In 2012 I got an e-mail from a friend who was thinking about writing a Cyberpunk game, with some sketchy mechanics based on Apocalypse World. I read the stuff, but I didn't really grok it, and in particular the idea of a mission-based Cyberpunk game seemed like it'd been pretty thoroughly done by Cyberpunk 2020 and others. Defining Cyberpunk is ( Read more... )

Designing a murder mystery is not easy. Figuring out the complex interlocking clues that lead to one unique solution is so hard that even most detective fictions don't actually do it, they chat by allowing bridging facts to be introduced in the denouement. Even novels like Ellory Queen's where the novel explicitly claims at a certain point that the ( Read more... )

Uncharted WorldsI think this may have been the only Space Opera on offer at the con - pretty typically SF is under-represented at KapCon. I've often pondered why it's easier to imagine nameless horrors from beyond space and time organising cultists to summon them than flying through space and meeting intelligent aliens, but there you are. I ( Read more... )

The last few years have been spent honing my presentation of Gumshoe in its various forms, so when I was staring at my big pile of familiar games and deciding what I should run in 2021, it felt like the easy and obvious choice. It also felt like a risky one, because I tend to think that these highly procedural games with a fairly complex ruleset ( Read more... )

KapCon Games are unlike most things we do and consume, in that they are a fairly big, and fairly blind, gamble at the best of times. Few specific scenarios have any kind of meaningful cultural or market footprint before you select whether you want to play them at a convention. Even if they did, anyone who's run a scenario more than once knows that ( Read more... )

So it's time for my annual post about KapCon, which is something like a new year's celebration and a time capsule about what kinds of things have interested me at different times. My first KapCon was, I think, in '95, the first or second year it'd been moved from Kapiti to Wellington. It was held in a conference room at the Museum Hotel, one huge ( Read more... )

I ran my game twice, in my preferred mid-day rounds. I said to my friend Sara the day or so before the convention that I thought it was the weakest scenario I'd brought to the convention since the absolutely dire Horror Victorianorum, because it's a scenario that breaks probably the most fundamental RPG story design rule: it is a story not about ( Read more... )

This game is one of those new-fangled "Shared Narrative" games where players collaborate on a story via a set of methods and mechanisms designed to simulate a particular kind of story. Whether this is still a "roleplaying game" is something that I've vacilated on since my original throw-down with Steve Hickey over The Lucky Joneses over a decade ( Read more... )

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Everyone knows that I don't LARP, so especially given that I live in a different country there were some people who were surprised to see me this morning at the LARP convention Chimera - the vast majority of people I saw were totally new faces to me. I'd somewhat lazily signed up for all non-costume LARPs, in part to save haulage from the UK, in ( Read more... )