Tag Archives: RPG

Articles, Level One Wonk

The Trouble with Licensed RPGs

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The RPG hobby is in the midst of a significant supply-demand mismatch. With high switching costs and higher still depth of play, most hobbyists stick with one or a couple games and tend to funnel their dollars towards known quantities with existing fanbases and deeper supplement libraries. Meanwhile, there is the appearance that designing a game takes only incrementally more effort than simply running an existing one, something reinforced by the over 130,000 products on DriveThruRPG (most of them selling fewer than 50 copies). Designers struggle to differentiate in this environment, which makes the strategy of hitching your proverbial wagon to an existing property as popular as it ever has been.

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Articles, The Independents

To Change Review – Transformative Tarot

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Stories of transformation are both very old and very common. From Tiresias and Circe to The Emperor’s New Groove and Turning Red, people have been changing gender, species, state of matter, and all sorts of other things up and down the stories we tell through the ages. Heck, on a personal note one of the first stories I was ever told was about the Children of Lir. To Change seeks to put that kind of story in the spotlight through the medium of a roleplaying game, using short sessions and Tarot cards to explore dramatic transformations and the consequences of becoming something new. 

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Articles, Editorial

Embers of the Imperium Review

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Genesys was released in late 2017, and supported with four major supplements from 2018 through 2020. At that point, the generic RPG went dark. The Covid pandemic was certainly part of this, but it was first a symptom of the broader issues for the RPG business at Fantasy Flight Games (FFG). In the mid 2010s, Fantasy Flight was (excuse me) flying high; as both the licensor of Star Wars and several enormously popular RPGs based on Games Workshop properties, Fantasy Flight was one of the biggest players in the RPG space, but that turned around quickly and badly. When FFG lost the Games Workshop license in 2017 they had nothing left in the portfolio outside of Star Wars; their biggest other game, Anima: Beyond Fantasy had been discontinued the year before. The company wasn’t ready to give up on RPGs, though. They had bought the rights to Legend of the Five Rings two years before, and whether in an effort to maximize their investment or simply because of the sunk cost fallacy, they also invested in a new game based on the ruleset they used for Star Wars. Genesys came out first, while Legend of the Five Rings was ultimately released over three years after FFG bought the property.

Embers of the Imperium comes into the picture after several upheavals, only one of which was a pandemic. In late 2019 FFG divested themselves of their RPG business, shuttling it over to another division of their parent company, Asmodee. Edge Studios, a Spanish company which originally published The End of the World, was the new brand for Asmodee’s RPG line. How did it work? Hard to say. The company does have two 5e-based games now (Midnight: Legacy of Darkness and Adventures in Rokugan), so they might be making money. That said, they did not give up on Genesys. After being announced in April of 2021, Embers of the Imperium has finally been released.

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Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Crowdfunding Carnival: June, 2023

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Welcome to the Crowdfunding Carnival for June! This month I’m trying something a little different, though the outcome will likely be similar to how the series has always gone. On Kickstarter, there is a pretty significant bifurcation between small independent outfits and larger, established companies, both in terms of overall success as well as campaign size. Now, as much as they don’t need the help, big campaigns are important to the hobby and are driving more of the self-sustaining fanbases across the RPG landscape. Still, listing them alongside a one, two, or three person effort seems a bit disingenuous. As such, I’m going to be breaking out the ‘big campaigns’ from established names (and serial crowdfunders) and then keeping the ‘indies of note’ in their own section. Whichever sort of campaign you’re looking for, you should be able to find it more easily now. Beyond that, there’s still half a year left in our first five year retrospective, and as more articles were written, 2018 kept on getting more interesting. To start, though, let’s talk about three campaigns from existing companies; we have entries from Steve Jackson Games, Evil Hat Productions, and Kobold Press.

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Articles, Solitaire Storytelling

Solitaire Storytelling: I Have No Railgun And I Must Scream

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Hey, so, if you’re reading this, first of all I’d like to know how you got your hands on my diary. Second of all, if it’s because I’m, you know, dead, then thanks for taking the time to read what I’ve written. It’s kind of a comforting thought. Anyway, my name is Hope! I’m seventeen years old, they/them. I like farming sims and books. And I’m writing this because magical extraplanar alien mecha have invaded, and I need some way to vent!

See, it’s not enough that giant bird robots are stomping around trying to kill all of us. My older sister Hazel happens to be one of the Pilots fighting them, using mecha of our own. She gets a railgun. I have to make do with a diary, I guess.

I miss her a lot.

So yeah, I’m going to be scrapbooking headlines right out of the news and recording my own experiences as the world tries to get itself ended by the Nondwellers – that’s what we call the alien mecha. Oh, and hey, if I am dead and you’re going to post or publish this yourself for a quick buck or something, could you at least title it the way I would? I already have it picked out.

“I Have No Railgun And I Must Scream.”

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Articles, Editorial

Candela Obscura Quickstart Review

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This review doesn’t really matter.

This review doesn’t matter because there are four types of people who will click on this review when they see it, and none of them are looking for more information in order to form an opinion. You will have critters who’ve already decided they love Candela Obscura and want to see if I do too, and then critters who’ve already decided they hate Candela Obscura, think switching rulesets was pointless…and want to see if I do too. On the indie/OSR side, you have those who can’t stand Critical Role, and want to see if I’m going to bag on it, ranting as long as I did when I reviewed Root. You also have those who are just thankful that the largest Actual Play in the game is using something other than D&D, and have already decided it’s better. Ultimately, I don’t think my conclusion is going to satisfy any of these camps.

It’s fine.

Now, given my own biases from both years of experience in RPGs as well as other media (not to mention writing to a specific audience for a living), I find it hard to believe that anyone was expecting a conclusion other than ‘it’s fine’ for the first ground-up new game from Darrington Press. Just like nobody should have expected Tal’Dorei to be a Planescape or Spelljammer or other setting that really pushes on the conventions of the D&D genre, nobody should really have expected that a new game from Critical Role Productions would do anything other than nestle neatly into the range of genres already popularized in roleplaying, specifically nestling in next to another bestseller, Call of Cthulhu.

I’m starting the review in this way because, ultimately, the specifics of Candela Obscura aren’t nearly as interesting as the reactions they’ve elicited. On Twitter, the first reactions I saw were mostly from indie designers who seemed primed to hate it. Apparently everyone became an IP lawyer since the OGL kerfluffle, because there were people outright claiming that the game had plagiarized Blades in the Dark and was violating the terms of the Creative Commons license (in case it isn’t clear, this is untrue). On Reddit, I read a lot of confusion about the system, though it’s hard to tell from comments if this is just from newness and lack of context, or if it is actually confusing in play. And, of course, the first big review expressed disappointment at how much of a retread the whole thing is.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

What are RPGs made of?

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The roleplaying experience cannot be solely defined by which books you pick up at your hobby shop. More than essentially any other medium, RPGs are changed by the people who play them and what they attempt to do with the game when they play. It is both the medium’s greatest strength and its greatest source of annoyance when trying to both critique published RPGs and set standards of good play.

If there’s one thing the RPG community is better at than anything else it’s talking past each other, and in a way this is inevitable. Every game and everything about each of those games which makes them good, bad, memorable, or forgettable is dependent on the people sitting around the table (on the discord, in the LARP space) actually playing. Now, this human element doesn’t discount what the rules bring to the game, and the ability to enjoy yourself in spite of a game doesn’t make it good (likewise, having a game bounce off your group because of your particular preferences and predilections doesn’t make it bad). This does mean, though, that we need to know what we’re talking about.

RPGs are more complicated than other games because they present three separate surfaces of writing which, in other media, either aren’t separated or don’t exist at all. The RPG system is the scaffold, the underlying mechanics, rules, and math which define how games work. The game is the group of elements built around that scaffold, the setting, procedures, and options which tell the players what the game is actually about. Finally, the campaign is the game itself, either from the players’ heads or from a pre-written adventure or two (or three). These elements in total build up to the game a group will actually play, and all of them bring something different and important to the final product.

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