Category: Games
-
More Crunchy Game Content: Even More Traveller Vehicles!
Now updated! Here are some more vehicles for the Traveller roleplaying game, designed (as before) using the Cepheus Engine rules from Moon Toad Publishing. As before, the entries are followed by some notes about the design. TL9 GRAV CRANE This is a heavy cargo mover, capable of picking up containers or whole vehicles up to…
-
Crunchy Game Content: Traveller Vehicles
On a Facebook group devoted to the Traveller roleplaying game one of the other members commented on the lack of civilian antigravity vehicles in the game. There are plenty of Grav Tanks, Grav APCs, Grav Gunships, but not a lot of common, inexpensive vehicles for everyday use. Here are some designs I’ve come up with…
-
Off to LibertyCon 2025!
In a couple of weeks I'm off to the mountain-girt fastness of Chattanooga, Tennessee, for this year's LibertyCon. It looks like a fun time. Here's my schedule in case you want to catch up with me at the convention: Friday, June 20, 3:00 P.M.: My Little (or Enormous) Buddy — Randee Dawn moderates a panel…
-
Some Notes on Alignment
Get your tires rotated every six months. Oh, wait: I mean Dungeons & Dragons alignments. We all know the famous three-by-three grid, right? You've got Lawful Good in the upper left, with Lawful Neutral below it and Lawful Evil at the bottom. The middle column has Neutral Good at the top, True Neutral in the…
-
The Subsurface Agency Wants YOU!
Geoff Manaugh is an interesting writer — his book A Burglar's Guide to the City is something everyone should read — and he has a fascinating blog called BLDGBLOG. The most recent post (as of this writing) is about some ambitious projects to do large-scale surveys of the subsurface environment using ground-penetrating radar, sonar, and…
-
Island of Lost Games: Fading Suns
It's been a while since we visited the Island of Lost Games, but there are still a few old and obscure titles on my shelf to explore. Today's game is 1996's Fading Suns, by Bill Bridges and Andrew Greenberg. It's probably the most well-known and successful of the Island's titles, but it never did manage…
-
Notes on Lovecraft’s Great Race
The "Great Race" — often known as the "Great Race of Yith" or "Yithians" (but more on that later) — are the villains (?) in H.P. Lovecraft's last major story, "The Shadow Out of Time." Written in 1934 and published the year before Lovecraft's death, the story is the narrative of one Professor Nathaniel Wingate…
-
Chatbots and Gamemasters
The author of one of my favorite roleplaying game blogs — he uses the handle "Noisms" and the blog is called Monsters & Manuals — recently tried an interesting experiment to see how well ChatGPT could run a solo roleplaying session using his own published game setting "Yoon-Suin." Short answer: not well. It's worth reading…
-
The Big Idea: Writing For Games vs. Writing Fiction
I wrote a guest post for John Scalzi's Whatever blog, discussing my work writing roleplaying games and how that affected my fiction. You can find it here. For visual interest, check out the cover of Weird War I!
-
My WorldCon Schedule
In two and a half weeks I'll be in Chicago for ChiCon 8, the 80th World Science Fiction Convention. I offered to participate in programming events, and they're really making me sing for my supper this time. Thursday, September 1 (all times are CDT) 2:30 P.M.: Writing and Story Development for Tabletop Games. This is…
The Cambias Digression 