Old Men Running The World

Category: review

  • 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.

    (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…)

  • 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…)

  • 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.

    (more…)

  • 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.

    (more…)

  • Trophy Gold: A Review

    Let Me Take You To One Side And Bend Your Ear About The Fine Role-playing Game Called Trophy Gold.

    A version of this article was originally published on the TEETH RPG newsletter.

    Trophy Gold, by Jesse Ross, is the game that I am most regularly recommending TTRPG people read and play. It’s not what I thought it would be, while also somehow being exactly what I wanted. A complicated feeling! But it scratches quite a profound itch. 

    In the space of the following sentences, I shall try to explain.

    (more…)

  • Trophy Gold: Another Review

    This review was originally posted to Kieron’s newsletter . It’s been edited slightly, as there was a whole section about how folks often unsubscribe to the newsletter when I wrote at length about RPGs, which clearly isn’t needed here. A note on content too – I don’t trace the genealogy of mechanics at all. This was written as an entryist review to speak to a curious audience mostly unaware of the indie rpg scene of the last decade and change.

    I’ve been searching for treasure for a long time. I have my freeform player-narrative games. I have my doomed horror games. I have my classical adventure games, in various traditions. I have a whole bunch of games that do great things which are entirely separate from all the things that D&D did and does. But I didn’t have a game which found a precise spot I craved satisfied two core things at once.

    In short, I had an itch. Trophy Gold scratches the itch. It scratches the itch firing a crossbow bolt through it. It is intensely co-operative. It is intensely merciless. It was exactly what I needed.

    (more…)