You know an old game that’s a lot of fun? It Came From The Late, Late, Late Show by Stellar Games. I think it’s safe to say that it was the first game where the genre was “camp.” The premise was that the characters were B-movie actors in a terrible horror movie. The rulebook was…
Whenever someone suggests that sometimes it’s ok to ignore the rules, someone else inevitably asks why you should even bother to use rules if you’re not going to slavishly follow them at all times, apparently to make sure that the discussion is safe from crows. A super-secret project that I’m currently working on required me…
Marvel might have coined (or at least popularized) the term “cinematic universe,” but it’s not a new idea. It’s the way comic book universes have worked for decades, and according to one theory nearly every TV show ever made takes place in a cinematic universe inside a snow globe. A cinematic universe is basically a…
As many of you already know, today is the official start of Shark Week (though if you’re like me you started early with the Rifftrax Live presentation of Sharknado 2 last Thursday). Facebook Twitter Reddit Tumblr Email
Last week, I set out to answer a question we get periodically, “when are you guys releasing more Qerth books?” but kind of got sidetracked explaining what happened with Qerth (and our company, and the game industry) between the time we started writing it in 1997 or 1998 and the book’s eventual release in 2006….
Except for last week’s blog about running con games, I’ve been doing a lot of shameless self-promotion here recently. I’m going to continue the trend again this week, but at least this time I’m using it as a sloppy segue into the main topic of the column. But first, the whoring: Brainfart Press (which is…
Since it’s con season, this week I’m going to talk about running convention games. For the most part, the tricks to running a good convention game are the same as for any other game: make sure everyone has fun, give each character a chance to shine, and give the characters a stake in what’s going…
I’m still recovering from OMGCon, which keeps getting better every year, and getting ready for DieCon, so this week’s blog is another quick one. I’ve been wanting to submit something to Game Chef for a while, but always end up missing it. This year’s event kicked off on June 12th, the day I left for…
“The novel is a challenge to vulgarization: write something that looks new to you: someone will point out that the thrice-accursed Greeks said it long ago.”–Charles Fort As Fort observes, there really aren’t any new ideas. The best you can really hope for is to mix old story elements in a new and interesting way…
A year or so ago, a game I was playing in had to go on a temporary hiatus because of the GM’s work schedule, so we started talking about what to play in its place. At some point, the idea of a Grindhouse-style game about Disney Princess came up, and after a while that evolved…
