category: RPGs

The Quiet Year is a sort-of-coop map-drawing and story-telling game. You use a deck of cards (special printed deck or there’s a lookup table for a normal playing card deck) to draw events, and use them to tell a story. I say sort-of-coop, in that it’s more like Roman consuls where each day/month it would swap who was “in charge” rather than agree or compromise on a single coherent course of action. In fact you’re explicitly not supposed to actually talk through each event together and agree it. You draw on the map the result of each event to build a recording of the story, and you can start building projects to fix the problems beset by your tiny community. The events are things like: An old piece of machinery is discovered, broken but perhaps repairable. What is it? What would it be useful for? As the seasons turn towards Winter, they get darker: The weakest among you dies. Who’s to blame for their death? There are other better reviews, and I don’t really want to do that here. Although I suppose this is a small review of the roll20 module that I used. ...

I make maps for my games. And sometimes, I just make maps because I like them. Hex Kit is a tool I use for that, because it’s so easy to get started! Now, I’ve not tried any other software, so I daresay Wonderdraft or some other mapper is better, but if you’re drawing hex tile maps, at a relatively large scale, you can do something easy very quickly indeed. Here’s a small starmap I made for a SWN game I was playing in. I think I spent about as long looking up the existing names as I did drawing it. ...

Over the last few weeks I’ve been playing Artefact, by Mousehole Press. I wrote some words about it already. In case I didn’t mention before, it’s pretty. Admire how pretty it is, again. Technically, one should play it in one or two sessions and think solemn thoughts as you meditate on being left behind. I didn’t do that. The game has setup (which I did wrong) and three acts, and I did those all on separate days. ...

Updated: October 2022. This is a post I’m going to write and re-write. It will never be finished, as, if nothing else, when it gets too long, no player will want to answer all the questions and then it’ll be useless. It’s also aimed at myself, and is not intended to replace any other sources, such as: RPG Safety Toolkit Monte Cook’s Consent in Gaming ©️ John Stavropoulos Fundamentally, most of the “How do I resolve this problem in my group?” questions from GMs on /r/rpg come down to (IMO): My player(s) want to play a game like X and I want to play a game like Y ...

Finally, FINALLY, ran Tomb of the Serpent Kings. It is rightly held up as a great intro dungeon, for teaching lessons (in a good way) about some OSR concepts to beginner players. We’re talking here about combat-as-war rather than combat-as-sport, and the general idea of “don’t assume your GM is keeping you alive”. The players I ran this for wanted to play in Fifth Edition, and as I’d chosen the RPG for our last game, I used a free conversion pamphlet. Spoilers below. ...

Obviously Slipgate Chokepoint has me thinking about Quake quite a lot. I’ve ripped the NIN soundtrack off my original Quake 1 CD that I bought for the Amiga 1200 that I owned. Fun fact, it could run Quake at about 9-20fps depending on the mod I loaded. I’ve installed a bunch of different Quake engines, and hi-res texture packs, then thrown them all out again, for something updated but unmodified. And I’ve been having a load of fun. These are my musings on how and why I was having fun. ...

So a recap, if you take an enemy in Slipgate Chokepoint to a high enough -HP when you kill it, you have performed a Gib. Like in the FPSes it is based upon, you get a benefit if you gib an enemy, here that benefit is to immediately perform a second attack with Advantage. The rules mandate that the GM describes the gib as exquisitely as possible. NO PRESSURE THERE THEN 😬. ...

So on another Kickstarter I backed the luxury version of Artefact. I didn’t know I was backing a luxury thing, I just like getting physical stuff in the post, and for the (comparatively rare) :flag_gb: RPGs, I can order at much cheaper postage. Well, it arrived, and it’s very lovely indeed. The idea of Artefact is, from the website: ARTEFACT is a story game for one player, designed for contemplative solo play. ...

So I have a Kickstarter problem. And one of the things I backed this year was this beauty. Go look, I’ll still be here when you get back. It’s basically Quake: The RPG, and is an adventure/conversion for Stay Frosty. ...

I used the perchance.org website to create a Slipgate Chokepoint character generator