Games I Play

Speed Character Creation for Smallville RPG

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I recently started running a 1-v-1 game of Smallville with my girlfriend, as she’s considering adapting Cortex Plus Drama for her own upcoming campaign. It’s an interesting challenge, taking a game that’s so clearly designed to generate momentum from the interactions of a player party (the campaign villain is usually a PC), and trying to make it fit to our quite specific requirements. It’s also been a challenge relearning all the things I didn’t like about the game when I tried it the first time: the impenetrable layout, inconsistent rulings, and seemingly limitless ways in which the game’s Plot Points can and cannot be spent. If it wasn’t for Stephen Morffew’s comprehensive Plot Point exchange chart, I think I’d be lost entirely.

Sitting snugly in the centre of my love/hate Venn diagram is the relationship map Smallville uses to form the basis of its “Pathways” character creation. Continue reading →

Ferrymen: Galactic Factions Redux

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Part 6 of the Ferrymen series, a long running home campaign adapting Diaspora to Fate Core.

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 →

Review of 2016

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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

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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 →

CAMELOT Trigger: Emergent NPCs

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I love CAMELOT Trigger. I love the setting, both the strength of its elevator pitch (“What if the Knights of the Round Table piloted mecha to fight robots in outer space?”), and the extra details that spark the imagination, without including too much to constrain it. And I love the system for mecha construction and combat, which brings an extra level of tactical thinking to Fate conflicts, reflecting the military-focus of the genre. We finished our campaign last weekend, and I’m still buzzing with excitement from a campaign-well-done.

I don’t love the example NPCs. Continue reading →

The Third Horsemen: Final Thoughts on the Dystopian Universe Beta

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Disclaimer: This post concerns the beta version of an unreleased game. The commentary below may not reflect the contents of the game’s released version.

Evil Hat’s Dystopian Universe beta is now closed, and the last of my feedback is submitted. Bound as I am by “disclosure pledge” obligations, it’d be remiss of me not to conclude our campaign story, and provide one final bit of feedback. Continue reading →

The Third Horseman: Initial Feedback for the Dystopian Universe Beta

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Disclaimer: This post concerns the beta version of an unreleased game. The commentary below may not reflect the contents of the game’s released version.

A tsunami of post-it notes. That’s my stand-out memory from the first two sessions of the Dystopian Universe RPG. One of the players (or more than one, or less than one MAYBE I’M BLUFFING) ended up with a secret that required them to pass on notes to the GM, and I guess everyone wanted in on the act. Continue reading →

Dystopian Universe Beta: Character Generation

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Disclaimer: This post concerns the beta version of an unreleased game. The commentary below may not reflect the contents of the game’s released version.

Last week we had our character creation session for the Dystopian Universe RPG. Whilst we were missing a player, that didn’t prevent us cracking on with a systems overview and setting generation. Our fifth player, a Fate veteran, didn’t require quite the same level of education, and has now mostly confirmed what his character is going to be too. Continue reading →

How to Run a Bad Leverage Game

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Back in my university days when I pretended I was going to be a screenwriter, I read some useful advice about getting your work reviewed and edited by someone else: when someone suggests that a part of your writing has a problem, they are usually right. When someone suggests a fix to that problem, they are usually wrong.

The other day I ran a one-off game of the Leverage RPG. It was… well, it wasn’t exactly terrible, but it was weirdly uneven, and my players were far from satisfied. We discussed the game afterwards, and the prevailing view of the players was that the game system had problems which had accounted for our mediocre experience, in spite of our determined efforts to have fun.

But I don’t think I agree that Leverage is a bad game. Continue reading →