Clik here to view.
Knights of the Hidden Sun Moves to a New Path
Readers may recall that I’ve spent the past several years helping my friend Chris Challice design and develop an RPG based on my Ready 2 Run system, Knights of the Hidden Sun. It suffered from numerous...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Help the Man Who Made Me Write
In 1998, Jesse Heinig asked me if I wanted to write for Mage: The Ascension. We didn’t get started together until about a year and a half later. That started one of the most important chains of events...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Making the Game Out of the Game
Over on a forum I frequent, somebody copypasted a chunk of Julia Kristeva with the intent of implying, “Look at all this impenetrable trash.” Except of course, it isn’t actually that complicated to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Geek Culture: Remix to Middlebrow
Let us put an end to geek pride? That’s probably a good idea. For one thing, it gives us the power to work on some progressive criticism even while we keep loving spaceships and wizards. Right now,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Cut from Gatecrashing
I did a wee bit of writing for Eclipse Phase‘s Gatecrashing. About a third of it made it in. I ran across this unpublished chunk and cleaned it up a little — for some reason, it lingered in my brain....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Bring Back Ultracomplexity
Remember Phoenix Command? That game was designed to model small arms combat with . . . well, I don’t know about realism, but exactitude, as it tracked individual bullets down to centimetres of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Phantasm, Home of Storytelling Lite
This year marks my return to my local convention, Phantasm. I’m going to run a World of Darkness game there with rules that may interest you. I used this system a couple of years back to run a game of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A Half-Baked Werewolf: The Forsaken Reboot Pitch
A couple of weeks ago a burst of inspiration compelled me to write up a proposed reboot of Werewolf: The Forsaken, but in retrospect I don’t think it would work with the line as-is. Plus, Stew Wilson...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Hey Girl, Ryan Gosling Plays a Psychopath in Drive
As far as the Kid is concerned, you’re not even a person — just a trope-giver. He gets off on that. I watched Drive a couple of weeks ago and found it to be a fascinating film about a culture-bound...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Canadian Sorry
He hates you. 9 PM Mondays on CBC. One of the little known, tragic parts of being Canadian is witnessing anglophones from other countries get increasingly angry at you for a kind of slippery, genteel...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Dusting Things Off
So yeah, it’s been a while. I’ve been extremely busy with the following projects: Left-Hand Path This is the book Dave and I (and Matt, developing) got to do after Imperial Mysteries because IM sold a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Violence and Symmetry in Game Design
Over the last decade and a half, lots of games have tried to get away from the violent-adventure focus, and this has been a fertile inspiration, leading to all kinds of cool mechanics. On the other...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Plays and Playcraft
Like lots of other people, improv and community theatre strongly influence my approach to roleplaying games. Most people model RPGs within a nested hierarchy of power and responsibility. The GM manages...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Things I Was Not Told To Do
A Typhonide — that is to say, a lesser aspect of Typhon, Aeon of Death. They can often be found destroying the Astral Spire. It wasn’t in the outline. There seems to be some confusion about what...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Mapless Fantasy
This provides no useful game information. I was working on an Exalted book. I forget which. One of Geoff Grabowski’s development notes was something to the effect of, “It’s not the 80s. We don’t need a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Mapless 2: Cheap Content!
That’s funny, this doesn’t look anything like the Five Empires of Tekumel! No really, it’s cheap. Google search cheap. Because I searched for “mapless fantasy” to see what other people had to say about...
View ArticleClik here to view.
No Content, Really
Vampire: The Masquerade? Shadowrun? Cyberpunk 2020? AD&D 2nd Edition and its worlds, like Planescape? Mind’s Eye Theatre with the grey book of box set? Rifts? Rifts, even? Deep cities? Scene-driven...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Setting Mastery
How badly should we treat this person? Roll Intelligence + Camarilla Lore or something. Back when D&D 3 came out, the designers talked about “system mastery.” Knowing the system better always...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Solving Setting Mastery
I’m pretty sure Dante knows what the Digital Web is. Why not email him in game? So last time I talked about setting mastery and how it can screw up a game. In retrospect I think I overemphasized the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
What’s In Your Trash Can?
Asch you can schee, Luke’s aschetic refuge only makesch him a schtronger ideological figure. *sniff* In a secret place, Wood Ingham and I (and other folks) talk about games and things. Wood posted this...
View Article
