The Bellringer’s Tomb For the past few weeks, I’ve gotten back into Below and Fallen London (formerly known as Echo Bazaar), two browser-based choose-your-own-adventure games. I’ve mentioned Echo Bazaar reasonably often in this blog, though it’s been awhile; I think my hiatus from the game ran nearly two years. I had […]
In response to a question from a reader, I’m tackling what is, in my limited knowledge, one of the great unaddressed issues of LARP-running: the long arm of the law and imprisonment, both by PCs and against PCs. Now, I bet you’re thinking of that one time there was a […]
In working on Quintessence, I’ve been trying to think of situations, either realistic or cinematic, that other tabletop games don’t model well, if at all. So when Kainenchen and I watched Stardust the other day, I was struck by the many times that a character sets a blade at another character’s […]
LARP-running has any number of challenges that tabletop gaming can’t reasonably face. The specific case I want to talk about today is module parties. I assume modules aren’t a significant part of salon LARPs, though of the three salon LARPs I’ve played, two included adventure sequences outside of the main area […]
While writing my recent post on Birthright, I got to thinking about other settings that could use its model of domain play, reskinning concepts appropriately. These ideas aren’t fully fleshed out by any means, and I don’t have immediate plans to run either of these – though developing a riff […]
This is another post about my work in progress, Quintessence of Dust, where I lay out the game’s resolution mechanic and how I’ve gotten there. The first post and starting point on this topic is here.
So I don’t have a long history with roguelike video games. Not to twist the knife for any geezers in the audience, but I was not yet born when Rogue was first released. I’ve played plenty of games that take place in dungeons – Diablo, Diablo II, Path of Exile, just to […]
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve put 15k words into a playtest document for Quintessence, and today I got to a span of rules I’ve seriously dreaded writing. The 4e brawler build of the fighter class is about the only version of grappling rules I think I’ve ever seen in […]
One of the last projects I worked on for MFV.com has just been released on the App Store. The Quarriors! app is a transliteration of the Quarriors! dice-building game. I strongly recommend both games, but especially the one that I worked on. Ahem.Quarriors! WebsiteQuarriors! on the App StoreI hope you’ll […]
I’ve mentioned Birthright a dozen or more times over the past few years of writing this blog, especially while playing around with SIFRP hacks, but I’ve never written a detailed post of why it deserves its place in the canon of D&D’s settings. If it weren’t wedded pretty heavily to its […]