Home>RPGaDAY2015

Tag: RPGaDAY2015

/

#RPGaDAY2015 Day 31 Favourite Non-RPG Thing To Come Out of RPGs

Wow. This is going to take a bit of actual thinking, at which I believe this month has shown I suck.

Okay, I’m going to cheat and say RPG games in computers. It’s no surprise that I love both Fallout: New Vegas and the Borderlands series. These both have the excitement of a shooter like Call of Duty, but inject it with RPG elements – Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas are basically first person RPGs. It’s a cheat because it’s still an RPG, but adding the computer game element to it changes it in my mind.

And the worst? The D&D movie.

#RPGaDAY2015 is the brainchild of game designer Dave Chapman. Basically, each day in August there is a question about RPGs.

/

#RPGaDAY2015 Day 29 Favourite RPG Website/Blog

I don’t really patronize a lot of websites or blogs per se. Those that I do, I use RSS to read. To be honest, even those that I do have in my feed, I very rarely read.

The one website that does touch on RPG stuff – though it’s more of a straight up geek site – is Hero Press. It’s generally bite-sized chunks of information, pieces of geek interest. Tim Knight, the guy who runs it, seems like a very stand-up dude from the slight interaction I’ve had with him.

But to be honest, the website I use the most in regards to RPGs is Google Plus. I don’t really use Twitter any longer because all the RPG people seem to be at G+, and G+ has a lot more options for cool comms than Twitter.


#RPGaDAY2015 is the brainchild of game designer Dave Chapman. Basically, each day in August there is a question about RPGs.

/

#RPGaDAY2015 Day 27 Favourite Mash-up

Okay, the actual topic is favourite idea for merging two games into one. I’m taking that to mean mashup, but could it also mean you have two games running and you want to merge them into one campaign?

Meh. I’m going with mashup. Not that it helps. Once again, can I just say Sword Noir (hardboiled sword & sorcery)? How about Nefertiti Overdrive (ancient Egypt and kung fu)?

I honestly can’t think of a mashup in RPGs that I have played, at least not one that left a big impression. Expedition to the Barrier Peaks maybe? Or Ravenloft? Those were cool, but it’s not like they made a big impression on me. They were adventures I went through or ran that were interesting, but left behind once we were done.

There was one very short campaign in university in which we played super-powered assassins. We were superheroes in powers, but were government assassins. I guess that’s as close to a mashup as I can recall that made a significant impact on me – as in I loved it.


#RPGaDAY2015 is the brainchild of game designer Dave Chapman. Basically, each day in August there is a question about RPGs.

/

#RPGaDAY2015 Day 26 Favourite Inspiration for your Game

That’s actually pretty easy. As the guy who has run games set in the Viking age, the Roman Empire, and 25th Dynasty Egypt, history is my favourite inspiration. Even for games that are not historical – like our epic Middle Earth campaign – huge amounts of it are informed by history, be that events, personages, or culture.

History, muthafugga. Dig it.


#RPGaDAY2015 is the brainchild of game designer Dave Chapman. Basically, each day in August there is a question about RPGs.

/

#RPGaDAY2015 Day 24 Favourite House Rule

Can I just say Sword Noir? No?

Back when I was playing d20, my favourite house rule wasn’t one of my own, it was Kenneth S. Hood’s Grim ‘N’ Gritty Combat Rules. Originally, these were available for free, but they got so popular, Mr. Hood (or someone representing him) put them up for purchase. That makes total sense to me.

I wrote a review of the free version back in my free e-zine days. You can find that here.


#RPGaDAY2015 is the brainchild of game designer Dave Chapman. Basically, each day in August there is a question about RPGs.

/

#RPGaDAY2015 Day 23 Perfect Game for You

I’m going to interpret this as asking for a kind of Platonic ideal game, as we’ve already talked about favourite games.

The perfect game for me would be a simple system (no more than 20 pages of rules, total) with abstract measurements for your characters, and a single mechanic that addresses any kind of conflict resolution. I don’t want to be rolling too many dice, but I definitely want dice to be rolled. Give the player plenty of narrative input and make creating mechanical obstacles so easy the GM can do it on the fly with a minimum of brain power.

This is the game I am always trying to design. This is the game I always want to play.
#RPGaDAY2015 is the brainchild of game designer Dave Chapman. Basically, each day in August there is a question about RPGs.

/

#RPGaDAY2015 Day 21: Favourite RPG Setting

This one is actually quite easy for me: Iron Crown Enterprise’s Middle Earth from the 1980s.

Man, did we play the shit out of those supplements. We didn’t use the Rolemaster rules or the later MERP. It was all D&D all the time back then, but damn did we love those ICE supplement with their gorgeous maps and amazing story hooks. Our campaign was 100 years after the War of the Ring, and was tied both to some resurgent evil and the return of the Blue Wizards from the East. Some of the setting particulars we had to change or adapt, but there was so much good stuff from the two Mirkwood books, the Mines of Moria, the Riders of Rohan, and so many others.

The one I remember as being the most awesome was the Court of Ardor. It had almost no connection to Tolkien’s actual stuff, but it fit really well with what we were doing in the setting.

This is me getting all nostalgic.


#RPGaDAY2015 is the brainchild of game designer Dave Chapman. Basically, each day in August there is a question about RPGs. This is day 21.

/

RPGaDAY2015 Day 20: Favourite Investigative RPG

#RPGaDAY2015 is the brainchild of game designer Dave Chapman. Basically, each day in August there is a question about RPGs. This is day 20.

Favourite Horror RPG: Okay, this one is nigh impossible. I don’t think I’ve ever played a horror RPG. I’ve never played any kind of White Wolf game, never played any kind of Cthulhu, never fought zombies or hunted ghosts on the tabletop. Now, RPG A Day allows one to choose something else if one doesn’t have an answer, so I’m going to go with Favourite Investigative RPG.

And that’ll be easy. Gumshoe. I used the Esoterrorists to run a short-lived X-Files meets Planetary campaign, and it worked fantastic. I love it for what it does – investigations. The best part is that the philosophy that drive it to excel for investigations is easily adaptable to most games. And it has for my games.