Graph Paper Games

Emma took a turn behind the GM screen this last Friday.  Emma is one of our young adult players, the daughter of the other players in the group.  Emma wanted to run a little interlude adventure for the D&D group that just liberated Grimfest, but in a weird twist had everyone playing their PC's as if they were the opposite gender (the explanation being that this was a parallel universe to my campaign's universe). The set-up?  A kingdom's day of celebration is interrupted by a bitter arch-mage with an axe to grind about the king and queen.  After monolouging he stole the city's giant magical gem that provides health and well-being to all. For a first adventure it went really well, with some fun non-combat gameplay and real effort to involve everyone.  The only problem was that the story went pear-shaped when instead of staying on track my PC (a human barbarian named Maartje who was making her first appearance) didn't ask the dragon where the arch-mage's...

Dennis Parizek was an amateur RPG designer, mostly it sounds like a guy like me or a thousand other gamers, who created his own RPG called Everyverse .  Dennis passed away from cancer, but his wife wants to honor him by having his RPG published. There is a Kickstarter for this project, and you can support it by  clicking here .  I don't know anything about the game, really, but I know a good cause when I see one.

The PC's explore the horrors of the healthcare system, after the zombie apocalypse The Friday before last Rachel was in the driver's seat as we returned to Lawrence, Kansas and the nightmarish world after aliens have unleashed a zombie plague upon the Earth.  Having recovered the remains of an NPC doctor's husband, the group returned to the hospital to discover that it had been overrun by zombies. What followed was a tense exploration of the hospital in an attempt to rescue survivors.  In the end the NPC doctor was accidentally killed by a PC who mistook her for a zombie, but one of the aliens was convinced to see the error of his ways and recruited to help humanity, which is a big win for us. Two thoughts about the game.  The player who accidentally shot first and checked later was given a lot of crap for what happened, but not by me.  That's because I'm a Genre Fiend, and a spooked guy accidentally killing a living human is not only appropriate for a ...

It's like the dam broke after the holidays when it comes to my gaming group. First of all, the one- or two-shot of the FATE zombie-now-with-aliens RPG run by Rachel has turned into at least a mini-series with several more sessions to go. Then, the other Rob in the group is planning on continuing the D&D campaign I started, with the same characters, but moving onto a whole different story arc. Finally John is planning on running West End Games' Star Wars RPG once month. This is a big shift in my gaming group's structure, which usually had a single GM running 2-3 times a month, each time with just some of the gaming group,  to each GM only running once a month for most of the gaming group.  The biggest issue is group consistency.  When I was running a single campaign, people could game twice a month and the group wouldn't get that large.  Now I feel it is likely that everyone will try to make every session, meaning larger numbers at the table. ...

Since I'm in the weeds in terms of RPG's these days, I thought I'd work on a few odd projects, including assembling this miniature dice tower from The Broken Token.  I'm constantly having dice fly off the table, so I thought this would be a fun project. It required a little sanding of the joints to get it to fit, and I added a smidge of glue to hold it all together.  But it wasn't difficult and looks good. It can even be disassembled and used to carry dice to and from your gaming location. It's not particularly large, which I actually like since I didn't want something large and distracting cluttering up the gaming table. I have actually been thinking about what to do next.  More on that later.