Richly Gothic in tone, Blades in the Dark sees you and your fellows playing scoundrels in a wrought-iron steampunk city, working together to score heists, claim fortunes, and establish yourselves in positions of power in the city. The world is well designed, providing a fertile ground for intrigues, cloaks-and-daggers, and unseen dangers. Character design is detailed, including character sheets for each individual as well as the gang as a whole. You pick your backstory, select your class, put points into your skills, and set out to make or take your fortune.

GURPS is technically not an RPG, but an RPG System. It’s a distinction without much of a difference; an RPG is at once distinct-from and inexorably-linked to the ruleset used to play it. It could be said that D&D is a system, while settings like Greyhawk, the Forgotten Realms, or Ravenloft are the actual RPGs. At the same time you could call Greyhawk a game setting, and say that The Keep On The Borderlands module that you’re playing is the actual RPG.

What If We Kissed calls itself the “same genre of thing as Dungeons & Dragons,” and I understand the mistake. As I said before, for better or worse D&D is the entry point for most anyone who is curious about RPGs. Unless they have a friend who is both well versed in RPGs and believes D&D is an imperfect introduction to the medium, a newcomer is first going to take a look at D&D.

Dungeons & Dragons, as you may know, is an RPG. No, that’s doing it a disservice. D&D is the RPG. Arguably the first of its kind, D&D certainly became the definitive example of the medium. It has dominated the cultural dialogue about RPGs to the point that even if you know nothing about RPGs, you’ve still heard of Dungeons & Dragons. It’s difficult to explain how ubiquitous D&D is as a concept, not just a game in and of itself: It has spawned books, clones, parodies, movies, and even a children’s cartoon show, although we can probably blame that last one on the ethos of the 80s more than any inherent merit.

You probably have an image in your head about what Table Top Roleplaying Games “are.” Even if you’ve never played one, you have a shape in your head, defined enough that you can see a group sitting around a table with dice, paper, pencils, and a cardboard screen and say “ah yes, that is an RPG. I saw it on Stranger Things.”

Noriama About Hard-Sci-Fi has always interested me as a genre. It’s that same strange mix of education and indulgence that was sprinkled through 80s-90s public television; an adult version of Bill Nye or Sesame Street. It’s also a clever assertion that both fantasy and active-imagination are not necessarily required to create engaging stories. It is, in a sort of way, historical revisionism of the future. You can err on the side of education, such as with A City on Mars, or with entertainment, such as Project Hail Mary, but the goal of Hard Science Fiction is to not only be narratively “true,” but factually as well.

With Kindness With a knife I have cut the cake into slices. Little slices, big slices, some get the flowers. Here is your slice, here is mine. You cannot have my slice. It is for me. That one is yours. Aren’t you grateful to me? And my knife? Original Post With Kindness

Manifest RPG Design Blog About After reading so many RPGs, playing so many RPGs, and thinking about everything that is the medium of RPG, I decided I needed to put my money where my mouth is, and actually create an RPG. The following are the posts of me detailing my thought processes. Posts Introduction First Steps Setting Manifestations Emotions Bond and Tier Static Versus Dynamic Dice The RPG Medium About I love RPGs, and have played them for most of my life.

Here is a collection of all my short stories: 1888 Amenti This short story was made using the solo RPG: 1888 Amenti, by Mundos Infinitos. More of an experiment than anything, this story was given little to no revision after completion. 1888 Amenti Taxman As a lover of Terry Pratchett, Death has been a character for an incredibly long time. This naturally suggests the question: where is Taxes? Of course, Terry answered this in a way with the Auditors, but I decided to make a short-story joke about it anyway.

Welcome one and all, to my collection of all my books, short stories, posts, musings, and other little oddscrawls that crawled across my brain. This website may change format semi-regularly as I experiment with format and schedule; I appreciate your patience as this repository evolves. Currently, I am involved in uploading the following projects: Noriama: My take on Hard Sci-Fi. The first human exo-planitary colony suddenly goes dark, and four people are sent on a suicide mission of mercy.