quick reviews
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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
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Mythic Bastionland: All Knights, No Homework
I have always wanted to love Pendragon. On paper it should be my perfect game: doomed knights, big feelings, generational tragedy, Britain drenched in rain and prophecy. In practice, the Pendragon Starter Set and I parted ways somewhere between the tournament rules and the very polite railroad of The Sword Campaign. The tourney and mass
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Gothic Feelings, Urban Nightmares: Playing in the Shadows of Buffy, Liminal & Vampire
Like a lot of people who were young adults in the late 90s and early 00s, I spent evenings watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer and hanging around with at least one black-lipsticked vampire enthusiast. I was not, it must be said, one of them. No eyeliner, no ink, no romantic belief in anything supernatural. I
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More Than Meets the Shelf: Licensed RPGs in the Age of Too Many Games
At some point, I picked up a Humble Bundle of licensed RPGs: G.I. Joe, Transformers, and Power Rangers (all Renegade’s Essence20 line). This was not because I had a burning need to run a Power Rangers campaign, but because the price-to-page-count ratio made the lizard part of my brain clap its little hands. They now
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Putting Down the Sonic: Why I Sold Doctors & Daleks
There are books on my shelf that say something noble about my taste and discernment. Then there are the others. Doctors & Daleks belongs to the latter category: the sort of purchase that clearly involved a momentary lapse of judgment, a credit card, and the words “5E” and “Doctor Who” in unwise proximity. By the
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After the War – Space Bears and Trauma (Review)
I’ve owned Apocalypse World and Mutant: Year Zero for ages and, like a true GM, never actually run either. I like the idea of post-apocalyptic survival, but when I sit down to prep, my brain quietly puts on a trench coat and leaves the scene. So I picked up After the War, hoping its “rebuilding
