Tuesday 4 August 2015

RPGaDay 2015: Whoops, missed the gun!

This Twitter bandwagon seems like a good way to jump back on board here for a while, and share a few of the thoughts I'm having about gaming these days. You can follow other people's responses on Twitter using the hashtag #rpgaday2015 , and see what other people are saying about the same questions.

I'm a few days behind on this, so I'll tackle the first four questions all at once.



1. What is the forthcoming RPG you're most looking forward to?

Tough one, although I'm going to have to go with THE DRACULA DOSSIER for Night's Black Agents. I loves me some Ken Hite goodness, and this looks like a tasty treat. An NBA campaign built around the high concept that the original manuscript of Dracula described a botched attempt by British intelligence to recruit Dracula as an asset, leading to a century of vampire-spy intrigue. Of course, Pelgrane is also going to supply us with the "original" manuscript, DRACULA UNREDACTED, as the ultimate sourcebook. Oh baby.

There's a lot of good stuff in the pipeline, though. SAVAGE RIFTS could be a fun reboot of an old fave, and there's the just-published FENG SHUI 2 to shoot up our gaming schedule. Now I just need to get some money that I can spend on these things.

2. Kickstarted game you're most pleased you backed.

I don't back Kickstarters. Not that I don't want to, God no, I just have no money to spend on such things. I was very delighted that my players bought into the Fate Core kickstarter on my behalf, though, and I love all of those books a LOT. John Harper's forthcoming BLADES IN THE DARK does look amazing, and I wished I'd been able to back it.

3. Favourite new game of the last 12 months.

I've written here about Jason Morningstar's outstanding NIGHT WITCHES, and that is probably the best new thing I've seen in quite a while. I may have had the most fun reading SPIRIT OF '77, though.

4. Most surprising game. 

I was a little surprised to see how many people are jumping on the Kickstarter for THE WARREN, a powered-by-the-Apocalypse game of rabbits. It's a modern take on the material in BUNNIES & BURROWS, a game I didn't really play when it was A Thing (obviously, based on the number of supporters, it was indeed A Thing, but not in Sydenham, ON). I was, like most children of my generation, emotionally scarred by the WATERSHIP DOWN cartoon, so I guess I can understand why people would be interested. Not for me, probably.

So I'll try to keep up with the #rpgaday2015 thing, although I probably won't do so every day. Several times a week seems more likely.

What's going on at my table lately? Well, I'm running an online spy game called CLOAK & DAGGER that's been a bunch of fun. It ended up being more paranoid Cold War feel than the rollicking 60s retro-fun I was imagining, but that's okay.

I just started running a new SHADOWRUN Fate game, THE FORKS, last week, and that's looking like it will be a lot of fun despite one of our players pulling out at the last minute. We made up characters last week and spent some time making a blighted urban neighbourhood to play our series in, using a few tricks stolen from a nifty Apocalypse World hack called HOOD.

I am also running, as a fill-in game, an old favourite: OVER THE EDGE. This game was all kinds of important to me in the 90s, showing what RPGs could do, and I am looking forward to bringing my modern skills to it. It always was a character-centric game, one that rewards imagination and improvisation, and I plunged into the deep end with the first session. Tremendous fun.

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