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Showing posts from 2014

Game Review: 13th Age

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Once upon a time there was Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition. And everybody hated it. I mean EVERYBODY . And because everyone hated it, and whined about it, and bitched about it, other games sprouted up trying to "fix" it. One example is Gamma World, which is a crazy dark kinda awesome but way out there game about a bunch of freaks doing shit. And the other one I've encountered is 13th Age . My friend A is running this for myself and a few other guys. And yes. I'm going to start mentioning the gender ratio in my games because I feel it's important. But all my games definitely have at least one female. Me. So I've never truly seen an all guys game. I've run for them, and I know the results are rarely what I would call a "good" game. But I'm just bias. This could also just be my experience individually. I don't make claims to say that a group of guys can't have a good game. I've just heard a lot of guys talk about how girls ch...

Game Review: Summerland

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"The world has changed. The Event brought the Sea of Leaves into our world, an immense forest that choked cities and drowned civilisation overnight. From the trees came the Call, a lure to the weak that left only pockets of humanity remain, resisting the woods' siren song. In the endless forests lurk the Lost, those whose wills were drowned by the Call, and the Wild, who have forgotten they were ever human. Can you be one of the select few who can resist the Call? Welcome to Summerland, a role-playing game of desolation and redemption beneath the Sea of Leaves." Isn't that compelling? Doesn't that just make you go "Ooooh" and want to read more? Well, it did me, and I'm eternally happy I did. I've been running one-shots of Summerland for about four years now, and enjoying every one I've ran. I even did a brief foyer into a campaign of it, but my social life was eaten by school just as it was beginning and sadly it fell apart. Th...

Let's Not Talk About Love

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I have an important question for you. It's really important. And I think it's part of the indie game scene that needs to be talked about. And focused on. So here it is: Has your character ever fallen in love with another player's character? For most of my gaming career, I have always attempted to have some sort of emotional bond to at least one other character in the game I was playing. As I played, I started as siblings, to wives, to cousins, to lovers, to exes, and eventually, back to siblings. But there was never really any emotion involved in these titles I picked up for my characters. It was just a fact about them. However, I've found over the last few years, as women have become more and more common, and the story has become more and more the focus, that's slowly changing. Emotions and emotional games are starting to take hold. It's perfectly normal now for my characters to run an emotional marathon with one or two other PC's. I will always a...

Confessions of a Gamer: The Little Ways Gaming Infiltrates My Life

Hello friends. My name is Kate. I have been a gamer for 15 years. I have been a GM for the same amount of time. I first started gaming when I bought a box set for D&D 3.0 and ran an adventure for my mom and a friend. I was hooked before I even got that box set. But let's be honest, gaming comes into your life, if you're like me at all, in more ways than just how many saturdays a year you spend at a table with dice. Maybe it's because I help run the largest gaming club in Toronto, or because I just am one of those all or nothing types, but there are things that gaming does to my life I don't usually confess to. Until today. #1. All of my characters and games have theme songs What? You don't do this too? C'mon. So for every character, and about 20% of my NPCs that are important, I choose theme songs. You can see my Deliria soundtrack here . I will spend hours of my free time searching for the right song. And then for the rest of the month/year while I'm...