So what was that I was gonna talk about?

Oh yes, the Tee Shirt RPG or Blue Buddha and the Bifrost Valkyrie.

Well you're lucky - I have a lot to say so I'm gonna talk about both. And I'm gonna talk about Touranne!

First a little context on what I'm gonna chat about. It's a pretty well established maxim of indie game design that one should not strive ( Read more... )

So before I start seriously talking about the stuff I'm working on (and this time I'll do it I swear!), I thought I'd enumerate those games which I'm currently working on but have not yet properly finished (that I can recall).

Games not listed here are those which I am officially done with even if they're currently with someone else being made ( Read more... )

• Sat, 12:17: My tweets: Sat, 12:02: Just finished @ laurenbeukes Zoo City. Better than Moxyland - probably due to having a si... http://bit.ly/jI4HhF
• Sat, 12:17: My tweets: Thu, 19:48: Hey game-playing people! Would a game where what happens in your game affects others' ga... http://bit.ly/kxGk9i

• Sat, 12:02: Just finished @ laurenbeukes Zoo City. Better than Moxyland - probably due to having a single narrator. My heart fell at the start of part 2.

• Thu, 19:48: Hey game-playing people! Would a game where what happens in your game affects others' games appeal? #rpg #design
• Thu, 23:18: It turns out, Opera and Ballet are very expensive if you want proper tickets. More so for champagne and smoked salmon sandwiches. Who knew?

For the past 8 years or so, the roleplaying world has held a competition known as Game Chef - a design contest engineered to provoke thought and create interesting and exciting games.

The theme this year was Journey and the ingredients (of which one should use three) were City, Desert, Edge and Skin. These act as design constraints (along with the ( Read more... )

 So the Warwick SF&F society are currently (and have been for the past two months) working on a collaborative RPG project. Which you can find (if you're interested) here. If you're not particularly interested then I'd suggest you avert your eyes from this post because I'm going to spend it discussing the design decisions we've made and are making ( Read more... )

By way of a prologue - my new campaign, utilising the fantastic Dr Who Adventures in Time and Space RPG by Cubicle 7, tells of the trials and tribulations aboard the starship F.R.S. Ananke - an old military vessel turned museum, hijacked by an intrepid crew when the space station it was attached to came under attack. Now severely undermanned and ( Read more... )

Roleplaying games, having a long history intertwined with fantasy, have, probably quite predictably, a rich and varied approach towards magical powers.

Rather than going into an exhaustive list of what kind of stuff is out there and why none of it quite scratches that itch, I'm going to list a handful of rules or axioms that I'd love a magic system ( Read more... )

Today, as I write up the Enlightenment Phase mechanics for Samsara, I got to thinking about the difference between closed and open mechanics and what that means for storytelling in an RPG.

I'll start with explaining what I mean by closed and open mechanics though: -

Closed mechanics are a mechanic of a system that the players are not allowed to fully ( Read more... )