April 10, 2012

Werewolf Translation Guide Released

The Werewolf Translation Guide is out! My longest piece for White Wolf for a while, and a chance to really get my teeth into both Werewolf games.

GO!

April 10, 2012

Tailoring RPGs to Smartphones

If you want to imagine the process of laying out an RPG, imagine hitting yourself in the nutsack (if you possess one) with a ball-peen hammer for several hours until you’re numb to the pain, then coming back to do it again six months later just as everything’s healed because you love it when your testicles swell to the size of cricket balls.¹

Ed Healy mentioned on Twitter this morning that 80% of Americans will have smartphones by the end of 2013². In his own inimitable style, he also asked of those of us who create games: “Will you create content for them?”³

Read more... gaming pipe dream self-publishing for stoats

March 10, 2012

Sketch 3: In The Cards

This sketch was delayed when I realised that the one preceeding it hinged around a fundamentally bad design choice. Which was a bit of a kick in the knackers, really. But that’s done now. On with the show!

Elevator Pitch

A game of modern magic riffing off the typical “occult underground” where characters are second-stringers and part-timers suddenly given the power of the Arcana. Character creation is done by a set of interlinking cards. Gravel meets Time & Temp meets, well, something else.

Mass Effecting the Thousand Suns

Mass Effecting the Thousand Suns is my hack of James Maliszewski’s Thousand Suns RPG—my go-to game for all manner of traditional SF roleplaying when I’m in a mood for something other than Trinity—to tackle one of the most gameable science fiction universes of recent years. Yes, I am of course referring to Farscape.

Despite Mass Effect 3 being released today in the UK[^1], I’ve not included anything from the Mass Effect games in the file. Partly, that’s because it’s all new stuff that will take time and energy to assimilate and translate into a rules framework. Mostly, it’s because my copy didn’t show up today despite being dispatched three days ago. I’m currently frothing and ready to kill someone. That’s surely the perfect mood in which to learn page layout in a whole new program, including the happy fun discovery that it can’t do something that you actually need for another project. I’m drifting.

Interlude One: Zero Point Expansion

As part of moving Æternal Legends from Mob United Media to Zero Point Information, we’ve had to do some re-arrangement of products at our various storefronts.

ZPI is now on Lulu. If you’re after a print copy of Æternal Legends, you can get it. If you want a PDF of Æternal Legends, well, you can get that too. And if you want to get Touched by Darkness or BLACK SEVEN along with your order, you can.

Read more... release self-publishing for stoats

February 21, 2012

Sketch 2: BLACK SEVEN in Print

Some things are simply commercially unviable. This sketch is one of those things: my dream of a print version of BLACK SEVEN

Elevator Pitch

BLACK SEVEN is awesome. But wouldn’t it be more awesome in print? Not as a boxed set, but a manilla envelope containing all you need to run the game for friends and at cons.