RPGaDay2015: Age of Ultron

7. What is your favourite free RPG?

A lot of people I've been seeing on Twitter chose Fate Core for this, but I'm going to go a different way with it. OK, it's splitting hairs, but "Pay What You Can" does not mean "Free" to me -- it means pay what you can. And Fate -- whether you play Core or Accelerated or whatever -- is such a great game that it should be paid for. Does that mean free games aren't good? Hell, no. A lot of free games are terrific. But if someone give you the opportunity to pay for something as high quality, well-supported, and powerful as Fate... if you don't pony up for that, you're not doing the hobby any favours. End of soapbox.

RPGaDay 2015: The Adventure Continues

5. What is your most recent RPG purchase?

I think the most recent thing I purchased was the Noir-themed Bundle of Holding. You know all about my addiction to these things, if you've been reading my blog at all, and I jumped at this one (although I've been more circumspect in my purchases lately with the budget being non-existent and all). Noir is a genre that I'm very attracted to, and I've been eager to get my hands on more source material. Greg Stolze's A DIRTY WORLD is pretty good, although it left me wishing it was about fifty pages longer, with more discussion of how a Noir game should be prepared and played. I felt like I got a better look at that by listening to an Actual Play of ADW on the RPPR Actual Play podcast. Worth a listen, if you haven't already checked that out, and those guys tend to play games that I like.

RPGaDay 2015: Whoops, missed the gun!

This Twitter bandwagon seems like a good way to jump back on board here for a while, and share a few of the thoughts I'm having about gaming these days. You can follow other people's responses on Twitter using the hashtag #rpgaday2015 , and see what other people are saying about the same questions.

I'm a few days behind on this, so I'll tackle the first four questions all at once.

Foundations

Every once in a while, it's important to go back to the formative ideas that shaped your thinking, just to keep them fresh and vital in your mind. I realized it had been a while since I'd talked about the ideas that bubble under the surface of our play style, and that maybe it was time to return to that well for a bit. If you haven't read some of my earlier stuff on the High Trust, High Drama style, this will tell you how we got there.

I grew up playing first edition Dungeons & Dragons, or Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, as we called it back in the day, and over the course of the next twenty years played a lot of traditional roleplaying games. In my thirties, I began to feel like the old style games weren't giving me the same thrill any more. I wanted more than I was getting from the likes of D&D 3rd Edition (and the many d20 games that budded off from it). As an adult gamer, my time was limited. I needed to make sure that our play time was as rewarding as possible.

A BLUE ROSE By Any Other Name...

I don't usually do this, but today I'm writing to tell you about a new roleplaying game I'd really like to see more support for. It's currently Kickstarting, although if you've been in the hobby long enough you may remember the first edition. 

The game is BLUE ROSE, from Steve Kenson and the good folks at Green Ronin Publishing. And it's an important game, folks, in an industry that is often clannish and slow to change.

Cover image by Stephanie Law from the original Blue Rose paperback.

Game Chef 2015 - The Long Sleep

Check out this gorgeous cover illustration by my buddy John Matthias!

So I decided that this year I would dive right into the deep end of the game design pool and put something together for Game Chef. It was intimidating putting something together so quickly, over just ten days, but I had a good time doing it and was satisfied with the results.

If you've never heard of Game Chef, it's a yearly contest with pretty wide-open parameters. You have ten days to design a game using the theme provided (this year it was "A Different Audience") and at least two of the ingredients (this year's were abandon, dragonfly, stillness, and dream). What kind of game and what format it ends up in are completely up to you. My entry, "The Long Sleep", is somewhere between storygame and American Freeform LARP. It's about people who are struck down by a disease that puts them in a comatose state. Their minds are not quiescent, however - the Sleepers find themselves in a vivid dream world, and somehow their minds are connected. Together, they embark on a journey Within...

Reflections. Ten days doesn't seem like a lot of time, but this is actually a do-able thing. I was happy with the game I got at the end of it, although there was stuff I wish I'd had the space for. 4000 words is not a lot, and you have to keep things simple and compact. I could have easily written another 4000 words if I'd had the space. I was very lucky to get an idea that had legs early on, so I didn't spend any time spinning my wheels. I thought about it for a couple of days, then wrote it down, caught my breath, and finally revised.

You can get the finished game here.

Review: TIANXIA - Blood, Silk & Jade

A couple of years ago, through the magic of social media, me and a handful of my players had the opportunity to playtest what was then a new game from Vigilance Press, TIANXIA. I was so flattered by the offer that I accepted, although I should have known that we were probably the last people who should have thrown their hat into the ring to playtest a game. It took us way longer to play through the game than would have been useful for our feedback to help the creator with edits, if we had engaged with the mechanics of the system for our game (and we really didn't). But our experience with this game was a very good one, and although I've already talked about it at some length on the podcast, it's worth a mention here - if only to say a belated thanks to Jack Norris, James Dawsey, and Vigilance Press by giving their excellent game a bit of signal boost.