Finishing a campaign

Roleplaying campaigns end all the time. Too bad they rarely finish. It took me years of GMing to actually complete a campaign, not merely see it dissolve. And I’m not the only one: Far from a representative poll, certainly, but it lines up with my experience. Almost 2/3rds of campaigns don’t reach a satisfying ending. […]

Arkham Horror the Living Card Game

Campaign games are a hot new thing in board gaming. I’m quite a sucker for them, and judging by their performance on Kickstarter, so are a lot of other people. Since I’ve backed a few, I figured I might as well write about them. To kick things off, however, let’s take a look at a […]

Dungeoncrawling by default

D&D is the “default” system many people use, for a variety of reasons, even if it really doesn’t fit the game. There’s a related trend I’ve come across, mostly in OSR: “default” gameplay. I should say upfront I’m really not an OSR person. But I’m curiuos about it, and as part of this curiosity I […]

The Facility

The Facility is a one-shot roleplaying game written by yours truly. You can get it, PWYW, from DriveThruRPG and itch.io. Yes, that means you can get it for free, I won’t judge. It is a body horror reverse dungeon crawl metroidvania. If that word salad of a classification didn’t scare you away but didn’t quite […]

Heretic

Another extra advance for Spire. This one’s doesn’t really introduce a new facet to the world of Spire, but offers a different way of interacting with its many deities. You don’t always see eye to eye with your deity. You are still their faithful servant, but there’s some dogma, some divine dictate, that doesn’t sit […]

Usherer of the World Yet to Come

Extra advances for Spire. They’re very high-concept, utterly bonkers, and I’m unreasonably pleased with them. Even if you don’t intend to play Spire, and you should, it should be easy to follow this. The World Yet to Come is neither a god nor a demon. It doesn’t have cultists or worshippers. It has usherers. It is […]

Spire – the game must be played

Spire, or more fully Spire: The City Must Fall is an RPG by Grant Howitt and Christopher Taylor of Rowan, Rook and Decard (don’t ask which one is which). In it, players are dark elves living in the namesake megapolis, their former capital taken over by high elves, or aelfir. The game is about the […]

Unified Theory of Blades in the Dark

I’ve complained at length about the Blades in the Dark rules almost making sense in its review. To summarize, subtly different logic governs the two core mechanics of the game, action and fortune rolls, with plentiful exceptions to how they work in specific cases, making it impossible to comprehend the rules instead of memorizing them. I’ve […]

Blades in the Dark – haunted by greatness

Blades in the Dark is the New Hot Roleplaying Thing. Written by John Harper and published by Evil Hat, it is a game about a crew of scoundrels in a haunted industrial city. While not directly Powered by the Apocalypse, it is a descendant of Apocalypse World. And just like its predecessor, it has spawned […]

Especially Nasty – Murder Mollusk

I’ve dug up this beauty from the depths of cloud storage (or should it be heights?), a kaiju boss fight. I mostly share it now because of all the titles the creature has. A monstrous slug five meters tall and twenty long, with scythe-like claws as long as a man, it crawled out of the […]