Roll Some Dice

What with one thing and another, I've revised Action City! for anyone who wants to check out a slightly expanded, much more complete version of the game. You can get it here. At 14 pages (including a character sheet and a brief explanatory epilogue), it's a wee little slip of a game, but I like it. My only trouble is that I'm not sure I have the narrativist chops to give it the treatment it deserves in play. However, plenty of people do -- people I know, even! -- so hopefully someone out there will give it a shot.

I was going to say " Action City! -- Now Complete!" but I kinda doubt that's true. I put the finishing touches on it at about 4:00 this morning, so I'm sure something important is missing or incomplete. Like, if there's a sentence somewhere in those last few pages that just ends , period be damned, it wouldn't surprise me. So instead, I'll just say that you can take a look at it here .

I still question whether I'll be able to finish something in time for submission to Game Chef 2010: Sojourner -- I'm pretty busy with, of all things, writing a musical tribute to an old Top Secret module -- but... I'm gonna give it a shot. So here's what I'm going with: Action City! With an exclamation point! The goal is to recreate the most Hollywood action movies Hollywood could possibly come up with. Think Die Hard , Lethal Weapon , Bad Boys II -- even stuff like Escape From New York or Beverly Hills Cop . We're talking about movies that embrace (or invented) the most cliched of action-movie cliches. The heroes are one-dimensional badasses with a humanizing flaw, accompanied by some friends and/or hangers-on, up against crafty villains and seemingly insurmountable odds. Y'know. That kinda thing. I'm taking my inspiration as much from the movies themselves as I am from convention screenwriting wisdom. As for how all of that relates to the p

So the ingredients for this year's Game Chef are up: The Basics Design and submit a playable draft of a roleplaying game between Sept 11th-19th, preferably inspired by the theme and ingredients listed below. 2010 Theme Game Chef 2010 is official known as Game Chef: Sojourner , and the theme is Journey . As always, you are free to interpret that however you like. 2010 Ingredients In addition to the overall theme, pick 3 of these 4 ingredients to design your game around. • City • Desert • Edge • Skin First thoughts: City, Edge, and Skin all jump out at me. I'm picturing a very scenario-focused game along the lines of The Mountain Witch or Lady Blackbird about accomplishing something very specific in a city. Probably getting from one place to another safely. More than that, though, I just can't say right now. Hell, something like Escape From New York or The Warriors isn't completely unreasonable. Second thoughts: Fred Hicks, Ryan Macklin, Willow P

This is a little tardy, but: I've updated and renamed my swords & sorcery hack for Icons . Now it's called Sigils , at the suggestion of someone on RPG.net whose name escapes me. The big change for this version (v0.4) is the addition of rules for summoning and the detailing of three types of spirits, three types of demons, and 12 types of elementals (really, it's just three tiers of the same four elementals, but still). That was the big piece of the puzzle that was still missing, in my mind, so it's satisfying to have it taken care of for the time being. ("For the time being" because I haven't playtested those rules or anything, and I'm relatively sure I left out something very important somewhere or other.) Even though I haven't been able to play or run it yet, I can at least say that it's fun to roll up characters, so go check it out and get back to me. UPDATE: It's since been replaced by Sigils version 0.5 , and will soon

So! As I expressed elsewhere , this year's Gateway was an unfailingly fun convention. The least-fun game I played in was still a lot of fun, so I have no complaints. Plus, I tied for the win in a game of Dominion , which was notable primarily for how unlikely it was. I'll go in chronological order (Friday afternoon through Sunday afternoon) so I don't leave anything out. Beyond Thunderbowl ( Leftovers ): I'd never run anything in the Friday 2:00 slot before, but with the 8:00 slot taken up by a game I didn't want to miss, I didn't have much of a choice. Thankfully, I had a full table -- an overfull table, actually. I advertised four slots and ended up with five players, including Leftovers fan and super-playtester Larry Harala , who's run a five-session Leftovers campaign with his group in Utah that sounds like a lot of fun and about which I'd like to hear more. Of course, since I only see him at these conventions twice a year, there isn't much

Hola amigos -- I know it's been a long time since I rapped at you, but... Wait, I've already done this bit once, haven't I? Anyway, this weekend at Gateway I'm running two sessions of Leftovers : Friday at 2:00 pm and Saturday at 8:00 pm. Pre-reg slots are all full, which leaves only two seats per game for day-of participants to sign up. Here's the blurb: Captured by Grafters, stranded in an irradiated wasteland, beset by Horrors -- and the only way out may be... the Thunderbowl! Do you have what it takes to make it through intact, or will they send you back to the Trench in a series of small leaky boxes? Leftovers is a roleplaying game of post-apocalyptic survival in a world of Lovecraftian Horrors... one of which is probably you. The name " Thunderbowl " is ripped off from a loving homage to " the largest table top Blood Bowl league in the western hemisphere ," run in part by a good friend of mine up in Vancouver, BC. Those guys l