Since Monday was Halloween and it’s been a long week, here’s the excerpt from Spooky: The Definitive Guide to Horror Gaming that we posted to the Death Cookie right after the book (Hex’s first full-sized one) was released back in October 2001. Horror gaming requires the player make a few changes to her normal style…
We all love Halloween, but except for those wacky Lovecraftian investigators who spend every October 31 trying to stop another evil cult from summoning up yet more Things Man Was Not Meant To Know, most RPG characters never get to celebrate the holiday. That’s just wrong, so here are a few ideas to help get…
By this point, you’ve got the “big idea” stuff about your ficton figured out. You know the basics of the setting, have some ideas for plot points, know who the characters are, and have some stock adventure ideas to get thing moving. If you’re halfway good at improvisation, you can probably run a session of…
As I mentioned last time, it recently kind of hit us that next year will be the 20th Anniversary of QAGs. The first edition of the game was printed in 1998 (Second Edition wasn’t released until 2003). Some of you may be too young to remember 1998. Others are old farts like us who still…
Before we get into the next section of Guardians of Shymeria campaign design, I realized that I’ve been missing an important game-specific trait. Since characters become Guardians as recognition for an act of great heroism, it would probably be nice to know what the characters did to get noticed by the Guardians. So I’m going…
I didn’t post last week because I spent the early part of the week getting ready for Archon and Thursday night loading up the booth and driving to St. Louis. What was I working on for Archon? Mostly boring stuff: reprinting missing character sheets from the games I’d already run at other cons, counting and…
A few of the Cinemechanix core rules require the group to make decisions about how they apply to the game at hand. Determining the starting Hero Factor (see last week’s blog) is one example of this. Another is deciding whether a character who reaches “Broken” status ends up dead, forced into retirement by his injuries,…
Now that you’ve got the ficton lined out, it’s time to start thinking about the rules, and character creation is usually the best place to start. By this point, you’ve probably got a pretty good idea of what kind of characters the PCs can choose from, so all you’ve got to do is figure how…
A long damn time ago, I defined the word “ficton” (it’s a contractual obligation) and told you that you could break a ficton down into 5 main components: Influences, Setting, Genre Trappings, Tone and Mood, and Dramatic Rules. Now that I’ve talked about all the rest (and procrastinated a lot), let’s talk about dramatic rules….
I’d planned to post a GenCon report last week, but I got hit with overtime at my day job when I got back (my 4-day week turned into 50 hours) and just didn’t have any time to write it. As usual, the plan was to arrive in Indianapolis on Thursday, run games on Friday, Saturday,…
