Review: Würm RPG

Having just finished Far Cry: Primal I am totally in the mood for a Palaeolithic and tribal roleplaying. Searching for a game suitable for this kind of a story proved more difficult though than I had anticipated. After coming into conclusion that either was no such game or none of them were very good I stumbled on the Würm (funded via Kickstarter and co-published by Nocturnal).

Summary: Having (only) read the rulebook I have to say that it has some excellent ideas as well as interesting ideas and at least is an excellent tool box for any game set in this kind of environment.

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Assassination in Three Hours — Blades in the Dark

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In mere three hours, we created our group of scoundrels and planned and executed an assassination. John Harper’s roleplaying game Blades in the Dark, dear readers, is awesome. This is my experience of our first session. Note that this is not a review nor an analysis of the design, just a description of a subjective experience. Continue reading

World of Dungeons: The Teachings of a Drunken Oneshot

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We had a Chrismas party a week ago. Instead of board games, I said I could run World of Dungeons. It’s an ultralight hack of Dungeon World which I hadn’t run it before, so we took it on a spin. Because nobody believed that we could play entirely sober, I decided on a full improv session. It degenerated slowly, but inevitably—and undeniably gloriously—into player vs. player mayhem, which surprised me very little. Despite my mistakes as a drunken GM, we had a whole lot of fun, and I learned a few important lessons. These are my notes from the GM’s standpoint. Continue reading

Thoughts on The Regiment: Ville’s views on X-Ray Down

This is my view on John Harper and Paul Riddle’s The Regiment, run by Lauri. There’s nothing much I can add to Lauri’s description of the session, so I’ll talk a bit about my impressions of the system. Do keep in mind that even though the version number is 2.5, The Regiment is still a work in progress; beautiful and promising, but flawed. I hope these notes will a) help the designers hone the game, b) make you interested in testing in it, and c) give you a couple of hints while playing it. Continue reading

X-Ray Down

IMG_8851Our gaming Guild apparently now has something of a regular random gaming night at the beginning of each month. This time it was my turn to be the GM (actually I just announced that I wanted to) and my weapon of choice was The Regiment by John Harper. As we had had some experience with the Apocalypse World hack I decided that this time I would tackle one of my RPG goals – running a game of X-COM.

For this particular session I decided to do a little something extra and went through the playbook templates for The Regiment – Colonial Marines (they were provided by Harper at the AWforum) changing most of the names to correspond the newest instalment of the X-COM franchise. While doing this I ended up into the deep end and found myself hacking the whole hack to suit my needs. Continue reading

Building Legos or How I Stopped Worrying And Ordered Pieces Online

This spaceship started the madness.

This spaceship started the madness.

“Hey son, lets play with Legos! Or to be precise keep doing whatever you are doing and let me build small shit that can’t even be used by minifigs.”

That might have been a conversion I could have went through yesterday with my four years old son. Luckily it wasn’t. Like a great dad I masked my obsessive building under the guise of playing with my son… Thanks internet for that too. Continue reading

Hello Vietnam! or trying out the Regiment

hellovietnamLast Wednesday we went to a family cabin of mine with the plan for alcohol, sauna and games. Good times!

I had originally thought of hosting something of a Kaiju-themed evening with King of Tokio and an AWhack called Monster Force Terra by James Mullen. As I was feeling a bit sick at the morning I decided to take The Regiment hack by John Harper instead as I knew it would more or less run itself with the guys I was going to the cabin anyway.

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