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Wood engraving in "Andersen's Fairy Tales", by Hans Tegner This continues a long-form campaign, Zen and the Art of Caravan Maintenance. Joshua and Emmett are now cattle ranchers, both seeking a quiet change in career for various reasons. They’re driving buggalo from Emerald City to the Porcelain Citadel. Now on the Lime Steppes, the Matriarch of the Pine clan is asking for a favour… Do ya like dogs? ...

This continues a long-form campaign, Zen and the Art of Caravan Maintenance. Joshua and Emmett are now cattle ranchers, both seeking a quiet change in career for various reasons. They’re driving buggalo from Emerald City to the Porcelain Citadel. Currently they’re in Violet City, hanging out with some Lime Nomad pilgrims, after irritating some lovable street-life. More drugs, some commeuppance. ...

Opening illustration to "The Cloud Kingdom", drawn by Charles Robinson I’m currently running a Ultraviolet Grasslands campaign, and like every other campaign I run, I’m really focussed on making the weather a big part of it. Just travelling should be a challenge — not the greatest challenge in the game — but not a literal walk in the park. I want the party hunting for dry firewood, or stuck at a swollen river, or so cold they can’t face breaking camp. Not every single day, obviously, but an “encounter” for me doesn’t have to be “kill a thing that’s appeared with suspicious regularity”. ...

This continues a (hopefully) long-form campaign, Zen and the Art of Caravan Maintenance. Joshua and Emmett are now cattle ranchers, both seeking a quiet change in career for various reasons. They’re driving buggalo from Emerald City to the Porcelain Citadel Last session they were approaching Violet City, and had resolved to kick back and explore for a week. ...

Time for a new game. I want to run Luka’s Ultra Violet Grasslands again, but I just don’t quite understand his SEACAT engine, so I’m going to use Black Hack for that1. We’re going to make a travelogue in the Vastlands! Joshua and Emmett are now cattle ranchers, both seeking a quiet change in career for various reasons. They’re driving buggalo from Emerald City to the Porcelain Citadel We had a Session Zero and talked about the kind of game the three of us wanted to take part in, and we all wanted something pretty chill. Violence should be largely avoidable (minimal surprise ambushes!) Not too grim (some of Luka’s flavour-text is being elided) Enjoy the ride, we’re thinking of the Westerns we like and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintence ...

This was a game I played in rather than ran for once! It’s a published adventure in both The One Ring (and Adventures in Middle Earth) 1e, now updated to 2e. So unlike normal, I’ll skip the story. In AiME it’s To Dungeons Deep in Erebor Adventures - for TOR 2e it’s been lowered in difficulty of enemies considerably, but otherwise is identical. Thoughts The good stuff: It’s great being in LotR again - I don’t know why I like playing games in Tolkein’s world....

TROIKA! It’s just fun to write down. The caps and the exclaimation mark are part of the name, even. It’s a silly game of nonsense lands and people and animals. I think of it as a less-complicated version of Hypertellurians - you don’t have a crazy selection of powers, or stat damage across three stats. Instead, scatter a couple of points across Skill, Stamina, and Luck, and then pick or roll a background. Backgrounds are things like Befouler of Ponds or Questing Knight rather than “urchin”. They give you some belongings and some skills; like spells or the ability to fight, scry, or dive. Like a very light class. So, I had a single session to fill, and I thought this would be a perfect pick. I’ll just run a lightweight pointcrawl across a city for a bit, what can go wrong? DEAAATH! That’s what. ...

The blog has been pretty empty in 2022, as I’ve changed timezone and country, and not played many RPGs. But I’m getting slowly back into the swing of it again, and as I’m doing that I realised it’s the same time of year I’ve been writing what I want to play next. After two years of lockdown-triggered online experiments, the real world beckons. So, compared to last year, I have finally run a session of TROIKA!...

Here’s DELVE, which describes itself as a solo map drawing game. Clearly I have a theme of map drawing games, but the others have been co-op games and this one is not! It’s almost a turn-based city-builder. ...