
Jim’s note: An older, lesser version of this article originally appeared via the TEETH RPG Newsletter!
This week, for reasons unclear, we played Heroquest on Tabletop Simulator.
(more…)Jim’s note: An older, lesser version of this article originally appeared via the TEETH RPG Newsletter!
This week, for reasons unclear, we played Heroquest on Tabletop Simulator.
(more…)These originally occurred in the DIE Arcana beta. I’ve tweaked them a little to give any perspective born of bringing the game to completion.
The early drafts of DIE RPG were mostly written in a mode which Grant described as Uncle Kieron leaning over to you in the pub and ranting enthusiastically. Some of that remains in the final book, as one can’t purge that level of avuncular horror that easily.
However, one thing I don’t talk about explicitly is what I was trying to actually do. And so this is basically me answering the question “Hey, Kieron, wtf you doing here, man?”
My primary aims were to:
These broke down in a few areas.
(more…)Jim’s note: a version of this article was originally published in the wonderful, the singular, and the dramatic TEETH RPG Newsletter! Subscribe for these reasons.
I had planned to write about setting-agnostic rule systems, system-agnostic settings, and the way in which we sometimes hack one game to work with another title’s adventures. I admit that some of the reason for this was that I really like saying the word agnostic. What a beaut! Agnostic. I relish it. This proposed essay, if I ever write it, and let’s assume that I already have, links to something about vibes in dice rolls in a later newsletter, building up a sort of coherent commentary on RPGs as sampled and adapted literature and the quilts of meaning that we build out of related cultural materials. {I am actually working on this, soon. – jim}
As you can see, great stuff is already happening in my imagined future.
But in the present something more important arrived from the past: I remembered a game of Feng Shui.
(more…)Jim’s note: the New York Times last week ran an article on one of the very greatest contributors to TTRPG history, fantasy atlas-maker Karen Wynn Fonstad. You can take a look at it here. This kicked me in the mind with an overpowering Proustian rush and I returned to my copies of her atlases of Pern, Middle Earth, and the Forgotten Realms. Then I remembered I had already written about fantasy atlases on the TEETH RPG newsletter. And THEN I realised I could post it up here. And you can read that, below.
I own a surprising number of atlases. Some are straightforward atlases. You know the sort: large-format hardback books containing maps of the world. Others, like The Times Atlas Of World History, which I somehow own multiple editions of, are also grand acts of generalised erudition: formidable slabs of publishing achievement that have been iterated over decades of republishing to explain something with maps. In this case, the general history of the human race.
(more…)Jim’s note: this interview is from the TEETH Newsletter back in 2023, but with TTRPG-adjacent Citizen Sleeper 2 imminent (yes! At the end of the month) so we thought it timely to repost here on Old Men.
Who is this person? Why, it’s Gareth Damian Martin, the writer, game designer and artist that some of you will doubtless recognise from Citizen Sleeper, a game that could hardly blend our interests any more concretely: inspired by the dice-pooling magic of Blades In The Dark’s role-playing systems and combining these sleights of dicery with the satisfying solo crunch of the digital game. Not played it yet? Then do so, right after, or perhaps even before, reading this. We talk to Gareth about the connection between tabletop RPGs and digital games and their – inevitable? – slide back towards an RPG of their own, Cycles Of The Eye.
(more…)I played Lauren McManamon and Jesse Ross’ Girl Underground a couple of years back, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. It’s a Powered By The Apocalypse (PBTA) Portal Fantasy game , where the group play a girl who arrives in a fantasy world, meets some chums, travels across the world, learns some lessons and eventually clicks their ruby slippers and goes home.
In short: it’s a Wizard-of-Oz-’em-up.
It’s an excellent game. This article isn’t going to be about that.
It’s going to be about the one element which didn’t quite work for me, and where that took me.
(more…)Jim’s note: a version of this article appeared on the TEETH RPG newsletter. As I see other games created with this system the more convinced I am of its genius. However, I am aware that has earned significantly less fanfare than Blades In The Dark, despite sort of being the game which really proves that the designer of both systems, John Harper, is a wizard. I can both understand this (the fantasy and reality of the game is somehow less commanding) but also find myself disappointed by it, because it’s a fantastic experience that I got a great deal out of. Creating a game that hacks this system is well up my list of things to do in TTRPGs.
So yes, rewind back to the summer of 2020, and The Catfail Club (our Tuesday night group formed in the shadow of Covid) are playing AGON, hosted by Failbetter’s Chris Gardiner.
AGON is a game of Greek myth and legend, but it is, more abstractly and, arguably more importantly, a co-operative game about Who Is Best.
(more…)It’s been a Zone Of Alienation time of year as the computer game people enjoy their lovely STALKER 2. But what about those of us who prefer the soft friction of paper, the frisson of GMless role-playing and/or digitially simulated boardgame interfaces? Eh? What about us? Well,the answer came up over on the TEETH Discord. There is actually a Stalker RPG, which I own but have never played, but there’s also THE ZONE. And I have played that, and even wrote about it.
(more…)I wrote the original version of this as a way to explain how to prep an adventure session in DIE. It ended up being something much more about the fundamental structure of an adventure, full stop. You strip everything away, what does an adventure look like? DIE generates a lot of loose ideas, so giving some ideas of how to organise them felt important. Eventually as the core DIE Rituals game actually comes with a self-organising structure, it became less essential to the book, and so was cut. I was never quite 100% happy with it, but everyone else seemed to find it useful, especially folks who I was primarily aiming it at (as in, new folks.) I’ve tweaked it a little here to be less purely DIE – I think these basic structural shape is a useful way to think of prep in any game which works in this mode.
DIE Rituals has a standard format – a series of necessary encounters you complete before reaching the final encounter. It’s written with a self-creating structure – a check-list of necessary encounters you work though, turning the questions to the players when you don’t know what happens next and so on.
However, especially in a longer DIE Campaign, you may want to have a plan for a session, to arrange your material in something you can use, and the players can find their way through.
In practice, it’s merely a more elaborate version of: “Where are they at the start? Where are they at the end? What’s to stop them from getting from the former to latter?”
This is how we conceive of the various “Elements of an Adventure”.
Firstly, Happy New Year.
Secondly, welcome to Old Men Running The World.
Over the years we have each amassed a bunch of RPG writing which has no decent home online, and should have one. We’ve become aware that we both basically talk RPG stuff each and every day, and we think doing some of that talking in public may be worthwhile. We’re also aware that we both have Hypergraphic Tendencies, and a safe platformn for that overwhelming impulse also seems like a good idea. We have things we’d like to say, and so a place to say it seems reasonable. This is that place.
(When editing DIE RPG, and cutting another huge and sprawling essay that really was extraneous, Grant Howitt liked to say: “Kieron – you have a blog.” Well, no, he didn’t have a blog, not a real one. But now he does. So you can and should blame Grant.)
We’ve got a huge backlog of stuff to post, but we didn’t want to overwhelm the site at launch, so picked a handful of articles to give a taste of our flavours and obsessions. But this will grow and change. We probably will write something about a game other than Trophy Gold eventually, for example. Jim has a whole lot of interviews he’s done with interesting figures in RPG. Kieron really does have a bunch of old DIE RPG stuff to do, too. And there are some new thoughts we want to pull together into an essay shape for publishing here.
Some of our stuff for this place will probably appear via our respective newsletters first. Or it might not. But it is the relative ephemerality of the newsletter that has, in part, inspired this place. So it will appear here eventually, and make this place a home and an archive.
In short, we’re here, we’re thinking in public, because we think thinking in public is both fun and occasionally useful.
Thanks for popping in.
Kieron & Jim.