Bluestocking's Organic Gaming

Tonight, my friend A. ran Gamma World for Toronto Area Gamers. Despite there only being two players, I have to say I had quite the hilarious time. So where to begin? Well, if you don't know what Gamma World is, it's a post-apocalyptic game full of whacky and weird creatures and inventions. In this world, the Great Britains (spelled differently) are conquering the world slowly. They wear animal helms to represent their fighting prowess (boars grunt and smash, wolves claw). My friend and I live in a small village occupied by the Britains for the last four years. My character, Nim-we , is a pyrokinetic feline. Yes. I am a flamey cat of doom. So how it works is you pick one random trait. The first thing I picked from the random options was pyrokinetic. This gave me the ability to breathe fire and have a fiery aura at will. Then I chose my second trait, and by magic, I got feline. So instead of being a cat-person a la  Doctor Who , I was like I'm totally a cat. I have ...

While using Facebook chat to natter at my friends, I asked, what should I blog about? They all yelled about a variety of gaming things, from Forgotten Realms to 4.0 to gaming with strangers and most of them all mentioned scheduling being a gruelling and time honoured GM-breaking tradition. What GM hasn't suffered the woes of no-shows, late players, and the dreaded two month schedule talk that never leads to a game and just results in an entire concept being thrown out the window in frustration ? Yeah. Sometimes it's like this . I don't have a solution. Scheduling can make or break a game. There are several approaches you can take to getting the wily folks we call players to line up and get ready to roll some dice, but honestly, I still haven't figured out the best methodology. Here are the tips and tricks, I have learned though. GMs make the best and worst players So... ahem, not to toot our own horn, but I find most often the people who bail last minute or don...

MonsterHearts : A game about the messy lives of teenage monsters ^ That title, right there, sums it up. I'm a huge fan of teenage monsters . When I was just a wee lass, being a social outcast and nerdlet in my local high school , I picked up the books by L.J. Smith . I can't remember which one I read first, but it was likely some part of the Soulmates series, and not the Vampire Diaries. I was already a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer , and so it seemed a natural progression of my inability to belong-ness that I pick up these books and become immersed. And as I got older, I started reading things like Laurell K Hamilton's Anita Blake series (seriously, what happened to her being awesome?). And then I progressed, naturally to Interview by Anne Rice. Eventually I got a little older (or a lot) and moved on past my teenage and early-twenties into a phase where vampires and werewolves took a back seat to lit theory, philosophy, poli sci and other school-like topics that ...