Black Armada is a small press publisher and blog about roleplaying and board gaming run by Rabalias and Frax. Between us we have over 50 years’ experience of playing and GMing. That means we really like it, and we really like talking about it too. We’re the publishers of games such as Lovecraftesque, Flotsam: Adrift […]
Safety Marks
In the course of writing, playtesting and now publishing Bite Marks I’ve been thinking and reading a lot about safety tools. The conversation has expanded so much since I started role-playing 29 years ago and I love how people are thinking about play culture, baking safety into mechanical design and normalising the use of safety […]
How does system matter? (part 2: house rules, mods and hacks)
This is the second in a series of articles. In the first I talked about designer intent, and mechanical procedures. As discussed in the previous article, designer intent is important but only so far as it is successfully communicated and/or implemented through the game text. We’ve talked about how the procedures of play can shape […]
Last Fleet is live on Kickstarter!
Hello everyone! The Last Fleet kickstarter campaign is now live! Last Fleet is a PBTA game about a rag-tag fleet, fleeing across space from the merciless inhuman foe that destroyed human civilisation. You play brave pilots, officers, engineers, politicians and journalists fighting to keep the fleet – and themselves – in one piece. The game […]
How does system matter? (part 1: designer intent, and mechanical procedures)
There seems to be a mini-rash of “system matters” discussion happening at the moment. I’ve often found these discussions get lost in differing definitions – you can’t agree whether system matters if you don’t agree what system is. More importantly, different aspects of system matter in entirely different ways. So rather than debate whether it […]
Join the UK Indie RPG League!
Are you interested in selling games at UK conventions, but want to avoid the cost and loneliness of doing it by yourself? Then you’re going to be interested in this. The UK Indie League is recruiting. We’re a group of friends who go to conventions together to sell our tabletop roleplaying games. We share convention […]
Black Armada supports KSRU
We’ve been watching closely the attempts by the Kickstarter United (KSRU) to get recognised by Kickstarter as an official union. We’ve been dismayed by the response by Kickstarter. We support staff efforts to unionise, and we support the demands for Kickstarter to #recognizeKSRU. We would like to emphasise that KSRU have not called for a […]
Push and pull mechanics
A popular mechanic which crops up in a lot of excellent games is Conditions. A Condition is a problem that’s affecting your character, like “broken leg”, “on fire” or “suspected traitor”. The idea is that the GM will hit you with trouble when your Condition would be relevant, or penalise you when it would get […]
Bite Marks is on Backerkit
We’ve sent Bite Marks off to the printers, which means it’s now available for pre-order if you missed the Kickstarter campaign. Bite Marks is a PBTA game of werewolf pack dynamics. This is a game about being a werewolf, in a Pack. The Pack is a deeply intimate and close family; like a family, sometimes it is full of […]
Getting from an idea to a first draft.
This is a companion piece to Josh’s blog about curating ideas. My method of curation is slightly different to his; but I wanted to talk first about my process getting from a game idea to a first draft. Full disclosure… I am an incorrigible consumer of productivity systems and books about ‘getting creative work done’. I love reading about […]
How I run investigation games (part 2: in-session)
Last time I wrote about how I prep investigation games. I’ll talk a bit more about that here, but I also want to move on to talk about what I do during sessions. My aim in running an investigative game is twofold: Make the players feel smart Make the investigation challenging Those two aims seem […]