Yearly Archives: 2016

What’s The Empire of Beril? The Empire of Beril is a retro-clone-ish game that makes use of a lot of the Open Game License material released by TSR/WotC. As far as what you’ll find, the game play will be similar, mechanically, to the original Dungeons and Dragons. One minor difference […]

The Empire of Beril

 in Uncategorized by
Going through my old D&D modules I’m always surprised by things I didn’t see the first, or twentieth, time through. This image from The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh (U1) is a beauty. The box text reads: Leaning on the starboard rail and looking towards the coast are three human figures. […]

The “Saltmarsh Stare”

 in Art by
Gamma World Box Title
Way back in 1987, aside from an ill-fated dalliance with the original Traveller (my character died during character creation), I’d only played sword and sorcery rpgs. A friend of mine borrowed a set of Gamma World from an older kid and we had a go. I don’t recall if we […]

What’s in the box? Gamma World

 in Box Set by
Part One of The Point of Departure, was about how memories of things that happen in games are real memories, and also, that these memories are the only real things about the games we play. Part two is about the titular “Point of Departure” and specifically what miniatures represent in […]

The Point of Departure: Pt. 2

 in Gaming Divisions by
On Monday night I ran a game of Call of Cthulhu, specifically The Haunting, formerly, The Haunted House. It’s a well known scenario found in every edition of Call of Cthulhu as well as in all the free “Quick Start Rules” .pdfs. It’s really a good introduction to the mythos […]

The Point of Departure: Pt. 1

 in Gaming Divisions by
Image of Ghostbusters
There’s something about the promise of a boxed-set. For me they’re evocative of roleplaying in general, and specifically of MERP. It was the first boxed set I owned. For a lot of folks it’s probably the “red box” or something like that (the first D&D book I owned was the Advanced Player’s […]

What’s in the Box?- Ghostbusters (GBI)

 in Box Set by
By user:Pieter1 - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=587010
People begin their design of a roleplaying game in all sorts of different places in the design, and for all sorts of different reasons. It might be a cool dice mechanic you thought up, the desire to create a certain type of character, or a reaction to something somewhere you […]

The Perfect Metaphor

 in Commentary / Cthulhu by
I read an article about paying for games which basically, was saying that aside from Gary Gygax nobody really got rich from role-playing so buy stuff and support writers. It also raised the point that, like musicians, RPG writers have been disadvantaged by torrenting. I agree, but I think that unlike musicians, […]

Is Organized Play Good For the Hobby?

 in Commentary by