Graph Paper Games

Tonight I trotted out Prowlers & Paragons for my kids to run them through a quick introductory session.  It worked out well, although the dice were all over the place.  Mac played Kroxigor , a monstrous reptile-man while Macy played Menagerie , a shape-shifter. Kroxigor (illustration from Arkhamverse) Kroxigor was one of the passengers on TransGlobal flight 246 which was attacked by the mysterious chemical gas.  Menagerie was actually a dog in the hold of the plane, now able to turn into a human.  Another passenger, a petty criminal, also gained powers which he used to burgle the nightclub where Kroxigor (prior to his transformation) was working as a bouncer.  In trying to stop the burglar, Kroxigor turned into his reptilian form and with Menagerie's help managed to recover the money, even though the burglar escaped using his elongating powers. art by Phil Cho Need answers about what has happened, Krox and Menagerie seek out Dr. Tom Gilcrest, th...

So I've been noodling around with the idea of doing a supers RPG campaign, possibly using Prowlers & Paragons, my most recent lightweight supers RPG purchase.  It's like Marvel Heroic Roleplaying with balance. In terms of the campaign itself, I have been thinking that it might be interesting to provide a kickoff event that could serve as a shared origin and the beginning of plot gears turning.  But how to share that with all the players? So I made this player handout.  I had to look around until I found a good picture (from a Flash comic book) that I could Photoshop to show the airline flight.  I'm still using Distinctions from MHR to help the players get a handle on certain things, like NPC's or campaign locations. Now, to see how the game works...

It's highly unlikely that I am going to do any gaming in the next three days (especially with guests in my house) so I thought I would get an early start on the "year in gaming" posts out there. Most of 2015 was spent with my trotting out the new fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons and running it in about every ethos you could imagine: mini-dungeons, mega-dungeons, wilderness adventures, urban adventures...  We are not done with the campaign yet, but it'll happen soon. In addition to D&D I also ran a session or two of Marvel Heroic Roleplaying with the infamous Deathwish Brigade for the kids, and of course ran the homegrown RPG that is the hallmark of the annual EOW event.  I also trotted out Champions (Hero System, fourth edition). What's surprising, when I looked over the last year, is how many RPG's I played.   Ultimate Hero , Cypher , Fate , EOW , D&D 5E , and Space d6 .  What's really cool is that out of the seven different RPG se...

It might look boring, but I'm pretty excited about this... It is an Office Depot Portable Clipboard Storage Case .  Now I know office supplies are not the sexiest Christmas presents ever, but I am a sucker for a) cool office stuff, b) stuff that holds other stuff, and c) stuff I can use for gaming. It also has this weird meaning for me about what would be the ideal amount of stuff to haul around for a gaming session.  My own personal disposition likes traveling light: not having loads of sourcebooks or a gazillion dice, etc.  Just pick up the case and off to wherever I'm running my game.  For whatever reason, that appeals to me.

Rachel is continuing to run her "Walking Dead" style story using the FATE system, although which each session more things that aren't very "Walking Dead" are making it into the game.  For example the zombies appear to be more cogent.  And they can metamorphose. And there's some kind of weird alien minotaurs running around. This is kind of interesting for me, as a player, because it has that element of "what the heck?" that horror games should have.  I noticed in the last session that people were saying "well, we know what zombies are, right, because we've seen zombie movies.  So we shoot them in the head."  This is contrary to The Walking Dead series, where zombie is never used and there seems to be no pre-existing mythology, popular or otherwise, about zombies. So it's not so much a zombie game, it's a wide-open horror exploration game, which is infinitely superior in my book.  Anyways, here's a few photos... Pol...

For a long time I've been in the market for a new supers RPG.  Since running Marvel Heroic Roleplaying a few years ago, I've been looking at other games, including some that had been passed by the general public, e.g. DC Heroes Third Edition or Silver Age Sentinels .  This was based on the notion that supers RPG's are so niche and so under-performing as a general part of the RPG world that just because the game wasn't making a splash didn't mean it wasn't good. Plus, I have my own tastes about what I like in a supers RPG, which I've touched on from time to time here, but to summarize I like a game that feels like a comic book, doesn't get bogged down in too much detail, but allows for PC growth and development in a tangible game-system way.  I also don't want to spend hours on character creation using a spreadsheet.  For that matter, it would be an added bonus if it could also accommodate a large number of players and didn't have glaring opti...

So pretty much since this gaming group began, all those years ago when I answered a flyer in my FLGS, there have been two GM's: myself and the guy who comments on this blog as "J Evans." Not too long ago, my son decided he wanted a crack at running a game, first using a Free RPG Day module and then his own one-shot of a "Fallout" game using d6 Space.  Shortly thereafter, J Evans' son decided to take a crack at running an actual campaign, a D&D 4E campaign that has been meeting about once a month for the past few months. That seemed to open the floodgates.  My daughter decided she wanted to run a fantasy one-shot, just to see what it was like, and despite being the youngest person in the group they went for it.  I served as her assistant, helping her run combats and citing relevant rules when necessary. Then, Rachel, another member of the group, wanted to try a mini-campaign of a totally different genre: a "Walking Dead" style...