Tag Archives: #RPGaDAY

#RPGaDay2015 22: Perfect Gaming Environment

Posted on by
1

RPG-a-day-2015We’ve seen what some people have done to construct their perfect gaming environment. They went for the immersive experience, emulating a space they might find within their games.

For me, the vision of my perfect gaming environment is a room lined with built-in shelves, holding my libraries: board games, role-playing books, fiction, and more. The classical sort of library you might find on Bookshelf Porn. Outside the windows, brilliantly colored leaves wave in the breeze, filtering golden autumn sunlight into the game room.

Overstuffed easy chairs crowd around a coffee table-high GeekChic marvel. Gorgeous wooden surface on top, for books, dice rolls and such, with a felt-covered play space beneath for when we might break out a map for a session or a board game.

That would be pretty spectacular. It’s purely a fantasy, but one I wouldn’t mind realizing some day.

#RPGaDay2015 21: Favorite RPG Setting

Posted on by
1

RPG-a-day-2015The cover of GURPS Cabal. Four supernatural creatures gaze out menacingly.This is another of those topics where I can hardly choose a single favorite. Not least because I feel like I don’t have enough exposure to settings in play, as opposed to having read the book and shelved it. So with the caveat that it’s one of my favorites mostly because it’s a fun read, I nominate GURPS Cabal.

The Cabal began as a mini-setting in the second edition of GURPS Horror, but it was Ken Hite’s expansion of the original material into a full supplement of its own, along with the usual GURPS rules expansion, that made reading about the Cabal so amazing. Hite took the basic framework of a mutual aid society for sorcerers, monsters, faeries, reptoids and so many others from the depths of classic and modern supernatural stories and blended it with real world history and occult traditions, with an especial focus on the Hermetic worldview.

There’s a dizzying secret history of the world, varied cast of characters to run up against and a cosmology straight out of the kabbalah. In short, it’s an intimidating setting to consider using in a game — I dabbled a couple times in different ways and didn’t feel very successful, relative to the bar of imagination and creativity that I felt the book set[1] — but it’s a damn fine read, and always an excellent source of ideas. But then the hard work — and I maintain it’s hard work, even as other people like to throw “Well, if you can’t figure it out, you’re just not trying” with this kind of high detail, low hand-holding material — of turning it into decisions and characters that will engage the players is still left to be done.

That said, I wish there had been more follow-up material to GURPS Cabal to read, at least. The Cabal gets a mention now and again in fourth edition GURPS material, as they became a new player in the Infinite Earths landscape and figure in the scant setting material in GURPS Thaumatology, but that’s about it, unless it’s all showing up in issues of Pyramid.

[1] I borrowed heavily for Mage: The Suppressed Transmission, and developed the Broken Spokes framework for a campaign that didn’t get past the first session and then a convention one-shot that I still feel embarrassed about.

#RPGaDay2015 20: Favorite Horror RPG

Posted on by
2

RPG-a-day-2015I feel like there are the games we call horror games, and the games that are truly horror games. People call Mage: the Ascension a horror game, because it’s a cousin of Vampire: the Masquerade and it has themes of the consequences of hubris, a la Frankenstein. And then we have the personal horror of Vampire itself, where the player’s character is the source of repugnance. Beyond that is the cosmic horror of Call of Cthulhu, in which characters discover the full dimensions of their insignificance in comparison to the true powers of the cosmos.

Which of those we find truly horrifying depends on the person. I have a friend who maintains Lovecraft’s conception of the universe is not horrifying, because as of the 21st century, we have assimilated what his characters dreaded to be the case as reality. It can’t be horrifying because it’s not unknown. My point of dissent with her argument is that regardless of what we think we know, there’s always a bigger issue, a bigger shell around what we know, that we don’t know. And the contents of that bigger shell are still unknown and still horrifying.

What that has to say about my favorite horror role-playing game is left as an exercise for the reader. If you’ve been reading Held Action for a while, you can probably figure it out.

#RPGaDay2015 19: Favorite Supers RPG

Posted on by
1

RPG-a-day-2015Mutants & Masterminds, done! It’s my favorite mix of ability to customize and ease to run. It’s adaptable, too. Silver Age supers, street level crimefighters, Heroes-like modern marvels: let’s do ’em all.

One of my dream campaigns is to use the Paragons toolbox supplement to create a modern, non-goofy, Heroes-like campaign where marvels find themselves afflicted with unimaginable powers — erupting, if you will — in a world that is far more complex and bizarre than CNN would have you suspect.

#RPGaDay2015 18: Favorite SF RPG

Posted on by
2

RPG-a-day-2015Extraterrestrials Sourcebook cover art for Conspiracy X 2.0.Conspiracy X isn’t your typical science fiction. It combines the weird pre-millennial “is there an apocalypse coming?” zeitgeist of the 1990s with the UFO lore of the 20th century and paranoia about government overreach, packaging it all in a familiar but legally distinct wrapper of federal agents investigating weird phenomena.

The game enjoyed a brief renaissance thanks to Kickstarter, as Eden Studios pushed out a number of supplements stuck in the pipeline after publishing a second edition of the core book, but it seems to have petered out in the years since. One of the stretch goals of the final fundraising campaign was to publish a long-rumored sequel game, Extinction, advancing the timeline one hundred years to an era when the various races are locked in all-out war for their own survival. No word on that front, and Eden’s efforts seem to be going into All Flesh Must Be Eaten and a new kid-friendly game, Adventure Maximus.

#RPGaDay2015 17: Favorite Fantasy RPG

Posted on by
1

RPG-a-day-2015It’s not a list without me bringing up Northern Crown, an alternate history of North America’s colonization period mixing d20 fantasy tropes with a “greatest hits” version of Earth’s history. It’s fantasy with a gun powder twist!

The honorary mention is Blue Rose, and not so much because it was exceptional — it was pretty good — but more because it got up the collective nose of people whose collective nose needed to be got up. Congratulations to Green Ronin for their pretty amazing crowdfunding of a new edition!

#RPGaDay2015 16: Longest Game Session Played

Posted on by
Reply

RPG-a-day-2015This question is unanswerable. Any session so long that it qualifies for the title of longest is one where I tuned out about halfway through. I briefly played in a couple groups where their custom was to play for five to six hours at a time, and that is absolutely well beyond my capacity to remain mentally engaged in a shared activity. I fade into the background after a while and suddenly we’re at a point in the plot where I have no idea what’s going on.

#RPGaDay2015 15: Longest Campaign Played

Posted on by
3

RPG-a-day-2015Carrion Crown: The Haunting of Harrowstone coverThe honor of longest campaign played goes to Carrion Crown. I’ve written extensively about it, recorded post-mortems with the GM and players, and generally covered it at length. Basically, Carrion Crown was a blast to play and a very singular experience in my tabletop game history. We developed a camaraderie there that I hadn’t enjoyed before or since. I’ll be thinking fondly of those folks when I’m old and senile.

#RPGaDay2015 14: Favorite RPG Accessory

Posted on by
1

RPG-a-day-2015The world’s greatest GM screen has been lauded at length on Held Action. I wound up upgrading to the landscape edition shortly before fading out of GMing games almost completely, so I never got the chance to enjoy it, but I loved its sturdiness and universality. The one drawback that screen has, which the landscape orientation helped mitigate, is that it’s so thick and sturdy than it can muffle your voice. At home, that’s probably fine, but in a convention setting, where I was doing most of my GMing, having your voice cut down in a noisy room is a killer.

#RPGaDay2015 13: Favorite RPG Podcast

Posted on by
1

RPG-a-day-2015At this point, it’s pretty clear my favorite podcast about role-playing games is Role Playing Public Radio. There’s a certain factor of attrition in there, as some shows faded away and I unsubscribed from others, but RPPR’s been there, practically from when they were posting dramatizations of Ab3’s actual play rants.

The form has changed over the year, as the regular RPPR crew expanded to include more than Ross and Tom, but the ethos and sensibility remain intact. Check ’em out!