It finally happened.  Steel met steel in a no-holds barred cage match for a sleepy little rail junction somewhere in west Septemtria. You can catch all the terrible action here. The overall battle saw one regiment of near-modern forces holding a rail juntion against a like-number of foes.  The...

Once you fully adopt the classic adventure game model you have some serious and subtle obstacles to overcome.  Overnight the campaign makes a quantum leap from ‘us against the GM’ to ‘everybody against everybody’, and that means an exponential increase in the threats that you – as a player...

When every player is actively engaged with every other player, this opens up the possibility for role-playing well beyond the conventional model of play. In conventional play, meaningful role-play is limited to player-GM interactions.  Sure, you can role-play conversations within the party, and those in-character negotiations can influence the...

Looking back on 2021, it occurred to me that the most important event in tabletop gaming in decades might have been the PvP death of Bob Dobs (run by Kestutis Kalvitis), who was eaten by cave bears on the command of Chief Fudd of Fug.  Cirsova, the man behind...

As this post goes live, the IP holders for D&D are doing their darndest to rip conventional play away from the hobby approach of “anything is possible at the table (as long as you adhere to story-arc driven narrative games)” and into a consumerist approach of “gatcha driven subscription...

In our last post, we covered the basic mechanics of Four Color Studio’s latest offering, 2d Delves.  Today, let’s talk about the campaign game. It’s what the kids these days call “procedurally generated” and “narrative”, meaning that you use random tables and just wave your hands and make up...

Thanks in large part to the bros actively re-inventing and reshaping RPGs through experimentation, session reports, analysis, and (sometimes heated) discussion, the hobby has cycled back to the age old question of, “Who invented role playing games?” Other lesser factors contribute, of course. The upper midwest Boomer Crew is...

The title 2d Delves does not, it turns out, refer to the number of dimensions involved in the game.  That’s a good sign for a miniature wargame as those generally require the use of a third dimension.  Instead, the 2d relates to the dice involved.  Most of the melee and...

The northern nation on Hyde’s Reach is just a generation or two older than its rival, giving it a bit of a head start in the economic development department.  Add to that the extensive agricultural lands and relatively recent discovery of rich silver mines in a mountain valley down...

There’s a new wargame campaign in the House of Wargaming, and it’s in a genre that I’m not too familiar with.  Luckily, you don’t have to be to get started.  You can learn on the fly, which is a lot easier when you’ve got a guide like Henry Hyde...