I’ve spent the last week adjusting to the new job (and normal people hours), so I haven’t had any time to work on Cinemechanix this week (though hopefully I’ll get a few hours of work done after I finish this post), which means I don’t have any news to report or observations to share on…
You’ve just bought a new RPG for your group to try out, and if it’s organized like most RPG rulebooks there’s a players’ section and a GM’s section. If the game is at all well-designed, the GM’s section has tons of useful information to help you figure out what you’re supposed to do both before…
Different kinds of games reward different abilities. Pictionary rewards players’ ability to draw recognizable clues and to guess the right answer from the clues other people draw. Poker rewards understanding the likelihood of winning with a particular hand, strategic betting, and bluffing. Candyland rewards the player with the best luck. I’ve talked before about the…
Things are slow on the Cinemechanix front this week. so let’s do one of those blogs where I sketch out a one-shot adventure using my handy One Shot Generator Script (adapted from some of the tables in The Book of Dumb Tables and its sequel). As always, I have two options, since each Book of…
My first attempt to read Tolkien was in middle school, when I read the first book in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I didn’t want to finish it, but I’d picked it for a book report or something and by the time I realized I didn’t like it, it was too late to switch…
Kind of a slow week on Cinemechanix playtest front. I’ve got the Hobomancer sample game almost finished and will hopefully be posting it next week, but otherwise there’s not much going on right now, so I’m going to take a break from the design journal this week and talk about cyberpunk vampires. I’ve been watching…
Since people seemed to like last week’s blog about writing adventures for publication (and since I’m still trying to figure out the best way to approach the more in-depth discussion of Cinemechanix), I’m going to follow up with a blog about actually submitting the game. I haven’t actually done very much submitting (nearly everything I…
Over the years, Hex Games has published somewhere in the vicinity of fifty game books, and I’ve been involved in the editing process of most of them at some stage. As a result, I’ve noticed that there are certain mistakes that show up over and over again, especially from first-time writers. Some of these problems…
Last week I posted a map and some basic information about the setting for the terrible fantasy novel I’m writing for National Novel Writing Month, The Quest For the Lord of the Dragonsword Throne. Since one of the characters is a wizardess, I’ve had to come up with some basic information about how magic works…
All Games Considered spent most of a recent show reviewing a whole bunch of Hex products. If you’re on the fence or want to know more about a particular QAGS book, there’s a good chance they mention it in the podcast. What follows was written for a sort of game essay contest for a blog…
