Tag Archives: RPG

Crowdfunding Carnival: January, 2025

Welcome to the first Crowdfunding Carnival of the year! No way around it, it’s a slow January, like many that have come before. Indie designers are often holding their cards until ZineQuest (formally announced in December), and major publishers are focused on closing out the year, which often means entering the new year with no projects on the slate (lest there be liabilities with no revenue recognition). As such, coming out of the New Year’s holiday there is often a small slate of projects, if any worth reading at all.

But fear not! This month’s update will be short but sweet, with three projects that are certainly worth looking at. While there are no major publisher campaigns active at the moment, there are two small format games tackling ambitious topics: Civilization building and mashing up time travel and giant robots. Then, we have a large-format labor of love which, though it follows in the footsteps of those before it, is still worth some consideration.

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Role-Playing Games in Psychotherapy: A Non-Therapist’s Review

While roleplaying games can certainly allow players to explore certain things and work through some stuff, an important axiom to remember is that your GM is not your therapist. Therapy is a serious business, and you shouldn’t be unloading your psychiatric needs on someone who is not trained to handle it (or try taking on those needs yourself, if you’re the GM), for their good and your own. Unless, one supposes, they were your therapist first, and are now running a game for you as part of your usual appointment.  Such is the purpose behind Role-Playing Games in Psychotherapy: A Practitioner’s Guide by Daniel Hand.

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Level One Wonk Holiday Special: 2024

Happy holidays to gamers here and around the world! It’s that time again where I settle in at the end of the year, make a comforting hot beverage and review what’s gone on in the last twelve months. And, to be completely honest, it’s been a doozy. In the gaming world, 2024 was a year of D&D, the game’s 50th anniversary being a banner event that led to the release of the new 2024 version of the 5e handbooks (I guess we’re not supposed to call them 5.5e, but come on). At the same time, the goliath that is D&D has taken some licks; the self-inflicted wound that was the OGL fiasco led to significant fragmentation in the high fantasy subgenre defined by, well, D&Ds. Daggerheart, Draw Steel, and Tales of the Valiant all brought forth new takes on the 5e formula, and were a double-edged sword in terms of D&D’s monopoly: On one hand, that version of fantasy, the swords and sorcery slash Tolkien mashup that existed nowhere except D&D in 1974 and now exists everywhere, is still the most popular RPG genre in the world. On the other hand, a wide range of 5e players took a look at other games, and if D&D didn’t end up being their first choice for D&D things, they definitely ended up looking at other games for other genres.

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When The Walls Fall Review – Fallen Cities and Falling Dice

The ancient city was originally founded as a place of study; a great library was its first building, and it remained ever its heart. However, the city grew to form the core of an unspeakable ritual, powered by harnessing a long forgotten god. Eventually, its distant neighbors could not tolerate the ideas it was spreading, and they attacked. That was when the walls fell, leaving a ruined city with a defaced statue at its heart… and broken roads, spreading corruption, and fanatics of that forgotten god bleeding out of it into the countryside…

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Solitaire Storytelling: Koriko: A Magical Year part 2

Check out part 1 of this Solitaire Storytelling here.

After more writing and more adventures, I’ve concluded my playthrough of Koriko: A Magical Year. The story I created, of Lapis, a witch-in-training who thinks she’s boring, ends up telling a pretty fascinating coming-of-age story. Lapis discovers how much bigger the world is than her village, how much deeper magic is than what her grandmother taught her, and how weird, wonderful, and sometimes terrible other people can be. All of those experiences and trials are filtered down from 65 pages of handwritten entries into seven letters home. Just like before, what the letters don’t tell is often as important as what they do…as the confession in the last letter so clearly broadcasts.

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Arkham Horror RPG Review

Edge Studio has been quiet for much of its current existence. While Edge had an original incarnation making RPGs like End of the World, in its current version it’s the RPG arm of Asmodee, built up in part from the original Edge Studio but primarily from the roleplaying team of Fantasy Flight Games. Immediately after Edge Studio was formed they did little besides finish existing Fantasy Flight obligations, mostly in the form of Legend of the Five Rings supplements. While Edge was also responsible for releasing the Twilight Imperium supplement for Genesys and a few 5e-based games, there has not been an Edge-developed RPG system. Until now. Finally in broad distribution at the end of November, Arkham Horror is both a new swing at an old license but also a completely new set of RPG mechanics, the Dynamic Pool System. While the Dynamic Pool System certainly drinks from the same well as Genesys, for Arkham Horror it presents much simpler mechanics; there are no custom dice, only d6s, and while the game provides the comfortable framework of character classes there are really only two mechanical levers players need to worry about pulling, skills and knacks. All in all, it’s a simpler ruleset designed to be an easier way to play Call of Cthulhu. The question, of course, is if that’s something that we want.

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