Graph Paper Games

Click from a larger pic Recently my gaming group has had to change the venue of our sessions because I am getting several cats in the near future and have two players who are very, very allergic.  This is kind of a bummer for me, because I like gaming in my own house and have been building a very cumbersome modular dungeon to use in my games that I do no want to lug around from place to place. So to resolve my immediate issues regarding having a more mobile gaming set-up, I invested in an Ergon Gaming Mat that I spotted on an ad from Amazon.  I have a Chessex game mat, the kind that folds up and takes all kind of punishment, but I was curious about what a more flexible silicone mat might be able to do.  In addition to having the normal grid on one side, it also had hexes on the other (which suited my constant dreams of running Champions again).  The mat showed the dry-erase marker clearly and could be rolled up, even squished with no signs of damage.  U...

I tried to avoid spoilers to this movie, but if you think I didn't, my apologies in advance. It's been a while since I've reviewed something, so I thought I'd give my handful of readers my take on the new DC animated movie Suicide Squad: Hell To Pay For those familiar with the earlier animated Suicide Squad movie Assault on Arkham , I should tell you that this is not a sequel to that movie but rather follows the DC animated movie Flashpoint , a fact which isn't revealed until pretty late in the movie.  That's too bad, because I thought Assault on Arkham was a great movie and vastly superior to the live-action film.  The real giveaway that the two are not related is that Killer Frost, theoretically killed in Assault on Arkham , appears in Hell to Pay  but with a different secret identity and costume (for those keeping track, the AoA version is Louise Lincoln, the HtP version is Crystal Frost). Hell to Pay is a pretty standard Suicide Squad plotline: th...

For my birthday I picked up a print copy of Heroes Against Darkness  by Justin Halliday .  Why, might you ask, would I spent hard currency on a book that is offered as a .pdf for free? First, I like real books.  I read them better, and can do so in places other than in front of a computer monitor. Second, it's worth it.  Beats me if Halliday makes any money off the sale or not, but I hope he did, because offering this game for free was a very generous gift to the gaming world. Heroes Against Darkness is worth owning. (At least if you are me.  Your mileage may vary.) Heroes Against Darkness  is, by its own admission, a "fantasy heartbreaker," which is the usually derogatory term used by someone's homegrown version of Dungeons & Dragons.  If I had to summarize HAD's genetic heritage, I'd call it an early edition of D&D done using Fourth Edition mechanics.  If that early edition had 11 character classes. HAD has the standard D...

Last month I reviewed Cold Steel Wardens, a superhero RPG seeking to emulate the good parts of the Iron Age of comic books. I feel like I read the game enough to write a review, but since then this game has been sitting on my nightstand, constantly drawing me in to reread it.  There's a lot that is compelling about this game, and a few things I'm having a lot of trouble getting past, both of which is probably what keeps me coming back to it.  (Note: I have a similar relationship with Rifts .) One of the things I really like is the way that the rules support investigating play.  There's a skill for canvassing an area for information that is different than the one you use to interrogate people or the one you use to research stuff online.  The GM section of running investigations is excellent and I'll likely port it into any similar game I run. I like how the game handles realistic combat and injuries.  Not really something you'd see in most supers RPG's,...

Just to get terminology straight, I'm talking about the Iron Age of comics, an era distinguished from the Gold, Silver, and whatever the current age is supposed to be called (I've heard "Modern," which is doomed to inaccuracy in a few years, and "Electrum" which might be an inside-baseball joke among nerds). The Iron Age is roughly defined as beginning sometime in the early 1980's and ended around 1996 with the bankruptcy of Marvel Comics, although vestiges of its influence still kick around in the comic book universe today.  The high points of the era are often cited as works like Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns  or Alan Moore's Watchmen .  The low points are often associated with names like Rob Liefield.  Hand-in-hand with the Iron Age was the collectibility craze of comic books with speculators and comic book companies simultaneously engaging in a mutal delusion that comic books of that era had tremendous value apart from reading them...

I went and saw Captain America: Civil War recently.  I enjoyed the movie for its introduction of even more classic Marvel characters and its superhero action, but I couldn't help but wonder if the movie wouldn't be more critically examined if it weren't in the wake of the gawdawful hero-versus-hero movie Batman v. Superman .  Because even as I was watching it I could feel myself slowly grinding my teeth over the plot even as I enjoyed the MCU's iteration of Black Panther and Spider-Man. Spoilers follow. Here's why.  In the original "Civil War" story arc in Marvel comics the flashpoint of the Super Human Registration Act which curtails the vigilante activities of superhumans was the flagrantly irresponsible acts of the New Warriors (my favorite 90's superhero team).  The New Warriors flamboyantly jump a small group of D-list supervillains who are basically just hanging out in their own backyard, while a TV crew films the Warriors as part of a real...

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, as I mentioned recently, I've got a lot of sentimentality for Star Trek RPG's, and Star Trek in general.  Three actual honest-to-God licensed ones exist in history: FASA's, Last Unicorn Games, and Decipher's.  I own the first two and have heard mixed things about the third. But there are also a lot of non-licensed Star Trek RPG's out there, and recently I saw that one of them, Far Trek , was offering a hard copy for a couple of bucks on Lulu.  Never one to let a deal go by I picked it up and thought I'd give you, gentle readers, my thoughts. Far Trek is a light-hearted, even breezy take on the Star Trek universe, almost exclusively the original series.  There rules incorporate stats, skills, and talents.  There are four stats: Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, and Charisma, with the stats ranging from about a -2 to a +2, reflecting their modifier on the die roll.  I actually like this mechanic, which I first encountered in True20.  It does...

This will be a pretty short review, since I only made one afternoon session for this year's KantCon, a locally organized gaming convention in Kansas City. One thing I like about KantCon is that you get a chance to meet some local gaming designers and some little-known games like the year I met the guys from Silver Gryphon Games and bought Ingenium and Aether .  This year I managed to get a spot at a table where two guys from Paragon Notion were running a demo of their game, The Ultimate Hero . By the games' own description it "combines aspects of comic book heroes and science fiction."  On the comic book side it has mutations, psionics, and even magic.  On the science fiction side you have space travel, power armor, and cybernetics.  The PC's work for an organization called DOSHI (Department of Super Human Investigations), a para-military agency dedicated to policing superhuman threats. The rules are pretty straightforward, generally a contested 2d6 r...

My daughter and I have loved the Young Justice TV series ever since it hit Netflix and helped us transition from Justice League and Justice League Unlimited, even though they don't share the same universe (Young Justice appears to be about one alternative dimension over, what with Wally West being the Flash in the older series, and Kid Flash in Young Justice).  Now we are working our way through Season 2 of Young Justice just as my son has finally gotten on the Season 1 bandwagon. While all this is going on, the Teen Titans comic book is poised to join Justice League in my "how to save six dollars a month not buying bad comic books" list. What makes one teen DC product so good (possibly superior even to JLU, and maybe one of the best animated superhero series ever) and the other similar title called by some the worst of the New 52 (and that's saying a lot)?  And more importantly, what can superhero RPG campaign makers glean from both of those things?  Let...

I thought I would jot down some general impressions from myself and some of the players in my group, following our first try at D&D Fifth Edition.  As a bit of backdrop, I ran the free mini-adventure from Goodman Games “The Wizard’s Amulet,” which I remember running back in the days of the third edition of D&D, but has now been renovated for the latest iteration.  The adventure features about ten pre-generated PC’s, with the optimal group size of six (I had seven), all at first level.  There is an introductory battle (almost a skirmish), a somewhat pointless exploration encounter that is more of an homage to the early days of D&D, and a final ambush that presents a steep challenge to a 1 st -level group.  It’s possible in the final battle for at least one PC to die. In terms of how the game went over with my group, most everyone (even the new players) like fantasy as a genre.  It was the first style of game the group played when they came together...

Capsule: A near-clone of Marvel Heroic Roleplaying that throws out the good while keeping the bad.  Useful if you're a fan of the Valiant Universe. I've been looking forwards to this game ever since Free RPG Day this year, although with some trepidation.  The rules were sketchy, and the free booklet promised more detail when the main rulebook came out.  I also snagged most of the additional free material Catalyst Games had put out as PDFs on DriveThurRPG, which gave me most of the major characters from the Valiant Universe. Quick side note about Valiant comics, for those who don't know.  Originated in the 90's during the whole big indie comics movement that spawned Malibu, Image, and a host of others small publishing companies.  The early Valiant characters included a pseudo X-Men mutant youth team (Harbingers), a archtypal "Iron Age" gun guy (Bloodshot), the high-tech alien armor guy (the bizarrely named X-0 Manowar), and a quirky no-capes duo (Archer...

First, read his , because it is pretty much spot on across the board. The Monsters All the classics, and as far as I can tell nothing really new.  You could, if you know the game well enough, probably recreate the table of contents on your own. In order to keep things still pretty simple, major league monsters now have two new abilities: Legendary and Lair Abilities.  Legendary abilities are basically additional attacks the DM can activate out of turn order, giving them an edge.  Lair abilities are a secondary effect associated with the location but also adding additional peril to the encounter. It's a way of working around how to give solo monsters parity with large PC groups who can dog-pile on a single monster who can only hit back once.  Like many things about the fifth edition, it is pretty simple and elegant. There's no rules for creating your own monsters or upgrading monsters.  Common humanoids often have a "boss" version like an orc chieftain. ...

I have to admit up front that part of my problem with Odyssey by Phil Vecchione is that I read and loved his book, Never Unprepared .  Never Unprepared dealt with session preparation for the GM and was a tight, informative, ridiculously helpful book.  I went into Odyssey, a book on campaign management, with similar hopes, but ended up disappointed.  This isn’t to say that Odyssey is a bad book, it just came under the bar of his former work. First, the good parts.  The book tackles an ambitious topic, not the running of a game session, but actually managing a full blown campaign.  The book tackles this several sections, including how to create a campaign, how to manage the campaign as it goes, and how to end it.  I find the section on ending particularly apt, given how I just ended mine.  Each area has this fictional gaming group of three players and a GM introduce and close each section, first with the GM doing it wrong and then with her doing it ...

Let me say, first off, that I think that aside from the somewhat-disconnected Hulk movie(s), I think that Thor is the weakest character in the Avengers franchise (the new casting for the Hulk in the Avengers movie pretty much resurrected that character from the "worst" slot).  My son loves Thor, and loves both the movies, but Hemsworth is so leaden as the lead character that it is no wonder they gave Hiddleston as much rope as he could handle. I get that Hemsworth looks like Thor should look, and that Thor the comic book character is pretty wooden on his own.  But setting him aside, Natalie Portman continues to such the wind out of every scene she's in to the point where you really are rooting for Thor to hook up with Sif instead.  Stellan Skarsgard is played strictly for slapstick laughs.  Kat Dennings is also a comic relief reprisal, but I think she should have been cast as Hel rather than jokey-sidekick to the sidekick.  And Christopher Eccleston has the do...

I've actually been on a bit of a RPG-buying kick lately, a sure sign that I'm either a bit depressed or just suffering from the wandering foot of my hobby tendencies. Edge of Empire  is the latest iteration of a Star Wars RPG, this one by Fantasy Flight Games. I own every Star Wars RPG out there, from the first edition by West End Games to FFG's new stop-a-high-caliber-bullet tome, and I may like this one the least, which is saying a lot since I'm including Wizards of the Coast's d20 version in there.  Why?  I'll tell you. It's not, as it turns out, because of their dice that are game-specific and damned expensive ($18 for a set), although that does cheese me off.  It's even not the way that they reduce all social interaction to a die roll, with little in the way of in-character roleplaying affecting the outcome. No, it's the way they chose to settle into the Star Wars universe.  In EoE, the PC's are all smugglers, soldiers, bounty hunte...

You know that something is amiss when even my wife can figure out the problem with an RPG... I bought the Fate Core System book (Evil Hat Productions) not too before heading off to EOW and have been reading it intently every since.  It is not a complicated game per se , just one that take a lot of things that are relatively unspoken or hand-waved in RPG's and builds the rules around them. I don't want to get too deep into the rules in this post, but rather just look at the pivotal one: Aspects.  Aspects are akin to the Distinctions in Marvel Heroic Roleplaying .  Actually given the timeline, MHR ripped off FUDGE/Fate.  But since I knew MHR first, I have to work from what I know.  In MHR, if you do something that dovetails with one of your Distinctions, you can either get an additional d8 (if it is positive) or a d4 and a Plot Point if it suggests a negative occurrence.  So for example if you use "Highly confident" to do something smoothly because, w...

Art by Grant Gould My paper copy of Blade Raiders , a new fantasy RPG by Grant Gould arrived yesterday, and I tore into it with gusto.  I've read the .pdf copy when it came several months ago, but I'm not a huge fan of reading e-books, and being able to thumb through the pages is always a more pleasurable and effective way for me to read. You can read my first look of the game here , but I wanted to do a more detailed one now that the book is out. First, let me say that there are a lot of "fantasy heartbreakers" out there that constitute a game designer's attempt to polish and tweak Dungeons & Dragons to their liking.  They are called "heartbreakers" by some because in the end, it's still largely the same game experience as the original, and if you didn't like that, you won't like its derivatives.   Blade Raiders  is not a fantasy heartbreaker.  It's a fantasy RPG, but there's little in similarity to the Tolkein/Dying ...