Category: Games
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Gamemaster Appeal
There are any number of books and Web sites providing aspiring roleplaying game referees with hints on how to make a campaign appealing to players. The best is probably Robin's Laws, even though the author had to overcome being Canadian. But just recently I was jotting down some ideas for campaigns I'd like to run,…
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Arisia 2013, Featuring ME
Next week I'm going to be a program participant at the always interesting Arisia convention in Boston, held at the Westin Waterfront hotel. My schedule, in case you want to follow me around and bask in my brilliance: Saturday (January 19) at 11:30 a.m.: Cambridge SF Workshop Flash Fiction Reading. The members of the coolest…
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Posthegemony Shows Why Rules Don’t Matter
Game systems are overrated. Roleplaying game designers spend a lot of time and effort trying to create rules which replicate a specific fictional reality — or they take on the impossible task of creating rules which replicate real reality. They do research on the probability of hitting your target with an unaimed pistol shot at…
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Tales From the Archive: The Transbalkania Affair
This is an adventure I ran for my Space: 1889 campaign back in the 1990s. Because this was written for my own use rather than for publication, it's a bit more sparse and telegraphic than usual. Transbalkania is a fictional country in the Space: 1889 universe, a tiny Balkan principality wedged in between Bulgaria and…
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How I Did It #8: “The Vampire Brief”
Since Halloween is only a couple of weeks away, it's appropriate to tackle my first horror story, "The Vampire Brief." It's another anthology story, written for the collection Odder Jobs, published by Dark Horse Comics. As the publisher name might suggest, the stories in Odder Jobs were all based on a comic book: Mike Mignola's…
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Soaps Vs. Self-Contained Episodes
I recently joined Brian Rogers and Tom Ladegard to playtest the character creation system for the Smallville roleplaying game. It was an interesting experience. Smallville (the game) is of course based on the TV series Smallville, about the teen years of one Clark Kent and his pals in a small Kansas town, including the angsty…
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Favorite Science Fictional Worlds, Part 1
I've been working on revisions for Star HERO lately, and my editor, the brilliant Steve Long, asked me to contribute lists of my favorite SF films, short stories, and novels for the bibliography. As I made up my lists it struck me that a lot of stories take place in settings which aren't very good…
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Tales from the Archive: The Auction
This is another of my old Space: 1889 adventures. I don't believe it has ever been published before, but I did use it as a convention game once or twice. It depends a lot more on player initiative than most adventures I write. The trouble with player initiative is that it's undependable — you expect…
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Tales From the Archive: The City of Tomorrow!
This is another old Space: 1889 adventure which ran in Challenge magazine. I wanted to write a scenario which captured some of the feel of 19th Century Utopian science fiction, in which the bulk of the story is a tour of the wonderful new society. William Pene DuBois's The Twenty-One Balloons is a note-perfect pastiche…
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Tales From the Archive: The Explosive Saga of DOC TOLTEC!
This isn't a published story. In fact, I wrote it as character background for a roleplaying campaign Brian Rogers was putting together. Brian was trying to create a superhero campaign with the feel of a real-world "all-stars superteam" comic book like JLA or The Mighty Avengers. These teams differ from groups like The Fantastic Four…
The Cambias Digression 