roleplaying games – Page 13

Bubblegumshoe: teenage sleuths, relationships, and a streamlined GUMSHOE system

Tabletop RPGs / Martin Ralya / June 24, 2016

Bubblegumshoe (paid link), by game designers Emily Care Boss, Kenneth Hite, and Lisa Steele, streamlines the GUMSHOE system[1] and tunes it for teen mysteries like Nancy Drew (paid link), The Hardy Boys (paid link), Veronica Mars, and Scooby-Doo. I had a chance to spend some time with my copy last night, and so far I dig it. Teen […]

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The GURPSening continues: S. John Ross’ recommended GURPS book list

GURPS, Tabletop RPGs / Martin Ralya / June 23, 2016

I mentioned S. John Ross‘ list of personal GURPS book ratings in an aside to my love letter to Warehouse 23 and Illuminati, but after using it to track down a bevy of awesome-looking books the other day, I realized it needed its own call-out post. This list is a fantastic tool (and trouble for

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GURPS Time Travel’s four mini-settings

GURPS, Tabletop RPGs / Martin Ralya / June 22, 2016

The more of GURPS Time Travel (paid link) I read, the more I love this book. Pound for pound, it’s one of the best gaming books I’ve read, GURPS or otherwise. Leaving aside the “idea nuggets” scattered throughout, Time Travel offers up six settings. Time Corps is brilliant, and does more in 13 pages than

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GURPS Creatures of the Night offers up some creepy gems

GURPS, Tabletop RPGs / Martin Ralya / June 16, 2016

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

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Setting information is telling me about your character

Tabletop RPGs / Martin Ralya / June 15, 2016

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

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Two handy S. John Ross game evaluation metrics

Tabletop RPGs / Martin Ralya / June 14, 2016

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

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The Astralnauts roam the galaxy hunting alien ghosts

Tabletop RPGs / Martin Ralya / June 13, 2016

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

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Exemplars & Eidolons: an OSR Swiss Army Knife

D&D, Old school, Tabletop RPGs / Martin Ralya / June 8, 2016

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

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5 years, 82 projects: My Kickstarter sniff test

Miscellaneous geekery, Tabletop RPGs / Martin Ralya / June 7, 2016

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

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Action Movie World delivers

Story games, Tabletop RPGs / Martin Ralya / June 3, 2016

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

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