Old Men Running The World

Author: Jim Rossignol

  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • Why DUNGEONs, Though?

    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.

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  • Feng Shui: A Hard-Bitten Cop And Some Game Rulings That Changed Me Forever

    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.

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  • An Imagined Atlas Of Imaginary Atlases

    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.

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  • An Interview With Citizen Sleeper Creator, Gareth Damian Martin

    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.

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  • On AGON

    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.

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  • THE ZONE: Surreal Play-To-Lose Horror RPG (is quite good)

    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.

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  • The Most Romantic Thing (On The RPG-mediated search for Experiential Validation)

    A version of this essay was originally published in the TEETH RPG Newsletter.

    A former girlfriend once asked me what I thought the most romantic thing was. Blindly missing the prompt to say something cute, I mused that the most romantic thing would be to die leaving a vast unpublished catalogue of complex and near-indecipherable work for your heirs to discover, so that you became both an enigma to those who knew you and an out-of-time legend whose eccentricities echoed down the ages, like Diderot. She looked at me in a way that suggested that she did not think this was the most romantic thing, which perhaps goes some small way to explaining how that whole situation did not persist. But the important thing is that while I am not casting myself as Diderot exactly, I am likely to leave behind a vast catalogue of near-indecipherable work if anyone remembers to look through the leftover chaos of folders, notebooks and documents once I croak my last. 

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