Sending messages to someone you’ll never see again across growing interstellar distances. A giant whirlpool crawling with pirates. A bar crawl on the borderlands. Trying to make sure your people don’t fall off the map. A rescue mission into an environmentally hostile forest chock full of horrible mutants and dragon cultists. A veritable library of zines. Zine Month ’22 continues onward at a typically breakneck pace, although maybe that’s just the time dilation we’re all going through… nevermind! You’ve had two rounds of ZiMo content already, so how about a third?
Tag Archives: Opinion
Pacing Problems
How fast do you burn through a storyline? If you’re like me, sometimes that core conflict is approaching a climax halfway through what you thought was your campaign. Or, if you’re like me at a different point in time, you find your players have cracked the advancement mechanics on the cool new system you wanted to try and now the power curve is shooting upwards, taking the storyline in places you weren’t ready for it to go. Whether it’s from game mechanics or your own writing, it’s easy for a GM to find themselves with a pacing problem.
There are a few issues with figuring out how to pace a role-playing campaign that don’t appear in other media. The first one is simply that other media have it way easier. It might be challenging to write a novel or direct a movie, but that author or director has complete control over how fast or slow events progress. When you’re GMing a game, with players staring back at you and wondering what’s going to happen next, that control is illusory. The second is that many of the tricks we’re taught in interactive media, like video games, either don’t translate or translate poorly back to the tabletop. Once again, a lot of that has to do with the fact that there’s more than one person playing and setting the clock.
Continue reading Pacing ProblemsZine Month Round Up #2
Diving into a sea of dreams to pluck secrets from memories. Goblins going grocery shopping and making a mess of it. Horrible abominations made by scientists who say ‘who’s playing?’ when accused of playing god. A mirror-themed adventure that would have Link and Samus feeling right at home. Death metal Viking cats. Zine Month continues. and so does our coverage! Given the contents of this particular round up and a bit more time to ruminate on things, I’ve got some Thoughts about Zine Month itself and its relationship to Kickstarter… but we can talk about those later! You’re here for the zines, so let’s see what we’ve got!
Crowdfunding Carnival: The Kickoff
Step right up, step right up! We’re changing the focus of Kickstarter Wonk and needed an equally dorky name! That’s right, Crowdfunding Carnival is the new, improved, and expanded version of Kickstarter Wonk, looking further across the crowdfunding world to bring you the latest and greatest in homegrown and original TTRPGs. For this kickoff article, though, I wanted to talk a little bit more about the TTRPG crowdfunding landscape and why it looks the way it looks.
Continue reading Crowdfunding Carnival: The KickoffZine Month Round Up #1
A John Carpenter-flavored horror adventure that moves from the Antarctic to a 90s mall. Climbing a holy mountain to beg for mercy from the gods. Dark age peasants stumbling upon sci-fi tunnels, and the change that discovery brings. Dark metal fantasy with most of the metal used to build giant robots. A slumber party pillow fight where letting yourself be vulnerable is more important than winning. It’s Zine Month 2022, so let’s start seeing what tabletop roleplaying zines are making their crowdfunding run!
The One Ring Review
So here it is. After a whole bunch of hubbub and more angry Tweeting than you can shake a stick at, The One Ring has been released. And what does that get us? The One Ring, Second Edition, is the official licensed roleplaying game of The Lord of the Rings, and is the jewel of the crown of Sophisticated Games, a company you’ve likely never heard of because all they do is hold intellectual property. Sophisticated Games is the root cause of every kerfluffle about this particular game, because they decided to hang Cubicle 7 out to dry back in 2019.
Continue reading The One Ring Review
Solitaire Storytelling: Last Tea Shop
I run a tea shop on the border of the living and the dead. The recently deceased visit for one last hot drink before their long journey to the Great Beyond. Time is strange here. Days and memories blur. Nobody visited yesterday – I am sure of that. Someone passed last week, but I am unable to picture their face.
The fog thins. A figure approaches. I stoke the fire. “Welcome to the last tea shop,” I say. “You are welcome here, To The Dregs.”
A Glimpse Into The Vault: Wildermyth
Role-playing games and video games came of age around the same time. While D&D was published in 1974, the very first attempts to emulate D&D with a computer came in 1975; Dungeon and DND were written for mainframe systems like the PDP-10 and PLATO, though they were unlicensed and never saw commercial sales. The first licensed D&D video game came in 1982, and it paved the way not only for later licensed games like the SSI ‘Gold Box’ titles and Baldur’s Gate but also virtually the entire video game RPG genre, from Final Fantasy to The Elder Scrolls to Diablo.
Role-playing video games were fairly direct emulations of rulesets like D&D early on, but as the software became more sophisticated they played more to their strengths. Current titles have gorgeous graphics and complex storylines, but narratively are mostly static affairs. Meanwhile, tabletop roleplaying games have always had the flexibility of a human GM to give them more breadth and a personal touch that video games couldn’t match. So what happens when a digital game designer tries to make their video game feel more like a tabletop RPG? You get Wildermyth.
Continue reading A Glimpse Into The Vault: Wildermyth
The Trouble With Kickstarter
In December of 2021, Kickstarter made an announcement that it was going to develop a new platform for crowdfunding, using blockchain technology. The announcement received a significant negative response, given the negative environmental impacts of current blockchain applications and the widespread use of blockchain tech, through both cryptocurrencies and non-fungible token (NFT) schemes, to commit fraud. It’s a fair response, though given how little the Kickstarter announcement said, perhaps not entirely warranted.
That all said, the end state of Kickstarter’s blockchain plans don’t particularly matter. Whether or not the new platform comes to fruition, whether or not it uses less energy-intensive proof-of-stake software, whether or not people leave the platform, these are in the long run irrelevant. What the announcement should have revealed to anyone who felt strongly enough to leave the platform over it is that the TTRPG hobby has let Kickstarter become infrastructure. Leaving Kickstarter sounds great in a tweet, but ultimately doing so is going to be tough for many of the creators who, without the company, would have never gotten off the ground.
Continue reading The Trouble With Kickstarter
Solitaire Storytelling: Paranoid Android
The war with the androids has made everyone paranoid. Including me, and including my interrogators. See, Asimov Landing Station is on the far edge of the galaxy, manned by only a skeleton crew, most of them scientists doing research. Nothing ever happens here. But after the government discovered that androids have the capacity of perfectly mimicking human beings the atmosphere in the Station has started changing. Several things had gone wrong or malfunctioned in non-critical but totally avoidable ways before, but now things are getting more severe: research has been delayed, the station’s systems have broken down at critical moments, and people have disappeared. Station security has singled me out as a suspicious person and they’ve taken me in for questioning. I’m starting to wonder… am I really human, or a sleeper agent with programming? Could I be one of them?
Cannibal Halfling Gaming 