Recommendations – Page 4

Kickin’ it

Round up

It’s been a little while since I did a list. It’s a good format to use when you are not totally sure what you want to write. And, yep, that’s how I’m using it today.

So, what’ve I been backing and kicking? Since the last one of these sorts of posts back in September 2024, quite a lot, actually.

On Kickstarter

Here’s the list. I’m going to write a bit about each of them down below.

Solarcrawl
A Perfect Wife: TTRPG Adventure + Fundraiser
Glumdark
A Feast for a Sphinx
Terry Pratchett’s Discworld RPG: Adventures in Ankh-Morpork
Royal Blood – A Tarot Heist RPG

1. Solarcrawl

Let’s start with the one that is still available to back on Kickstarter. Solarcrawl is an OSR exploration game set in a fantastic space age. It’s created by Galen Pejeau, an “illustrator and occasional game designer” according to their itch page.

I absolutely love the look of this one. The artwork seems to suit the subject matter so perfectly, its’ clean lines and definite, scientific style give it the right sort of vibe for a planet exploration game. I am excited to try it with the Death in Space rules but it is designed for any OSR game.

The idea is that your homeworld is dying and you are needed to go out and explore beyond the gravity well. So off you go to try to find new planets to explore and help you to revive your own.

The game is split into two phases, Mission Phase and Homeworld Phase. Mission allows you to go out and find planets, explore them and hopefully avoid their unique dangers. Afterwards, you have the Homeworld phase, when you do research, build and improve your ships, “regreening their world.” That sort of thing.

Take on dual roles: as the astronauts journeying forth to the other worlds within their solar system, and as the heads of the space agency that builds their rockets, chooses their destinations, and hopefully, work together in hopes of rekindling their fading world.

It funded very fast but I am sure the creator will appreciate any and all further backers. Go check out the campaign here. There’s still 10 days to go.

2. A Perfect Wife

One of the big Zine Month projects, this one caught my eye almost immediately. The project was created by David Blandy of Eco Mofos fame, but the creators of this scenario zine are Zedeck Siew, Amanda Lee Franck and Scrapworld.

It’s another OSR project. One of their stretch goals was to make it specifically compatible with the Liminal Horror RPG but, as I understand it, it should still be easily useable in any other OSR game.

The adventure is described as “urban horror” and explicitly involves a Malaysian mythical creature known as the Pontianak. This is the spirit of a woman who died in childbirth. According tot he wiki I have linked to, the spirit seeks out her victims by sniffing out their drying laundry. Apparently this is why Malays will not leave clothes out to dry at night.

This one is very interesting since the main aim of it was to pay the airfare and living expenses of the creators on a trip to Nottingham, England.

The purpose of this campaign is twofold. It seeks to fund:

1: The publication of a tabletop RPG adventure zine in print and PDF.
2: The air tickets and living expenses for Amanda Lee Franck, Scrap World, and Zedeck Siew to spend one week in Nottingham.

With the former, we hope to entice you to help us with the latter.

You get: a complete mystery- and horror-themed adventure with evocative art based on an iconic-but-underrepresented Southeast Asian monster.

We get: an opportunity for three TTRPG designers to cross oceans and meet their peers, and each other, for the first time.

This will give them the opportunity to attend the Weird Hope Engines art exhibition, focusing attention on indie game creators, in Nottingham. They will be exhibiting works there themselves.

Curated by Dying Earth Catalogue (David Blandy, Rebecca Edwards, Jamie Sutcliffe), running from March to May 2025 at Bonington Gallery, Nottingham, UK.

In fact, you can already get the online version of the scenario published by Zedeck on his blog.

But the campaign was a success and it should fund both the publications and the trip. I can’t wait to get the physical object.

I’m sorry I didn’t write a bit about this one a lot sooner as it is such a worthy campaign but I am glad to see they were completely successful and I would even hope to get over to see the exhibition in Nottingham during its run between March and May this year.

3. Glumdark

You know, there are a few companies/creators that I would probably back no matter what the project. In the case of Glumdark, it wasn’t the creators themselves but the company, Exalted Funeral. I’ve gotten a few things from them in the past, although I don’t buy from them much because of the shipping. They published Between the Skies, for instance, and I think it’s pretty clear that I like that a lot. So, when the Glumdark Kickstarter was repeatedly slung at my face from Instagram, I paid attention. I knew nothing about it but I took a punt. I am quite glad I did.

Glumdark started as a website. It was built as a resource for GMs running dark fantasy games. It’s got a plethora of useful tables . You can go and check them out right here, at glumdark.com. What’s nice is that you have tables for GMs, of course, but also for players.

As a dungeon master, you may choose to punish your players with some fresh doom, or just amuse yourself with the joy of randomness. As a player, you can expand your backstory or seek inspiration for new adventures.

It’s system-agnostic, making it equally useful as a resource to players of D&D 5e and Troikans alike.

Here’s a few of my favourite things from the site:

The Location Generator is probably the best bit for me. You can click on a location name such as, “A Mysterious Tower,” and you will get three paragraphs about such a place under the headings of “The tower,” “The access,” and “The occupants.” If you are not a big fan of any given paragraph, for instance, if you don’t like the description of the tower itself, “A tower built from stacked round stones in a dense, loamy forest,” then you can just click on it to generate a new one. Or you can just click on the Location name again to generate a whole new tower. Go and try it out!
The “Bad Omens” table starts with this entry at number 1: “A black cat starts to cross your path, but is crushed by a falling ladder.”
Number 13 on the d20 “Defining Life Events” table is: “You bear the mark of Goonfun, the savior.”

So, now they’re making a book with similar goodies in it, along with some art that is very pretty indeed, in a nasty sort of way. It’s also going to come with a soundtrack! Here’s the Kickstarter page.

4. A Feast for a Sphinx

I just really like Evelyn Moreau’s art style. I have been following her on Instagram for a while and now on Bluesky and I’m always delighted by the work she shares. And she has been pretty prolific. Just go have a look at her itch.io page here. The only piece of TTRPG work I knew, though, was Goblin Mail, for Troika! And it is a really original work with a fun premise and beautiful design elements. So, when she announced her new Kickstarter project with the same collaborators, Sofia Ramos (writing) and Luna P (layout,) I obviously backed it.

A Feast for a Sphinx is an adventure for Mörk Borg. Now, I have yet to run a Mörk Borg game but that didn’t stop me. It is a revamp of a dungeon formerly published on itch and the promise is that

Everything was rewritten, balanced or added to make this the best version of the module while keeping the central idea the same.

It is going to be produced in a zine format of 30 to 40 pages (which is on the long side for a zine.) It will describe the dungeon and deliver some new creatures, adventure seeds and a bunch of tables for randomly generating encounters, rumours, etc. Go have a look at the campaign page here.

5. Terry Pratchett’s Discworld RPG: Adventures in Ankh-Morpork

So, I was very suspicious of this one, I’ll be honest. I’ve read most of the Discworld novels, and I know the irreverent, comedic, satirical tone Terry Pratchett set. I never felt like you could really replicate that at the gaming table, exactly. No, that’s not true. It’s one of my favourite ways to play RPGs, in fact. I like to have fun with them. Puns come as second nature on dungeon crawls, silly NPC names are my bread and butter. My worry was more that it would seem somehow forced or unnatural if that’s what the game was explicitly trying to get you to do.

As the campaign went on, though, I began to think the creators understood that worry. To prove it, Modiphius did one of the bravest things I have seen in some time, they made an actual play to show off the game. It couldn’t have been in any sort of finished format at the time they released the video, but clearly they had enough to make a fun and funny one-shot. Now, they had some of the more recognisable faces on the RPG actual play scene involved, which helped. Quinns of Quinns Quest was the GM and the players were Josephine McAdam, Abubakar Salim and Liv Kennedy. Go and check out the video on Youtube here. They really managed to highlight the ways in which the rules encourage play that will generate genuinely comedic moments without it feeling like you’re being fed a bunch of “hilarious” prompts.

Anyway, that got me to back this one. And I wasn’t the only one to back it, dear reader, oh no. They raised almost two and a half million pounds! Whew! Can’t wait to get my hands on it in the summer. In the meantime, go take a look at its Kickstarter page here.

6. Royal Blood – A Tarot Heist RPG

I wrote that I would back almost anything from some creators. This is another one of those. It’s Rowan Rook and Decard. I’m an unashamed shill for Grant Howitt and don’t really need any reasons to buy something he’s involved with. But this game looks so beautiful as well. It’s a tarot based game.

Royal Blood is a tabletop roleplaying game about heists, tarot cards, magic, fate and desperation. It uses a deck of tarot cards to build characters, plan a heist and determine opposition, and to resolve every risky action the players make in an attempt to claim power.

This game has actually been around since 2016 but it was not crowdfunded or given much support by RRD either for that matter. This time, the kickstarter campaign did really well so they have some money to throw at it and they have a partnership with Mana Project Studio, the Italian TTRPG creators who are responsible for some of the best looking games out there, including Cowboy Bebop.

As for all of these projects but Solarcrawl, the Royal Blood campaign is over but you should still go and check out the Kickstart page here. You can actually pre-order it there now too.

The Theatre of Trophy Gold

Getting my flash in

Orlen, dusty, wide-brimmed chapeau drowning her alarming eyes in shadow, holds aloft her trophy, beaming. The bag of coin, pleasingly hefty, dangling from her dextrous digits. “‘Aah ‘baht ‘at ‘en?” Her companions, ensorcelled by something above her sturdy, sinister shoulder, point. A hiss, as a punctured bladder, sounds in her ear. Speculative, her left hand shoots up, ready to throttle the looming serpent. It narrowly misses losing its ring finger as a dagger, recently released by Rasei, skewers the snake to the formerly coin-concealing statue. Orlen chances a glance. The cold blood dribbles down the stone man’s shoulder, over the sickle he holds dramatically crossing his sword over his chest. Nima cries, “More snakes!” Time to go. The treasure hunters scarper down the path of the sickle, ignoring the sword’s point and the keep slouching beyond it on the horizon, hoping for Hester’s Mill.

A dramatic retelling of the opening scene of our recent game of Trophy Gold, run by friend of the blog, Isaac. To those who were there, apologies. I’m sure I got a few details wrong, either deliberately or by mistake. Drama seems appropriate for this fascinating game, defined as it is, within Sets.

Trophy

So, as you probably know, dear reader, if you have been with me for a while, here on the dice pool dot com, I am a more-or-less avid listener of the Fear of a Black Dragon podcast from the Gauntlet. I wrote a post on my appreciation for it and the Indie RPG Podcast last Summer. Our path to playing this incursion (as Trophy scenarios are called) leads very much from that. Jason Cordova, one of the podcast’s capable hosts, rarely ventures into the OSR’s hex-defined landscapes. Rather, you can generally find him in the narrative woods and trails of story-based games. On the podcast, he often discusses his experiences in running OSR (or just old tbh) modules in other systems. Back in the olden days of Fear of a Black Dragon, this generally meant either the incredibly rules-lite World of Dungeons or Dungeon World My last post on this blog was about the feelings Dungeon World made me feel. Go and have a look!) These both have PBTA DNA. Their mechanics lend themselves more to the application of imagined narrative than cut-and-dried, D&D-esque, result-binary systems. And this is really only because of the inclusion of a third option, a mixed success, or success at a cost. Since the implied consequence cannot be defined outside the context of the situation, it is usually left up to those at the table to invent it (although Dungeon World generally provides far more pre-written options than does the baldly efficient text of World of Dungeons.) And look, if you’re a PBTA maven, my deepest apologies for what is, no doubt, a faintly condescending and largely inaccurate paring down of a game system that is probably the most influential in the indie game space of the last decade and a half. But if you were raised on a distilled diet of Borgs in your old schools, you’re welcome.

I have gotten off track. The point I was trying to get to was that, a few years ago, Jason switched to running pretty much every module in Trophy Dark or Trophy Gold instead. Mostly Trophy Gold, in fact. Obviously, this got me very interested in the game. The idea of running D&D style modules in a more narrative style highlights a whole new facet of the hobby that I always thought would be very fun to explore. And, after reading a bit about the game and learning of its mechanical descent from Blades in the Dark I wanted to try it even more. It just turns out that, much like Tom (with Dungeon World,) before him, Isaac got there before me. I’m not complaining. I love being a player in these games.

So, to put it briefly, both Trophy games were written by Jesse Ross and published by Gauntlet Publishing. Elements of the rules have been adapted from Blades in the Dark by John Harper, who is also responsible for World of Dungeons and other elements were cribbed from Graham Walmsley’s seminal Cthulhu Dark. They are games about treasure hunters going out into the dark forest to find gold and bring it home so they can continue to survive in a hostile world. In Trophy Dark, your vile little adventurer is a goner; you’re not making it past the end of the session. Sorry. That’s the point of Trophy Dark. But in Trophy Gold you make a treasure hunter who might live to the end of the incursion if you’re lucky. They might even weasel their way through to another one. Speaking of which, I wrote a blog post about making a Trophy Gold character last summer. You may find it illuminating if you’re interested. Do bear in mind, though, the game I used in that post is not quite the same as the one presented in the book published in 2022. I used the game from the Codex Gold magazine, which you can pick up for a steal over on Drivethru. I don’t think there are any really drastic rule changes but we noticed some discrepancies in a few of the tables.

A gold and black illustration of an adventurer being lowered on a rope into a dark cave where a giant spider awaits. the cover is framed by stylised black spiders on a gold background. The words, Codex, The Gauntlet's monthly RPG zine appear in the top left of the cover. — The cover of Codex Gold from Gauntlet Publishing

Hester’s Mill

So, what’s all this about Sets? You didn’t think I remembered mentioning that earlier, did you, dear reader? Well, Incursions are formatted in a very particular way. Trophy Gold helpfully breaks it up and introduces the format like this:

Theme – much like any dramatic work that might be presented on the stage, a Trophy Gold incursion should be built around a theme, even if you are adapting it from another type of module. I would call the broad theme of Hester’s Mill to be “Harvest”
Sets – these are particular locations in which the treasure hunters will be presented with clear goals. I find it fascinating that the rules tell the GM to make the goal explicit to the players. I’m not giving away too much by telling you that the goal in the opening Set I wrote up in the intro is to find the way to Hester’s Mill. You complete the Set by achieving this goal and this is eminently important to the cycle of play. You may not wish to complete the goal of every Set. It might not be clever or necessary for you. Your character’s overall goal is to earn enough Gold to relieve them of their Burden, both of which are abstract scores on the character sheet. In other words, you know from the start how much you need to take home so you don’t die on the streets or get consumed by the evils of the world. I don’t think anyone would blame you for trying to convince the party to get the heck out of there once you had managed to collect enough money. But, just because you got your Benjamins, doesn’t mean everyone else did. This can lead to inter-personal conflict, unsurprisingly. But it might also lead to moments of support and kindness in these Sets. Drama, gettit? And guess what you call the things you find within the Sets… Yep, Props. It’s obvious, really. So the statue of the man with the sickle and sword in the intro? Yep, that’s a Prop. You also have Treasure and Traps as defined elements within Sets
Flowchart – What the holy business-process, Batman? Yep, it makes so much sense, when you think about it. When you are trying to play something like an OSR module, you might have a map which visually represents the location but that does not necessarily represent the decisions, actions and repercussions that might lead the PCs from one Set to the next. In many ways, the Flowchart is the more useful of the two. I’d like to give it a go in any game where I’m running a particular scenario, honestly. Not very theatrical though, disappointingly
Monsters – these are specifically mentioned because the section I am referring to in the Trophy Gold rules from Codex Gold is there to explain how you might convert an OSR module to be played using Trophy Gold instead. So, Jesse Ross has helpfully provided a lot of advice on converting Monsters, a staple of the genre, to be used in that system. One of the most fascinating aspects of the game is that the monsters do not come pre-named. That is left up to the party. This can be either cool AF or disastrous. The monsters we encountered in Hester’s Mill so far have been both bonkers and horrifying. And if it had been left up to me, they would have been called something stupid
Magic – Similar to Monsters, this includes advice on conversion. But, I will say that there is a very useful table of already converted D&D style spells presented in the rules for you to use.

Anyway, it should be clear that the Set is the main denomination of organisational structure within an Incursion. So far, I think we have interacted with three or four Sets in Hester’s Mill and achieved the Goal in two or three of them. You can use another highly abstracted currency, the Hunt Token, to complete a Set without having to actually face its dangers. You can receive (and also lose) these tokens on a Hunt Roll, one of the three types of rolls in the game. If you spend three Hunt Tokens like that, you simply draw the curtain across the stage and open again on the next Set and get to work on the new goal.

In general, rolls, of which you have Hunt, Combat and Risk, are made using a dice pool mechanic much like that used in Blades in the Dark. The D6 is the only die you need but you will need them in Dark and Light varieties. You will always roll a Dark Die in Combat and you can roll one to give you a better chance of success on a Risk Roll if you’re willing to risk mind or body… More drama.

The Combat Roll is particularly fascinating because it doesn’t work like a regular success/failure roll at all. Instead, you describe how your character exposes themselves to harm in the battle and then roll your Light Die. That number is your Weak Point. You then roll a Dark Die for each of the treasure hunters in the fight. Ostensibly, you’re rolling against the Endurance of the Monster, but, if any of them roll your Weak Point, that increases your Ruin, which is like a harm track. One you hit 6 Ruin, you are Lost… So dramaaaatic, right?

Add to this the Devil’s Bargain, nicked from Blades in the Dark and you have a recipe for some real dark character moments in Trophy games. You crowdsource the possible options for both Devil’s Bargains and unfortunate consequences of failed rolls from everyone around the table and this makes for some extremely fucked up inevitabilities on a lot of rolls.

In conclusion

We have yet to finish Hester’s Mill. I know we have at least one more Set to get to. I’m really looking forward to going back to it. We’ll be dealing with the aftermath of something pretty messed up and, hopefully, finding some more goodies. I have to say, the Incursion has been very pleasing in introducing us to a lot of lore and cool fantasy history while also giving us the opportunity to get into fights and burn down shrines so far. With any luck, there’ll be more of that as we wrap it up next time.

How about you, dear reader? Have you played Trophy Gold? Or Hester’s Mill? What did you think?

The Feeling of Dungeon World

Hirelings to Heroes

My good friend Tom. recently kicked off a Dungeon World campaign. I’m a player in it. It’s got a very particular flavour and premise that places the players in the position of being the hirelings of the “real” adventuring party. And so it was at the start. But, before we had a chance to yell, “WATCH OUT FOR THAT FLESHY BOI MAN THING” the tables were turned and the PCs had to dig deep and find something heroic inside themselves or have the entire group die horrible deaths in the depths of the first dungeon. I would like to give a big shout-out to Tom’s awesome in media res beginning in a massive organic mouth with eyes on the inside and little flesh monsters. It rocked.

My character is Craobh Beag (pronounced something like Kreev Byug), a Kyrfolk (think minotaur whose bull half was a Highland) druid. Had a lot of fun with the shapeshifting and his generally chaotic nature. You can check out Tom’s post about how they built the world we’re playing in here.

A shaggy, red-haired straight horned cow in a field. — This is what my Dungeon World character looks like except with two legs and more vines. Highland cow by Nilfanion – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7868883

Old School?

But what I want to write about today is what the game evoked for me. As a player of a certain age, my first introduction to RPGs was the red D&D boxed set back in the late eighties. This was fairly normal at the time, as I understand it. It really was magic. I don’t remember too much of the mechanics of playing that game. My memory is reliably questionable. But I have a distinct memory of the feeling of it. The wonder of imagining my little dwarf swinging his wee hammer at monsters in some unnamed dungeon, having real adventures! I’d played choose your own adventure books like Fighting Fantasy and Zork before but this was entirely different. There was no way of save-scumming by keeping a finger on the decision entry page so you could go back if you didn’t like the outcome. The consequences felt consequential and the world was wide open. No limits!

When I think of old school games, I think these are the feelings they should elicit. Fear of threat, concern for real consequences, appreciation of truly impactful decisions, a sense of freedom in an open world and an enjoyment of the fantastic. I want to be fearful for the life of my character. I need to know that the decisions I make can have a truly terrible or wonderful impact on the world in some way. Now, there are a lot of differing opinions out there as to what constitutes an OSR principle. Some of them involve the inclusion of resource management, others disregard that as non-essential but insist that they should be ‘rules-lite.’ Anyway, let’s take this list I lifted from Wikipedia that comes originally from Matthew Finch’s A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming (2008.)

Rulings from the gamemaster are more important than rule books. Concoct a clever plan and let the gamemaster rule on it.

Player skill is more important than character abilities. Outwit the enemy, don’t simply out-fight them.

Emphasize the heroic, not the superheroic. Success lies in experience, not superpowers.

Game balance is not important. If the characters meet a more powerful opponent, either think of a clever plan or run away.

I think we can see that these four pillars of OSR games cover a lot of the feelings I want to get out of them. A sense of the fantastic is noticeably absent. But that might be something specific to me.

Dungeon World (2012) by Sage LaTorra and Adam Koebel supports this type of play so well. It ticks all these OSR boxes! Now, obviously, I have only played the one session of it so far, but I have to tell you, the first of the stars I sent to Tom after that session was this:

right at the top I have to say that this is the closest I feel I’ve gotten to experiencing the feeling of playing old school dnd in a very long time. Despite the system being slightly different, it’s close enough that it feels familiar. More importantly, it’s the overall atmosphere [Tom] has created with a pretty traditional dungeon scenario with puzzles and traps in a recognizable fantasy setting. It really brought me back.

It’s an odd duck, Dungeon World. It is very much a PBTA game. You have bonds and moves and holds and degrees of success/success with consequences when you roll your 2d6. But you also have D&D’s core abilities, alignment, HP and magic spells. You even have classes like Dungeons & Dragons. The standard races are human, elf, dwarf and halfling (Tom has tweaked the list of available races or cultures in their campaign. Once again, you can read more about that in their own words here.) So, this is how it retains the flavour of D&D without the ruleset. LaTorra and Koebel could have made a dungeon exploration game that was far more Apocalypse Worldy. I mean, do you really need the D&D style stats? No. Is alignment necessary? No. But we are trained to understand that the fiction presented by those things is reminiscent of a particular type of game that we want to experience the feeling of again. Well, that goes for those of us who have had that feeling before. For others, who maybe never played anything but PBTA games and are loathe to dip their toes into OSE or DCC or even actual D&D, it offers them a chance to do that.

So we were on a storm-wreathed cliff-side, and we were being led by a ghost dog we had just befriended. The ghost dog walked through the air to the other side of the cliffs as though the rope-bridge was still standing. But the bridge had been cut in the middle. Still, we knew the undead doggie was trying to direct us to where we needed to be, so we used a combination of moves (shapeshifting into a forest bird), equipment (lots of rope, which our paladin ended up losing as a consequence of his actions) and luck (mixed success) to make it across to the other side (even though the self-same paladin decided it would be clever to tightrope walk across and nearly plummeted to a nasty death as a result.) This one scene involved most of the pillars of the OSR that I quoted above.

Old as new

Sometimes I find I just have to write about games like this, that are brand new to me, even though they have been out for over a decade. I’ve done it with OSE and Dragon Age too. This might seem a little redundant to some, but the way I look at it is that, if it’s new to me, it’s new to someone else too. I have to remind myself that somebody discovers OD&D every day. I only first tried a PBTA game about three years ago. When it comes to RPGs, there are trends and movements and there is always something new coming out. And there are quite a few people publishing articles on them. But I don’t think that any reason not to write about games like this that I am enjoying and enthusiastic about right now, no matter how old.

Dear reader, we have literally, only just begun our Dungeon World adventure and I am hoping to write more about it and the other games I’m currently involved in over the next few weeks. There are so many! I am looking forward, next, to discussing Trophy Gold, run by Isaac, and a new project/event that Tables and Tales is cooking up too. So stick around for more!

The Dice Pool at One Hundred (Posts)

Progress

The last time I wrote a post like this one was waaaaay back on post number 30. That was a mere month after I started thedicepool.com. I used it as a sort of check-in with myself. I decided, at that point to quit posting daily as a way to make this more sustainable and to increase quality at the expense of quantity. I thought, at the time, that I would be able to spend days working on a single blog-post, researching, editing and polishing. In practice, that has happened only rarely. Normally, I spend most of the week skiving and then, with my self-imposed deadline looming I pull on my blogger’s hat, think of a topic and wheel my office chair up to my desk to actually write it in an hour or two.

I do wish I could more consistently plan, write, edit and post. Mainly because, the posts where I have done that are usually the ones I’ve been most proud of. I would include my series on Between the Skies, and the post about my experience with After the Mind the World Again. Both of these prompted their creators to contact me directly and After the Mind the World Again got a mention from Thomas Manuel on the Indie RPG Newsletter making it my most viewed post by a pretty wide margin. So, I’m going to redouble my efforts to spend more time on posts to produce something I can be more proud of.

Saying that, I am happy with some of the progress I have made with the Dice Pool Dot Com. Joining the Wood-paneled Web Ring run by Stu Horvath or Vintage RPG fame, was really cool. I would love to see more sites join Wood-paneled actually, as I really believe in it as a less corporate form of online community-building. If you’re reading this, dear reader, and you have a site that you think would be a good fit, go check out the web ring at the link above and contact Stu for an invite. I know he’d be thrilled to add a new member.

As well as that, I may not have won any prizes, but I was happy to be a part of the 2024 Bloggies. I think the dice pool came in about 7th place in the Debut Blog category, which, having read the other entrants who came higher than me, felt about right, to be honest. In fact, it was the exposure to all of these amazing blogs by people with similar interests and the desire to write about them was the best part of the Bloggies adventure for me. It got me thinking about the sorts of topics I’d like to write about, gave me ideas for riffing off other bloggers’ posts and made me think about the value of blogging in general. By the way, Clayton Notestine of the Explorer’s Design blog won the overall Platinum Medal for this post: The 1 HP Dragon. You should go and read that and subscribe to his awesome blog. Some really thought-provoking ideas in it. While you’re at it, go and check out Murkmail, who won the Debut Blog prize. They have grown enormously during 2024 and the blog is well worth a read.

What a week!

I say I want to spend more time working on blog posts, but, if I continue to have week’s like this one, I’m not sure how I could. Here was my gaming schedule for the past week:

Monday: The Darkest Dungeon board-game campaign in person
Tuesday: Dungeon World: Hirelings to Heroes Session 0 – on Discord
Wednesday: Dragon Age RPG, Duty Unto Death in person in our local game shop, Replay
Thursday: Dungeons and Dragons: Scatterjammer online
Friday: Dungeon World: Hirelings to Heroes Session 1 in person
Saturday: Trophy Gold: Hester’s Mill Session 0/1 in person

That’s six gaming sessions in the last week if you include the Darkest Dungeon game, which, obviously, is not an RPG. But I make the rules around here and I say it counts. I have loved it, honestly. It’s obviously not sustainable and something’s got to give, but I got so much from all of these. Some nights I might have been a bit tired or just not feeling it. But here’s a thing I learned a long time ago: playing games is a form of relaxation. It’s fun, or, at least, it’s supposed to be. Even on nights where I was at a low ebb, the game would actually make me feel a whole lot better than just sitting in front of the TV.

This sort of week would not be possible without Tables and Tales. All of these games were with members of our small but dedicated local RPG community. If I look back at the last year and consider the best thing I have achieved it would be Tables and Tales. Obviously, while acknowledging the fact that this was a team effort from the start and not even my idea. That credit goes to Isaac and Tom. I have been very proud of whatever meagre contributions I have managed to add. Dear reader, if you are an RPG enthusiast and you don’t feel like you get enough opportunities to get a group around an actual table I can’t recommend this enough. We started with a small group of friends but then I advertised for players for a game on the local game shop’s Discord. That was the proto-community along with Tom and Isaac and some of their own friends and workmates. We set up our own Discord to announce games and get members to sign up. From that point members invited other friends and family and before we knew it, we had enough people to allow us to play games six nights a week.

As for the games themselves, I have discussed some of them at length already. My experiments continue with my Spelljammer campaign. Most recently, I have started to use the tables in Between the Skies to come up with some weird space shit to throw at the PCs. I’ll write about that once I give it a chance to percolate a little bit. I just recently wrote about our Dragon Age game. It is likely to be wrapped up in a couple of weeks. Might see about continuing into a campaign with this band of Grey Warden recruits though. As for Trophy Gold and Dungeon World; these are both brand new to me and the group. So far, after one full session of each, I can say I’ve thoroughly enjoyed them. I have a lot of thoughts and I’ll definitely be blogging about them soon. The Darkest Dungeon campaign has had trouble getting going but we’re trying to stick to a schedule now. It’s tough and unforgiving and gives me a lot of OSRy ideas.

Dear reader, if you have stuck around for the last one hundred posts, thanks! I appreciate your patronage. Go tell a friend about thedicepool.com and then come back to enjoy the next hundred.

Dragon Age: Duty Unto Death

The Basics

You might recall, dear reader, that last year, I threatened to put together a game of the Dragon Age RPG. I even wrote a couple of blog posts about the game which you can find here. Well, I’m back to tell you that I’m not just all talk. Sometimes I really follow through on plans to play games. Myself and four other members of Tables and Tales started playing the short scenario, Duty unto Death for the Dragon Age RPG a couple of weeks ago. We’ve had two sessions so far.

The first was mostly session 0 stuff. Only three of the players were able to make it to that one, but those that did make it all created their own characters. My post on Dragon Age Character Creation stood me in pretty good stead for this. We ended up with an Antivan Wayfarer warrior, a Dalish Elf (which my computer keeps autocorrecting to Danish Elf) rogue and a human Apostate Mage (who is short and hairy enough to pass for a dwarf, thus fooling the silly templars.) Our final player joined us for this week’s session so, in order to allow us to get started as quickly as possible, he selected one of the four pregens that came with the scenario. He chose another warrior, this time a Surface Dwarf who makes a decent tank.

The group has a varied experience of both RPGs and Dragon Age. We have at least one super-fan of the video games. They know the lore inside-out and knew exactly what they wanted to play when they signed up for the game. The others all have some knowledge and several have played Dragon Age Origins recently. As it turns out, the scenario I chose is set right before the events of that game and features at least one major character from it, so that’s worked out really well.

We’re using our newly renovated independent game store, Replay as the venue. I haven’t been back there with a group since about this time last year, but since they have greatly expanded their gaming space recently, and because they are open late on Wednesday nights I wanted to give it a go. As always, the staff were welcoming and the place was great. The renovations are still under way but they have done all they can to accommodate players all the same. I can’t wait to see it when it’s done.

Tabletop

A screenshot from the intro to Tabletop with Wil Wheaton.

Does anyone remember the Wil Wheaton Youtube show, Tabletop? It was part of the Geek and Sundry network for quite a while but it looks like the last video is about seven years old now. Anyway, it mainly focused on introducing people to board games but this one time, they got Chris Pramas, the creator of the Dragon Age RPG to write a scenario they could play on the show. So Wheaton wrangled up a bunch of his show-biz pals and they made two half-hour videos of it. This was eleven years ago so it was a pretty early example of an actual play. And it was really good! It taught you the basics of how to play the game and entertained you at the same time. You can find the first episode here, Tabletop: Dragon Age RPG. If you are one of my players and you’re reading this right now, please don’t click on that link!

The illustration is of three heroes, an elf with a bow, a dwarf with an axe and a human mage battling a horde of undead. The words Dragon Age are at the top and the title of the scenario, Duty unto Death is at the bottom where it also indicates that it is an adventure for characters of level 2-4. — The cover of the Duty unto Death adventure for the Dragon Age RPG.

So, the scenario he wrote for it was Duty unto Death. They released it sometime after the show went live. He has included in the published version a few notes on how the game went on the Tabletop show, where the players surprised him, how he improvised certain encounters, that sort of thing. They are fun and possibly useful little asides. It’s short, teaches the basics of the game’s rules well and has lots of Dragon Age flavour in it so it was perfect for my purposes. There are quite a few other published adventures for Dragon Age, but most of them were much longer and would have required a lot more prep time on my part, which I don’t have right now. Duty unto Death is about 8 pages long. It’s not especially involved and doesn’t get into some of the tenets of the game. There is not much in the way of exploration or, indeed, social encounters. But, I feel like it’s doing what it sets out to do very well.

So far, our heroes, a group of Grey Warden recruits, traveling in Ferelden, have been left to their own devices by their leader, Duncan. Fans of DAO will know the name. It was fun to drop it in the intro. Anyway, he had introduced them to the duties of the wardens, gave them a few lessons about darkspawn and the blight and that buggered of to the Circle of Magi. He asked the recruits to head to a village to meet another Warden from Orlais. On the way, they got into a fight with a couple of darkspawn, tipping them off to the possibility of a coming Blight.

Cunning stunts

The Combat Stunts table from the Dragon Age RPG. It has 15 entries including "Skirkish - You can move yourself or the target of your attack 2 yards in any direction for each SP you spend," "Defensive Stance - You attack sets you up for defense. You gain a +2 bonus to Defense until the beginning of your next turn," and "lethal bloW: You inflict an extra 2d6 damage on your attack." The table shows the Stunt Point cost of each stunt on the left hand side and has the descriptions on the right. — The Combat Stunts table from the Dragon Age RPG.

That first battle was very instructive. It was the first time any of us had really interacted with the rules so we were all learning a little. After the first round, they had barely scratched these two Shrieks. It felt bad, like the worst sort of D&D, attritional combat, except for the highlight of the mage casting Walking Bomb on one of the bad guys. In the second round, people started rolling doubles and the stunts started coming. Sandor, the Surface Dwarf, added two extra dice to his damage with a Lethal Blow, almost smashing one of the darkspawn, and we were away. The players started to play more tactically, utilising their minor actions to add bonuses to their attacks by aiming, or bonuses to their defence by getting their guard up. They were utilising their class features almost immediately. I was surprised and genuinely impressive to see how instinctively my, admittedly very savvy and clever players, took to the mechanics. The combat ended with that Walking Bomb paying off, the Shriek went boom and took the other one with it, covering the entire party in black gore.

By the time they got to their destination, and found themselves in another fight, this time with some Devouring Corpses making a nuisance of themselves in the inn, it felt like they were old hands. We had to leave it in the middle of that battle since Replay was closing and we all had to go home. All in all, it has left me wanting more! Can’t wait for the next session.

Making Room for Roleplaying

Pay off

Twelve days into 2025 and I find two of my Gaming Resolutions are already paying off. Numbers 1 and 2 on my list went like this:

Make those stars sparkle and make those wishes come true: I was first exposed to Stars and Wishes this year when I took part in my first Open Hearth games. For the uninitiated, at the end of a session, a GM might ask their players for their Stars, i.e. stand out moments, moves, characters, players etc. and Wishes, in other words, what they would like to have seen happen in the session, what they wanted more of or less of or what they would like to see in future sessions. For a GM, this is an incredibly useful tool. It allows you to see what your players like and what they dislike. But, I find, too often, I don’t always re-integrate the stuff that came up in players’ Stars and Wishes. And I know, for certain, that when I do manage to apply what I learned from feedback, it has made my games better. So, how am I going to do this? I have an idea, that I literally just came up with, to create a spreadsheet to record each player’s Stars and each player’s Wishes from every session of every game. I’ll add in some columns to record potential ways to add more of the good stuff and ways to fix the problems that were revealed. Another column will summarise players’ reactions to the solutions. If it needs more tweaking, another column will detail that. I think this could be an invaluable tool to improve my games and will be there as a record so I don’t forget.

Brighter stars, wiser wishes: Sticking with the Stars and Wishes theme, I’d like to get more useful feedback from it. One of Tables and Tales’ fantastic founding members, Shannen, used a few methods to get more valuable feedback from her players in a game earlier this year. She requested feedback through DMs on our Discord. Why? Well, most people are pretty nice, actually. They tend to not want to offend anyone or say something in front of a group that might embarrass somebody. So, if you take the process away from the table, they might be more likely to tell you what they really think in private. We were just discussing this last night and, along with that, we all agreed that Stars and Wishes in the Discord chat for the game is way more valuable than having people just tell you them at the end of a session, when players are often pushed for time, or before they have had a chance to think about it and provide something really useful. So, my second resolution is to get written and private Stars and Wishes from now on.

Well, we had our fortnightly D&D game on Thursday night for the first time since our December break and everyone had great stars and wishes. They shared them on Zoom with everyone (it’s an online game.) But later some of them also shared theirs in our Discord chat as well. Tommy brought up a couple of really important points. One related to one of their favourite experiences of Wildspace in the game recently and how they would like to see more of that. This is the sort of thing that is easily actionable for me. With solid examples of the type of play people want to see more of, I can work to emulate that in the future. That was the easy one, and I am most grateful for it. More difficult might be their other wish: how do you get more meaningly relationships between PCs, as a GM?

Hands off

A halfling rogue, a femme elf druid and a masc human ranger in a forest presented at a slightly dutch angle. — An illustration of three adventurers from the D&D 5E 2014 Dungeon Master’s Guide. They’re probably just about to have a long talk about their feelings. Little Bombo, there, is sick of Lilithidella’s owl always trying to fly off with him as a snack and Roger has been pissing off Lilithidella ’cause he keeps using all her shampoo.

Just butt out? Right? I could just stay out of it. I don’t need to always be sticking my oar in, do I? I think that’s fair. GMs have a lot of jobs to do already, so if the PCs start getting into a conversation that might very well help to build or break their relationship, the GM should just take their big nose and get it out of those PCs’ business. But, of course, listen, eavesdrop and take note. You never know what you might be able to use later.

Sounds simple, right? But to be able to do this, it means leaving room for it to happen. Even if you don’t necessarily encourage this sort of relationship-building exercise, you still need to make time where it could potentially happen. This is one of those unintended consequences of having a game based on a ship. You have built-in downtime while they travel. In fact, the first time they set off on their squid ship, I asked them if they wanted to take some time to get to know one another. Now, this was a band of adventurers who had been thrown together by the vagaries of chance and the unseen hand of powerful NPCs. None of them knew each other at all mere hours before lift off. And some of them had dark secrets. So, the suggestion was met with muted trivialities and outright lies, largely.

Instead, they got to know each other through their actions and words during their adventures, often in the most hilarious ways! Personal relationships were formed between certain of them in a pretty natural way. But there is a clear desire to make similar connections between other PCs. So, I am wondering how to leave space for that. There is an extended wild-space journey coming up, starting in the next session. This might be the best opportunity I have had to hand them that chance. My current plan is to simply ask how they are spending their time aboard ship during the voyage and hope they grab the reins themselves.

Hands on

Large white block letters spell out the name of the book, THE ELECTRIC STATE. They are overlaid on top of an illustration of a huge cartoon-cat-headed robotic drone, damaged and smoking hanging over an overpass beneath a slate grey sky. — a portion of the front cover of the Electric State RPG from Free League. The massive cartoon-cat-headed drone is so pooped after dealing with all the Tension in his party that he decided to take a break by hanging over this here overpass. Illustration by Simon Stålenhag.

But I can’t help thinking about the mechanic in a game I recently read, The Electric State. The Electric State is a road-trip game, so it has the journeying aspect in common with our little jaunt across fantasy space, if not much else. I think the designers looked at this genre and wondered how to bring recurring NPCs into it. I might be totally off the mark with this supposition but there is something about an adversarial or beloved NPC that comes up repeatedly in a campaign that players just love and the “on the move” nature of a road-trip game means that you might have to really shoe-horn in those characters to an extent that might feel very un-natural. So, instead of relying on your NPCs to cause stress and interpersonal drama, the game makes it so that the PCs have to be creating the Tension themselves. Tension is the name of the mechanic and it is required to allow your PCs to recover lost Hope (one of an Electric State character’s two tracks, along with Health that measures how they’re getting on.) Your PC has a Tension rating with each other PC, and vice versa. These ratings are likely to be unbalanced, i.e. Viv might have Tension 0 with Juan, but Juan has Tension 2 with Viv. This extract is from the core Electric State book:

To each of the other Travelers, you have a Tension score ranging from 0 to 2.
0 No tension, no question marks or unspoken thoughts or feelings.
1 Suppressed or contained irritation, love, interest, or other feelings and thoughts.
2 Uncontained strong emotions, such as rage, love, or even fear.

When you lose Hope points through play and you want them back, you have to contrive a scene with another PC with whom you have Tension. This might be an argument or a heart-to-heart talk or an emotional breakdown, but whatever form it takes, you both reduce Tension with the other PC by 1 point (if possible) and you regain a point of lost Hope. Of course, this means that, if your character does not have any Tension with any other PC, they have no way of regaining Hope points. So it is in your best interest to ensure you have some interpersonal drama at all times.

Dave Thaumavore, in his review of the Electric State, tended to think that this Hope-Tension feedback loop did little more than encourage manufactured drama between PCs. Of course, that’s the idea. The game is made to do that. It is certainly no coincidence that the mechanics work that way. But I can see his point. Will it feel too contrived? Will it be a pain for players to try and come up with new ways that one of the other characters has pissed off their own character all the time? Not sure. Haven’t played the game yet, but I’d willing to bet it would get bothersome if the campaign went on too long. Now, I will say that the Electric State is designed for short campaign play, so maybe it would be fine.

My question now is, if I wanted to try and tack on yet another non-D&D sub-system to this game, how would I do it with something like Tension? I could just take the Tension mechanic wholesale and give everyone a Tension score with everyone else. And then ask them to work out there shit in their downtime hours, so building more interesting and deeper relationships. But what motivation could I give them to do this? There ain’t no Hope points in D&D. But, maybe if two PCs deliberately get together to have a scene in which they reduced their tension, they could each take a boon, like a point of inspiration or temporary hit points or some other special effect only available to them when they work together next time.

Maybe the real question is, should I adopt this sort of mechanic just to encourage intra-party roleplaying? Or should I just keep out of the way?

Any thoughts or suggestions will be greatly received, dear reader!

After the Mind the World Again

Disco Elysium

Have you played Disco Elysium from the much lamented Za/um studio, dear reader? It’s one of those seminal, cult-classic games that shifted my thinking on what video games could be. It’s a mystery game but, is it, really? Even if it is, is the mystery the one presented? Is the goal to find out who killed that guy hanging from the tree in the yard behind the Whirling-in-Rags? I suppose it is, but only up to a point. When playing it, you quickly meet and pass that point, much to the frustration of your ever-suffering partner, Kim Kitsuragi. Psychologically freed of the mundane requirements of your character’s job as a police detective, you can finally get to work on the real mystery; finding yourself. In many ways, the game is a protracted character creation session. You have to do everything from defining his political and romantic persuasions, coming to understand his opinions on art, exploring his relationship with vices of all kinds to just figuring out his name. How does the game handle these revelations? Well, largely through the personification of various aspects of your Detective’s personality. These take the form of his stats, Intellect, Psyche, Fysique and Motorics and the various skills associated with them. They speak to you, often in deranged or idiosyncratic voices representative of their own, niche fragment of his personality, and try to get you to look at the world from their highly rarified perspective or to act based on it.

It’s a unique game. It’s also a unique experience that left me with so many interesting thoughts and questions. One such question was, could you make a TTRPG out of this? The answer is, you can certainly try.

After the Mind…

The Character Sheet screen from Disco Elysium. It shows each of the four main stats, Intellect, Psyche, Physique and Motorics and all of the skills that are associated with them in a grid on a black screen with white text. — The Character Sheet screen from Disco Elysium. The TTRPG stats are not as complicated as this.

Last night, I got together with four other members of Tables and Tales to play a session of After the Mind the World Again by Aster Fialla. The front cover of the game uses the tagline, ‘A murder mystery role-playing game.’ This is not an inaccurate description. However, I feel like the subheading on the next page is getting closer to the facts:

A Disco Elysium-inspired murder mystery TTRPG about a
detective and the voices in his head

In this TTRPG, the inspiration comes not from the fascinating world or the city of Revachol, it doesn’t come from the richly drawn characters of the video game, or even its ubiquitous politics. It comes, instead, from the essentials of the gameplay. In other words, the shit that’s going on in the Detective’s head and how it affects the world around him. You see, this is a GMful game that requires five people exactly, one of which is the lone player with the other four acting as GMs. Each GM represents one of the four stats from Disco Elysium, Intellect, Psyche, Fysique and Motorics. They are collectively referred to as the Facets. One of their responsibilities is to describe various features of the world the Detective moves through. Intellect has responsibility for nerdy people, art pieces, journals, etc. Meanwhile, Fysique gets stuff like buildings, a good strong state, and brawny folks.

At the start of the game, the player comes up with a name, pronouns and presentation for their Detective, as well as their role (they might not be a cop, but a PI or an insurance adjuster or something else.) Each of the Facets also gets a turn here, though. Psyche gets to describe the Detective’s face, while Motorics comes up with aspects of their style and an unusual object in their possession, for instance. I found this very fun, as did everyone else at the table, I think. I even commented that having others make your character for you in other RPGs could be just as fun!

Once that’s done, each of the Facets answers a couple of questions designed to form a baseline for their relationships with other Facets at the table. After the Mind the World Again is Powered by the Apocalypse, so this sort of character building question should be familiar to anyone who has played a game like that before.

Then they get started making the Neighbourhood. You go around the table, starting with the person who most recently played Disco Elysium, and get everyone to answer one of the five questions presented in the book that should give you an idea of the type of area this murder has taken place in.

Once you’re done with that, the Detective tells us a little about the victim and then each of the Facets introduces a piece of evidence from the crime scene. Intellect tells us about any Prior knowledge that’s relevant to the situation, Psyche describes a Person of Interest at the scene, Fysique comes up with a Landmark, in this case, where the murder occurred, and Motorics gets to reveal a clue, something tangible at the scene.

From that point, the Detective starts the investigation, describing what they are doing in the fiction, triggering particular Moves, using the Facets’ stats to make rolls and making Deductions in an effort to solve the murder. This is in line with the Detective’s Agenda:

Explore the world to its fullest.

Make the most of your Facets.

Play to find out the truth.

This is complicated by the fact that each of the Facets wants the Detective to act in different ways, offering sometimes conflicting options and sabotaging each-others’ efforts as they try to have the greater influence on the sleuth and the investigation. Facets’ stats can be boosted or reduced in various ways, often by the actions of the other Facets. Its important to note that the Facets’ Agenda is not focused on solving the murder, rather than constructing an interesting experience:

Create an intriguing world for The Detective to explore.

Highlight the differences between the Facets.

Play to find out what happens.

The Detective investigates, and the Facets Declare Evidence as particular features are described in the world. It’s up to the Detective to combine two pieces of evidence to Make a Deduction. When it comes to that point, they ask the Facets for explanations as to how they fit together. Whichever Facet’s explanation is chosen is the truth and the Facet gets a +1 to their stat, while also getting the opportunity to reduce the stat of another Facet by the same amount.

The investigation is structured into a Deduction Pyramid, which is split into four tiers. On the bottom tier, there should be eight pieces of evidence. These should be combined when the Detective Makes a Deduction so that, you end up with four Minor Deductions on the next tier up. These Minor Deductions should then be combined to come up with two Major Deductions on the penultimate tier. Finally, those Majors need to be combined to come up with the Solution to the murder, sitting right there at the top of the Pyramid.

There are several other mechanics in the game, including one to ensure that the Detective does not simply always choose the explanation of the same Facet all the time, which is clever. A Facet’s stat cannot go above +3 or below -1. If that does happen, the Facet gives the Detective a Condition and goes back to the default value of 1.

…the World Again

A screenshot of the aftermath of the Detective from Disco Elysium punching a twelve year old kid. The scene is in the yard of the Whirling in Rags hostel. A man in a green jacket and yellow flares stands over a prone kid who he just punched. Kim Kitsuragi, dressed in an orange jacket and brown baggy, tapered trousers looks on. — A screenshot of the aftermath of the Detective from Disco Elysium punching a twelve year old kid.

None of us had ever played a game quite like this one before. Obviously, some of us had played PBTA games in the past, so the mechanics were nothing frighteningly new. At points, I even felt echoes of a game of Avery Adler’s The Quiet Year that most of us played last year as we took turns describing the world around our Detective. That Detective was an amateur sleuth named Bruce with a fabulous moustache, a flight jacket, an obsession with whiskey and a curious ability to identify any wooden model aircraft he might come across.

But, sharing GMing duties with three others at the table is a unique and sort of chaotic experience. At the start, it’s actually a little difficult to get into gear. I was playing Motorics and I found I had to be constantly checking my playbook sheet to remind myself what features of the world were within my domain, what my GM Moves were and when I should use them. There are features in there that you might not expect so you have to watch it and you can’t use your GM Moves just whenever. Since all four of us Facets were feeling like this, it kind of stuttered into life as a session, once the character creation bit and the initial set-up of the mystery were done. Meanwhile, Bruce, played ably by relative TTRPG noob, Jude, had to come to terms with the fact that, when it came to any of the really important decisions, he had to give up control and ask the Facets for options before settling on one version of the truth or selecting a course of action.

As we got into the flow of it, though, and as some of us became more lubricated by the liberal application of fine Spanish lager, we found the conversation that was the game began to come much more instinctively. We were interacting with the mechanics and deliberately fucking each other over for stat points, while Bruce began to explore the small, dead silent village of Battersfield and investigate the murder of local baker, Barbara Devons. Evidence has been declared in abundance and two deductions have been made! Bruce managed to finally make it out of the Bakery to explore the office, the bare flour cellar and even the gay bar across the road. Unfortunately, we had to leave the case unsolved after the four hour session. Hopefully we’ll be able to pick the trail back up again soon.

We ended up having a really fun time with After the Mind the World again. The stand out scene for me was when Bruce was interrogating Jenny at the crime scene and all four GMs jumped in to answer in particular ways that they thought reflected their own domain within the one NPC. It worked surprisingly well, even though I’m not sure that’s how it’s supposed to work at all.

I would say that there is no way to play a full investigation in a single three hour session without rushing through scenes and maintaining the sort of laser-focus that Harry Dubois does not exemplify in any way. The character creation and making the mystery section took over an hour alone before Bruce ever rolled a die in anger. If you’re going to give it a go, plan it for two sessions.

Do you think you would like to give this game a try, dear reader? Or would you rather go back to Martinaise and collect some tare in a plastic bag while pondering that old wall again?

Gaming Resolutions 2025

New Years’ Resolutions

‘What do I want to change about myself?’
That’s the question I think most people are trying to answer when they come up with their New Years’ resolutions. The answers? Invariably, they are something like, I want to lose weight, I want to be healthier, I want to learn a new skill, I want to pick up a good habit, I want to read more, I want to watch less TV. Right?

For me, this kind of thing rarely works. The failure has little, if anything, to do with the challenge itself, usually. It’s about the arbitrary nature of it. You decide to make this change on New Years Day because its a new year, not due to any external or internal catalyst. To me, it robs the resolution of the weight of a meaningful promise to myself. And it’s not just me. By the the second or third week of January, the ruins of broken and abandoned resolutions litter the landscapes of our lives.

So, here’s another question, that you might be asking at this stage?
‘Why are you writing a blogpost entitled “Gaming Resolutions 2025” then, Ronan?’
It’s a very good question, dear reader, and you deserve an answer. To answer, I’m going to examine my gaming resolution of 2024. It was, in fact, my only resolution. At the close of the year I had been working on a Resistance System game for a few months. It didn’t have a name but the idea was that players would play magic users in the modern era. They would form a party and work together to achieve certain goals for their secret magical society while also attempting to outdo each other in power, reputation and knowledge. The central mechanic was centred around sacrifice and I was going to design Fallouts appropriate to that. I’d come up with some classes, skills, domains, resistances and the idea for unique mechanics by December 2023. So, my resolution was to finish working on that game and move on to the next one. That was, pretty much, the death-knell of my work on that game. I think the last work I did on that was in April, 2024. And that work was token, cursory at best. One thing I know for certain is that that promise to myself was too big. The game was too big, the amount of work it demanded of me was too much and the prospect of doing it was a little too stressful.

So, instead, this year, I am going to commit to getting a bit better at certain things, instead of committing a lot of time and effort to complete a project I didn’t even really know how to start. And these are all things that I have been thinking about for some time, stuff I have wanted to implement for a while to improve my play and the games I am involved in. So, it doesn’t feel so arbitrary.

So, without further ado, here are my…

Gaming Resolutions 2025

Make those stars sparkle and make those wishes come true: I was first exposed to Stars and Wishes this year when I took part in my first Open Hearth games. For the uninitiated, at the end of a session, a GM might ask their players for their Stars, i.e. stand out moments, moves, characters, players etc. and Wishes, in other words, what they would like to have seen happen in the session, what they wanted more of or less of or what they would like to see in future sessions. For a GM, this is an incredibly useful tool. It allows you to see what your players like and what they dislike. But, I find, too often, I don’t always re-integrate the stuff that came up in players’ Stars and Wishes. And I know, for certain, that when I do manage to apply what I learned from feedback, it has made my games better. So, how am I going to do this? I have an idea, that I literally just came up with, to create a spreadsheet to record each player’s Stars and each player’s Wishes from every session of every game. I’ll add in some columns to record potential ways to add more of the good stuff and ways to fix the problems that were revealed. Another column will summarise players’ reactions to the solutions. If it needs more tweaking, another column will detail that. I think this could be an invaluable tool to improve my games and will be there as a record so I don’t forget.
Brighter stars, wiser wishes: Sticking with the Stars and Wishes theme, I’d like to get more useful feedback from it. One of Tables and Tales’ fantastic founding members, Shannen, used a few methods to get more valuable feedback from her players in a game earlier this year. She requested feedback through DMs on our Discord. Why? Well, most people are pretty nice, actually. They tend to not want to offend anyone or say something in front of a group that might embarrass somebody. So, if you take the process away from the table, they might be more likely to tell you what they really think in private. We were just discussing this last night and, along with that, we all agreed that Stars and Wishes in the Discord chat for the game is way more valuable than having people just tell you them at the end of a session, when players are often pushed for time, or before they have had a chance to think about it and provide something really useful. So, my second resolution is to get written and private Stars and Wishes from now on.
Summaries in the chat: I don’t know why I don’t already do this for every game. It proved pretty useful in the Blade Runner game I ran earlier this year. In that one, I had a single document that I updated after each session so the players could easily keep track of what happened session by session. I always write up a summary after every session anyway, so taking the extra step to share it with the players is obvious really.
Take bigger swings: As a player, it can be tempting to take the safe route. After all, you don’t want your precious little guy to get hurt, right? WRONG! I have decided that it is far more interesting if your character makes the decision to put themselves on the line to save a friend in dire need, or to make the foolish decision to prioritise monetary gain over their own safety or to just do something cool instead of something sensible. I don’t necessarily think this style works in every game (I’m thinking of our current game of the One Ring, for instance) but where it does fit, I think it’s far more rewarding.
Get out of my comfort zone: I have a type; the gruff voiced, slightly grizzled veteran. That’s who I’m playing in two different ongoing campaigns right now and I am beginning to think I’m predictable. I don’t always play that, but it happens often enough that I can recognise it as a pattern. So, I have decided to make a conscious effort to play other types of characters. I am convinced it will lead to more fun and surprising experience for me and hopefully for my fellow players.

What about you, dear reader? Do you have any habits you want to break or strings you’d like to add to you role-playing bow? Let me know in the chat!

And finally, Happy New Year! Here’s to many more sessions and great experiences around the gaming table in 2025!

Games I Got to Play This Year Part 2

Wrap-up

It’s an end of year wrap-up. Everyone’s doing one. Check out the last post for the campaigns I have been playing in the last few months. This one’s for the one-shots.

One-shots

Pirate Borg – the link above will take you to my post mortem on this one shot. It was a great time, in all honesty. My first foray into running any kind of Borg, and I was pleasantly surprised by how easy and instinctive every part of it was, even the ship-combat, which was new to everyone at the table. If you are interested in pirates, light cosmic horror, or just gnarly old school gaming in an alternate history version of our own 18th century, you’ll enjoy Pirate Borg in all likelihood. By the way, I also did a character creation post on this one.
Troika! – Whalgravaak’s Warehouse – Ok, look, full disclosure, this is supposed to be a list of one-shots but this is technically more like a really spread out short campaign where we get together to play a one-shot of the same game every once in a while when we can all afford the time. Know what I mean? Anyway, in the first one-shot of these two consecutive one-shots, the PCs found two different ways into this warehouse, abandoned by its wizardly owner centuries previous. After crawling this “dungeon” for a bit, they made friends with a thin mutant, and their monkeys got to play with the worm-headed hounds that lived in a nest in the warehouse somewhere. They made short work of the Cacogen they’d been sent to murder and we wrapped up the session. In the second one-shot in this series of one-shots, three of the band decided to continue to explore, making more friends, this time with a large cadre of mercenaries who had been sent to deal with some cultists. They then set fire to some rope, captured some minuscule soldiers in gremlin-jars and climbed a mountain of onions. This is the kind of nonsense the PCs get up to in games of Troika to be honest. This is standard. If this sounds too gonzo or weird, you are in the wrong place. The Eternal City of Troika is not for you. You should probably try somewhere more normal. From my point of view, and, I think, that of the players, if you lean into the bonkers aspects of the setting and you are willing to go along with the more outré elements of the system (the random initiative mechanic stands out) you will probably have a very good time with this game. It’s great for one shots. Or two shots if that’s your thing. Might turn into three shots, actually.
Honey Heist – this was another one of Isaac’s games. He ran it on a night when another game fell through. It was very last minute but we were still able to get a crew together. Jude, Tom and I rolled up some friggin’ bears with criminal backgrounds and went to do a heist at the biggest honey convention in the UK, in the NEC in Birmingham. We tried to do a TED talk, we disguised ourselves as massive bees and we crashed a van. You know, typical bear stuff. Another absolute belter of a one-shot, this one. It’s the definitive one-page RPG by Grant Howitt of Spire and Heart fame. Isaac and Tom had picked up the printed form of a bunch of these one-pagers at UKGE and Isaac had been looking for the opportunity to run one of them. This game was obviously made to create wild swings as you use either you Bear or Criminal stat and try to avoid going too far on the bear side or too far on the criminal side. This forces you to take risks and do stupid things to drive the heist forward or, more likely, sideways. Tom did a brilliant write-up of the session on their blog here.
B.D.S.M. Below Dwelling Sewer Mutants – Yet another game run by Isaac at short notice. It is a mutie-eat-mutie game by Neonrot and you can get it here. The premise is pretty straight-forward. You are a mutant. You are probably unpleasant in some way. At the start, you have a mutation that may or may not be useful in certain situations. You can progress and grow by eating other mutants to gain new mutations along the way. If you like that idea, you’re in for a treat. I think it is probably a game that works best in one-shot play. We had fun with it and I think most tables will.
Cthulhu Dark – Roadhouse Feast – I went into quite a lot of detail on this one in the post I linked above so I won’t go through it all again. Suffice it to say, I really enjoyed running the Cthulhu Dark game for the first time. The scenario itself was great but, to me, it is the simplicity and the ingenuity of the system that really shone. If you are into cosmic horror games and you haven’t tried Cthulhu Dark, you should give it a chance.
Liminal_ – I promised a report on how this one-shot went some time ago and here it is. We had four players (known as the Disoriented) for this one-shot plus me as the the Architect. As I thought we would, rather than have the players play themselves in this Liminal Back-Room nightmare, I had them use the character generation tables in Death Match Island. This worked really well to come up with some distinctive, memorable characters quickly and with no fuss. They started off all in the same public building. Since one of them was a district attorney, we agreed it should be a court house. One of the others was there as a witness in a case and the other two were, in an unlikely turn of events, cousins who had been called for jury duty on the same jury. That is pretty much by-the-by, although it did come up in conversation later. Thy all stepped into a room together and found themselves in a building of nightmares. Now, you have to roll up the rooms as they open the doors. There are a couple of d100 tables in the book that are crammed with inventive and horrific room descriptions. The first door they opened led into some sort of creepy, dank cave system; the next into a mouldering bowling alley that was was canted at a 45 degree angle; the next opened onto the abandoned bridge of a ship, rocking in a dreadful storm and with a trail of blood leading off through one of the other doors. I made a mistake at the very start, where I allowed the players to open a couple of doors and then decide which one they would go through. The rules state that, if you open a door, you have to go through it. This felt a little restrictive to me, in a role-playing game, but we proceeded in this way and the players were good sports about it. As we progressed, rolling on the Room and Entity tables, it felt as though, at times, they really wanted to see what the hell was going to come next. Isaac said afterwards, that it felt a lot less subtle than he had thought it would and I have to agree with that. When you think of liminal space horror, it often is just empty corridors and abandoned hotels and the like. Sometimes a strange entity might make an appearance, but it’s the spaces themselves that are supposed to be innately creepy. Some of these rooms we rolled up on the tables felt that way, like the corridor with missing persons posters of the PCs on the walls but a lot of them were straight-up horror like the one with nurse-entity (I think?) chopping a guy up on a slab (it was ok, he was into it!) Also, I think this is something I would be careful with: when you roll a random entity, they sometimes don’t seem to fit, thematically, with the room that you just rolled up. I think it is ok to re-roll if that happens. I didn’t do that and once or twice, felt like they collided awkwardly. Now, these are nitpicks, really. In general, we had a good time with this, the players loved playing their pretty normal characters in these horrific scenarios, just running blindly from threat to dreadful threat. We used both the regular room table and the guest room table (the entries here were written by some industry luminaries like Johan Nohr and Tim Hutchings.) One of the best things about that experience for me was that I was just as surprised, horrified and disgusted as the players were! One of the challenges then, of course, was that it was my job to quickly read, interpret and present the room to the players without taking too long, stumbling over the words, reading them too much or generally fucking up. Unfortunately, we didn’t quite make it to the end of their mad dash through the back-rooms. The PCs still have a few squares of fatigue to be filled in. Hopefully we’ll be able to pick that up and finish it off someday.
Mothership – Moonbase Blues I wish this wasn’t in the one-shot pile but heigh-ho. Sometimes your GM moves away and leaves your characters stuck on a moonbase that is probably trying to kill them. I mean, there was someone or something there trying to kill us. I was under no illusions that we were likely to all die out there, I just wanted to know how. Anyway, the one session we had of this game was great. Full props to Joel, our GM, for putting so much time and effort into he prep for it. He had a series of recordings that he played for us at key moments, he had handouts and provided us with cheat-sheets. It was a great experience. Also, I loved playing my character that I created in the post I linked above, Victoria Ibanez, the Corps’ finest. I’d love to get to play her again. Mothership is a great system with compelling mechanics and one of the best character creation experiences out there. If you need any more convincing, you should go and check out Quinns’ review of it.

Conclusion

So, that’s it. Those are all the one-shots that I got to play in the last few months. I didn’t get to play many of the games I wanted to, but I sure did have fun not playing them. Next year, I am continuing the theme of not playing the games I listed in that post by starting the year off with a one-shot of After the Mind, the World Again, a Disco Elysium-inspired, GMful mystery game and, Dragon Age, which, I have at least discussed at length on this very blog here and here. Honestly, I think it was useful to set out goals for the games I wanted to play. I may not have gotten to play any of them if I hadn’t done that. So I will continue to write about things I want to experience on the blog and see what happens.

I will be posting more intermittently as we come into the holiday period now. I will be travelling to visit friends and family a lot and won’t always have the chance to post as regularly as I would like. So, in case this is the last post before the end of the year, I wish you the very happiest Winter Solstice/Hogswatch/Western New Year.

BTW

Here are links for where to buy each of these games:
Pirate Borg
Troika!
Honey Heist
BDSM
Cthulhu Dark
Liminal_
Mothership

Games I Wanted to Play this Year

Review

So, how have I done with that list from earlier in the year? At the time I wrote that, on the 28th July, I thought, Time-shmime! Who needs it?! Not me, that’s who. I’ll breeze through this entire list of ten frikkin’ games. But, of course, that was assuming a lot.

Assumptions

The first assumption that was happily crushed was that we had a smaller number of GMs willing to run sessions in our little community, Tables and Tales. Up until then, only three of us had run anything so I assumed that would continue. When a fourth and even fifth GM raised their hands to take the helm, I was delighted. That’s what I had always wanted in our space. From what I can see, if GMs were water, most RPG communities would be dying of thirst. Even in the much larger Open Hearth community, you tend to see the same dozen or so members announcing new games all the time, despite there being a membership in the hundreds. Given the size of Tables and Tales, five active GMs represents a pretty large percentage of our total player-base. On top of that we have had a couple of board game nights too. The long awaited and pretty fun Darkest Dungeon board game is, honestly, very close to the video game (actually, I’m told by friend of the blog, Media Goblin it’s closer to Darkest Dungeon 2 in rules) but also pretty close to an RPG so we gave it a go.

Assumption number 2: I have a pretty stable schedule, which meant that I could run games almost every night of the week if I had the wherewithal. And there were weeks there when I was playing, either as GM or player, in four or five sessions. Turns out that was not sustainable. For one thing, obviously, I started writing this blog, dear reader. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love doing this and it’s not like it takes that long, but if I want to blog, I need to do it in the evening (even though I am typing this on the train to work right now because its a busy week for me and my evenings are taken up with pre-Christmas socialising.) Between that and various other work and family commitments that came up, it was simply impossible to maintain that sort of schedule.

Reality

Even taking these points into account, I managed to play a lot of games in the last few months, just mostly not the ones I expected to. So, let’s have another look at that list:

GM

Tales from the Loop – Mascots and Murder – Short Campaign – Nope, didn’t happen. This one is still simmering away on that back-burner, ready for promotion to the front of the stove-top any time now. It had to be shelved to make way for other games and other GMs. Like I said earlier, I was perfectly happy to do it.
Dungeon Crawl Classics – individual modules – Haven’t managed to get any of these to the table yet, I’m afraid. But, I have a plan for this one. I have had to re-arrange my schedule a bit to allow it. Our local game shop, Replay, has been undergoing a big refurbishment in the last few months. Once it’s done, they will expand their number of gaming tables a lot and I am hoping to get in there on a Wednesday night to run some DCC Level 0 funnels. My preference would be to get some newbies to sign up for these sessions and hopefully gain some new members for Tables and Tales in the process. The new year will be the perfect time for this, I think.

More Troika! – one-shots – Achievement unlocked! Although, technically, it was more like two sessions of the same game, rather than multiple one-shots. I did a blogpost on it! We went to Whalgravaak’s Warehouse, one of the Location based adventures made for Troika. So far it has been very fun. It’s a dungeon crawl, there’s no doubt about that, but it’s a warehouse. And the rooms and creatures and general vibe are beautifully weird in the way only Troika can do it. So far, the PCs, a Monkey Monger, a Wizard Hunter and a Gremlin Catcher (there was also a Landsknecht who has since moved to Spain) have murdered the Cacogen they were sent there to murder, made friends with a thin mutant, captured entire detachments of microscopic soldiers in gremlin catching jars, discovered a desert other-world on top of the warehouse and, um, set fire to a load of old rope. Brilliant craic altogether.
Death Match Island – one-shot – You know what, I just completed a rewatch (maybe not “rewatch” since I never watched the entire thing in the first place) of Lost, the whole thing. All six seasons. All 5000 episodes. I think I was in mourning for the lost Death Match Island one-shot that should have been. This one was a scheduling issue. Those of you out there who play RPGs (and if you don’t and you’re here, welcome! You must be confused…) will be aware of the difficulties one often encounters in getting four or five adults together in the same room at the same time. Honestly, I am surprised this problem doesn’t come up more often in Tables and Tales. Anyway, having just finished that Lost marathon, I am 1000% ready to play this game. It’s not quite the same and it would definitely not run for 678 sessions like Lost would if it were an RPG but it has the same heart and the same mystery box feel to it. And I want that. That’s what I want.
The Wildsea – campaign – Just go read my blogpost on My First Dungeon’s campaign of the Wildsea. I desperately want to play this game. Honestly, whether I got to be a player or a Firefly, I would be excited. But, really? I’m not sure when I was going to fit this one in this year. Another campaign? Dunno what I was thinking.
DIE RPG – one-shot – I finished listening to the My First Dungeon Wildsea campaign and just started listening to the DIE one. They have a great episode that is mainly Kieron Gillon being effusive for an hour about his, admittedly very cool, game and I enjoyed it. But then I got into the Session Zero episode and I immediately wanted to play it. I want to run this for my friends and have them play real-world people with real-world problems working it all out it in a fucked-up fantasy world of their own creation as characters of their own creation. I really want it. Maybe next year.

Player

Old School Essentials – campaign I think – So this one has not happened yet. I think it is, at least partly, due to the fact that Isaac, of Lost Path Publishing has been running other shit like crazy in the last few months instead. I hope it wasn’t my OSE character creation post that put him off running the game (I’m pretty sure it wasn’t. I’d really be flattering myself to imagine I had that much influence on anyone.)

Heart: The City Beneath – Open Hearth campaign – Our GM, Mike, brought a whole bunch of us together (There were six PCs at the start) to hopefully save the landmark known as Nowhere from being consumed by the Heart. This was a real learning experience for me as it was only my second time as a player in the Resistance System (see the section on Magus, Pike and Drum below for my first experience.) I discovered that, if left to our own devices, players (for “players” read “Ronan” but not just “Ronan”) are apt to take the hand when there is no form of initiative to govern the order or frequency of actions in combat. It was a lesson learned early in the campaign due to one player’s proper and timely use of Stars and Wishes after the very first session. Saying that, I had a brilliant time playing my Incarnadine, Priest of the God of Debt, alongside a Heretic, a Cleaver, a Deep Apiarist, a Vermissian Knight and a Deadwalker. We often had opposing desires and drives, which made the role-play fun, and the GM came up with lots of weird and interesting situations, NPCs, enemies and locations for us. Forgotten-Frost-Remembered, my Aelfir Incarnadine, got to reach Tier 4 of the Heart and retire(!) at least in his head.
Call of Cthulhu – Masks of Nyarlathotep – campaign – Not really sure if this was anything other than wishful thinking when I wrote this, to be honest. This post explains that it was always going to be a long shot to get this campaign started again. But someday, I would love to get Grant Mitchell back on the trail of the mystery in this thoroughly classic campaign.
Magus, Pike and Drum – Playtest – This is Isaac again. He has a great basis for a Resistance System game set in the English Civil War that never was, and this is it. There were four of us gathered around the table for this playtest at the end of the summer. I genuinely had so much fun with it. Gráinne was my character. She was an Irish noble and she had some very fun abilities (some of them were a bit too fun with a few too restrictions, it was decided, as a result of this playtest.) What was important in the game is that we solved the mystery in very short order, after scaring the shit out of the mayor and not blowing up the town. But what’s really important is that we provided Isaac a lot of valuable feedback to feed back into his new game. Can’t wait to play this one again, hopefully in the near future. I hope to write a lot more about this game as it develops.

Conclusions

So there you go. Three out of ten. Not great. But! I experienced so many other games instead of the ones I didn’t get to in that post! And I got something out of all of them. I’ll tell you about them in the next post (or the one after if I don’t have time to write the rest of the week and just post some more old fiction on Sunday instead.)