Mutants and Masterminds gets a lot of airplay on the internet forums: any time someone asks about superhero games, a raft of people come out of the woodwork to impose it upon you. I bought M&M 1st Edition a few years ago and was less than enthralled. It was D&D…with superpowers. Considering the general miasma…
Transhumanism
In 1966, Transhuman was defined by F. M. Esfandiary (later, FM-2030) as: included physical and mental augmentations including prostheses, reconstructive surgery, intensive use of telecommunications, a cosmopolitan outlook and a globetrotting lifestyle, androgyny, mediated reproduction (such as in vitro fertilisation), absence of religious beliefs, and a rejection of traditional family values. (Source: Wikipedia The word…
Current games in development
As mentioned a few posts ago, here is a list of the games that have gone through our idea filter and dropped down into the Book Development stage. If you’re a regular reader, the chances are none of these are of surprise to you, although I’m not sure we’ve blogged about all of them. So,…
War of the Worlds: Earth concept art
Which do people like more? (See the comments for more info)
D&D 4th Edition – A lazy blog post
I decided to just post verbatim an IM conversation between the two of us about D&D 4th Edition. I make no apologies for my laziness.
Lucky Ringo
Greg Stolze writes on his web page: What I learned … is that the best creative partnerships are the ones where each of you thinks the other guy is doing 70% of the work, and you’re the lucky Ringo along for the ride. (crossposted to my other blog)
The 23rd Letter: in film?
Back in late 2006, I got a bit of a shock. Maybe you do as I do but I like to beachcomb through Google and see what people are saying about the things I have written. I pick up a few comments about The 23rd Letter and Zombi most often, usually through RPG.net which seems…
How we design a role-playing game
I thought I’d share a bit about how our game design process works and (in a subsequent post) what we’re currently working on. This is not necessarily the best way to design a game, and we’re always looking at ways to get more stuff done, but at the same time we are only two people,…
Game Developers and Publishers
I’ve just taken over editing of the Game Developers and Publishers area on dmoz. If you are in this arena and want your site listed there, please submit it through the site suggestion link on that page and I should be able to look at it within 24 hours.
Paper, PoD, PDF
All of the books we’ve published (whether as Crucible Design or LateGaming) have been less than 100 pages. In general, this has felt big enough for the game that was being written, and every time we start out with a new game, one of the earliest questions is “how big is the book?” With the…
Game book layout: the four parts
In trying to layout some of our recent game projects, I’ve noticed some common components in every book, which has led me to the conclusion that every game book really consists of four parts: Character Generation/Creation (Chargen) Game Rules Setting GM Section Different games put these sections in different orders or interweave one or more…
UFO files from The National Archives
Lots of PDFs, a video and an MP3. The files contain a wide range of UFO-related documents covering the years 1978–2002. So if you want to find out more about lights in the sky over Waterloo Bridge, near misses by pilots, crop circles – and what the UK government thought of it all – this…
Vader escapes custodial sentence
You couldn’t make thisup. “The judge was on the verge of sending the Dark Lord to prison for the maximum possible term but abruptly changed his mind when Vader lifted his hand and waved it from side to side, while at the same time telling the judge that he “found his lack of faith disturbing”….
Saur: introduction
Half a decade ago, when Crucible was still about, we tasked ourselves with a job to create games settings in one week and bring them back to the fold. The catch was, the group decided what sort of game you were to write. The one that was given to me was subtitled “Roman Empire, No…
The WhiteChapel Project – early history
The Project in Whitechapel was formed in September 1941 as a subsection of the Special Operations Executive (SOE). The SOE was directed to encourage espionage behind enemy lines and build the core of a resistance cell in the event of a land invasion. As a result, they were entirely dependent upon the security of radio…
RPGnet whiners strike again
I loathe it when the RPGnet whiner crew crawl out of the woodwork and accuse people of being passive aggressive with the threat of bringing down the mods. You can’t even express an opinion without being asked to tone your language and the P-A finger is then pointed. That’s the absolute definition of the Ad…
Things like this inspire games
NASA media announcement I can think of a half-dozen things that would make a great game. It’s not going to be any of those things though. It’ll be something dull like a new source of some type of radiation.
Resolutions: Dealing with Canon and Context
Canon is the past in the play. It establishes facts which have gone before. It doesn’t mean it can’t be retconned afterwards but for the most part it is immutable (or at least it should have immutable facts and mutable descriptors, the latter of which may be changed due to Context. Context is the present…
systems, systems, systems
Is it right to design another system for a game? At the moment we’re still writing War of the Worlds, though we’ve started development on Status: Refugee and a Supers game. In all three, the working system is to be a derivative of ERIS from “The 23rd Letter”. Part of me wants to use ORE…