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Award Shows are Good Actually

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  The Ennie awards have just been awarded for another years, and as is tradition, this means that there has been a load of chatter about award shows and their merits. This year saw a bumper crop of nominees , including several of my Blogger colleagues . Some of them even won! While I hesitate to claim total Blogging cultural victory, we're getting there. The Ennies are of course not the only award concerned with TTRPGs - there are also the Diana Jones award , the Sprinties , the Rammies , The Awards ,, the CRIT awards , the Bloggies , and the Lizzies (as well as various categories in other awards, like the Origins Awards and the Nebulas , and I am sure I am missing some). Most award shows bill themselves as recognising and rewarding excellence in their field, which is a noble goal, but also almost entirely subjective. Excellence according to whom? In awards decided by a panel of judges, it will always be according to their opinions, with or without a judging rubric, and when y...
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The Game is Made of Holes

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  The fruitful void, whitespace, rules-lite, et cetera. A set of role-playing rules will often be like a Swiss cheese: Some overarching rules to provide structure, and holes to fill at the table. When designing a game, you must choose the scope and specificity of the rules. You probably need to (perhaps metaphorically) write down at least  one  rule for what you're making to be considered a game (though you may convince me otherwise), and conversely, there is a limit to how many rules you can write down if you intend to finish writing within your lifetime. When then, is the correct amount of rules? Surely this must be a solved problem in the field of game design. The correct answer is of course whatever you think it is. We play game to have fun, or at least some kind of desired experience. If a game provides that without you feeling chafed under the weight of the rulebook, or lost in a big, empty or not very fruitful void, then the game has the right amount of rules for y...
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On Treasure in Holes

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  It is a truth universally acknowledged that a destitute adventurer, in possession of a sharp blade, must be in want of a hole. Holes are after all where the treasures live, guarded by orcs and worse. Of course, in modern parlance, we like to call these holes "Dungeons", and if we want to get real fancy, they're "The Mythic Underworld". This is because, indeed, it does not make sense that one would store that much treasure in what is, essentially, a hole in the ground. Even at the best of times, going underground is a scary prospect, untold tonnes of earth and stone hanging over your head, ready to collapse at any moment if not properly secured, burying you with your treasure for all eternity. Sensible people build castles, it's less work. Maybe a little basement underneath, but none of this deep cave stuff. That's delving too deep, too greedily. This means that normal people don't put their treasures in big dungeons deep underground. People with lo...
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A Quick Look at a Big Book: Mythic Bastionland

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  After two iterations of the age of Industry, and once in the age of electricity, Chris McDowall, AKA Mr. Bastionland, has decided to tackle the age of heroic fantasy , of the Arthurian persuasion. Rather than the explorers of Into the Odd and debt-ridden failed careerists of Electric Bastionland, Mythic Bastionland concerns itself with Knights on a Quest. Like previous games set in the world of Bastion, the rules are light as they come, though with a little bit of added complexity in combat in the form of Feats and Gambits, as well as wrinkles related to weapon types, mounted combat, and mass combat. You know, knight stuff. Besides that, it's just the usual three-stat roll-under and no to-hit roll. It all sounds cool and fun. In total, all of this ends up filling a total of sixteen pages, including the GM advice for running the game. At the end of the book are 30 pages of play examples with commentary (the "Oddpocrypha"), with the rest (the majority of the book) are ...
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A Songbirds Campaign Retrospective: Part 1

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  This week, I did something that is probably rarer than it should be in the tabletop RPG sphere: I ended a campaign, rather than let it fizzle out or changing tracks and leaving it hanging. I have had a few people ask me about the campaign and my thoughts, so I figured I would write it up as a blog post. I have previously written my thoughts on the game, Songbirds 3e , and my overall thoughts on the game haven't changed much, so if you're more interested in review-like thoughts, that's the post you should be reading. In this post, I'll rather instead be focusing on the campaign itself, taking a bit of a bird's eye view on how it ran, the choices I made, and a write-up of the general story. I'm not very good with keeping session notes (read: I don't take or keep any notes), so I will be relying on my memory for this, as well as looking at the prep I did. Relying on the adage of "prep situations, not plots", many of the situations I prepared are ga...
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A Quick Look at a Big Book: Cairn 2e

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Theodor Kittelsen 1870s, Photo: Nasjonalmuseet/Ivarsøy, Dag Andre   Once again, I am stretching the definition of "big book", firstly because the Cairn 2e books are not that big, at least compared to chonkers like His Majesty the Worm or The Hidden Isle , and secondly, because I am actually looking at TWO books: the Player's Guide and the Warden's Guide. There were in fact several more books in the box set, but most of those were also Players Guides. For the purposes of this review, I will cover the idea of the box a bit, but mainly focus on the contents of these two "core books", rather than the adventures. The second edition of Cairn is, like the first, written by Yochai Gal. The books have beautiful cover art by Bruno Prosaiko and interior illustrations by Amanda Lee Frank and Keny Widjaja. I have played a little bit of Cairn 1e (a single session in fact, unless my memory betrays me), so while I have a passing familiarity, I am not deeply enmeshed in ...
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A Link in the Great Chain: Clerics in the Religious Hierarchy

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  The Pope is deader than the OSR, and we're posting through it. For this year's conclave, here's a post about hierarchies in organised religion and how to make it gameable. In fantasy role-playing games, we are likely to be presented with a pantheon of gods (even if the depiction of polytheism does not match how it has been practised historically, or indeed today). Dungeons and Dragons also has strong Christian underpinnings , even if it is not explicitly written. Taking what we have and running with it, the Cleric class should thus bear some resemblance to the clerics of real-world religions - that is, they are a member of a religious organisation with a hierarchy, in which they have a specific role and rank. Following a Christian template, this means that they should be ordained - otherwise, you are a lay preacher and explicitly not a member of the clergy . Of course, playing a parish priest is not necessarily conducive to fun dungeon-crawling adventures, so they wou...
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