19th Level

It occurs to me that one of the genres I've not gamed in for years is that of time travel. I'm pretty certain I've had the occasional time travel adventure but I'm thinking more a game dedicated around time travel. I had a Star Trek game about a starship that bounced from one parallel universe to another that was rather fun, but that was in the late 1990s/early 2000s - nothing since then as far as I can recall. That's a bit surprising, as I love both the time travel genre and history in general. I think one of the things that makes it challenging is how to handle such things as paradox. The game I'm most familiar with as far as handling situations like this is Pelgrane Press' Timewatch which makes paradox a gameable mechanic. It's in your best interests to avoid outright paradox while dancing around it. For example, if your characters were to be imprisoned, it would be quite the paradox to have your characters just vanish from their prison cell. On...

On my list of games to try at some point is some game from the Gumshoe family of RPGs. I've got a bunch of them - though I've never played one outright they are all wonderfully done and have a very high density of useful ideas, even if you never play one of those games outright. However, I do want to get around to playing one of them at some point. High on my list is the recent TimeWatch RPG, followed closely by Night's Black Agents , especially it's Dracula Dossier. For TimeWatch  I'm generally a fan of the time travel genre and more importantly, at least for me, a huge fan of history. I hope at some point to be able to visit Istanbul and see the capital of two great empires, to see the pyramids in Egypt, to see the canals of Venice, etc. I doubt I'll ever be able to go on a history world tour but some of those destinations are definitely in reach (alas no trip to the Royal Navy Museum in Portsmouth next year - the girls really want a trip to Disney......

I Kickstarted the TimeWatch  RPG in early 2014. It was supposed to be delivered in November 2014, so it was definitely late, having just arrived at my door today. For the most part, communications were pretty good, with a few quiet periods here and there. It was one of those projects were stretch goals definitely increased the scope of the project. I've had various PDF drafts of the project as time went on so I had a pretty good idea as to what I was getting but the finished product was definitely impressive. What I'll be doing here is giving a high level overview of TimeWatch , possibly followed by a full review should my group take it for a spin. TimeWatch  uses the Gumshoe system, as seen in games like Trail of Cthulhu  and The Dracula Dossier . It has a few things that distinguish it from most RPGs: General Abilities are things like fighting, athletics, etc. To test them you roll 1d6 and add nothing. 4+ is typically a success. Add nothing? Are you crazy? Well,...

Hey look more stuff to distract me! I came home today  to a pair of packages, one with the new Tunnels & Trolls Deluxe Edition and one with The Dracula Dossier , a campaign for Night's Black Agents. My experience with Tunnels & Trolls is fairly limited - I've played a few one-off games way back in middle and high school. It's a game that looks a lot like D&D, with a series of stats that are generated by 3d6. It has a small number of classes - warriors, wizards, and rogues are the big three. Warriors and wizards are pretty self-explanatory. Rogues are anyone else - they can learn to use magic, they can fight decently well. There's also the warrior-wizard, a class really difficult to qualify for (but one I saw a lot of now that I think of it...). The Deluxe Edition is expanded from this baseline with more difficult-to-qualify for classes. Unlike classic D&D stats go up over time - they go up a lot. Since wizards used to expend strength to cast spells, y...