Old Men Running The World

Author: Kieron Gillen

  • The Seven Part Pact: the First Actual GM-Full Game

    I was asked if I wanted to be a wizard for a week. I said yes.

    It was a playtest of Jay Dragon’s the Seven Part Pact, where up-to-seven (we did six) players are all academic wizards in a fantasy realm (Think Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell) Each has a title, and an area of magic that’s their domain (think the Wizard of Earthsea). Each’s domain is also an area of responsibility, to ensure it doesn’t fall apart (think, Sandman). They form a found-family of arseholes, each a being of almost unimaginable power, pursuing their own desires and schemes and often butting heads (think Amber). Each also takes a dual role, taking the tasks often reserved to the GM in a specific area – so, for example, the Faustian as a character is about demonic magic and preventing satan from escaping… but is also plays as the The Keeper of the Chains, who is called upon to make the complications in the world.

    The Seven Part Pact is a GM-full game. I think it’s the only GM-full game.

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  • DIE RPG: That Horrorshow AI Emotion Wheel Emotion Knight Expansion

    A couple of days ago, an AI generated emotion wheel went viral on Bluesky which lead to a bunch of folks messaging me saying it should be a DIE RPG expansion, lol, etc.

    It is unwise to make jokes at me.

    You can download this 4-page expansion PDF here.

    It includes rules for playing Emotion Knights of any emotion on that wheel, including a stance for each emotion.

    DIE RPG is available from Rowan Rook & Decard. I now realise you could abstractly run this expansion with the free Quickstart too, but don’t do that to yourself.

  • The Skim: Mythic Bastionland

    It is this organ’s firm and unyielding belief that one cannot review an RPG from reading it. You can review a manual, certainly, but you’re not reviewing the game in any meaningful way.

    However you can skim and see what pops out.

    This is the Skim, and this is what we got from skimming Mythic Bastionland.

    IN A SENTENCE 

    Kieron: It’s OSR1 hexcrawl2 Pendragon3 in miniature4 (complimentary5). 

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  • Where I Review My Gencon 2024 Haul From A Photo As I Had My Luggage Stolen On The Way Home

    Reviewing role-playing games is a controversial business. There’s some people who believe you can make a meaningful judgment about a game by careful consideration of its manual, and there’s other people who understand that’s nonsense.

    You don’t need to read a game to review it. You can just look at its cover and make all the judgements you want. Of course, some people say you shouldn’t judge anything by its cover. Those people sound like the sort of people who didn’t have all their games stolen on the way home from Gencon on the train back to my home.

    That’s me, by the way. That person is me.

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  • Role-playing Games Are Either High Art or Fanfic

    Pieter Bruegel the Elder, who likely would have glanced out the side of his eye at this whole argument.

    I was probably making a cup of tea, as I usually am.

    I just stared into the middle distance and thought “all role-playing games are either High Art or Fanfic” with a force that made me know that it was fundamentally true – which meant, on some level, it must be fundamentally false.

    All dichotomies are false. You can never take this too seriously, as it’s a classic The Map Is Not The Territory trap.

    However, given a certain definition of Fanfic and High Art, I think it’s can be a useful map. When I say “a certain definition” I mean “Mine.”

    Or, at least, the ones I’ve stolen.

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  • Where I Solve The Scheduling Problem In Dungeons & Dragons

    I was recently in a pub, talking to a friend about their collapsed game of Dungeons & Dragons. I was somewhat frustrated by their tale of woe – perhaps the most common tale of woe. I imagined all these decades of people wasting time, just waiting for that one player to be free on Friday.

    I decided to solve their problem by writing a patch for the 2024 edition of the D&D Players handbook.

    Here’s a PDF to download.

    Print it out and slide it in after Page 8.

    This is probably overkill, but it breaks my heart, and made me laugh. You can’t resist yourself sometimes. It is actively strange that RPG folks write rules about everything, but have avoided giving actual advice on basic play culture ideas. Generations after generations of players, falling into this particular trap. No more, I say.

    Go! Print out! Stick it in manuals worldwide. This can be a better world, or at least one where people go down dungeons and fight kobolds more often.

    It may work on other RPGs too.

    I wanted to include it on the page, but I ran out of space, but a recent episode of Fear of a Black Dragon discussed this topic at length. If you want further inspiration, you can listen here. The segment starts 19 minutes in.

    Thanks to this homebrew toolset which made the homage easy. It’s genuinely astounding work. Also, thanks to Stephanie Hans for letting me use her art from DIE RPG.

  • Designer Notes: How Do Aliens Do “It”?

    I’ve released a new game zine! You can grab How Do Aliens Do “It”? here, which is a pay-what-you-want-or-not Carved from Brindlewood game about Alien teenagers in a repressive, information-scarce society gather to share what each of them knows and try and work out how doing “it” works, and how they feel about that. It’s a playful game which tries to approach big stuff lightly, and I’m really happy with it.

    And for those who want to know the process, here’s the designer notes (which are also in the game)…

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  • What I’d Tell You To Try If You Told Me Your Game Sucks

    Look, ma, I can do clickbait titles. I’m a real boy content generator now.

    I wasn’t going to call the article that. It’s very much what I’d use if I was 20-30 years younger on Youtube and forced to try and engage with that hellscape. Instead, I am on a blog: an elegant weapon, for a more civilized age. I don’t need to do it. I am, because while the blog is a lightsaber, it is a lightsaber made of shits and giggles.

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  • DIE RPG: Designer Notes

    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:

    1. Support the themes of the comic in a different medium.
    2. Be as accessible as possible.

    These broke down in a few areas.

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  • About A Girl (Underground) and Protagonism

    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.

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