Archive for the ‘Roleplaying’ Category

Batman Meets Rainbow Brite: the beauty and horror of internet fan fiction

I spent a few hours the other day reading Transformers fan fiction.
I know some of you are shaking your heads and thinking, “I always knew he would come to this point… but I hoped he wouldn’t.” And for the rest of you, yes: I am talking about fan-written fiction based on the world of the [...]

How I learned to live with the Wrath of the Dragon God

This week I had the distinct privilege of watching Dungeons and Dragons: Wrath of the Dragon God on DVD. Dragon God is the second recent movie to be based on the rules and setting of everybody’s favorite dice-rolling, kobold-slaughtering pastime. The culturally-oblivious among you may have missed the box-office sensation that was the [...]

The most dangerous game

I think I’ve found the greatest Top Secret RPG campaign ever. (It beats my own experience with that game quite handily.) If this quote doesn’t sum up Top Secret, I don’t know what does:
Finally, a wino picked off the agents one by one. Not because he was after them, but because they kept going down [...]

Setting the scene

Well, the tactical situation in that last post was starting to get pretty complex, so I decided to break out the miniatures and recreate the scene to be sure that we’re all on the same page. Click for the larger version, and let me know what details I’m missing.

Multiple choice question #56

You are a low-level minion hired by the Evil Mastermind to perform some important task–kidnap somebody, steal an artifact and deliver it to the Mastermind, or something along those lines. You accomplish your task, return triumphant to the Evil Mastermind, and demand the payment that the Mastermind promised you.
The Evil Mastermind gives you a [...]

Ode to the Random Execution Table: reflections on Top Secret

Reading this sordid tale of violence and depravity (in an RPG) brought back more than a few memories. Specifically, of TSR’s old Top Secret roleplaying game. Top Secret was a spy/espionage game in which players created secret agents and sent them on missions of dubious morality.
I did not own this game, but my [...]

Edit me

Gencon last month saw, among many other things, the release of a hardcover roleplaying game book that I had the privilege of editing. The book is Legends of the Samurai, and it’s the biggest single project that I’ve edited to date.
Editors and proofreaders generally only get mentioned in reviews of RPG books when they’ve [...]

Surviving Warhammer

This afternoon, I finished running a Warhammer RPG scenario for Michele. (This is the game mentioned in the previous post.) We played the “introductory adventure” from the back of the main rulebook, and both had a great deal of fun with it. Here are some quick impressions of the adventure and the [...]

This is your RPG character on drugs

OK, time for a little geeky RPG humor. Earlier this week I came across a humorous little essay written by a gamer who blames his favorite character’s descent into madness and addiction on the cruelty of the adventure’s author (some profanity, you’ve been warned). It’s a bit long, but worth getting to the [...]

This is the way the world ends: thoughts on Gehenna

I read an interesting roleplaying book a while back, and for some time I’ve been meaning to talk about it here.
The book is Gehenna, the final sourcebook published for the Vampire: The Masquerade game line. Gehenna is the end of the road for Vampire and its elaborate setting; after many years of publishing Vampire [...]