Tag Archives: Apocalypse World

Season of the Witch, Part 4

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session4bThough it seems we have more than enough of timing issues with this campaign we are managed to have an awesome fourth session yesterday. And even though we have been using Eldritch Sigils for a few years for the campaign it seems we can still find minor details that need correcting.

It seems like ages ago when I was GMing ANKH to my friends after school and just had to tweak the rules of the game to suit my taste. It might have been twenty years ago but I’m still doing it. And for the life of me I cannot see the reason why?

Why cannot I be satisfied with the rules as written?

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Underdark Without Nightvision #6

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Spoiler Warning! Underdark Without Nightvision is a based on my experiences on playing Out of the Abyss campaign as a human ranger (deep stalker) and will include a host of spoilers. Thread carefully!

After a long holiday hiatus we got back into the Underdark. To solve the problems with the leadership amongst our groups and to (eventually) escape the abyss. Or in fact the group did get together but I was absent.

So this time I’m going to talk about player absence.

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Season of the Witch, Part 2 (and 3)

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It took us some time to get back to this (well, actually about two months) but finally returned to colonial America. Since I’m already writing a campaign debrief on this forum I decided that we do not really need another one. Thus this post is mostly about stealing stuff from other games to improve your own.

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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 →

Going to Ropecon?

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This year’s theme for Ropecon is “journey” and as I’ll travel from Tampere to Helsinki for this event I thought I could come up with some things to pass the time during that journey. Actually this idea came while reading at Ropecon’s front page that they are encouraging con-goers to organise their own pre-cons at Thursday (since it is a national holiday).

The only restriction for this kind of activity is that the drive takes only a couple of hours (maybe some extra if we make a couple of stops) so we need to have activities that do not take too much time and/or can be put on hold while someone takes a bathroom break etc. Continue reading →

Permission to Change the World

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One of the favorite things my gaming group brings up are the “Legacy Tokens” that allow the players to take part in the narrative “legacies” of the gaming world. I stole this idea from a (fan-made?) addition to old Deadlands but it still has evolved from those beginnings. In the following I will high-light how we have used those chips to give the players major power to reshape the narrative.

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[Door of Shadows] Creating the Campaign Setup

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The Pull

Randomizing the characters

We started a new campaign at the beginning of the year (as discussed in my previous post).

This campaign is linked to the Wayward Sons-campaign I ran last year though it takes place 40 years earlier. And even though I jump started this “discussion” about the campaign with the experiments I have had with a Mythos Tome I decided that our first session also deserves to shared.

As first sessions go it wasn’t an actual playing session in a traditional sense but more like a conversation of what we were going to play. Vincent Baker‘s Apocalypse World advices you to do something similar but we took it a bit further.

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Experimenting on Mythos Tomes

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We have been playing my AWengine hack for a few months now. There is a lot to talk about this game but I make my return to blogging by discussing the use of Mythos Tomes in roleplaying games.

A Mythos Tome is most likely found in horror games but should by no means to be limited to them. Mythos Tomes are ancient books filled with most eldritch secrets no man was ever to know. Or at least that is the main assumption. Continue reading →

Killing Player Characters

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Death and the act of killing a player character in roleplaying games is a controversial subject. The players are quite rightfully protective about their characters but even when not considering about their opinions about the death of a PC the hardest part of such an event is in the hands of the GM.

In my past I have shied away from killing the characters. As a teenager I tended to make all of my rolls in secrecy so I could always fudge the result to keep a character just barely alive. Later on I made the decision of making my rolls open so that the dice would decide wether the character survives or not. But lately (once again thanks to the AWengine) I have had to scrutinise my thinking.  Continue reading →