Category: Games
-
Mr. President, We May Be Looking . . .
. . . at a wargames GAP! Apparently the Pentagon needs to find replacements for the generation of beardy wargame grognards who are starting to fail their final saving rolls. Here's an article about the problem from War on the Rocks.
-
Dragon Awards!
Congratulations to this year's Dragon Award winners: Best Science Fiction Novel: Artemis by Andy Weir. Best Fantasy Novel: Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson. Best Young Adult/Middle Grade Novel: Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi. Best Military Science Fiction or Fantasy Novel: A Call to Vengeance by David Weber, Timothy Zahn, and Thomas Pope. Best Alternate History Novel: Uncharted by…
-
Island of Lost Games: A Footprint in the Sand!
Exciting news about one of the first titles I covered in the "Island of Lost Games" series — John Hill, one of the original Droids gaming group, ran across my post and sent this reply: I enjoyed your recent post about the game "Droids", though the circumstances that led me to discover it leave much…
-
Random Encounters: Steampunk Paris
I'm starting a new feature of the 'blog this week: your Weekly Random Encounters. Each week I'm going to post a new random encounter table for a particular setting. Use these for roleplaying games, story prompts, or as a kind of I Ching to predict your week. I'm also appending the Situation generator to each…
-
After-Action Report: Basic Dungeons & Dragons at JiffyCon
(Blogging has been interrupted lately because I bought a new computer and had to spend far more time than I liked getting it set up. That's done, so with luck I can return to my two-or-three-times-a-week schedule.) A couple of weeks ago, on October 28, I attended JiffyCon, a mini game convention held at Smith…
-
Island of Lost Games: Epiphany
Throughout the history of roleplaying as a hobby, there have been attempts to remove the dice from the games. The argument usually goes something like this: real life isn't random, at least not on the scales at which humans act in day-to-day life. Events have causes. So why do we roll dice to see if…
-
We Have A Situation Here
Most roleplaying games display a curious paradox. The player-characters, the ones controlled by the players, are literally the only people in the game setting with free will, yet they tend to show a crippling lack of agency. Player-characters are forever getting hired by bossy patrons, handed orders by their commanders, or being assigned quests by…
-
Island of Lost Games: Nephilim
Nephilim, published by Chaosium in 1994, is one of the handful of French roleplaying games which have been translated or adapted into English-language editions — Steve Jackson Games's In Nomine is the only other one I'm familiar with. Compared to Anglophone games, the French ones all seem more cerebral, more mystical, and much more closely-coupled…
-
Island of Lost Games: Dream Park
One could write a whole series of blog posts on the theme of "unlikely licensed roleplaying games," and somewhere near the top of that list (but below GURPS Planet Krishna) you would undoubtedly find Mike Pondsmith's Dream Park: The Roleplaying Game, from R. Talsorian Games. The 1981 novel Dream Park, by Larry Niven and Steven…
-
Island of Lost Games: Droids
(Sorry for the hiatus. Events happened.) No, it has nothing to do with Star Wars. Droids is a fascinating and unique little roleplaying game which came out in 1982 from a company called Integral Games, in Arlington, Texas. The lead designer was Neil Patrick Moore, and according to the RPGGeek Web site Droids is his…
The Cambias Digression 