Why are narrative games so hard to grok?

Nice clickbaity headline, well done. But it’s true – narrative, “modern” games like Fate or Dungeon World are seemingly much harder to run, or even play, correctly, as compared to the more “traditional” games like D&D. By “running the game correctly” I mean using the rules to their full potential and in a manner articulated […]

Sunless Fate 3

Welcome to the final (at least for now) installment in the series converting Atomic Robo rules to run a Sunless Sea-inspired game. Previously, we covered character and ship generation, as well as ship combat, trading and zeafaring. This post will have little to do with rules, instead focusing on exploration and mystery of SS, and how to […]

Sunless Fate 2

Welcome to the second part of the conversion of Atomic Robo rules to run a Sunless Sea-inspired game. The first installment dealt with character and ship generation, a mostly straightforward matter of applying existing rules. This post will cover ship combat, trading, and zeafaring, all of which required invention of new sub-systems, some of them a departure […]

Sunless Fate

Have you ever wanted to play a roleplaying game based on Sunless Sea? With a tagline like “lose your mind, eat your crew”, how could you not. It’s a game of zailing (yes, zailing) a steamship in the weird underworld of the Victorian Gothic universe originating in Fallen London, a free narrative browser game and […]

Atomic Robo Skill Calculator

Atomic Robo is one of the latest incarnations of Fate (not to mention an excellent comic). It is great, but that’s not what the post is about. There are many reasons to love that particular version of the system, and modes are on top of that list. On paper, it sounds easy: just pick your modes, assign them ranks, […]

First Impressions: Fate Core

Fate is not exactly new. The system has been around for over a decade, in many different guises and variations. The latest iteration, Fate Core, was released in 2013 after a massively successful kickstarter, and I finally got around to running it. We’ve played through a small campaign of superheroes in Sydney which started off ridiculous and […]

Paradigms of Play

This is an updated, 2017 version of an older article, with much better terminology. …in which Magician talks of himself in third person and reinvents GNS. Well, not quite. GNS (at least as far as I understand it) concerns itself with the desired experience, the agenda of a game: to win, to tell a story, […]