Back in 2013, I went looking for an old English coin in the basement, which I couldn’t find, and found this 1,700-year old Roman coin instead. It took me an hour to go from knowing precisely dick about Roman coinage to being 99% certain about what this one is, when it was minted, etc. I […]
A 1,700 year-old Roman Antoninianus Read More »
I snagged a copy of GURPS Creatures of the Night (paid link), by Scott Paul Maykrantz, because I love monster books and it sounded like this one might be full of weird and wonderful oddballs. Not all of its monsters grab me, but there are some delightfully disturbing creatures in here. My copy was a whopping
GURPS Creatures of the Night offers up some creepy gems Read More »
Jack Shear’s blog, Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque, is always a great read (it’s been one of my RPG blog staples for years), but World-Building: When is Enough Too Much? is an especially good post. It made me think of a scene in Game of the Year (paid link), where the GM uses the game
Setting information is telling me about your character Read More »
Game designer S. John Ross recently posted two game design tidbits — more aimed at RPG evaluation than design, but applicable to either — that are just too good not to share. RRIP is — as I see it — a quick-and-dirty way to assess a game’s crunchiness, and the Videogame Rule is an axiom
Two handy S. John Ross game evaluation metrics Read More »
Thanks to a G+ post by Greg Gorgonmilk, I checked out the weird, colorful world of The Astralnauts over the weekend. Created by artists Alex Pardee and Matt Richie, the Astralnauts are a team of spacefaring ghost-hunters who track down extraterrestrial spooks. If you read that and immediately thought “campaign setting!” then I like the
The Astralnauts roam the galaxy hunting alien ghosts Read More »
I wrapped up my second 2016 Hugo Awards finalist novel, N.K. Jemisin‘s The Fifth Season (paid link), yesterday, and it was awesome. The Fifth Season is post-apocalyptic fantasy, which is unusual enough to pique my interest, but it’s doubly unusual: Its setting, The Stillness, experiences recurring apocalypses — Seasons — that can be decades or centuries
The Fifth Season’s recurrent apocalypse Read More »
I’m going to be playing Exemplars & Eidolons (paid link) next week, so I figured I’d better pick up a copy. Because Kevin Crawford is a mensch, it’s free in PDF and cheap in POD. In a nutshell, it’s designed to mash up godlike heroes and old-school D&D adventures. Grab a D&D module, read a
Exemplars & Eidolons: an OSR Swiss Army Knife Read More »
Yesterday I was thinking about Kickstarter and how happy I am with some of the stuff that’s come in the mail this year, and I realized I should revisit a post I made on Google+ back in January — one that prompted some great discussion — and see if it still applied. It does, so
5 years, 82 projects: My Kickstarter sniff test Read More »
I don’t usually buy single issues of comics (I much prefer TPBs), but I backed Paradox Girl on Kickstarter because it looked like a lot of fun, and I wanted to support its creators. It delivered on time, and I finished reading all three issues over the weekend. It’s every bit as fun as I’d
Paradox Girl is a hoot Read More »
I’ve had the pleasure of playing two sessions of Ian Williams‘ Action Movie World (paid link), and this game fucking delivers on every front. It’s designed to play like a cheesy action movie made from the mid-1970s through the mid-1990s, and it does exactly what it says on the tin. The two movies we’ve played were
Action Movie World delivers Read More »
