A Fathead (genus Psychrolutes) trawled during the NORFANZ expedition at a depth between 1013 m and 1340 m, on the Norfolk Ridge, north-west of New Zealand, June 2003 (AMS I.42771-001). Photo: K. Parkinson © Australian Museum. The scientists and crew on board the RV Tangaroa affectionately called this fish ‘Mr Blobby’. Note the parasitic copepod…
Villains, Aren’t We All: Evil and the Gaming World, Part 3
It’s one thing to go head-to-head with an Evil being. And still another to play an Evil character. But what happens when you’re minding your own damn business and someone else in your troupe decides they don’t want to be Mr. Nice Guy? Now, that’s a real dilemma. Probably one of the biggest difficulties is…
Villains, Aren’t We All: Evil and the Gaming World, Part 2
Now that we’ve had a bit of introductory discussion about Evil, let’s move into the most intimate placement of Evil in a game: within the Character. An interesting comment was made regarding whether or not an Evil character knows that what s/he is doing is wrong. Are Evil characters simply misguided? The idea of “misguided”…
Film Review: The Illusionist
I really enjoyed this movie. It showed all of the overt magic and illusion which we would associate with stage magery albeit with the benefit of camera tricks to make them seem all the more unreal. Edward Norton plays the title role of ‘Eisenheim the Illusionist’, a cabinet-makers son who falls in love with a…
Villains, Aren’t We All: Evil and the Gaming World, Part 1
Comments really are the sweet spot on a blog, aren’t they? I get such great ideas from someone bouncing off a post I’ve written and before you know it, you have a chain reaction of kinetic ideas. The hardest thing is ALWAYS remembering all of the great “You know, I should write about that” topics. …
I need a concept artist
I hate the fact that I’m crap at drawing. I can describe stuff but I’m finding more and more that I want to find a concept artist. I want to have some images to post with the content I’m writing. I’m nto quite at the stage where I’ll post something onto RPGnet and I’m not…
This guy ain’t rolling his own dice in my game….
“Ladies and gentlemen, some dice stacking moves” I don’t want this to be a link blog but….go watch…it’s a flash video…
Story Games. Just Bloody Great.
Good gaming blogs are hard to find. I’m building some of the better ones into my blogroll there but one of the best I’ve found is Story Games. I love it. And that’s saying something. The key here is thatt it’s REALLY a blog pretending to be a forum or vice versa. I can’t work…
“Immersion”
I like a lot of the roleplaying blogs that are out there. They’re straight-talking affairs and whether you agree or disagree with th definition of “swine” or whether you agree that “Wrongist” behaviour is simply not-on, they’re usually varied enough to give you something to read. New to the blogroll is Malcolm Sheppard’s Shooting Dice…
Work?
Ideas At the moment we’re not taking unsolicited ideas. We’ve moved all of the current ideas to the wiki which is, I’m sure you’ll agree, a much better place for them. Rather than keep everything to ourselves, we post some of the interesting tidbits under the Game Design category. See the sidebar for quick links to…
Zombi Review
Jeff Rients writes about 5 old games he feels were overlooked. While I can agree with the ancient (James Bond, Lords of Creation) and the venerable (SpaceMaster) and perhaps even the weird (SenZar – though I always thought it was an internet joke-meme) I was shocked and surprised to see number 5 on his list…
What makes a popular game?
This thread on Story Games reports an interesting statistic. Dogs in the Vineyard has sold between a thousand and two thousand copies. The sales figures for DnD aren’t ten times that, they’re more than a HUNDRED times that, and that was for the FIRST print run. More have gone into print since then. The 23rd…
Pickup Games
We’re not talking about games which are designed to get the GM a date with the hot new girl in the gaming club (as mabmorrigan will likely relate happily later) but rather games which can be started quickly, how to pick up a game and get started and the pitfalls of doing so. Games that…
Roleplaying As Education
I have a list that is rapidly growing of things to post here, but for some reason this is on my mind just now, so… When I was growing up, roleplaying was that weird thing you did afterschool that no one was entirely sure wasn’t some form of devil-worship. The stigma seems to have abated…
Out-Of-Character… For Me, I Mean.
The most difficult character I ever had to play was one drawn from a stack of manila folders in a gameroom in Astoria, Oregon. It was a one-nighter session — not my usual brand of poison, but I was a girl in a room filled with guys and Guinness, and anything becomes more palatable with…
First Impressions
Congratulations — you’ve managed to rustle up a handful of players, maybe even titillated them with a hint of what’s in store for them. You’ve slogged through the char-gen process and, like horses held too long at the ready, the characters are chomping at the bit for what’s waiting for them down the road. Now,…
Trust.
This isn’t about Roleplaying, Sci-Fi or Gaming in general. I’m angry. This is regard to a complaint raised against the North and West Belfast Health and Social Services Trust regarding the treatment of one of their patients, a young adult with special needs. This young man is under the total care of the Trust as…
TTN: Zombi
Tonight at TableTopNorth, I decided to eschew my plans of running 2300AD because, simply, the setup is massive and I don’t know my players very well. They seemed to want an action game so I dug out a copy of Zombi, one of my own games, and decided to force them into some hot undead…
Origins of The 23rd Letter
Syndicate… As mentioned earlier, it started out as a psionics ruleset for a sci-fi corporate espionage game called Syndicate which was masterminded by John. Syndicate was never published and indeed never went beyond a couple of dozen pages of brainstorming materials. I adapted some material from some of my earlier attempts at game backgrounds, mainly…
Roleplayers beware…
LONDON (Reuters) – Police on Thursday charged a woman on terrorism-related offences for possession of a computer hard drive loaded with operating manuals for guns, poisons, mines and munitions. To be honest, these criteria would qualify half of the roleplayers I know for internment. It was my ex-wife who said, “Guns, the more you learn,…