The Gaming Den

You can also ask the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence for their take on the matter, in the Quadriennal Intelligence Community Review 2009.

OK, for Ars Magica 5th edition we have to start at the fucking cover , because that's where the weirdness starts. This book proudly states that is is “Created by Jonathan Tweet & Mark Rein • Hagen,” which would be pretty impressive if true. But it's not. This book was not touched at any point b...

But also, the fact that the continent was touched upon so late in the line did not help. So to speak, all the good plots had already been allocated. Since their supernatural individuals are pretty much defined by what events they were involved in, you get as a rule of thumbs that the more important...

This bit has always astounded me. Africa and the Middle East have regions of astounding inequality, have played host to some of the oldest civilizations on the planet and on a meta-level this book came out super late in V:tM's lifecycle. Under such circumstances how do you feature a book on these r...

It also needs be said that this is an American product developed primarily for an American audience, and Americans are a bit more race-conscious about the whole thing than some other countries. Which isn't to say Black British people or Black Germans or Beurs or whatnot don't have their own issues,...

For example, one clan wants to hire your team to rough up a leader from another clan so that they can push some sort of legislation through. In this case, if one or more of your team members are in either of these clans, it is problematic. Unless your group is made up of character who do not care a...

Even In Nomine, where you literally can play a judeo-christian angel or demon and report to an archangel and have actually had angels called to the golden throne before God is willing to go there. In the setting, there's a place called "The Marches", which is basically where abandoned god...

But in general, I do believe that having people get a pile of attributes and then a pile of skill points is fundamentally better than having people buy their skill points and attribute points from a three digit or larger pile. People kind of want to have characters with slightly more total attribut...

The more I read, the more I think what you're looking for may be something that Humanity never ever conceived in the entire history of ideas. Finding two opposing concepts is trivially easy (that's what antonyms are for). Finding four who would be exclusive in pair is not. Only fantasy novels and RP...

It wasn't my original intention. I wanted to point out how you could conceptually divide the world between the four gods following this model, and I ended up checking if Games Workshop guys didn't actually used those elements as a basis, and wrote it up to explain some concepts further. I guess that...

I'd try establishing some link between the four Gods of Chaos and the four classical elements, borrowing from astrology. - Khorne is Fire : active and brave. Color is red. In astrology, the associated signs are Aries (horns), Leo (claws, fangs), and Sagittarius (the only sign carrying a weapon, albe...

The Crusades comprise eight major holy wars and countless lesser conflicts from the 9th to 11th centuries. Obviously, this book was written by one dude in the days before wikipedia, but what the actual fuck? According to modern Wikipedia, the First Crusade starts in 1096, when the 11th century is a...

D&D, on the other hand, assumes nothing even remotely interesting ought to happen in town. You shop, you leave. That isn't vaguely true, and hasn't been for decades (disregarding 4e's 'nothing moves if the player's don't witness it'). Even Gygax had shit going on in towns in his modules. In tem...

Back in 1997, French companies Multisim and Kalisto made the Dark Earth RPG, novels and video game , whose post-apocalyptic setting revolved around literal points of light: the remains of humanity gathered in the few small places sun was still shining on. But the difference between Dark Earth and D&...

Anyway, most of the "real world history can't possibly be connected to this history" problems can easily be waved away with either "when the mana cycle went below the magic point it altered the fossil record, so that's why it appeared to have never happened and everyone thought it wa...

You know, it's kind of weird that earthdawn isn't just set so far back in the past that all this stuff could happen. Like- stone henge is old, really, really old, and there's evidence of structures very much like stone henge as far south as the coast of Africa, suggesting an empire or group of affi...

That reasoning seems flimsy; of those six billion people, less than 1% are going to be magically active, and even if they are, the magical traditions are not very compatible with technology and can't be reproduced and researched the way advanced technology can. Plus, magic is influenced enough by p...

Shadowrun has [...] gone through a double digit number of line developers. Wait, what? I know only about six of them (Tom Dowd, Nigel Findley, Michael Mulvihill, Rob Boyle, Peter Taylor, and Jason Hardy). That is, unless you count the period during which so little editorial control was exerted that...

Not only that, but actual rules, advice and procedures on how to do that, the same way we have right now for prepping runs, legworking, etc. and closing up with an actual example of this setup presenting a small scale region with local movers and shakers and opportunities for the runners to engage ...

So all you require from Shadowrun to be a sandbox-compatible game would be a one-liner somewhere in the rulebook that says shadowrunners can also keep a watch on corporate activities, select valuable targets for extractions and datasteal by themselves, and get through a fixer to fence them after the...

Per Mulvihill's own admission, they intended Dunkelzahn's ritual to involve a nuclear explosion contained by a magical barrier, but they never wrote it down in a published product. The first actual nuclear explosion in SR history happened in Burning Bright , which was written by Tom Dowd when he was...

What's wrong with the nukes in SR? Is there some reason authors decided to make nukes not work? Originally, Shadowrun first edition had some nukes totally working in 2004, when Israel destroyed half of Lybian cities (without ever suggesting how the Middle East would turn out after several millions ...

The Dark Side Pool: For a system with dice pools. The gamemaster puts a bucket with some colored dice in front of him. Players are free to pick up additional dice from it whenever they want to boost their roll. Whatever the result, the player keeps the dice in front of him until the GM "call t...

However, sometimes I wonder if this assumption shouldn't be questioned some and society's competence should be scaled back a little bit. Because of the way the rules are used, equipment and procedures in SR are faultless until someone glitches his roll. And the way it is played, there is no roll un...

In SR mages get a whole list of powers nobody else has. This is at least: Casting Magic Magical Defense Summoning magical monsters Dismissing magical monsters Astral perception Astral projection Making magical weapons Using magical weapons I tend to think they should be unbundled and you get to dec...