I'm a sharing mood. Here are two bits from Something Wicked. They're very long, so they're going behind a cut tag.

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I commented early on that one of the things I really wanted to do was treat cosmic horror without Lovecraft being at the center of it. Not in all ways - I'd be an idiot not to quote from the opening of "The Call of Cthulhu", for instance, and I'm not an idiot, so I did. But in some other ways, yes. Here's a keyword intended to do a thing that I've ( Read more... )

So now, after various 1-to-1 exchanges, I have this nagging feeling I'd really enjoy running a HeroQuest campaign in which chimerical monsters (you're not a gorgon, you're the gorgon; you have no species, though you may have a family) try to defend the ancient ruins you share with many other such creatures from amoral loot-seekers and immoral ( Read more... )

 More discussion time! Jeff Richard and I spent some time last night talking about possible "mundane" survival horror settings, pitting characters against human adversaries. We started with deep-cover spies whose cover gets blown, and passed on to spies or others in the midst of the central African wars of the '90s (influenced by my wanting to read ( Read more... )

 Woot! Outline draft done and off to publisher and co-author for review. Happy me. :)

 The blogging continues.

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I’m a big believer in minimizing the need for exposition, in setting things up so that the characters’ progress through the game world shows them what’s going on bit by bit without the necessity for a bunch of discrete lecturing. I’ve also drifted in the direction of feeling that the progress itself is the story, or ( Read more... )

 About cosmic horror, of course.

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On cosmic horror, as (he argues in The Conspiracy Against the Human Race) we all live it, all the time.

For ages they had been without heads. Headless they lived, and headless they died. How long they had thus flourished none of them knew. Then something began to change. It happened over unremembered ( Read more... )

 Back to musing at the Something Wicked blog!

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One of the perennial challenges with horror is making sure that all the participants agree on what is they’re doing. That’s true in all gaming, of course, but when you’re shooting for a particular kind of mood, agreement matters extra.

The usual assumption in gaming storyline is that there’s ( Read more... )

I've been thinking lately about things that are fun to do in rolegaming that don't involve in a lot of violence, carnage, and woe. Please chip in.

Capers: Capers provide a lot of scope for action with a minimum of violence. There is a risk of what John Rogers calls "asshole fatigue" creeping in: there's a cumulative weight of woe from all the bad ( Read more... )

 Today is a day of gaming happiness: HeroQuest characters made and play begun on Return to Apple Lane, and my players were in excellent form. Lots of fun all around.