Originally published at Figures of Text. Please leave any comments there.

Friends of mine run a monthly Artistic Challenge Throwdown on facebook. While it’s primarily visual artist and craft, I sometimes get a short story in for it. This month’s submission is below the cut.

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Originally published at Figures of Text. Please leave any comments there.

There’s a general election on Friday. It’s going to be an earth-shaking, transformative election, unprecedented in the history of the Irish state. This time, we’re going to vote for the other lot, not the usual lot. In fact, the usual lot are pretty screwed, because they broke ( Read more... )

Originally published at Figures of Text. Please leave any comments there.

A year ago, more or less, I got an out-of-the-blue phone call from Mongoose, informing me that my contract was being terminated. I was Mongoose’s longest-serving staff writer by far, having started way back in May of 2003. That equates to roughly five million words, by the way ( Read more... )

Originally published at Figures of Text. Please leave any comments there.

As a spin-off from last week’s thoughts - one element that works well with antagonistic PCs is the concept of ‘temporary’ characters. If you kill off my 12th level D&D elf wizard who I’ve levelled up from 1st, that’s a big thing. If you kill off the elf wizard I came up with ( Read more... )

Originally published at Figures of Text. Please leave any comments there.

Writing adventures (and I’ve been doing a lot of that lately), I was struck by the odd gap between the player’s side and the GM’s material. What’s the first or second chapter in most RPGs? Character creation - how to make your player character. Your singular, lonely, self- ( Read more... )

Originally published at Figures of Text. Please leave any comments there.

I started a new D&D4e campaign with my sunday group. It’s the third time I’ve tried running a fourth edition campaign for that group. I’m having trouble hitting the right tone - the first game’s setting was too restrictive, the second was my attempt to run Old School play with ( Read more... )

Originally published at Figures of Text. Please leave any comments there.

Two quick reviews as I run out the door…

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Originally published at Figures of Text. Please leave any comments there.

Along with thousands of other gamers, I picked up the Gamers Help Haiti bundle from DriveThruRPG. It’s an astonishingly generous offer from the hundreds of publishers involved, giving something like $1400 worth of products away for free with a $20 donation to disaster relief. ( Read more... )

Originally published at Figures of Text. Please leave any comments there.

I’ve always said that my year doesn’t start until Warpcon, and that’s definitely true this year. That lets me put the last week, which includes hard drive failures, medical bills and the car dying in the middle of the road in torrential rain as well as the whole redundancy ( Read more... )

Originally published at Figures of Text. Please leave any comments there.

Dead Presidents is easily one of the top five campaigns I’ve run. Off the top of my head, the other contenders are The Chrysanthemum Road, the SLA Industries game with the orbital fire truck, my Nobilis playtest, Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, and my first Blue Planet ( Read more... )