I’m back from Victoria! While away I had the idea to reflect a little bit on my awards . If I was more organized I would have written my thoughts down on their 10th anniversary . That said, writing this two years late feels on brand. The first time I made an awards post it was in response to the Ennie’s snubbing Jez Gordon’s art in Death Frost Doom: “that this book wasn’t up for a best…
I just got back from Ottawa for work. I fly out to Victoria tomorrow to enjoy the sights of the West Coast. The summer is rushing by and I have been quite busy. How is it already GenCon? I feel particularly disconnected from the Ennies this year. I recognized so few games and people in the list of nominations. Maybe that’s how you felt too, why you are reading this post. I am an old man now:…
My friends and I have almost wrapped up our first Blood Bowl league. We began with a round robin tournament, playing six rounds of games between the six players in the league. (I think using the power of math we could have figured out a schedule that went through the round robin portion of the league faster, something to do for next time.) We gave everyone 2-3 weeks to meet and play, which people…
I am sad to learn about the passing of John Blanche. My friend Tim has written a nice article about him for Wargamer and Kelvin remembers the time Blanche sent him a postcard . The documentary The Grim & The Dark has posted the entirety of their interview with John Blanche . It’s quite lovely listening to him speak. I don’t know if I really understood who Blanche was and his impact and…
Last summer Games Workshop released the 3rd edition of Horus Heresy. For those keeping score at home, I managed to play three games of 2nd edition before they moved on . I find their urge to constantly churn their rulesets annoying, but that seems to be how it goes with their games. I probably don’t play enough Horus Heresy to justify all the boxes I have bought, but I have bought some boxes. The…
It is our patriotic duty to buy Canadian Mothership modules. Emergence is a funnel adventure—like you remember playing in DCCRPG . Emergence takes place Henko Acquisitions Correctional Complex. Players play inmates who wake up after some unknown accident has damaged the facilities. They must try and escape to the surface. There is a whole lot more going on, some of which I’ll discuss below, so if…
I find it hilarious that there are two OSR blogging webrings you can join if you are so inclined. The 90s are back, in webring form. Daniel Sell of Troika set one up first, the New Old Gaming Blogring . Shortly after, Elmcat created rootr.ing , which serves the same purpose, but felt easier to customize, so you can its widget at the bottom of this page. If you dislike both of these options, Daniel…
Once again the keying of dungeons is the topic of day. Sam Sorensen writes in defence of the humble paragraph. In doing so he pits the paragraph against the bulleted list, a false dichotomy. In his post the examples of bulleted bolded lists are bad because they are word soup, not because they are lists. There is nothing precluding people from writing strong prose while also leaning on structure.…
The original DCC RPG zine is back, bigger than ever. (Literally.) You can help Dak Ultimak publish a new edition of Crawl’s first issue , with an alternate cover by Doug Kovacs. Long time readers may recall that Crawl! was the first thing I wrote about on this blog . I was lucky enough to receive one of the limited edition black-on-black versions of the zine. Maybe one day I can sell it and…
Is Luke Gearing too powerful? Joined by Johan Nohr and Jarrett Crader , Luke has written a hex crawl adventure for Mork Borg , Tephrotic Nightmares . That’s a solid posse of RPG people. I had impossibly high expectations for this book. Tephrotic Nightmares is about the sea of ash, a region that was ruined by The Arsonist. Dark Sun had a Sea of Silt, so perhaps I am already biased towards liking…
I’ve migrated this site from Jekyll to Hugo , something I’ve wanted to do for ages, but haven’t been assed to do till now. I’ve been running the Hugo version of the site on beta.save.vs.totalpartykill.ca , which I may keep around as a place to muck around in public. I think I’ve caught all the issues that arose with the migration, but if you spot anything let me know. I’m curious if the change is…
My friend moved to New York City for work. A weird time to head South, I suspect most people want to travel in the opposite direction. I’d rather he was still here, but there is one perk from his being away: I can mail books to him. On his last trip back he brought with him a copy of His Majesty the Worm (HMtW) , by Josh McCrowell . HMtW is an OSR game designed for dungeon crawling. The…
Clayton has done an amazing job organizing the Bloggies this year. Everything is neatly organized on his blog, with little infographics to help you follow along with what’s happening and what you need to to participate. The first round of voting is happening right now . As before there are four main categories: advice, reviews, gameable, and theory. He’s added a new ‘meta’…
An interesting post from Clayton discusses what he calls Dominant Mechanics: “ Dominant Mechanics are rules that cannot co-exist in a system without monopolizing play and overriding other rules.” My favourite example of this would be skill checks in later editions of Dungeons and Dragons. This idea relates to one of my big complaints about 4E , where your characters various powers end up being the…
The man that brought you Fuck You Design brings you a rant about fancy-ass zines : “Am I language policing here? Sure, why not. I think the original sense of the word matters and is worth preserving, worth insisting upon. I think zines, as a non-luxury print media are important.”
Press the Beast shared a criticism I enjoyed of some parts of the OSR, and the obsession with products as the output of the hobby. The post is a bit of a rant—to put it mildly—but I also think it’s good advice all the same. When I was posting my Carcosa session recaps , notes, and advice , I was trying to highlight just how little I had done to make that game go. It shouldn’t take much…
I spent a little bit of time over the last two days getting ready to play Mythic Bastionland. I made a map over the holidays, but didn’t finish filling it with stuff at the time. I was writing down NPC names, rolling on spark tables, and getting enough notes down so that there was some solidity to the world the players were going to explore. Mythic Bastionland encourages some amount of…
I have written about keying dungeons in the past, when discussing Dwimmermount , and when talking about Deep Carbon Observatory . This topic seems to be in the news again, after Ben shared an enjoyable video of his dislike of Goodman Games’ house style for their modules . 1 DCC RPG is quite text heavy, and uses simple two column layouts reminiscent of old TSR modules. They are essentially the best…
Long time readers may recall I had started an Arthurian Dark Souls sort of setting I never finished called Misericorde . A year or so later Chris started sharing his work for Mythic Bastionland , and it was more or less exactly what I wanted to do, but better in basically every way. (I mean, for starters, he finished it all.) So anyway, I want to play Mythic Bastionland. The first step is making a…
The past year ended up being the biggest year of blogging on this site. At the start of the year I shared my thoughts on blogging in the post Blogging is Forever , a reminder that social media is transient and you should own and control the writing you care about. I was posting fairly consistently throughout the year, but kicked things into high gear in November. This is almost certainly motivated…
Back in 2024 I decided to track all of my purchasing and painting of minis. This was an attempt to buy less and paint more. It was a nominal success. This year, not so much. Whenever my life becomes too busy I find I channel my hobby output into pure consumerism. I ended up buying box sets that will certainly be fun to paint, but that remain unpainted (and often unbuilt!) as we come to the end of…
I have wanted to buy a copy of Crown of Salt for ages. Nova wrote a pretty glowing review some time ago. Months later Jason and Tom talked about it on Fear of a Black Dragon , and were both so euphorically enthusiastic I knew I needed to check it out. I came close to buying it several times, but getting it from abroad with shipping always felt too pricey and decadent. And then I saw it at the…
Whenever I say Warcry is the best game Games Workshop has made, someone always chirps up to reply that I am wrong, that title belongs to Blood Bowl . It was hard to argue about a game I have never played. Blood Bowl is Games Workshop’s skirmish fantasy football game. You are basically playing Jervis Johnson’s take on American Football. Now having finally played, I have to admit it is pretty…
This isn’t the focus of your article , but it feels really good to see someone saying that their longest campaign lasted 23 sessions over roughly a year and a half. Way too many people seem to believe that the average gamer plays every week, without stopping, for years. — @vaskrag.bsky.social It’s true! We can’t all be James . Those 23 sessions felt long and epic, and become more mythic in…
Masters of Carcosa is the longest campaign I have run. My friends and I played 23 sessions, starting at the end of 2014, ending near the start of 2016. The game began after Brendan took a break from running Pahvelorn , likely to focus on his PhD. I hadn’t run a game since I was a kid! Playing in Brendan’s Pahvelorn campaign was hugely inspirational, and has informed how I have run games since.…
And so we come to the end. Did I know this would be the last session of the campaign? Hard to tell, but I posted about it going on hiatus shortly afterwards. This session ended up being a fitting conclusion for the campaign. Gus and Eric were both in attendance. We ended on real cliffhanger. The whole campaign had been building towards this moment: the party decided to attack the Jale Slaves…
This session was all about trying to make friends. The players had a zany scheme: dress up a slaver in the space alien amour they had stolen from a tomb in order to convince the space aliens it was in fact the slavers that were out there desecrating their holy sites. They once again returned to the Space Alien outpost, no longer abandoned. They had returned to their experiments, making use of the…
More slaver killing antics, as the party heads north to investigate rumours of slaver activity. The party had liberated the Orange Man citadel North of their home base of Invak many sessions ago, but hadn’t returned in some time. This was another fairly vanilla session, but was a good setup for the next one, as they had plans for the body of one of the dead slavers. Though the party was still…
Another session with no treasure, which was starting to become a point of tension with the players. In my mind Carcosa was really grim and grotty: rich PCs didn’t make sense to me. In hindsight, I think we could have made it all work. Dark Sun imagines the fighters raising armies and becoming warlords. This was a direction the PCs had started to think about. We could have leaned into that more.…
The players decide to head East, further into the territory friendly with the Jale Slavers. The town the players learn about, Joi, may have been lifted straight from an episode of Masters of the Universe. As sessions go this was pretty straight forward. Lots of chatter in town, and then an encounter in the wilderness. It feels weirdly short reading the re-cap below. At this point I was so far…
The previous session the players rolled a 1 on the Hazard Die when travelling back to town. We didn’t want to play out the encounter at midnight, so I told them it’s how the session would start. I had an idea in my head: the blue men the players had saved were actually bandits! The session opened with a fight through the town. A circle of Bone Men stand watch around ancient Snake Men ruins. They…
I forgot the man himself Daniel Dean also made an appearance during this campaign. This might have been the only session he managed to play, but the nice thing about G+ was people would sometimes drop into games if they happened to be free on a particular night. Eric and Gus had it in their minds to start building a keep, recruiting an army, and just moving on to a sort of domain type of play as…
Some important discoveries this session. The Rainbow Connection finally discover the lair of the Jale Slavers. They had first learned of it after rescuing some slaves in the wilderness. They would begin to plot its downfall starting now. They meet my Carcosa take on Trap-Jaw. I had written up a Carcosa style He-Man encounters, though I didn’t end up using too many in my game: 16 Encounters…
The players had their home base in Invak, and had a strong relationship with the merchant town to the south, Jahar. At this point in the campaign they wanted to try and unify the region around the common aim of dealing with the slavers. There was a lot of travel between the two towns session, as they tried to negotiate an agreement. This was the session the Space Alien Strike Force finally made an…
As you’ll see in the comments, I had been reading Blood Meridian, and the book and its mood started seeping into the game. I wrote about this a few years ago: A Carcosan Western . The game was meant to be light-hearted Masters of the Universe themed game, and while there was a fair bit of that, the game was probably more cowboys than He-Man. (That said, the Staff of Avion the players find this…
This session the players explored the rest of the Space Alien outpost. When the returned I had re-stocked the space differently, because it had been captured. The rooms that they had not explored previously were sealed, so that area was unchanged. This session feels like some stereotype of an OSR game. The party wakes up all the Space Aliens that manned the outpost, who were in cryropods. Nick…
My Carcosa-style recap of this session was as follows: The Bone Man sorcerer, The Dominant Reflection (AC 16, MV 90’, HD 4, Chaotic) has taken over the abandoned Space Alien outpost, along with a sizeable group of Bone Men cultists. They worship the long dead Snake Men. I had been teasing Bone Men cultists operating between the party’s home town of Invak, and the merchant town to the South,…
This is the first session Chris P joined the fight. There were two Chris’s on G+ that were consummate players. Like Eric, they were almost always down to play whenever you would post a game. Players like that make running a poorly organized campaign work. When I would share invites on G+ for the Masters of Carcosa sessions I would include rumours and news the players had learned. There was also a…
I remember this session really well, because it was another weird one. Only Dion and Willie could make it, and they didn’t want to do anything risky. The players travelled with the merchants on their trip South, stopping in the village of Glom. There they met affable Carcosans and got totally wasted. The description for the settlement in the hex is as follows: Village of 310 Ulfire Men ruled by…
The players had found a Space Alien compass in an earlier session and decided to see where it would lead them. I had decided it would lead them towards the tomb of a dead Space Alien hero. A nearby hex was described in the book like so: In a pure white chamber is the perfectly preserved corpse of a Space Alien wearing a suit of reflective armor that protects against the following types of weapons:…
… the leader of Invak would pay for the heads of Jale Slavers, and so the game because all about hunting the slavers and chopping of their heads. Blood Meridian, but in Carcosa. (Except the party would actually kill slavers, not any old person.) Wait, I lied. This session the party does end up killing people and taking them back to Invak to collect their reward. Bad PR for OSR players…
Sam Pearson is the person behind two of Games Workshop’s greatest games: Warcry & Spearhead. He has recently started a YouTube channel after ending his time at the company as one of their lead game designers. So far the videos are all straight up bangers, but he’s recently shared three videos on game design that are worth watching in particular: Meaningful Player Choice Designing Warhammer (or any…
The caverns the party explore this session were another way I had imagined to get the party out of the region they were in. The Protector of Truths was leading a group of Yellow Men in a war against evil Mi-Go on the other side of Carcosa. The Mi-Go the players would encounter on this part of the world were those lobotomized by The Protector of Truths, so they were more like animals than…
I came close to going the whole year without playing a single game of Mordheim , but a visiting gamer from Vancouver put the call out to see if anyone in our Mordheim league was free to play while he was in town. Of course I said yes. Another regular from the store’s Mordheim posse joined in, alongside someone who had never played a game of Mordehim before. We had planned to play 2-3 games, but we…
The party finally visits the merchant town to the South, Brown Man village of Jahar. These merchants were the ones who escorted the players up to Invak in the first session, when the party encountered them on the road. Because the party had gained some notoriety in the region they were able to wander and meet with the people of the town. I’m quite certain I ran this sort of things using reaction…
The session began with exploration and learning more about the world. This was the first time the party got lost in the wilderness, an important part of the game. My travel rules worked. The party found more caves to explore in the future, and learned of a second citadel that purportedly held a tomb of vile sorceress magic—the best kind. The party would refuse to seek it out for the remainder of…
Almost a full month since our last game! The fastest way to kill a campaign is to miss games, and playing every week meant that a missed game had an oversized impact. I’m impressed the Carcosa game managed to last as long as it did, as I was a bit too quick to reschedule when I was a little busy or tired. Reading the comments I see that at this point I still didn’t have a clear procedure for…
The party had been told rumours that there were healers to the south that could heal Gus’s character of his terrible mutations. (You may recall that was his first character’s fate in our first session of the game.) The party ignored those rumours last session, but decided to pursue them this time. Bryan’s character came out of my random generator with a tattooed map on his skin: a map to the…
My first session of Masters of Carcosa only included 2 players, Gus and Eric. I was a little worried the game wouldn’t catch on, but the next session included 6 people! This was basically the Pahvelorn crew, along with the lovely Bryan Mullins. Players would change from sessions to session. A true open table! These were all the rage in the early 2010s. The parties home base was the town of Invak,…
When I was running my Carcosa campaign , I would post session recaps on my blog in the form of hex descriptions written as if they came straight from the book. Each session had additional descriptions for each hex the characters explored, and I also included a random ‘restocking’ table. Three of the entries in the table would present alternative endings to the session the players just played, with…