I got this from the blog of reknowned comic artist PJ Holden So you want to be a writer? Or do you want to make a living as a writer?
Category: Industry
Q-CON XIV video
The official video for Q-CON XIV was posted today: It’s good to see it running as I did all the research for the first Q-CON by visiting cons around the country when I was President of ‘Slayers the year before. I amended the constitution, got it ratified and and then pushed the idea of running…
Crucible Design’s Games on Sale at Key20.
After what seems an age, the first roleplaying games I wrote are on sale again at Key20 SpaceNinjaCyberCrisis XDO The 23rd Letter ( RPG.net Review ) Zombi: The Earth Won’t Hold The Dead ( Review by Jeff Rients ) I’ve linked to reviews before but they’re easily searchable anyway.
Top 10 Roleplaying Games of All Time
Just to confuse matters, these are in alphabetical order but to my mind they represent the absolute cream of the crop when it comes to roleplaying games. Amber – The godchild of Zelazny’s novels, Amber brought us some really innovative methods of determining hierarchy and conflict resolution in a diceless roleplaying system. Re-defining the player…
A hatred of self and the games that do it.
How many games put you in the role of playing Ordinary Joe? Not many. A recent thread on TheRPGSite talks about: Originally Posted by The RPG Cliche List Nephilim Law. In modern-day occult games, mortal humans are considered to have the same intrinsic worth as cattle. (So named for Nephilim, a game that is particularly…
Art:
northerain is the blog of the artist behind Bloodsong Media. I like his stuff which he describes as: My style is more or less based on existing photographs. I use those to paint over them in photoshop. Since they’re not sketches, it’s impossible to do it in black and white. Sounds perfect for both The…
Diddlysquat is dead
Mark notes that Diddlysquat is dead. I didn’t know much about it, to be honest but reading the testimony of specky I’m reminded of lots of the silliness that went on within Crucible Design. In the end, projects like this are fuelled by a small core of people (usefully termed schemers and collaborators.). Everyone else…
Riffing off The 23rd Letter.
Ghost Whistler on RPG.net came up with a23rd Planet idea. He was riffing off the name of the game but it made me think tonight about: The 23rd Century Fast forward events in The 23rd Letter by two hundred years and you might have an idea of a micro-setting. Making psychics essential for space travel…
Top 5 reasons why D&D sucks
5. Roll-playing Game While not as bad as some systems (*cough* World of Darkness) in terms of the amount of dice you roll at one time, there are a lot of rolls for resolving single tasks. There are so many extra rules for things (most of which require rolls) that the emphasis is on the…
r-Maps (and being ahead of the curve)
There’s a lot of talk of relationship maps. I’ve been playing with the idea of an r-map for gaming for use as a player aid for a while. It really started to surface when playing superhero games in order to try and keep up with the number of NPCs and subplots that were going on….
Systems
A posting on RPGnet asks us to describe our homebrew systems. I ended up describing mine thusly. Maths-easy 2d6 comedy with either a manga/anime/mecha or zombie holocaust backdrop Qualitative success using 0-3d10 to create a crunchy yet narrative system which can be considered both rules-lite and “a gun game” with a backdrop of psychic powers…
Zombie Links
This isn’t a link blog, but these are very fun. Zombie World News “ZombieWorldNews.com is , as far as we can tell, a departure from other Zombie sites. Instead of the reader being a spectator, we hope to draw you in through a dynamic, ever changing scenario, that you can just read and enjoy, or…
Do women look for more depth?
Inanna Jones writes a bit about this sexism thing here on the IrishGaming livejournal: So generalising remark: women look for more depth. I disagree with Inannajones. I think both men and women look for depth. The depth is just in different seas. There is a group of guys who look for cheesecake art. They like…
Shakespeare at least had Viola.
Apparently, I’m exercising the power and privilege of my gender by criticising the idea that we should actually de-cliché a cliché in order to make everyone feel secure about themselves. (Question: if a cliché is de-fanged, doesn’t it become meaningless?) The author goes on to criticise my statistics because the sample size is not representative…
So I had to go ask some women….
The Bitter Guy calls this a really retarded response. Fair enough. It probably is retarded to point at something that’s fucking stupid and say that’s fucking stupid especially when the stupid thing is something that is “pro feminisim”. Yes. Terrifyingly stupid. I do have to wonder however as I’ve brought this up with just about…
More on sexism (plus registration and comments)
I’ve turned off registration for comments because it should be off. Bit of a mea culpa there. I am enjoying the discussion on sexism in RPGs which has been continued on thedeadone.net and Mary’s blog. I wrote: “Some game companies are currently trying to market cute and fluffly and romance and “social†games to women…
It’s about starting conversations with new people
I started a little storm in a teacup with my last post. Even got someone else linking to me. And some of the comments on that posting (e.g. “Enh, I went and read the Late Gaming post, and it’s so stupid, I couldn’t even work up the energy for a reply.”) just prove the point….
If Jesus had tits, would you believe in God?
On mer writes about rpgs we find an opine about how it’s such a shame that the pulp-rpg “Spirit of the Century” included archetypes such as: Gadget Guy, Gentleman Criminal, Jungle Lord, Man of Mystery and not Gadget Girl, Lady Criminal, Jungle Queen, Woman of Mystery Yes. It’s a bloody shame. So why don’t we…
Would I GM for money?
There’s a bloke on StoryGames who’s advertising his new business: Will GM for money. The price is $50.00 per month of weekly play, as of the 23rd of Febuary, the price is $10.00 per week payable in advance, which including includes snacks and drinks: a five session pass comes with a spiffy membership card with…
James Wallis is back. And you thought he was just tall.
James Wallis, poster boy for the health benefits of vegetarianism and one of the nicest blokes I know now has his own blog. James will always be welcome at my table. I do mean dinner table because it would be WAYYYY too intimidating to have him in a game…