the engine that powers all four of those games. However, playing so much Gumshoe also means knowing it well enough to recognise its limitations. Continue reading
Fate Degenerated: Black Mirror RPG Hack
Recently I was talking to a friend about sci-fi roleplaying games in a present-day setting – not space opera or cyberpunk, but social science fiction led by issues more than characters. Since this was something they were looking to explore in a short game rather than a fully fledged campaign, I started to consider if a series of one-offs might be the best way to go, and how Fate could be adapted further for one-shot play. I’ve called this a “Black Mirror” hack, because it’s the example of this kind of thing I know best, but since each episode of the show is entirely standalone, no familiarity with the source material is required to try it out. Continue reading
All Aboard the Hype Train: 2015 RPG Releases
Due to some difficult personal stuff I neglected this blog entirely last month, to the confused dismay of absolutely no-one. Now that things have started to settle, for better and worse, I’ve been thinking about the future – roleplaying games included. Continue reading
Dragon World: New Basic Moves
Finally, something Apocalypse World related to justify the title of this blog!
I recently attended a get-together with the London Indie RPG Meetup Group, a lovely bunch of folks who regularly convene to… well, play indie RPGs, as the name implies. Continue reading
Roll Plus Hot 