Powered By The Apocalypse has come on strong as an influential rule set over the last decade plus. It frames every game as a conversation with certain things happening based on the fiction. The discussion of moves, agendas and the like can throw some people off even though much of the game is putting new terminology on old techniques. What really helps people get these games is playing them in...
For a variety of reasons, romance is a challenge in many tabletop RPGs. While discussing how a character simultaneously eviscerates and decapitates a Big Bad Evil guy comes naturally to many, fewer people feel comfortable playing out love and romance scenes with their friends. That’s one of the things that made Thirsty Sword Lesbians such a refreshing chance of pace. It put romance and action...
When Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon came out twenty years ago, it exposed a new audience to a new side of the wuxia genre. There were plenty of western fans of the exquisite fight sequences, but many also were hooked on the stoic romance between the main characters. This has always been part of the genre but American releases of these films tended to focus on ones with hard-hitting action...
Mysteries can be one of the trickiest types of game to run. Threading the needle between too much information and too little information changes from GM to GM and group to group. When it works, it’s brilliant. There’s a reason Masks of Nyarlathotep is a favorite of mine. The piles of clues that kick off that investigation makes the game a great player driven sandbox. But when it doesn’t, it’s...
As a professional nerd, I would be hard pressed to choose the nerdiest thing I’ve ever done. One thing that definitely cracks the top five is my time as the head of an e-fed in college. Me and my friends put together a fictional pro wrestling show every week via email. They’d send in the promos you’d expect to see on a show in between matches, tell us what storylines they’d want to act out and...
Cyberpunk is on a lot of minds right now. The two largest franchises in the genre, Shadowrun and Cyberpunk, recently released new editions to great fanfare. For fans of the genre who aren’t enamored with the backstory connections or the old school flavor of those editions, Peril Press released a small cyberpunk game called Neon City Overdrive that offers the same slick style of its...