19th Level

Once upon a time I was playing in an AD&D game around 1997 or 1998. I was still fairly new to the Boston area and was meeting people. I was playing a halfling cartographer named Rollo. For Rollo, the thrill of dungeon crawling was the cool maps he could make. We defeated some goblins and had one goblin prisoner. Rollo offered to share the treasure if he told us where it was. After he told us the assassin in the group made to off the prisoner. In my most innocent voice, Rollo asks, all horrified... "You mean we're not going to share the treasure?!"

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,...

I suppose it's a good sign that my favorite session over the past year is also the most recent - a Ghostbusters  game. Like I mentioned in the writeup for that session, we've been having some hiccups with attendance of late - real life and all that. Icons has been a bit tough to keep going with variable turnout. I'd been thinking about perhaps Star Wars D6 in the autumn and the groups been talking about Ghostbusters what with the new movie... So we figured a one-shot might be in order. We thought we'd only have three players plus GM (our group is five plus GM) but as it turned out we only had two but had one of those "what the hell let's go for it". It wound up being a ton of fun. What worked? To begin, I think we were all in the right mood for a something a little bit silly and everyone just dove into character. It didn't help that two out of the three of us lived in Brooklyn once upon a time, really helping with the accents (and the third ...

I'm not 100% sure I'll be doing all of these but given participating in this event last year brought my blog out of hibernation, I'll give it a whirl. Given most of my gaming is now done via Roll20 with a group that spans the eastern seaboard, I've definitely been all about the virtual dice - though even with that, I find it worth the CPU cycles to see the darn things actually roll, even if it is virtually. If I'm in a real face to face game, then my preference is to break out the old dice pouch - heck in a recent online game I participated in as a player we used real dice. I think it helps that most have us have reached the age where half the fun is in seeing what happens which makes failure just as interesting as success...

Young Centurions is an implementation of the Fate Accelerated RPG which I reviewed here a few weeks back. Young Centurions is a prequel to Evil Hat's first Fate RPG, Spirit of the Century . In both games the premise is on the first day of every century, at the stroke of midnight, are born a bunch of heroes, Centurions, who will embody some aspect of the spirit of the upcoming century. They aren't superheroes, but they are definitely a cut above your regular person. They make things happen, whether as inventors, psychics, explorers, crimefighters, etc. They are opposed by Shadows, their counterparts born on the last day of the previous century. They represent a negative aspect of the new age. Only a fraction of the babies born on these dates become Centurions or Shadows. Centurions and their counterparts live long lives, to the extent that there will be some who survive long enough to serve as mentors to the next century's Centurions. Spirit of the Century  ...

Gozer the Traveler. He will come in one of the pre-chosen forms. During the rectification of the Vuldrini, the traveler came as a large and moving Torg! Then, during the third reconciliation of the last of the McKetrick supplicants, they chose a new form for him: that of a giant Slor! Many Shuvs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Slor that day, I can tell you! - Vinz Clortho, Keymaster of Gozer With some attendance issues over the past few games we've been doing some gaming experimentation of late in our gaming group. I was able to play in a Monster of the Week  one-shot and last session three of us did a game of Ghostbusters (I GM-ed this one). I'm not sure if it was a matter of the session, the game, the mood we were in, or alignment of the planets, but the Ghostbusters game was a ton of fun (so was Monster of the Week for that matter). I knew we were going to to Ghostbusters in advance so I had some chance to prepare getting a R...

This isn't a full review of all the incarnations of Star Trek but rather some thoughts on my experiences with them. Modiphius has just announced that they will be producing a new Star Trek RPG which has gotten me talking with a number of people I know from previous incarnations. So to begin, my background. Once upon a time (around 1975) I was a preschool and kindergarten kid living outside of Syracuse, New York. My mom would want a little bit of peace and quiet while she made dinner. And as it so happened, the show with the guy with the funny ears was on at that time, which apparently was capable of entertaining me. And the rest is history. I had no choice but to be a Trekkie. FASA I discovered the FASA game while I was in high school, had some games then and several more in college. FASA used a percentile based system married to using "Action Points" to keep track of action - every round you had a pool of action points you could spend, breaking down your rou...