Bluestocking's Organic Gaming

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...

"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...

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...

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...

Remember how I was going to only have the obligatory sexism post? Well! I lied. So a few days after the first incident on Old School Gamers, I dared to click the little icon on my Facebook page just to, you know, see if there were any interesting posts (like about teaching your kids to game, or systems used for Aztec settings, or the gods as tangible), which there were (obviously), but there was also a picture. Of a naked woman. Wearing a chain. Just a chain. It naturally got messy pretty quickly. I'm happy to report I didn't really get much involved because, well, there's a dead horse, and I had a big stick, and decided I'd save my muscle strength for another horse on another day. But that didn't stop the multitudes from crying out sexism! and the multitudes from crying out "tastefully placed chain art!" and the mods from shaking their heads. Of course, this meant my name was brought up. And I was sent messages, both of support and of "you'r...

This is a critical fail. So my good friend and epic GM J is running a GURPS (I know, right?) game he's lovingly called Tales of Adventure . This game has three groups going, each within the same world and the same country, so far. At any point, logically, our characters could meet up, clash swords, order heads be removed, become friends, or fall in love. Anything is possible is this vast and war torn country named Tandesea. I've played GURPS before, twice. Both times with J, so I can't say I know if he's running it correctly (although I doubt he's screwing with it much, he likes rules), but I will say it's becoming increasingly more smooth in every carnation he presents it. The first time was with a game called Chronicles of Ancient Darkness , based on the novels by Michelle Paver. Our characters weren't designed for combat, and there ended up being a lot of combat, so it got a little boggy. In the second game, Shakleton Crater, J brought us to the...

If you're not familiar with H.P. Lovecraft and his racist yet awesome short stories and novella, then by all means, this post isn't for you, and also: Where the hell have you been ? Seriously? For the rest of us sane people who give a nod to one of the biggest names in horror, you'll also likely know that role playing in Lovecraft's fiction has gone through several incarnations since it's original inception as Call of Cthulhu published in 1981. This game used the basic premise of the horror of Lovecraft's world, specifically that of Cthulhu, and combined role playing in the 20's. I own (of course) and have played Call of Cthulhu, the newest edition of which has you playing investigators using percentiles to determine if you do or don't succeed at your actions. As some of you may know, there aren't many percentile games I like, or even love, Maschine Zeit being the great exception. Call of Cthulhu (CoC) is not a great exception. I found it clun...