Category Archives: Roleplaying Games

Horror in Dungeons

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With all the OCR-stuff going on dungeons are getting better rep than in ages. Dungeon World is a certain classic and a game I would be willing to play at any time. Almost a year ago I talked about making dungeons on the fly and this subject raised its ugly head last Tuesday when the party descended into an ancient underground city in Egypt. Granted I was pretty tired then but I still think I had something good going on.

We are going to continue our descend into this forgotten tomb tomorrow and while I was searching the web for ideas and made notes about how to get it right I came into a conclusion that what I am actually doing is building a dungeon while I thought I was making a scenario for Call of Cthulhuish game.

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Endgame

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As our current campaign is drawing closer to the end I feel I could share some thoughts about the endgame of roleplaying campaigns.

Last year Aki wrote a lengthy post about the story arch of his character in the “last season” of this ongoing megabeast. And he got quite deep into the difficulty of ending one of these seasons as I like to call them. Continue reading →

Previously in…

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We are having so much fun!

We are having so much fun!

We have all been there. The game is about to start and we just wait for that one player who is always late. Everybody is busy checking their Facebook or random videos from YouTube. Some leave for a smoke and maybe one player starts to go through the assorted papers for the game. Then that last player arrives and the game should start.

But it doesn’t.

Maybe it is because of collective tiredness or maybe someone wants to argue about a tv-series. Or maybe the GM has left the dice at home and no-one thought of bringing their own.  Continue reading →

ENnie Awards 2015

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It is no surprise that the awards-granting occasion started by and closely followed by D&D fame granted most of the mentions to Wizards of the Coast. What is somewhat surprising that the Dungeon Master’s Handbook won an award in the supplement category. I would have guessed that it would’ve been a core product, but little do I know…

The surprise this year was Zak Smith’s Red and Pleasant Land, which gained 4 mentions! To my knowledge there were people there who left the occasion when Zak got the award for best writing and then continued to get three more awards. I have only read two reviews about that, and the first thing I thought after reading about the idea of two vampires being locked in a near-eternal battle was: Hey, that was my idea! Then as I got further into the review I noticed that this is nowhere near anything I have ever thought of. But enough of that, this is about ENnies.

Mutant: Year Zero deservedly got a mention. I would have liked to see it winning even more stuff, but alas, mostly D&D oriented voter base.

I was somewhat surprised that Iron Kingdoms ranked so poorly. Their artwork is usually of the highest quality. Also the setting is not half-bad ;)

Next year should be more interesting as there probably will be fewer WotC products coming up. Although they have now adopted a policy of using third party publishers to do their work for them, so that fact will play the dark horse in 2016.

The difference between CoCian and BWian philosophies of skills

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Roleplaying games can represent stuff about real life that you don’t necessarily stop to think about. I’ll write about one here, the difference between how Call of Cthulhu and Burning Wheel handle skills, and what those differences say about human capabilities. And why it matters quite a lot to me, personally. Continue reading →

Return to Bretonnia, or Rekindling Old Flames?

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IMG_1229Last Wednesday we started a campaign that I would have never dreamed that would actually happen – we’ll return to the world of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying game. Once upon a time at 2006 we started a campaign using the second edition of the said rpg and from that gaming group grew our current community of almost 50 active members.

The GM for this new campaign will be one of the players of that original group; Santtu has been planing for this campaign for almost all of this time and I’ve been eagerly waiting for it. I think that the character I created last week might actually be third one created for this particular game. Not to hex it or anything but we are supposed to get the game going on this Friday.

Why should this all be of any interest to others? As it turns out getting together with “old love” might be as problematic in roleplaying games than in real life.

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Killing in RPGs

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A while back Lauri asked me to continue the ongoing theme of this blog on psychopathy of player characters by linking me to this article on Indiana Jones. This particular page of the article is about how no one cares about killing. Actually, I’m going to touch on other things besides psychopathy, but its going to make an appearance.

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Creating an Archipelago Game

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About a month ago I managed to get into Jason Morningstar‘s Archipelago game “Love in the Time of Khavarner“. I really liked the setting and the style the game worked and began immediately to think how I could hack it. Jason himself said that it is not as simple as it seems. And after working on a game I have to admit he was right.

Without going into details about what is needed for an Archipelago game I must admit that I used the two existing games Love in the Time of Seið and Love in the Time of Khavarner as the starting point. I did not have high ambitions about a truly original masterpiece but an idea about a game I really wanted to take part in. Continue reading →

What to Call the Game Master?

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The original title was Dungeon Master, but you can’t really use that outside of the Sword & Sorcery genre of D&D (and also probably for IP reasons). Therefore, other games needed to find other titles. Some more success than others.

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