Trail of Cthulhu has been effectively and efficiently stepping on Call of Cthulhu‘s coattails for a short while now, offering a take on Lovecraft’s unfathomable and otherworldly horror that offers a fresh approach. While Call of Cthulhu‘s percentile system had a tendency to make or break situations where you could kill a trail stone cold […]
Icy Winds and Mighty Thews: A Review of Citadel Beyond the North Wind
Heroic fantasy encapsulates that slice of fantasy that embraces excitement, sword play and a measure of high camp, in my opinion. The genre never seeks to mirror reality, venturing instead into impossible and impractical matters of magic and the supernatural. Here swords glisten with the gore of a hundred minions, and villains, often otherworldly in […]
They Might Be…: A Review of AGE Bestiary – Giants
Giants have been an frequent and diverse threat in movies and TV over the last few years – whether the engineers of Prometheus, the Frost Giants of Thor, the trolls from Lord of the Rings, or Hodor from A Game of Thrones (okay, Hodor might not be a threat to most, but you still don’t […]
Out of Their Box: A Review of Evil Wizards in a Cave
The worlds in which our role-playing characters live vary wildly in their flexibility. At one end of the spectrum you have the fundamentally inflexible railroad where characters influence the progress of plot only in terms of whether they live or die. The world exists in a sort of stasis in the absence of the characters, […]
Release the Beast: A Review of AGE Bestiary – Beastmen
Creatures born of man and beast fill legends and contemporary media alike with monsters of rampant ferocity or unexpected champions of surprising character (often with something of a Red Shirt mentality about their prospects of surviving until the end of the book / movie). You can see examples all over the place – whether Mr […]
Crypt Kicker One-shot: A Review of Fire in the Darkness
One of the key things I, as a Gamemaster, appreciate are those little nuggets that make improvising a session easier. I realise that every GM probably handles these situations in their own way, some with greater ease than others. I personally find that if I have a solid idea, the adventure sort of forms around […]
Burn, Baby, Burn: A Porphyry – World of the Burn Review
I had a strange experience at UK Games Expo, in Birmingham, earlier this year. While running a demo game, the voices at the next table frequently erupted in uproarious laughter and bubbling exuberance mildly disrupting our ability to hold cross-table conversation. At the end of my session, I checked with the neighbouring GM to see what […]
