Sun has finally set on the 2023 Character Creation Challenge, later for some of us than others. As always, many thanks to TardisCaptain for organizing the challenge & leading the way with his own set of contenders. My takeaway from this year has been to lean more heavily on games with more random, or at […]

The challenge comes to a fittingly ridiculous end with Star Wreck: The Pirkinning by Mike Pohjola (2006). It’s a tie-in to the Star Wreck series of films – well, web vids to be precise – created by a small handful of friends & volunteers in a Helsinki apartment. Rather than bold standard bearers for the […]

January is well in the past, but we keep on trucking with the last two entries. Character 30 is giving us some serious side eye. Possibly also giving us a literal eye, right out of somebody’s head. That’s ‘cause the game for today is Scorn, by Raphael Chandler (10th anniversary edition, 2012). This is a […]

Character 29 is headed for the utmost north & beyond, because we’ve arrived at Hollow World Expedition (2006). It’s 1936 & the PCs are part of a team that have set out to explore the mysterious interior of the Earth via a secret gateway at the North Pole. At least as far as the rules […]

Character 28, though a few days late for the 28th, is for the 2020 printing of Advanced Fighting Fantasy, Second Edition, based on Steve Jackson & Ian Livingston’s classic gamebook rules & elaborated by Graham Bottley. It’s a super simple set of rules, but you can get a surprising amount of depth out of it. […]

What day is this? What is time even any more? Appropriate questions to be asking since today’s game is Numenera by Monte Cook (2013). It’s a billion years in the future. Eight previous epochal civilizations have risen & fallen. Now the people of the Ninth World navigate the ruins of technological wonders no one can […]

Day 25 sees us trying to preserve the natural order again, but this time not by going on a bloodsoaked rampage. We’re not just not a werewolf, we aren’t even a regular wolf! This is eco, by Morrigan Studios (2005). It was one of a number of games (probably most notably Atlantis: The Second Age) […]

Summerland, by Greg Saunders (2009) is post a very different apoc. One day, the entire surface of the Earth is covered by forest, each region by its native type. That’s literally in one day, too, as in we woke up one morning & it was forest to the horizon. They called it The Event. Yesterday […]

This may be another brutal struggle, but at least I was prepared for it this time. Day 24 brings us to the famous/notorious Avalon Hill FRPG Powers & Perils, by Richard Snider (1983). Legend has it that we’re talking Rolemaster levels of complexity here, so we’ll see how this goes. Right off the bat we’re […]

Today’s game continues the apocalypse, although in a much less wahoo mode than Mutant Future. Day 23 brings us to Atomic Highway, a 2009 game by Colin Chapman. This is a much more Mad Max style of post-apoc & the system reinforces that at every step. To begin with, we choose a concept. The game […]