Monday 21 September 2015

My Better Half (Part Two)

Megan during a podcast recording session.
When I realized that I wanted to push my game a little further into dramatic territory, my wife Megan was the first person I tried to "sell" on the idea. I remember being hesitant about it, even though she's a drama nerd from way back, because she had bought into the idea of RPGs as monster-ass-kick-a-thons as much as I ever had in my teenage years. Her character Rosa, who had begun life in that long ago ANGEL campaign, was a combat monster.

Thursday 17 September 2015

My Better Half (Part One)

Today is my 11th anniversary. 

Yeah.

Me (with much redder hair) and my lovely bride Megan.

Wednesday 16 September 2015

More Eberron by Gaslight

Sorry for the gap. Where were we?

Oh yes.

Last time, I talked about the history of this Victorian setting embracing Eberron going back to the reign of Elizabeth I. One of the things I seized on when I was leafing through the original Eberron campaign book was the section on cosmology, where different planes would align with the game world (including the realm of the dead, the plane of the monstrous Quori, and Xoriat - the realm of madness). That seemed too interesting to lose. I began imagining a world where the Dal Quor, the home realm of the Quori, was going to align with our world and unleash a massive Quori invasion. To defend their territory, Elizabeth I and Titania strike an alliance that is made manifest in their very bodies - they join together to form a new being, Gloriana. Good Queen Glory.

Sunday 6 September 2015

Campaign Workshop: Eberron by Gaslight

I mentioned this last week as the "mash up" I was currently crushing on. To be fair, since then I've realized that a lot of this idea can probably be traced directly back to Benjamin Baugh's superlative THE KERBEROS CLUB, but what the hey. And if you haven't read that one, you should - if you have any love at all for Victoriana, the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, WILD TALENTS, or just stunningly good RPG sourcebooks, it's the bee's knees. 

A couple of years ago I wrapped up my long-running Victorian vampire hunter game, SUNSET EMPIRE (and as some of you know, I often still mourn its loss in these pages - alas!). The concept for that game could be described, in broad strokes, as Victorian adventure in a world where the fantastic existed secretly below the surface. Like THE KERBEROS CLUB, as my game went on, the world got weirder and weirder until the vampires had conquered London with a magical weapon and German werewolves in silver-bullet-proof armor raced to the rescue. OK, it wasn't a subtle game.