reading
Stuff I’ve read and felt compelled to write about
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Sharp Swords & Sinister Spells: A Hexcrawl Stress-Test
I’m doing this review because I’ve got The Evils of Illmire sitting on my desk like a wet promise. I want to run a hexcrawl. I want the feeling of a map full of bad decisions, where the party stares at a stretch of swamp and argues about whether the safest path is the one
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Hillfolk: Talk First, Fight Later (Maybe Much Later)
Hillfolk sits on that part of my shelf where the “conversation-forward” games congregate like gossiping aunties at a wedding. But I didn’t come to it for the soap. I came looking for a low-magic, community-first historical game, something that could live in the day-to-day friction of a tribe trying to survive winter rather than the
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After: Stonepunk Dreams at the End of the World
Every few months I get the itch for “my” post-apocalyptic game. I’m not looking for the one with gun-nuts in ice-cream vans or zombies in tactical vests, but something stranger: broken worlds, new cultures, weird ecology, big feelings about the end of everything and the awkward beginning of whatever comes next. Then I look at
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Dolmenwood: Pixie Boots on Firm Old-School Ground
There are books you leaf through and think, “Lovely art, someday.” Then there are books that smell like a campaign, the kind that squat on your shelf and mutter rumours until you give in. Dolmenwood is the latter: three brick-thick hardbacks that look like a children’s fairy atlas left out in the rain and retold
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Golden Scars & Bad Decisions: Reviewing Cosmic Dark
The phrase “cosmic horror in space” covers a multitude of sins and a fair number of excellent games. What makes Cosmic Dark interesting is not just the corporate-hellmouth vibe, but how confidently it structures that vibe into something you can run tonight. The book opens like a briefing from a smiling HR ghoul: you’re Employees
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a|state 2e: Hope, Grit, and the Corner You’ll Bleed For
I’m the kind of GM who likes frictionless rules and plenty of texture: fiction first, mechanics that nudge rather than nag, and a setting that gives me a reason to care whether the power stays on in a tenement. Also, I am an unrepentant sucker for good art; this book is a stunner. Paul Bourne’s
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Beneath and Above: Diving into Heart & Spire
There’s a particular shelf in my study where the “beautifully doomed” RPGs live. You know the ones: art that looks like it was printed with occult ink, settings that smell faintly of incense and revolution, rules that don’t so much simulate reality as dare you to make better fiction. Heart and Spire sit there like
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Playing the Discworld RPG: As Full of Life as an Old Cheese
Some settings feel like they ought to be RPGs. The Discworld is one of them. It’s already about people blundering through plots they don’t fully understand, improvising wildly while the universe throws Consequences at them in the name of narrative satisfaction. That’s a Tuesday night game, right there. Like a lot of nerds of a
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Rust and Resolve: Why Salvage Union Might Be My Mecha Game
For me, a good mecha RPG isn’t really about the robots. Or rather, it’s not only about the robots. I’m not here for Gundam melodrama or lovingly tracking armour facings on a hex map; I’m closer to ABC Warriors than Wing Zero. I want players to feel how absurdly powerful a mech is in the
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Snow Crash Synapses, Neuromancer Nerves: Which Cyberpunk RPG Actually Plays Like 90s Cyberpunk?
I grew up on flat black CRTs and dog-eared paperbacks promising that by 2020 we’d all be plugging our brains into ice-slick grids while wearing sunglasses at night. I then did a master’s degree in AI and, plot twist, ended up working in the bit mines where the cyberpunk future arrived without mirrorshades: inequality at
