Seven Stars in the Rearview (Part Three)

One of the recurring themes of the game, in retrospect, was travel. We had agreed that the game was to be a globetrotting adventure in the Indiana Jones mold, rather than an extended expedition to a single exotic locale, or a tale of pulpy masked heroes fighting crime in the shadows of a big American city, and almost every episode had the player characters visiting a new port of call: Shanghai. Hong Kong. Cairo. London. Rome and the Vatican. New York. San Francisco. Rio. Buenos Aires. Virtually no corner of the globe went unexplored, and that meant that as GM, I had to constantly be painting in new pieces of setting.

Seven Stars in the Rearview (Part Two)

With Dr. Song in place as the nominal villain of the piece, until it became clear that others were even more “Sinister”, the globetrotting adventure was ready to begin. Much of my early work was very uncertain, because although I knew that the campaign would begin in Shanghai (a setting so vivid that I could have run the whole game there) I wasn’t sure where the players would go from there. With Rob’s character Su Li motivated to thwart the plans of her evil father, all I needed to do was dangle his latest plot in front of her to drive the action. And Dr. Song, of course, was after the titular Seven Stars of Atlantis: fabulous gemstones rumoured to have magical powers and a connection to the lost continent itself.

 

Seven Stars in the Rearview (Part One)

There is a melancholy that comes with the end of a campaign, even one that’s been long and satisfying. Maybe the longer and more satisfying the game is, the harder it is to let it go. We’re all junkies for stories. We get tangled up in the lives of our cast of characters, their problems and their passions, and we wonder where their lives will take them next.

Review: NIGHT WITCHES

I know, it's been a while. Once again, the working world has caught up to me and The Blogging has suffered. I've got a few things I've been meaning to talk about here -- including my noodling around for a couple of weeks building a Harry Potter hack using FATE ACCELERATED -- but let's get back to business with a little review. 

Short Takes: Primetime Adventures 3rd Ed

So we've started playing a new game GMed by my lovely wife Megan, Shakespeare VA (based on one of the series pitches included in the HILLFOLK core book). We're playing it using the latest iteration of PRIMETIME ADVENTURES, fresh from its successful Kickstarter campaign. PTA has been a favourite around our table for many years, since our friend Rob introduced us to the game with his supervillains-fight-the-power game, T.H.E.M. PTA hits the sweet spot for us most of the time in terms of enabling the kind of drama-intensive play we do best around our table, so we were all excited to see what the 3rd Edition brought to the party.

My character from T.H.E.M. as imagined by the talented John Matthias.

Down and Out In The Golden Age of RPGs (Part Three)

With so many things standing in the way of gamers trying out new game systems, new settings, and new modes of play, what can we do to change things?

The good news is that the industry is already coming to grips with the new realities of gaming in the 21st century, and has been doing its bit to make trying new things as accessible as possible. The big companies have offered a wide range of "starter" products (like the previously-mentioned PATHFINDER box set) to get people's attention, with everything you need to run a game packed right in there. Having readily-available materials that are attractive and accessible goes a long way toward getting people to try something new. If they don't have to invest more time than it takes to choose a pre-gen and add a suitably grandiose name, that's all to the good.

Down and Out In The Golden Age of RPGs (Part Two)

As I've said on the podcast, we live in a Golden Age for gaming. There's a chunk of the gamer population that looks nostalgically back on the early days of the hobby as the best of times, but I'm not one of them. I wouldn't trade the games we played back then for the games we're playing now for all the polyhedrons in Chateau de Chessex.

Today, we have a multiplicity of games to play, games that cater to virtually any taste you can think of, and some are so weirdly specific in their subject matter that gamers of my lost youth would have had a hard time imagining their existence. There are so many titles available -- new games, old games, new games evoking old games, old games appropriating the tricks of new games -- that it would be impossible for even the wealthiest gamer with a bottomless well of free time to play them all, or even keep track of them.