All posts by Seamus Conneely

An escaped Mad Adventurer on the loose! After playing tabletop RPGs for a decade and a half and GMing for most of that I turned my hand towards writing for/about them! Since then I've added another decade on top of that, oh gods. I got my start with the Gaming Security Agency, and then joined the Mad Adventurers Society for a few years before setting up CHG. I write about games here, have written for games such as Transit: The Spaceship RPG and materials published by Raging Swan Press and Beer Star Games, and have written entire games such as Lost Among The Starlit Wreckage. You can find me personally @RGM79Ace or under cannibalhalflinggaming on the various socials.
A Glimpse Into The Vault, Articles

The Price of Coal – A Labor Day Review

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“In 1920, the coal miners of West Virginia faced shameful living conditions, and even worse working conditions. Miners were paid subsistence wages, despite high profits, or even paid only in scrip which could only be used at the company-owned store. Within the mines themselves, workers experienced frequent cave-ins and other dangerous accidents, as the operators were reluctant to reduce production for the sake of safety. Whispers of unionization began to arise in the mountains. The coal companies responded harshly, employing company gun thugs to violently and cruelly enact the company’s will upon the miners. Events escalated from there, including the declaration of martial law, spiraling into the 1921 assassination of Sid Hatfield, who had by then become a local icon and a leader to the miners throughout the region. Federal troops were dispatched to Blair Mountain, including aerial bombers equipped with leftover gas and explosive bombs from the Great War. Days of guerrilla warfare followed, during which as many as one hundred miners were killed for the crime of wanting a better life.”

This is, in actual real life, The Price of Coal – and for our purposes, it is also a GMless storytelling game for 3-5 players by Jennifer Adcock!

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Articles, The Independents

Clever Girl Review – Wretched & Together With A Raptor

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You probably know the story – a theme park where things go horribly awry, but instead of an accident on a ride or something there are real dinosaurs on the loose and they’re eating everyone. There is a solitary survivor, holed up in the park’s control center, trying to figure out how they’re going to survive and get off of the island. There is also, however, a raptor leading a pack of their fellows in trying to get to the human to avenge themselves upon their former tormenter. The human has chosen to live; can they? The raptor has chosen to embark on a crusade of vengeance; will it destroy them? This is Clever Girl, two-games-in-one by Matthew Gravelyn!

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Articles, Editorial

Cyberpunk Edgerunners Mission Kit Advance Review

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Few tabletop roleplaying games have leveraged other forms of licensed media into improved sales of the original material better than R Talsorian Games’ Cyberpunk. No game has popped back into our weekendly noting of bestsellers more times long after initial release than Cyberpunk RED, and while they’re not the only factor the biggest noticeable spikes were in the wake of first Cyberpunk 2077 and then Studio Trigger’s Cyberpunk: Edgerunners anime. For those who played as V and watched David Martinez chrome up and went looking for more, though, RED could be a bit jarring: it’s still Night City, but a very different one, not 1:1 the setting the players and viewers would have been hooked by. Clearly the bait was good enough,  but a certain Fixer got us a look at something that will pull them in ever better ahead of its release: the new Cyberpunk Edgerunners Mission Kit. Wake up, samurai. We’ve got a beginner’s game to review.

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Articles, The Independents

Stewpot: Tales from A Fantasy Tavern Backerkit Review

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The tavern is the fulcrum point of the adventuring lifestyle. It’s where wandering heroes can find food and shelter after weeks out in the wilderness, it’s where quests can often begin… and it’s where quite a few stories find their happy ending. After all, being an adventurer is a tough life. Many adventurers, whether they retire after a successful career or call it quits early, get the idea to be the ones running the tavern, providing the same things they needed back when to a younger generation. It can take some doing, however, integrating back into settled society after a life living on the road and by sword and spell. How do you let go of who you were, and who will you become? Let’s have a taste of Stewpot: Tales from a Fantasy Tavern from Takuma Okada, now on Backerkit with Evil Hat Productions!

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Articles, The Independents

The Facility – A Breathless Choose Your Own Mad Science Adventure

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You awaken, cold and in the dark. Fumbling around by low blue lights in a coffin shaped pod. You pull yourself out of the box, and in the dark see the faces of others. You are all wearing loose fitting white clothing and laceless shoes. Hospital patients? You peer into the dark, seeing little but hearing the sound of dripping, running water and distant machinery. You gather what you can, knowing that something is hunting you. It will be here soon.

Wait.

Can you remember who you are?

Welcome to The Facility by Galen Pejeau!

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Articles, Solitaire Storytelling

Solitaire Storytelling: No Map, No Plan

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A good heist requires an immense amount of careful setup. Details about the security, the target, the way in and the way out, the crew, the tools needed, all of those need to be studied and planned for extremely carefully in order to make success as likely as possible.

I have none of that.

There’s a big fancy estate up on that hill that I know has to be full of all sorts of goodies. There’s me. And there’s the cover of darkness.

I have no idea what I’m heading into tonight, where anything is, or how I’m going to get away, but I’m still determined to make a fortune with No Map, No Plan.

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Articles, The Independents

World Ending Game – Saying Goodbye With Style

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“Think about screenplays and films, or the final episode of a television show that you know will not be renewed. Think about saying goodbye to friends who are moving away. Think about the last day of summer vacation. Think about funerals. Think about the restaurant that closed all those years ago, and the noodles they used to serve. Think about the best birthday party you ever had. Think about putting off the last chapter of a book until tomorrow. Think about grief, and relief. Think about the end of a world. Think about the feeling of emerging from a movie theater into a dark parking lot, under the stars.” Longtime readers might recall I’ve written about saying goodbye to characters before, but that was largely in a ‘how to remember and treasure them’ way. The reasoning behind that article is, however, the same one that drew me to check out the subject of this one: the attachment to characters that we’ve created and a desire for closure as we leave them, and the snapshot of their lives that we played out, behind. This is a look at World Ending Game by Everest Pipkin.

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Articles, Indie Frontiers

Zine Month 2024 Round-Up

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Lock your credit cards, hide your wallet, tell your banks to close early, because it’s February and that means a veritable deluge of new tabletop roleplaying game zines taking their shot at getting created with some crowdfunded help. Down the hall Aaron can be heard trying to keep his head above water with the first wave of ZineQuest projects on Kickstarter (there’s an alarming number of gargling sounds), but as has been tradition I’m taking a look beyond the white-green halls of the original ZQ to see what other excellent projects can be found in the wider Zine Month 2024.

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Articles, System Hack

System Hack: Cyberpunk RED Minions

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Two of the roads with the most traffic to Cyberpunk RED are, naturally, players of Cyberpunk 2077 and players of older tabletop editions like Cyberpunk 2020. However, once arriving at their new carmine destination there are naturally going to be a few disconnects, and one of the biggest is in the nature of combat. The smart Cyberpunk 2020 party wanted to blast their opponents to chunky salsa as fast as possible and often could, and V eventually becomes a cybergod capable of mowing through entire gangs on their own. Cyberpunk RED characters are themselves tougher in turn than their 2020 counterparts, but they simply can’t go through their enemies that fast. Aaron pondered changes to the combat rules but found that, as with anything else, fiddling with the wiring that already exists can pose a lot of challenges. I’m not fiddling with the wires, so much as I’m adding an attachment (much like the Cyberpunk RED Luck Deck from that same article) – and I’m stealing from a galaxy far, far away to do it. 

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