Tag Archives: RPG

Articles, System Hack

System Hack: Colony Sim Cortex Tasks and Work

Leave a comment

When you boil it all the way down, RimWorld is a game where you assign tasks to your colonists and optimize how they get performed. Every time you place down blueprints, place a zone, or add a ‘bill’ to a production structure, you’re effectively communicating a specific task. When it comes to our tabletop colony sim, these sorts of tasks are going to be a cornerstone of the gameplay loop just like how they are in RimWorld. The actual implementation, though, is going to be quite different.

Structured time in RPGs is seen as something to be avoided, at least outside of combat. In most trad games, the passage of time is something either tracked closely in increments no more than a few seconds, or glossed over entirely. We have started to see games, especially games using Free League’s YZE system, paying more attention to the passage of time, while Edge’s new DPS mechanics used in Arkham Horror are assigning a mechanical bounding to the typically loose definition of a ‘scene’ by anchoring characters with a dice pool that exhausts over the span of one scene. It’s useful to consider rules like these for our game, but a Colony Sim is going to require something different. With productive tasks being primary, constant and consistent time tracking is going to be needed to fairly assess what’s going on in the colony.

Continue reading System Hack: Colony Sim Cortex Tasks and Work →
Articles, Editorial

It shouldn’t have been called Single Player Mode

8 Comments

Cyberpunk Red has been going strong for around five years now. The game came out around the same time as the tie-in video game Cyberpunk 2077, and represented a return to form after 2005’s Cyberpunk v3 (and 2020 being over 30 years old). Now, R. Talsorian Games has kept the party going with continual Cyberpunk support both free (in the form of Monthly DLC) and for pay (in the form of the Interface Red collections as well as standalone supplements like Black Chrome). Single-Player Mode is the most recent standalone supplement, and your take on it will depend entirely on what you think a solo RPG is (or should be).

If you’re older than a certain age, when you think solo RPG you think something like Mythic GM Emulator, a set of rules that can act as a GM and let you play through modules or combats on your own. If you’re younger than a certain age (let’s say younger than me at least), your first thought of a solo RPG is probably more like a journaling game, or a hybrid narrative game like The Wretched. It’s important to state this because despite its 2025 release date Cyberpunk Red Single Player Mode is firmly the first of those two. There are no campaign framing tools, no narrative generation, and no character supplements. Cyberpunk Red Single Player Mode is built firmly on using an ‘oracle’ to answer questions which allow you to progress forward through your imagined narrative, and also provides tools to let you play out investigations, social interactions, combats, and neutrons all on your lonesome. What it’s truly best at, though, is having a library of random tables which enable you to set up all sorts of premises, missions, and random encounters to make your Cyberpunk solo game more interesting. You may realize as I say this that random tables aren’t just for solo gaming. Not only is that true, it means that while I think Single Player Mode makes for an excellent GM aid and has some good rules additions…it just doesn’t work as an effective solo game.

Continue reading It shouldn’t have been called Single Player Mode →
Articles, Editorial

The Last Caravan – Con-Apocalyptic Road Trip

1 Comment

They came less than a year ago. The war was swift – and brutal.

Humans and aliens bombed each other to smithereens, and now both sides are licking their wounds. Mysterious new factions rise to join the struggle of the fallen titans. In this landscape of shifting allegiances, we may have to choose sides. Debris from the explosion of the aliens’ mothership has clouded the atmosphere, lowering the temperature and creating the coldest winter in a thousand years.
We find ourselves in a melancholy, wintry landscape — quiet, until it’s not. Egg-shaped alien structures thirty stories tall now squat, humming, over the cities they crushed. Xenofauna and lost invaders stalk the woods and highways. A war is brewing in the aching silence.

We are navigating the waking remnants of human and alien empires — and all we’ve got is a car, our fellow travelers, and the road.

It’s time to head west with The Last Caravan.

Continue reading The Last Caravan – Con-Apocalyptic Road Trip →

Articles, Level One Wonk

Cultures of Play, Quanta of Play

4 Comments

The assumptions, intentions, and design of tabletop roleplaying games are infamously broad; seeing eye to eye on how to play is as primary a challenge as finding a time on the calendar for four to six people. Back in April of 2021, the blog The Retired Adventurer published a post called Six Cultures of Play which still sees reference as a succinct overview of distinct play traditions which have evolved over the last fifty-ish years of structured tabletop roleplaying. Between solid analysis and the author’s own admonitions not to see bright lines between the cultures where there aren’t any, I see the article as a useful model to start thinking about how people game and what they want.

Of course, the gaming world hasn’t stayed still, and from the publication of the original post to the renaming of Twitter to “X” in 2023, fragmentation was the word of the day. Since then, we’ve seen continuing fragmentation joined with an upswell in interest in fairly specific playstyle differentiation, driven by migration away from Wizards of the Coast products and strong take-up of “D&D alternative” products including not only Pathfinder but Daggerheart, Tales of the Valiant, and Draw Steel. The core ideas in the Cultures of Play post still hold true, but the consistent signpost in my mind is in the introduction, where the author describes a culture of play as equivalent to a ‘network of practice’. A community of practice is a group which forms around something they collectively do (or practice) which they have a passion for and want to do better; a network of practice is also that but doesn’t assume the same consistent strength of relationships, therefore being a more appropriate term for a larger, more nebulous group. As broad as a network of practice can be, I don’t really think it aligns with a ‘culture of play’ anymore.

Continue reading Cultures of Play, Quanta of Play →
Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Crowdfunding Carnival: October, 2025

2 Comments

Welcome to the Crowdfunding Carnival for October! We’re in spooky season, but more importantly, con season has wound down and the game designers have wound up. Tons of solid campaigns are on Kickstarter and Backerkit, and we have a few majors and some interesting tie-ins as well.

Before we get going here, it’s worth noting that as of today, Kickstarter United, the union representing Kickstarter employees, is going on strike as they have been working without a contract since July. The union is looking to enshrine working hour expectations, especially important as Kickstarter has been working on a four-day workweek for the last three years. Any allowances to ‘revert to normal operations’ by management would effectively constitute a 25% increase in workload with no adjustment in compensation. As seen on their website Kickstarter United is not asking anyone to boycott Kickstarter or withhold support from creators, so our normal monthly review will go on. That said, please visit the union’s website to see what you can do to support. With that news out of the way, let’s look at some campaigns.

Continue reading Crowdfunding Carnival: October, 2025 →
Articles, Editorial

My gaming group: A twentieth anniversary review

5 Comments

September of 2025 marks the twentieth anniversary of my current gaming group. Yes, you read that correctly. While I’m not sure of the exact day, twenty years ago either this week or last week I met with five other nerds in the study room of Carnegie Mellon’s newest freshman dorm, New House (which has since been renamed). The organizer, my friend Dan, had swiped the mailing list from an event run by the university’s chapter of White Wolf’s Camarilla Society; he decided that while he wanted nothing to do with a Vampire LARP, he met some cool people at their D&D one-shot event and would want to play D&D with them. We all decided that yes, we’d like to play D&D, and from there we were off. Three more people joined over the next couple of semesters, a lot of games were played, and we were a close-knit group until graduation in May of 2009.

Continue reading My gaming group: A twentieth anniversary review →
Articles, System Hack

System Hack: Colony Sim Cortex Characters

Leave a comment

Characters are the key unit of play in any RPG, and our system hack is going to be no different. For a game modeled after RimWorld, though, we’re going to have to strike a balance between emulation and ease of use, especially considering how many characters may be at play.

Cortex Prime allows for a range of different options for modeling characters, collectively called Prime Sets. Different combinations of Prime Sets lend themselves to different genres, and each one has different rules mods that can be attached to it. Only one Prime Set is required, Distinctions, but luckily it works well for certain traits within the RimWorld framework.

After some consideration, the two core Prime Sets we’re going to use outside of Distinctions are basic ones, Attributes and Skills. Attributes may not be directly used in RimWorld, but giving each character a rating in Physical, Mental, and Social can also be used for stress tracks, recreation type preferences, and other underlying RimWorld properties that wouldn’t fit with other Prime Sets. We’re also going to look into Resources and Relationships, Prime Sets that will be important for the game but perhaps limited at character creation.

Continue reading System Hack: Colony Sim Cortex Characters →
Articles, Level One Wonk

Big groups, small games

1 Comment

For the most part, the ideal size for a gaming group is five, four players and a GM. This is driven by group dynamics; researchers wrote in the Harvard Business Review back in 2018 that the ideal group size for meetings is between five and eight, at least if the point of that meeting is to have a productive discussion and get things done. Roleplaying games skew to the lower end of this mostly just due to the fact that in addition to the actual ‘meeting’ of a game, there is also the need to manage that many characters, their contributions, and their stories.

Ideal doesn’t mean only, and an experienced GM can run games anywhere in that 5-8 range without too many problems, at least as long as they’re realistic about how long things will take. More and more, though, games are being written towards a specific group size, usually a smaller one. In some cases it’s obvious, like Fiasco: the number of turns in the game, and therefore the amount of time the game will take, is directly proportional to the number of people playing, and even playing with five people, the maximum number recommended by the rules, the game begins to sprawl and the story begins to sag. In other cases, the restriction comes from a clear place, but the question hangs in the air about how to subvert it. A good example of this is DIE: There are six roles, six dice. That’s how many there were in the comic, therefore that’s how many there are in the game.

Continue reading Big groups, small games →