Handling luck

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.

Blorb: The Technoskald Interpretation

Blorb is a neologism for a particular prep-focused play style that occasionally creates controversy because it means the game world is "real" even before it shows up in a session. Here are my notes on what I think it means.

Rolling Dice in Call of Cthulhu

Call of Cthulhu has some surprisingly (to me) narrative-focused rules for rolling dice.

Digging into the original Star Wars RPG

I've been thinking about trying to do for Star Wars d6 what Cthulhu Dark did for Call of Cthulhu, or what Into the Odd did for Cypher: break it down to a minimal approach without needing to spend too much time thinking about game rules. As I was looking at this, I started to wonder if it doesn't need anything more than GM attitude. Here’s my first set of thoughts about the game.

Those Who Came Before published!

TL;DR: My science fantasy supplement "Those Who Came Before" (written for Into the Odd Remastered and games derived from it) is published and available on Itch.io!

Mental health in horror RPGs

Cthulhu Dark and Trophy Dark have a different way to model harm, including mental harm, and this approach provides a fantastic model for other games. Even in horror gaming - I would say especially in horror gaming - we all should retain the ability to decide what to explore, and systems like the one outlined above give us the opportunity to do that.

Who really is my neighbor?

How can we think about in-game communities in a way that motivates players and PCs? I'm looking at structures for my Into the Odd hack to center community defense and improvement.

Replacing the Sanity system in Mothership

The Sanity (Stress and Panic) system in Mothership doesn't appeal to me, and my friends playing the game have commented on it as well. What could we do instead?

Hack Publishing

I published a couple of game hacks for the Acoustic Cover Jam this week, both of which started out on this blog. You can find my conversion notes for Numenera using Into the Odd as well as World of Ultraviolet Grasslands there.

Tweaking World of Ultraviolet

The playtest of World of Ultraviolet continues, so I wanted to write a bit about what has changed so far. This includes hit points, a slight tweak to talents and abilities, and an important set of additions to the main resolution mechanic.