That’s a wrap for the January Character Creation Challenge. First off, hats off to TardisCaptain for kicking off the challenge & for soldiering through some pretty gnarly chargen of his own. This has been a lot of fun, & it’s interesting to see how other participants have approached it. For my own quick reference, here […]

The final day of the January character creation challenge & we wrap it up with the okay-ish Terran Trade Authority RPG from Morrigan Press. Powered by the Omni system, a generified version of Talislanta’s core mechanic, the game is based on those classic Stuart Cowley picture books so many of us drooled over as pre-teens. […]

The future is grimdark & not just figuratively in today’s game, Fading Suns. Imagine a twist cone of Stargate & Dune & you won’t be far off. It’s the close of the 50th Century & humanity has spread across many systems, founded & lost two Galactic Republics, encountered many alien life forms – some of […]

Today’s game sets the speed record so far. It’s the 2014 edition of Cat, & I was done chargen before I finished my oatmeal this morning. All of the characters in Cat are house cats who protect their humans from supernatural threats that only animals can perceive. Most often these are malevolent spirits called boggins. […]

Affutez vos lames, camarades. Today’s game is another mostly historical one, 2010’s All For One: Régime Diabolique. I say mostly historical because although the PCs are all musketeers in the service of Louis XIII, there are worse threats than just Richelieu out there, including witches, devil worshippers, werewolves, demons, vampires, & maybe the Beast of […]

Moving out of the horror section of shelf two brings us to the costume drama section. First up is Qin: The Warring States. As the name indicates it’s a game of wuxia adventure inspired by super-lush Zhang Yimou pics like Curse of the Golden Flower & House of Flying Daggers. The character concept that sprung […]

It has eternal lain on my shelf – or at least for the last 17 years, the receipt from the FLGS is still tucked in the back – & it’s finally time to bring out Call of Cthulhu d20. For some reason I had remembered this as a Ken Hite production, but darned if it […]

Still in the apoca-horror vein (har) today, we crack open Monte Cook’s World of Darkness (aka the McWoD). This one’s a bit of an oddity. It’s an OGL RPG that came out in 2007, a couple of years after the launch of the nWoD. So you’ve got the basic 5×5 organization of kith & subgroups […]

The world is finally no longer ending today, but it’s still in grave danger. Day 23 brings us to another CJ Carella game, oddly enough: his 1995 Palladium RPG Nightbane. Originally titled Nightspawn but renamed after some legal pressure from, I swear I’m not making this up, Todd MacFarlane about the whole “Spawn” thing, this […]