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. Or you could call The Keep On The Borderlands a pre-built adventure, and it’s not until you and your friends are sitting around a table rolling dice that there is an actual RPG, but that’s mostly a matter of taste.

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. There’s no avoiding it.

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 Tabletop Role-playing 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.”

Some non-fiction musings and thoughts about things.

• Thoughts on Gender Neutral Titles
• Fan Fiction
• A Brief Look at Grimdark: Part 2
• A Brief Look at Grimdark
• A Brief Look at Genre
• Two Paths Diverging
• A Kind of Slur

A Realist’s Guide to the Fantastical World

About

Long Ago and Far Away was an old PBS show hosted by James Earl Jones. With a brief introduction, the show was a vehicle for children’s stories, oftentimes from foreign countries or based on old folk-tales.

I had an old VHS with several of the shows recorded on it, and I watched it regularly. One of the introductions had James Earl Jones reading an atlas, looking at maps of far-off lands including “The Cheese Palace of Pushka, capital of Brotzt,” “the Kingdom of Zeep,” and the “Outer Minor Mutaan Islands.”

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

Cemetery of Swords

This poem was made using the solo RPG Cemetery of Swords, by Efarrisgames.

• The Poem
• The Game Moves

Gentleman Bandit

This poem was made using the solo RPG Gentleman Bandit, by Allison Arth. I used the Mode variant, and played three times, rolling on the Poker Play table after each.

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.

NOTE: All references to games and RPG systems are to be considered “as of writing.” New versions of games might render some of my comments inaccurate.

Here is a collection of all my short stories:

Caveat Emptor

This story was made using the solo RPG Caveat Emptor, by Exeunt Press.

• The First Customer
• The Second Customer
• The Third Customer
• The Fourth and Fifth Customer
• The Sixth Customer
• The Last Day
• The Game Moves

Grimdark Future

• My thoughts on Fan Fiction

Translation

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

Freedom

• Part 1
• Part 2

Reborn

• Part 1
• Part 2

Monster Hunter

This story was made using the solo RPG Monster Hunter, by La esquina del rol.