Old Men Running The World

Category: After Action Report

  • DIE RPG: When I roll A 1

    I’ve been meaning to put this here for a while, but as the DIE RPG quickstart has been lobbed on Drivethru and Itch, it seems a good time. This is a tweaked version of something I wrote over on my newsletter, when I finished my long playtest campaign of DIE RPG.

    I often think of this bit of Red Dwarf.

    It’s where Rimmer is describing his great victories in Risk, much to Lister’s annoyance. An endless string of “And then I rolled a 6!” The joke being, that no-one is interested in hearing about people’s gaming adventures.

    I spent fifteen years of my life trying to prove that wrong, and get people excited about that time I rolled a 6.

    Or a 1.

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  • 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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  • 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.

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