Has it really been a month since I last posted? I swear, there's something about running the Indie Game Reading Club Slack channel that consumes whatever bandwidth I used to have to make longer posts. By the way: if you're riding out the GPlus diaspora along with the rest of us, drop me a line if you… Continue reading Recalibrating
Last Tuesday we played our fourth session of Forbidden Lands. My heart was -- is -- so heavy. But on we played. Last week I decided to go all-in on FL's procedural generation and ditch everything attached to the Raven's Purge campaign. It eliminates my prep time and lets me discover the world alongside the players. That real-time discovery… Continue reading Fiddling While Rome Burns or Drawing the Magic Circle Anew (probably both: Forbidden Lands session 4)
We were missing our fourth intrepid adventurer for last night's Forbidden Lands game, so I busted out Plaid Hat's Gen7. It's the next board game in their Crossroads series, the first being their two Dead of Winter games. While we were playing, I could not help but notice how much playing Gen7 feels like playing… Continue reading Gen7 is Methadone for Storynerds
Last night we ran our third session of Forbidden Lands. After hewing closely to the game's campaign materials last session (The Hollows, a sample town in the Gamemaster's Guide) and grinding against, well, everything about it, this time I decided to run the game more in the vein of Mutant: Year Zero. That is: zero prep, generate everything on the… Continue reading Push Me, Pull You
Yesterday I had an unexpected opportunity to run two similar games side by side. My friends Ralph Mazza (Ramshead Publishing, created Universalis, Blood Red Sands) and Jahmal Brown (indie con rock star, wrote Clockwinders for Fate Worlds, writing Cortex Prime: Supers) were in town for a week of gaming and escaping their icy wastelands. We had been batting… Continue reading A/B Testing: The One Ring vs Forbidden Lands
