Old Men Running The World

Author: Jim Rossignol

  • What Powers The Man Behind Wyrd Science?

    What Powers The Man Behind Wyrd Science?

    There is some superb coverage of tabletop in the nowadays, and some of our favourite stuff comes from Mr John Power Jr. If you have encountered Wyrd Science in either electronic or paper form, then you have seen his work. Wyrd Science is the sort of tabletop coverage we deserve, with an eye to TTRPGs that pleases both myself and Gillen enormously.

    Issue 7 of Wyrd Science is out now, and it’s delightful. Below the cut I talked to Power about the new issue, but also repost the vast and rambling interview we conducted last year about how the project came to be. If you read it, and you should, there will be some tales told that you will find very familiar indeed.

    (more…)

  • Experiential Yearning And Some Sort of Space Hack?

    It’s been a while! Sorry, not really been able to post lately, but back now, and better late than never. -Jim

    What do you want out of TTRPGs? No, that doesn’t matter. What do I want out of TTRPGS? Yes, that’s the important thing. Let’s find out!

    A few years ago I was pitching a videogame to a room of swarthy videogame veterans. Beards, fortunes, you know the type. You have probably heard of these people. They had a lot of experience, and even more opinions on the experience of others. Anyway, the conversation came around to an already established game, how it was successful, and why. The general drift of things was that it didn’t matter how good or bad any individual element of the game was, because overall it fulfilled the sort of experience that gamers wanted, and had always wanted, and would always want. That, they said, was a good pitch: addressing a popular gamer fantasy. I had to agree. 

    (more…)

  • THREEDOM: Conaning it up with our One-Dice Wife in Adventures In An Age Undreamed Of

    A very calm Conan fights some bad worms.

    So the grandest campaign we have played in recent times was run by the Mysterious Third (Chris) and actually featured a Fourth (Dan, who isn’t even a Forever GM!). So it’s not really Threedom at all. Nevertheless, we must make our report! Since there is much to speak of, including the origins of one of our most important in-jokes, we will be efficient and concise, probably. 

    So: this was the Modiphius 2d20 system Conan: Adventures In An Age Undreamed Of (pub 2017), an official adventure — Waves Stained Crimson — adapted by (Chris) for his regular group and then run again for our pleasure. In it we capsized, captured a ship, killed many people by accident, more on purpose, freed slaves, got hitched, rescued a lost bride, and learned dark sea magicks. Also: we did some VENGEANCE. All very Conan-y.

    Let’s get into the sinewy, muscular details.

    (more…)

  • No Man Is A (Deathmatch) Island: An Interview With Tim ‘Old Dog Games’ Denee

    IMPORTANT NOTE: this interview was originally for the TEETH RPG newsletter, which is very interesting and good, and you should subscribe to it. We conducted it just as the book was being distributed. I am sure we’ll talk about Deathmatch Island in detail elsewhere, since we’re very PARAGON-y over here, and there is much to talk about. Suffice to say, it’s a fascinating implementation of what we think is one of the most interesting RPG systems, and its creator, Tim Denee, is well worth getting to know.

    Deathmatch Island
    (more…)

  • Threedom: The Vast In The Mörk

    Recently we three — Kieron “DIE” Gillen, Jim “TEETH” Rossignol, and The Mysterious Third (Chris) — embarked on a hex crawl. To do so we combined a zine, The Vast In The Dark by Charlie Ferguson-Avery, and a lite dark fantasy RPG system, Mörk Borg by Pelle Nilsson and Johan Nohr. The word Mörk means dark (or gloom), so our calling it The Vast In The Mörk is a sort of joke by virtue of it actually being the same words. We’re clever like that. But in no other way.

    Here’s how we got on.

    (more…)

  • The Thief & The Necromancer 

    Jim’s note: an initial version of this was originally published in the TEETH RPG newsletter, some years ago.

    We’ve not had a great deal of opportunity to play new RPGs lately (at the time of writing), so it was a delight and a relief to indulge in an interesting one this week. I was fortunate enough to be able to spend some time with Chris Gardiner of Failbetter Games, James Hewitt of Needy Cat Games, and Kieron Gillen of in the Garrick’s Head, or at least that’s where I remember first meeting him, a long, long time ago.

    Together, at Gardiner’s prompting, we played a game of multiple GM PBtA journalling game, The Thief & The Necromancer, by D. Vincent Baker (aka Lumpley Games). It was a rather an interesting experience, and I shall tell you about it!

    (more…)

  • THREEDOM: Beowulf: Age Of Heroes

    Jim, Kieron and The Mysterious Third (Chris) have a regular group. We’re forever GMs, and play short campaigns where two are forever GMs no more. This is Threedom, and these our our stories. This time we report on Beowulf: Age Of Heroes.

    Kieron: I’m smiling at your notes for this chat, Jim. “Oh no, we played 5E! Sort of.” The ‘sort of’ is carrying a lot of weight. Handiwork games seem to be folks really who are interested in bending 5E significantly, and there’s a lot of that here. As the basic intro Beowulf is set in the world of the Anglo-Saxon poems about a Danish hero who kicks the ass of a monster, and then its mum and then has a bad time with a Dragon (though kicks its ass on the way out). The game’s got a lot in, but its core thing is as a duet game – one GM, one player. That’s about all I knew going in – Warped 5E, literary-historical-setting, duet game. Is that a fair description?

    (more…)

  • Hot Under The Collar For The Cold War: Dr Malcolm Craig on his classic RPGs redone for 2025

    Jim’s note: this was actually in the last TEETH RPG newsletter, but I figured I would cross-post because the Kickstarter has now gone live and it looks fantastic. Malcolm Craig is an erudite creator and has plenty to say. If you missed this before, go read!

    Malcolm Craig is a senior lecturer of American history at Liverpool John Moores, but his interest in both the Cold War and in RPGs runs much further back. Now, nearly twenty years on from his original indie releases of Cold War RPGs, he’s releasing a new edition. Having been intrigued by this prospect when we talked the Jon Handiwork a few newsletters ago, we were glad to find that Malcolm was also up for a little chat.

    (more…)

  • A Reading: Ultraviolet Grasslands and The Black City: Second Edition

    Jim’s note: I wrote a version of this for the TEETH newsletter last year, but with Our Golden Age looming somewhere in the uncertain space of development, I thought I’d return to it. One thing I’d say: I am a lot closer to getting UVG to table than I was when I wrote this, and what has changed is the work I currently want to do to get a game into play, and also a desire to dabble in something weirder. Anyway…

    I casually mentioned over on the TEETH Discord that I might give UVG:2E (UK stock) a quick read-write up, and so here it is. To be clear: we’ve not run this as at the table, but I always read more books than we have time to run games, and so I feel it’s absolutely okay to spend some time talking about that first part. The reading of books, I mean.

    (more…)

  • Previously On: Mothership

    Jim’s note: this was previously posted on the TEETH RPG newsletter. (Sign up! Share with people!) I’ve added some subsequent thoughts to this, because we played it even more since I wrote this. My promise to “write about Mothership” became something of a joke on the newsletter, taking me a couple of years to reach this incomplete conclusion. But at least it’s a start, eh?

    Mothership. I Finally Wrote About Mothership.

    I was poised to write something about Mothership a while back, but a couple of things gave me pause. Firstly, my group really wanted to play another game of it. We weren’t sure we were “playing it right”, and felt like we needed to give it another shake, just to make sure the wrinkles weren’t ones we’d put there ourselves.

    (more…)