Roll Some Dice

Our hero. Hey, so Gateway is this weekend and I never even did a proper recap of Gamex . What can I say? I've been busy. In lieu of recapping -- and also because I'd like to recap GenCon sometime before November -- I'm just going to post some pictures of the Big Board and some props. A brief recap of the storyline, though: The Modron Hierarchy has decided that the Prime Material Plane, and specifically the plane-hopping adventurers therefrom, is a serious threat to Mechanus and the Hierarchy. They believe there's a correlation between extra-planar incursions from the Prime Material and the rising numbers of rogue modrons over the millennia. The obvious solution is to destroy the Prime Material, and thus preserve Order. But you can't just destroy a plane of existence like that, not if you're a modron. There are procedures and protocols to follow. Forms to fill out, presumably. The wheels of bureaucracy turn slowly. Plus, you have to be sure about t

Finally got around to taking a few pictures of our Living Dungeon World Big Board o' Facts . Right now, those facts are still in sticky-note form. I'll recopy them on the board for improved legibility and post a recap of the weekend soon, but I thought I'd post some pictures just to give you an idea of what went on. (Disclaimer: They will give you no idea of what went on.) An overview of the chaos. Multiple Prime Material Planes, and my shameless AD&D cribbing. Isgoth, an owlbear the size of "OH MY GOD!" Halflings are boring homebodies who do parkour. "Boring" is a relative term here. Bards : Narcotics :: Kobolds : Hot Oil. Halflings are complicated. (Also, more S2 nonsense.) Rinaldo, daring two-eyed leader of the Modron  Rebellion! Shh! Don't tell the Protectors of Dragonmount their lives have lost all meaning.  Confused yet? That makes three of us.

Little change of plans for Living Dungeon World at Gamex . It's still on. We're just trying something new. I'd previously alluded to us doing something very much like what we did at OrcCon , but we've since decided to scale things back a bit. In part this is because two of our GMs from OrcCon won't be around for Gamex ( Hamish has returned to his ancestral homeland of New Zealand for the summer, and Andrew recently relocated to the Bay Area), and while Colin will be around he'll be running the Houses LARP on Saturday night, so he'll have his hands full with that. So with our numbers thusly reduced, it seemed, shall we say, foolhardy to try to replicate what we did last time. New plan! Jesse and I have recruited one Vernon Lingley into our ranks -- whom, if you are lucky, you already know -- and the three of us will be running a total of five  Dungeon World sessions over the course of the weekend. Yes, that's cut down from the 10 previously

So hey, this happened: My Game Chef entry, The Eleventh Hour , is a Finalist . Pretty cool! I was more than a little surprised to discover that, to be honest -- not because I'm not proud of my work, but because seriously, there were 96 other entries this time around. And 15 of them were in Italian! How'm I gonna compete with that? Apparently, the answer is "Somehow." The bell pepper symbolizes games. Anyway, I'm pretty psyched about this turn of events, because it means I've made the Finals three years in a row now, which certainly feels like a feat. I kinda don't really count 2010's Action City , which may be unfair, but the Finals for that year didn't even involve any peer review or any real critical process. Still, I did get positive feedback about it, so I'm not dismissing it altogether. I do not expect to win, nor do I care one way or the other about winning (honestly!). There were a ton of really interesting, innovative entries t

Hey! We're bringing Living Dungeon World back for Gamex , this Memorial Day Weekend. What's Living Dungeon World? Glad you asked! This is DUNGEON WORLD. It is a world of monsters and heroes, gods and demons, swords and sorcery, Good... and Evil. This is your world. And it's alive. Living Dungeon World is a weekend-long series of connected heroic-fantasy games. Play in as many or as few games as you like. Start as a lowly villager Friday afternoon and forge your legend over the course of the weekend, or drop in on one of the nine sessions just to see what this whole awesome thing's all about.  Change the world, or just visit it. It's up to you. New to Dungeon World ? No problem! Dungeon World is a simple system based on Vincent Baker's Apocalypse World , but focused on action and adventure rather than interpersonal drama. No previous experience is required, and all GMs will be happy to have first-time players at the table

A number of readers wrote in about Game Chef , and both of them asked, "Hey, when does the next Game Chef start?" The answer: Last week! Next question: When's the submission deadline? Answer: About 90 minutes ago! Yeah, sorry I didn't mention anything about it until now. Honestly, I've just been busy with stuff, including my own Game Chef entry, and ended up not getting around to posting about it in time. So... I hope you found out about it on your own and submitted something, because I was useless in that regard. Anyway, the theme was "Last Chance," in honor of the imminent demise of The Forge . I'm sure it'll produce a lot of lighthearted, fun little games. Like my game. This is a game about four cultists working in the shadows to bring about the end of the world. The Grand Convergence – an alignment of heavenly bodies that only occurs once a millennium – approaches, and with it a rare opportunity to call forth an otherworldly e

So! I finally got around to taking some pictures of the Big Board at Living Dungeon World last month . The Big Board was... well, it was the big board on which we tracked all of the emergent world-building stuff that came up during play. Whenever a player or GM came up with a detail about the world, like the name of a god or an important past event, or when something significant happened in play, like and outstanding warrant or a character death, we'd write it down on a Post-It and stick it on the board. At some point, I transcribed most of those notes onto the board itself. Since we all had such a good time with Living Dungeon World at OrcCon, we're pretty set on doing it again for Gamex in May . The idea is that we'll have another Big Board, but the setting we collectively created at OrcCon will serve as a foundation on which to build. It should also be noted that none of us really knows what we're doing, and we're pretty much making it all up as we go. Any

This year's OrcCon proved a notable convention for a few reasons. One, it was practically bursting at the seams, with record attendance and so many RPGs submitted that around 30 had to be turned away for lack of space. (Crazy, right?) Two, I managed to cajole pop-culture writer and RPG virgin Todd VanDerWerff into attending the full con to finally experience for himself what this whole RPG thing is about. Three, LIVING DUNGEON WORLD. (And four: A game of Descent that finished in under five hours. But I'm getting ahead of myself.) Note: This is super-long. You've been warned. Friday afternoon, I ran Dungeoncrew , my D&D-ish hack of the excellent Supercrew . This is how bad this whole hacking thing has gotten for me: I'd never run or even played Supercrew before, but as soon as I read it, I started wondering how easily it could make the leap to the dungeon. The answer, of course, is "So easily it's almost there already." If you haven't gott