Tonight, Justin O'Dell showed up at The Compleat Strategist, and the two of us played John Harper's two page RPG Ghost/Echo (pdf link) with a guy named Drew. The rest of the crew played Dogs in the Vineyard. I was really skeptical about running Ghost/Echo at first, but it turned out great. The document consists of a page of flavorful lists, a ( Read more... )

Thursday, I talked about gaming in a parking lot until a quarter to one. Immediately prior to that, I talked about gaming inside The Compleat Strategist. Before that, I played Paul Czege's My Life With Master for the first time. I actually looked through my financial records and confirmed that I bought the game in October of 2005, making it the ( Read more... )

Many of my gentle readers are removed from me by great distances, but a thanks to the power of the Internet and a pleasant confluence of events, you get to see and hear some of the people I hang with. Embedded below is footage of a convention that was held New Jersey this past weekend, which was attended by some folks I've grown rather fond of.

( ( Read more... )

Last year, I mentioned I wanting to spin an entire game or campaign out of three lonely paragraphs from Greg Stolze's ...in Spaaace!  I've finally done something with that impulse.

The Thursday Night Crew is going to try In a Wicked Age, but we wanted to come up with our own setting and random inspiration generators.  So we all submitted ideas ( Read more... )

Mea culpa: This is what I get for only being on the fortieth page of Houses of the Blooded at the time I wrote the original post.  As Sam Zeitlin (
( Read more... )

Man, do I ever agree with somebody. Okay, several somebodies, but I'm only talking about one right now. Tango is fun! Especially the promenade with underarm turn I learned two weeks ago. Seriously, I've been having a blast taking lessons at Dance Factory in Arlington. It's a very friendly independent dance studio (as opposed to Arthur Murray's ( Read more... )

But first, we interrupt our regular programming to let you know that Greg Costikyan is both thinking in public and looking for fellow thinkers. The discussion has some gems, and led me to articles like this one on the Netflix Prize. Death to the games industry, long live the games.
...

It was not until I discovered the Television Tropes and Idioms ( Read more... )

The Thursday Night crew helped playtest Brennan Taylor's How We Came to Live Here. It's a South-Western Native American myth kind of role-playing game that's not quite finished. Until it gets finished, you can download it for free. As you already know, I've enjoyed playing his game Mortal Coil, and I've got his crazy d20 space game Bulldogs! on ( Read more... )

... would be an excellent name for a rock band.

Speaking of the offensive but strangely compelling, the good people at Penny Arcade have furnished a link to an article containing several anecdotes about the (as you will see) bizarre tactical PC game King's Bounty: The Legend. a game I may have to partake of after (1) I have money, and (2) I tire of ( Read more... )

1) I'm leaving to get my Saab in Richmond!

2) The epilogue to the epilogue of our Mortal Coil game, by me:
"Tell me the story of that constellation, grandpa!"

The ancient man, shaved bald and adorned in robes tied tightly with green cord, looked with love upon the smiling girl. He craned his head toward the heavens with a grace that belied his age. ( Read more... )