Essays, actual play, theory talk, and general navel-gazing about story-focused roleplaying, aka “indie” games. And trindie. And OSR. If you’re small and scrappy, I want to talk about what you’re doing! If you’re fighting to grow, I want to talk about what you’re doing! Basically if it’s roleplaying (tabletop, freeform, larp, whatevs) and it’s not the monolith of D&D, it’s in my wheelhouse.
I’ve been slowly going through Invisible Sun, book by book, digging into it in as detailed a way as possible. Read the first installment of this series if you want to catch up. Caught up? Great. Let’s move on to The Path, where the “truth” of the game’s setting is revealed to the GM. This… Continue reading Invisible Sun: The Path
Kickstarter announced Zine Quest 2. I'm gonna do it. I'm making this public announcement as a way to goose myself into actually doing the thing. I've got several ideas! But I think the one I'm going to do to wet my beak is my solitaire PbtA game Tiny Dragons. It's fun, clever, sweet, and actually… Continue reading Zine Quest!
I recently wrapped up our Band of Blades campaign and thought it’d be nice to take a little break on the other side of the table. So my best buddy is running Magpie’s Masks for us for a while. Masks is a game about teen superheroes. I don’t know much about the teen supers subgenre,… Continue reading I’m Just Playing My Character: Alibis In Play
We wrapped up our tenth and final session of Band of Blades this week, bringing our campaign to a close. The Legion arrived at Skydagger Keep for their final showdown with the endless hordes of the Cinder King. We were, perhaps, more excited for the campaign to be over than we were to see how… Continue reading Band of Blades: A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
While it’s true that virtually every RPG you’ll ever play will require rulings or some other human judgement, there are a few games out there that require improvised game design as part of the play experience. Or at least make it fun as hell. As I’ve written before, we’re in the midst of the Band… Continue reading Improvised Game Design
