Fantasy Adventure: Runeslayers

Last week I had little time for gaming, but I did manage to pull off a rather interesting session of trad-style adventure gaming with Runeslayers. We played for five hours, during which time we managed to create characters for two players and play through a large enough arc of adventure. There were two players and […]

Fantasy Adventure: Runeslayers Read More »

Fantasy Adventure #1: Abilities

Re-creating Dungeons & Dragons is a common pastime of rpg enthusiasts. I started doing it myself with the 3rd edition in 2001 or so, when I decided to run a traditional fantasy campaign with the rules set. At the time I ended up rewriting the whole game starting with the combat and magic rules and

Fantasy Adventure #1: Abilities Read More »

Gaming Pedagogy

Inspired by the game carneval ludopedagogy seminar I attented last month, some basics on the topic follow. This is mostly just unwinding stuff from my own head without a particular goal to it in the short term; in the long term I wouldn’t mind working on some new pedagogical gaming; it’s an interesting topic, after

Gaming Pedagogy Read More »

Game Carneval of Oulu

I visited Oulu for a long weekend last month, to participate in the game carneval around there. It is a most fascinating experiment, a gaming convention distributed into theme-coordinated events along a month’s time and funded as a cultural project. (They even paid my travel expenses, which is one surefire way of getting me to

Game Carneval of Oulu Read More »

Diplomacy: the Italian Cha-Cha

Hmm… haven’t had time to blog lately (an eternal lament of the blogosphere, I’m sure). To fix it, a couple of words about a game of Diplomacy we played on Saturday with the kids around here. I’ve played lots of beginner tutorial -type Diplomacy games lately, and this one was no exception. In between me

Diplomacy: the Italian Cha-Cha Read More »

What say you, Cthulhu?

Continuing on my last post, I’ll outline a theory of what investigative play in Call of Cthulhu is really about. Investigation in roleplaying games is at the same time a rare yet common beast, so it’s important to understand what it does. Consider: almost any plot-based roleplaying game adventure is predicated on characters investigating this

What say you, Cthulhu? Read More »