My group played our second session of Star Wars World this past weekend, and this unofficial Apocalypse World hack by Andrew Medeiros is now my favorite Star Wars RPG.[1] One of the things I look for in a PbtA game is interesting playbooks, and SWW has those in spades. When I was choosing one, I […]
The Star Wars World RPG rocks Read More »
My copy of the Planescape Campaign Setting (paid link) arrived this past weekend, and I had a chance to spend some time looking through it. My first impression is that Planescape packs a punch. What’s inside? The guts are classic 1990s TSR: four saddle-stitched books, four poster maps/thingies, and — somewhat unusually — a GM’s
Planescape makes a hell of a first impression Read More »
I’ve been noodling some more about running Planescape as a sandbox, and since my copy of the boxed set isn’t here yet I decided to pull stuff off my shelves that seemed like it might be a good fit. Important safety tip, Egon This is dangerous! This is how ideas collapse under their own weight!
Raiding the larder for Planescape sandbox ingredients Read More »
Planescape (paid link) was one of the AD&D 2nd Edition campaign settings that passed me by while it was still in print, but I’ve been curious about it for years. I was thinking about it yesterday when an idea hit me: What would Planescape be like as an old-school, gold-for-XP sandbox? Since I don’t own
Planescape as a sandbox Read More »
When I opened and sorted the pound of Gamescience dice I ordered from their website (here’s the listing), I didn’t notice that there were some odd dice “masquerading” as ordinary dice. At least for me, it’s hard to tell what’s on a Gamescience die until I’ve inked it — I see a decahedron, I assume
The pound of Gamescience dice was odder than I thought Read More »
I ordered a pound of dice from Gamescience the hot minute they came back in stock, and I figured I’d break it down here so folks could see what’s in the current assortment. Das basics At $55, it’s not cheap — but neither are Gamescience dice in general, and you get a lot of dice
What do you get in a pound of Gamescience dice? Read More »
Over on Monsters and Manuals, David McGrogan (author of the excellent Yoon-Suin, one of the starred recommendations on my big list of RPG stuff on Lulu) wrote a neat post about a rule of thumb for sandbox games: Two Problems for Every Solution. David shares an example from his campaign that explains it well: For
One choice, two consequences Read More »
I was poking through Dave Arneson‘s The First Fantasy Campaign[1] the other day and happened across a section I’d never looked at before: Gypsy Sayings & Chance Cards. The sayings don’t mesh well with my GMing style (they remind me of Ravenloft’s Tarrokka Deck (paid link), a 2e product revived for 5e), but the Chance Cards
Chance Cards in Blackmoor Read More »
Tabletop Gaming has a White Male Terrorism Problem, by De Scriptorice, has been making the rounds in my circles on G+, and I’ve been trying to figure out what I wanted to say about it. Not because I’m of any importance, but because what that post describes is awful, and speaking up matters. Yesterday, I
You can validate others’ experiences without invalidating your own Read More »
I love dice, I love fiddling with game design, and I love simple tools that make things easier. At the nexus of those three things sits AnyDice. Developed by Jasper Flick, AnyDice calculates the probability of each possible result for just about any die roll. (I say “just about,” but it’s never let me down.)
AnyDice: A handy game design tool Read More »
