Author Archives: Brent
50 Games in 50 Weeks: Space Hulk: Death Angel
You are a space marine, a heavily armored and incredibly powerful warrior searching an abandoned ship for deadly, xenophobic aliens. Unfortunately, they will find you. This is represented in a card game. And that’s the yin and yang of Space Hulk: Death Angel. The basic idea–marines assaulted by aliens as they traverse a space ship–captures … Continue reading
The Perfect Light RPG? Dread.
Role-playing games exist in a problematic black hole. Existing role-players play RPGs, but the hobby isn’t attracting a lot of new players (though D&D 4th Edition appears to be changing that somewhat). So how to attract new players to the hobby? Well, last Sunday, I had the chance to run a game of Dread, and it was a revelatory experience. It might be the answer, or at least point the way towards the answer. Dread … Continue reading
50 Games in 50 Weeks: Fudged Mouse Guard
My game group played Fudged Mouse Guard a few weeks ago. It takes the excellent Mouse Guard RPG–a game of intelligent mice with medieval-level technology–and converts the system to Fudge (every stat is a score from -4 to +4, and you roll dice that modify your score up or down for a final result, which is compared … Continue reading
50 Games in 50 Weeks: Dungeon World
Dungeon World is another sword-and-sorcery tabletop RPG system aiming to recapture the purity of classic Dungeons & Dragons. The surface looks the same, including the four classes of Cleric, Fighter, Thief, and Wizard. The mechanics and approach, however, are quite different. Player-character attributes mirror D&D, except for the addition of Bond, which is used to … Continue reading
50 Games in 50 Weeks: Fiasco
Man, I loved Fiasco. Fiasco is a tabletop RPG that approaches die rolls from a radically unorthodox angle. The players roll the dice at the beginning of the game, and those rolls tie into various elements of the setting (the book comes with several starter settings). Once those dice are rolled, they’re never rolled again. … Continue reading
Let’s Play an Interesting RPG: F%&!ed Mouse Guard
In our 17 December 2011 session, we played Fudged Mouse Guard, which uses the Fudge system toolkit to create a free system similar to that of the official Mouse Guard RPG. Unfortunately, my recording lost audio, so you can only hear me in the recording, and none of the players. As such, I’m not releasing … Continue reading
3 Dice Dungeon, A Solitaire Dungeon Crawl Game
Nearly a year ago, Greywulf posted RPG Solitaire Challenge: 3 Dice, a simple solitaire game of dungeon exploration. In his game, you roll 3 dice for your adventurer’s stats, then for each room in the dungeon, roll 1 die to determine the room’s type, 1 die for a monster, and 1 die for a treasure. I played the game a couple of times, and while I had fun, I found two major issues: The game is very swingy. I played … Continue reading
50 Games in 50 Weeks: InSpectres
InSpectres is a lot of fun. It’s a tabletop role-playinggame that’s basically Ghostbusters. The lightweight system includes only four attributes per PC–Academics, Athletics, Technology, and Contact–with a focus on one of them. A total of 9 points are distributed among these attributes. The core mechanic involves rollingsix-sideddice–as many dice as you have points in the attribute that applies to the attempted action–and looking up the highest die rolled in a results table. Higher numbers provide extra … Continue reading