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 […]
Tag: roleplaying games
The power of asking
Over at Department V, Smiorgan writes about Everway’s three methods to decide a conflict: Karma, drama and llama. Smiorgan discusses the issue of who decides what the plot should be (in order to rule in accordance with drama), and how randomness (fortune) can introduce something new and unpredictable. I mostly want to talk about the […]
Lovecraftesque update
For those who have been following this project, we’ve just been through another round of playtesting (some internal, some external) using updated rules. This was a bit of an odd playtest in a way. The rules updates we had made had their intended effect, the game seemed much improved, and overall we seem pretty much […]
Lovecraftesque – actual play report
Actual Play report of Lovecraftesque As played at Seven Hills in April 2015 Players: Josh, Fergus and Ric [In the setup we agree the basic parameters for the game, in open discussion – the only time that discussion is permitted.] We decided to set the game in the Himalayas. Off the back of that, we […]
Lovecraftesque: playtest
After half a dozen external playtests and a similar number we ran ourselves, we’ve been beavering away on an updated version of Lovecraftesque. We’re now opening it up for a second round of external playtesting. What’s the game about? You create your own story of brooding horror in the mould of Lovecraft, but without using […]
Crowdfunding calculator
In the run up to our planned Kickstarter of Lovecraftesque, I’ve been busily crunching numbers to make sure that the whole thing will fly financially. All of our figures have gone into a spreadsheet, where I can easily update the costs as I get better information, and tweak the prices of the rewards to reflect […]
Lovecraftesque update
So, as you might have noticed from my earlier post about playtesting, the first round of Lovecraftesque playtesting is over. We picked up a lot of issues – a few quite major, most not so. We’ve moved quickly to make some changes and additions to tackle the former, in order to get some rapid feedback […]
Lovecraftesque – playtest now open
The first draft of the Lovecraftesque rules is now complete, and we’re looking for playtesters to try it out. A reminder: The game is all about creating your own story of brooding horror in the mould of Lovecraft, but without using any of Lovecraft’s material. It’s a GMless game, in which you spend most of […]
Lovecraftesque – who watches the watchers?
Since the last post we’ve been hard at work nailing down the few remaining details of Lovecraftesque that weren’t already nailed down. We’ve conducted an informal playtest that went well (though we didn’t have time in the end to try out the Journey into Darkness or Final Horror, which are two parts of the game […]
Introducing Lovecraftesque
[Edited to add: Lovecraftesque was successfully kickstarted in 2015 and you can now buy it here] Admiral Frax and I have been working on a new story game. It is a game of cosmic horror in an uncaring universe, for 2 or more players. It is called Lovecraftesque. What’s different about this game? This GMful game […]