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 […]

We find ourselves in media finem mundi today as we crack open C.J. Carella’s 1996 game Armageddon. It’s a spiritual (har) successor to the earlier WitchCraft, whose backstory/metaplot included hints of a looming future catastrophe à la Gehenna in the World of Darkness. Well, in Armageddon the catastrophe has stopped looming & shown up good […]

Today’s apocalypse is still on the horizon but it makes up for it by being the literal John-of-Patmos-huffing-cave-vapors Apocalypse. Next on the shelf is The Seventh Seal, 2002, from Creative Illusions. The PCs in this game are all Sentinels, humans chosen by Archangels to receive a small measure of divine power to use in the […]

Continuing in the post- or peri-apocalyptic vein, today’s character is brought to us by a|state, a 2001 game from Contested Grounds. If Kult is the Clive Barker RPG, then a|state is the China Miéville one. Think Perdido Street Station with a soupçon of Dark City thrown in for good measure. Every single human being lives […]

It’s a segue from action-adventure-intrigue to the post-apocalyptic section of the shelf today. Day seventeen’s character is for the 1984 third edition of The Morrow Project (TMP). The premise of the game is that starting in the early 1960s, a mysterious wealthy industrialist named Bruce Morrow began to show certain powerful & influential people undeniable […]

The weirdness gets played straighter today as we segue into Eden Studios’ 1997 game Conspiracy X. As the name would imply it’s essentially a tabletop version of The X Files. The PCs are members of a secret organization called Aegis that fights to protect humanity against Greys, Reptoids, Atlanteans, Nazi occultists, US government collaborators with […]

Those of us who were around for the 1980s & 90s will remember that tabloid papers were a much bigger part of North American pop culture then. The milder variety was a mix of celebrity gossip & fraudulent cures – clickbait on paper, if you will – but the wilder papers were a peek into […]