Over the last year or two, I've played a good bit of Call of Cthulhu and related games. While I love many things about that particular game, I don't like the crunchiness of the character sheet. Investigators have nine attributes before we even get to things like Sanity, Luck, Magic Points, and skills! One thing … Continue reading Cthulhu Style Investigations
I've been playing the original Star Wars RPG (WEG 1987) in a solo game and damn if combat isn't cumbersome. Lots of rolling and comparison and adding numbers up, as trad games like this commonly require. Photo by Zacharias Korsalka on Pexels.com First, you roll your skill (e.g. "Blaster") to attack against a target number … Continue reading Cumbersome Star Wars Combat
During a discussion in the Mothership Discord about reskinning the game for other settings, I came up with the following little hack. If anything, it's just a small set of house rules for creating classless characters and maybe simplifying the stats and saves. Please feel free to comment any feedback. It's completely untested, just a … Continue reading Micro hack of Mothership
I've been playing a lot more solo sessions, and I didn't want to clog this place up. Plus, I just wanted to experiment with something different. Photo by lalesh aldarwish on Pexels.com So in April, my spinoff blog Solo Skald launched. So far, I've played campaigns of Blades in the Dark as well as Scum … Continue reading Spinoff solo blog
Lots of discussion happening today around games that are missing rules or worlds. That's a bit simplified, so here are the posts I'm thinking about: Negative Space"F**k-You" Design As a note to the latter: I don't really love the way the author implies such a strong sense of emotional negativity, but this does resonate with … Continue reading Be specific about unwritten rules
A quick set of thoughts on naming, focused on NSR and FKR and other abbreviations.
What makes Into the Odd (and, by extension, Electric Bastionland) so great? Here are a few reasons.
The crew takes shore leave on Station 472 and considers changes to their future business plans. Also, bricks of human flesh.
Luck rolls represent the GM choosing to be surprised rather than just deciding what happens. I look at how a few different games do this and talk about my currently preferred approach.
In this week's session, I took a small location from the Dissident Whispers book, added some content from Dead Planet and the third-party module Black Heart of Paradise, and generated one of my favorite sessions of Mothership yet.
Technoskald's Forge 