I’ve been sitting on this game for a while, mulling it over since it came out last March. I’ve been considering Til Dawn for a while and might finally have the opportunity to run it. That means you all get to come through it with me!
Continue reading “Til Dawn Review”
The upcoming Fate game, A Far Off Land is a modern take on fairy tales with characters spanning both the magical world and the mundane. This is similar to games like City of Mist and Bloodlines & Black Magic but it hits that nice sweet spot that so many Fate games do. It’s straightforward and accessible for an alternative jaunt but rich enough for a deep campaign if you want to go that route. A Far Off Land is available right now as a pre-order on DriveThru RPG and us Kickstarter backers have already gotten our copies, but I’ve got a sneak preview for all of you right now with the book’s talented author, Megan Bennett-Burks.
Continue reading “Interview with A Far Off Land Author, Megan Bennett-Burks”
Hot on the heels of SIGMATA, I’ve taken some time to look through the new game from Evil Hat Productions: Uprising. I’ve actually had this one for a little bit (I was one of the Kickstarter backers) but the actual street date for its release is today so I’ve been waiting to review. Uprising is a darkly-themed game of resistance, betrayal, and hardship, set in the same universe as The Resistance, Coup, and Coup: Rebellion, collectively called the “Dystopian Universe” which really doesn’t seem like a term you can claim as your own thing. Regardless, it’s a very attractive-looking book but does it live up to that potential? Read on and see.
Last time I came at you with some Fate rules for Dinotopia, I took the broad approach to making characters. This time I’m drilling down on something that’s very important for all characters and a little different from other Fate games: species. Characters’ species in Dinotopia likely affects nearly every facet of the character. Mechanically, it comes up in two ways: the character’s skill array and their species aspect.
Over the holidays I got the last of James Gurney’s amazing books in the Dinotopia series. If you don’t know anything about this series, drop what you’re doing and go check it out now. It’s beautiful and imaginative and captivating and was a big part of my childhood. I’ve been thinking for a long while about how to adapt this to an RPG and this time, immersed again in the wonder of Gurney’s world, it all started to finally click.
Continue reading “Dinotopia RPG, Part 1”
I’ve been a big fan of Bill Bryson for years, ever since I read his amazing A Walk In the Woods in middle school. He’s hilarious and interesting and he makes topics that would otherwise be very dry (from the history of English to a drive through the American Midwest) into page-turners. One of his latest book is One Summer, the story of June, July, and August 1927 in America, and it’s not only a great read but it’s a resource waiting for your early-twentieth-century campaign.
In the FATE mini-campaign setting Eagle Eyes, the players are detectives in Imperial Rome working against conspiracies in the Eternal City. It’s an awesome setting and I really recommend it, but the conspiracy mechanic is a great feature for other FATE campaigns. It’s especially powerful if you use all the brilliant vision of Ken Hite from Night’s Black Agents. Combine these two and you’ll have a great game dealing with dark, shady ladder of evil whether fueled by Red Court vampires in The Dresden Files, corrupted tribes in Ehdrigohr, or self-made supervillains in Base Raiders.
About a month ago, I finally started a regular campaign using D&D Fifth Edition. It’s been a lot of fun and it’s prompted me to think about what the creators have changed in the game for this edition and how it plays out. Something that wasn’t changed, and I don’t think it needed to be, was alignment. But, my id started to whisper to me, what if it was?
Mephit James Blog 