We tend to look at new things here at Cannibal Halfling Gaming. Our mission of putting games and gamers together often takes the form of introducing something that might be unknown in front of someone who may be interested. But what about sharing new things to love about something you already love, something that provides ideas for play that had not been considered before? I didn’t know it when I first encountered it but these two volumes, Imperial Histories I & II, had been powerful influences on games I played and still remember fondly.
Continue reading Legend of the Five Rings: Imperials Histories Volume I & IIAll posts by Aki
The Independents: Paint the Town Red
“Something very bad happened to you a very long time ago: you died and it hurt.
You’re cursed. You’re still here and you couldn’t just stay dead. You’re definitely not in heaven, but there’s a pretty good chance this could be hell.
Your heart has basically stopped. You don’t need to eat. Your skin is clammy. Your touch is cold as ice. You have to remember to breathe, to blink, to smile. Those are things people do? Right? It’ll be alright. Everything will be okay. You can get it together. You just have to find the right place and the right people and it will all work out. There are other dead people just like you. They’re suffering in just the same way you are.
The quickest way to forget is blood: someone else’s blood. Your touch won’t be as cold as ice after you drink another person dry. You’ll feel a little more human. Your heart will beat like it’s meant to.
Take a sip. Cut loose. It’ll be alright.
When you’re in the moment, you can almost remember what it meant to feel alive.”
– The introduction to Paint The Town Red
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PAX Unplugged 2023 Notes and Shadow Scar Preview
I was prepared for a far greater in-depth dive into PAX Unplugged 2023. I had cleared as much of my schedule as I could, broken down priority events I wanted to join, built in backups and made my plans for getting in and out.
And then the Dice Gods laughed.
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PAX Unplugged: A Local’s Guide (2023 Update)
Ho adventuring gamers! We are on the eve of PAX Unplugged in downtown Philadelphia. After a few years of plague I have managed to shove a fist through the loose grave I was buried in and make my way last year. There were some changes, and what advance information I have suggests that things will be mostly the same. A few years ago I did a primer on attending, as I happen to live in the general area. For the most part, things in general remain the same but there are a few key differences in getting there from when I tried to dispense wisdom back in…2019? Oof.
Without further ado, this is the wisdom and knowledge I have gained.
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Eat the Reich (Backerkit Preview)
The date: 1943. The location: Nazi occupied Paris. Your assignment: to climb into a pressurized steel coffin. Survive a drop from a few thousand feet. Make your way to the Eiffel tower, where the Fuhrer’s airship is docked and drink all of the party leader’s blood.
Relevant note: you are a vampire.
Sometimes you need a self respecting monster (or six) to take care of the scummier ones.
A backer preview of Eat the Reich released in October 2023 (fittingly on Friday the 13th). It is an RPG written by Grant Howitt (the creator of the Honey Heist), illustrated by Will Kirkvy and published by Rowan, Rook and Decard (the publishers of DIE RPG), and it is a completely, totally and 100% unapologetically anti-fascist joyride.
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Meet the Party: Mecha Wasteland – The Crew of the Ulaid
Last week we took a look at the creation of a Mecha Wasteland (and getting Baba O’Riley stuck in our heads). This week, we turn to some of the people and machines that might populate it. Sticking with the themes, I went with a crew of freelance operators picking up work in the Free Port of Suez and specializing in quick and discrete operations. This group can take on work from all comers, from desperate Free Cities, pirate lords, or be used as deniable assets by the two great powers as a cold war begins to warm.
Without further ado, let’s meet the crew of the Ulaid.
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Meet the Campaign: Mecha Wasteland – The Crew of the Ulaid
Every so often, I get the craving to dive into the mecha genre, and each time I have thought about introducing it to some kind of roleplaying. This has stretched through freeform play by post, play by email and even a brief dabbling with the Mekton Zeta RPG. However, as the years have passed the people who I had played with have moved onto other things. While scratching the itch, I looked up the interview that Seamus did with the team behind Mechasys. It was an inspiration and while it doesn’t do everything, it is broad enough that I can do a lot of things and I would really love to play it at some point. With that said, the old formats I played in don’t exist anymore and realization has dawned that the most likely I am to see it in action is if I have run a game myself. A bit rested from my first completed attempt at GMing I began to bandy about a few “what-ifs”. What started as playing around as character creation led to thinking about how I would frame a game…and from there, I leapfrogged into another idea: showing how a campaign can be built.
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Adventures in Rokugan Review
This review is delayed, far from the “hot off the press” take that I had intended back some time ago. Instead this has been an article I have stewed on for some time. In 2020 there came an announcement that Edge Studios would be taking over RPG properties that had been held by Fantasy Flight, which includes two that I have written about extensively in the past: Star Wars and Legend of the Five Rings. Since the acquisition, the publishing has mainly been constrained to reprints of books in use and published already developed supplements that had been in the pipeline before the acquisition. It was a bit of a surprise to me that the first new material from this new studio was to take the setting of Rokugan and put it into the mechanics of 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons.
My reaction to reading it at first was, to put it politely, visceral.
My First Complete Campaign
In January 2023 I crossed off a New Year’s Resolution: I completed a campaign I was running. It seems like a smaller accomplishment, considering that I’ve been gaming off and on for close to 20 years now, and my group is filled with veterans who have run at one point or another. But for me, this is the one time I managed not only to run a game, but had a story arc that was completed and brought to (by most accounts) a satisfying resolution.
There have been failures. Over the years, I have tried to run a variety of things, from Blades in the Dark to Star Wars. I even managed to get a few sessions of Traveller strung together. For a variety of reasons these failed to move past one-shots, never materialized, or just fell apart. This happens. Aaron has written about situations just like it.
So as I look back over the game that did succeed, it’s time to run a post-mortem to know what worked and what didn’t for when I get back in the saddle to run again. You know, after my sanity restores a bit.
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A Return to PAX Unplugged (2022 Quick Recap)
PAX Unplugged returned to Philadelphia this year, marking the fifth time the convention has taken place. I was fortunate enough to attend this year, making it the third year I’ve managed to go. Before I begin, I want to take a moment to thank the organizers for a few things: One, for continuing to choose Philadelphia as the site. I think that the area and community are an excellent fit with abundant transportation, housing, and food for a bunch of tabletop nerds, along with a city that prides itself on inclusivity. Philadelphia has gotten some bad press as of late, but I never felt anything but safe and welcome as I walked through, to, and from the event space. Second, I want to thank them for the amount of logistics and cat wrangling it takes to get a group of tabletop gamers to do anything. My GMing has increased since my last visit to the convention, and with it so has my appreciation for the work that it takes to get this rolling each year. This year, the team made sure that getting through the door was about as pain free as possible despite requiring proof of vaccination along with the necessary ticketing and security checks for entry. So I absolutely want this convention to keep going.
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