Player Typologies in Role-Playing Games
What do people want out of a role-playing games? Probably five different things.
role-playing
Eclipse Phase Second Edition Review
Posthuman studios has always been confident in how they sell their books: they licensed Eclipse Phase with Creative Commons, meaning that the files are free ...
Role-Playing Game Studies: Transmedia Foundations
A bunch of role-playing game scholars wrote a handbook for role-playing game studies. It’s published by Routledge, but as an academic handbook, it’s fairly e...
Halat hisar
Note: This is not an explanation of what Halat hisar was. If you need to understand the context, you can read an explanation written by the organizers.
Nights Black Agents and Zalozhniy Quartet
We recently finished a campaign of Night’s Black Agents, after playing it for 1.5-years and 29-sessions, making it one of the longest campaigns I’ve played. ...
PanoptiCorp, part 2: When Now Is Too Late
This is the second post about PanoptiCorp. The first was about personal experiences, so it actually makes more sense to read this first to get some context f...
PanoptiCorp, part 1: the Soul of a Corper
Warning: this is long, rambly, and has no context. I will write a part 2 with more context, when I’ve had some time to process what I experienced.
Jeepform scenario, iteration 2
I ran a simple jeepform scenario based on Reservoir Dogs a few years ago. I recently became interested in larp again, partly because of Monitor Celestra.
Advanced Dungeons & Discourse
A couple of years back I ran a game of Dungeons & Discourse. It’s based on the brilliant web comic, Dresden Codak. It ran very smoothly, but mostly thank...
Metaphoric Rules in Role-Playing Games
It is very common for role-playing games to extend rules meant for one thing to cover other fields. The archetypical example of this is using combat rules fo...
Mage: The Re-Awakening
I used to run a lot of Mage: the Ascension. Nobilis has almost perfectly taken its place, but for a nostalgia trip, there is no replacing the original. Havin...
Gender in Apocalypse World
I’ve recently been playing Apocalypse World in our weekly playing session. It is a generally good game, at least if you prefer the style: violent, apocalypti...
Post-Mortem: Tyhjyys joka meidät yhdistää (The emptiness that binds us)
Recently, a two-year long campaign ended. With 53 evenings spent playing, it is the longest game I’ve been involved in. We played Heimot, a Finnish science f...
About Randomness in Role-Playing Games
When randomness in role-playing games is discussed, it usually means analysis of specific dice-mechanics. And since most rpg’s employ dice, it is a useful pu...
Ropecon and a new Finnish fantasy role-playing game
Ropecon was just last weekend and a friend of mine, the writer of Cafe Lax, published a role-playing game there: Bliaron. Apparently it sold quite well.
Gaming over great distances
I just played my first game of role-playing over the internet today. I’ve played IRC-based role-playing games before, but these have centered on the text; th...
For all I know, you’re the rat
Reservoir Hounds was a success, at least with some criteria (and some post-game lie). The game ran for less than an hour, but that wasn’t surprising as I wa...
Are Role-Playing Games Art?
The short answer: of course they are! The longer answer? Possibly, see more.
Roadtrip the rpg
Yesterday we drove some nine hours to deliver stuff. Surprisingly it wasn’t few hours of talking and then endless hours of being bored. We got company and on...
The Mountain Witch
I started a game of The Mountain Witch yesterday. I like this game particularly for being so easy to pick up and start with a moments notice.
Political games
Last Sunday we played the third game in my series of political games. ‘Political’ does not here mean that they included political action by the characters, b...
Liquid Crystal
Next weekend I’ll have chance to play Liquid Crystal again. It is a game in which players create and play robots with no personality to start with. The game ...
New year, new ideas
We were sitting in sauna and it was getting late when we decided that it would be a perfect opportunity to play a short game of role-play. Few hours of time,...
Between Heaven and Hell
We’ve been playing Nobilis for some time now. It is a campaign, led by me, about the diplomacy between Heaven and Hell. The players have two sets of characte...
Of theory and practice
A discussion I had with some local rpg-players got me thinking about the history of rpg-theory in Finland. The best known of theories was the one based on th...
ReNutopia
Remember that game of Shadowrun I mentioned before? It died after some three playing sessions. However, it had too much potential & time spent on creatin...
By train, for a change
It’s not something I usually write about1, but I read a few (older) posts by Thanuir about railroading, and I thought about commenting those posts. ...
Computers and role-play
I noticed something when I happened to watch a tv-program on games. It seems (and this is in no way rigorously analytical, just a hunch) that a (computer) ga...
Tähti
We’ve played Mike Pohjola’s new game Tähti (Star) for a few times. It’s a game about teenage mutant ninj- krhm, I mean about a teenage mutant girl band. It’s...
Nutopia
We’ve started a new role-playing game, with an interesting subject. It’s a game of Shadowrun, although we’ve had to make some changes in order to fit the rul...
Ropecon
Ropecon was some time ago. I’ve been trying to concentrate on reading, so commenting on Ropecon is several weeks late. It was an exhausting experience for se...
Dogmatic manifestos
I’ve finally read something I’ve been meaning to read for a long time: the manifestos Dogma 99 and The Manifesto of the Turku School. While I understand, at ...
Chronicle coming to an end
It seems we are finally reviving the larp chronicle we have been writing for several years now. We already agreed that the next part will be the last; maybe ...
Convention problems
We tested the questionnaire J. Matias Kivikangas has written for Alterations yesterday with mainly positive results. There were some minor complications that...