A little while back I made a list for myself that others may find slightly useful. Here are some RPGs that I own and haven’t read yet. They’re what I consider to be pretty short. I’d rather play or run a game I know that read a 400-page rulebook of some game I don’t know. But for 20 -100ish pages that’s quick and another system under my belt.

I’ve read parts of all of these but I don’t know the systems well enough. I need to read them cover to cover again. Here are the short games I want to read the whole way through sooner than later.

Crossed out ones are ones I’ve read since writing the list. Page count is approximate.

Feel free to add cool short games you recommend in the comments.

20 pages
Lady Blackbird
Archipelago II
Wilderness of Mirrors

40 pages
Breaking the Ice
Shooting the Moon
Warrior, Rogue & Mage
In A Wicked Age

60 pages
Montsegur 1244
Remember Tomorrow

80 pages
A Dirty World
Hell for Leather
Microscope
Solar System

100 pages
Storming the Wizard’s Tower

130 pages
ICONS

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This post is part of a series of answers to the Reverb Gamers 2012 blogging prompts (full list in PDF format here).

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #3: What kind of gamer are you? Rules Lawyer, Munchkin/Power Gamer,
Lurker, Storyteller/Method Actor, or something else? How does this affect the kinds of games you play?

Another good one. I am a hybrid of the method actor and storyteller, both of which Robin Laws does a good job describing.

I love story and characters. I want my character to feel real, or at least believable. I will try to do what they would do, not what I would do or what is the smartest decision as per the rules. I will bend and be flexible to allow the story to continue or to accommodate the rules, but I will try to work out why my character is doing that rather that just saying he does.

I love crafting and living stories with other players and the GM. When the story specifically involves my character or a skill he has, this is the height of roleplaying for me. Story where my choices as a character matter. I like running games like this too, which pleases my wife who loves this stuff, but while my players enjoy it I do need to remember to throw some fights in there too.

With combat I try more and more these days to make it meaningful and cinematic. Fighting on a rain-slick cliff is cinematic. Knowing the guards are on their way and what you’re doing is very illegal, is meaningful. I try to infuse the roleplaying story side into the combat. I also try to make the characters fight like they would, bravely, fiercely, cautiously depending on their personality.

If you game with me you know you’re in for a story, but it won’t be me reading pages of history or exposition to you, it’ll be one we make together that will involve your characters. At worst, exposition will come from an NPC’s mouth and from their point of view. At best, the player characters will uncover what they need to know organically through play. Story and character are king. For me, these are what make games fun.

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• Reverb Gamers #31 – What If I Had Never Gotten Into Gaming?
• Reverb Gamers #30 – What Gaming Taught Me About Real Life
• Reverb Gamers #29 – What Does ‘Gamer’ Mean To You?
• Reverb Gamers #28 – House Rules
• Reverb Gamers #27 – What Monster Would You Be?

This post is part of a series of answers to the Reverb Gamers 2012 blogging prompts (full list in PDF format here).

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #2: What is it about gaming that you enjoy the most? Why do you game? Is
it the adrenaline rush, the social aspect, or something else?

This one’s easy for me. I play for stories, character interaction and discovery. I GM for the same and for the worldbuilding and in the hopes of surprising, delighting and sometimes challenging my friends.

Why do I play?

I know a lot of people say RPGs aren’t stories, that the GM isn’t a storyteller. I don’t like railroading but that doesn’t mean RPGs aren’t about stories. For me that is one of the most important parts of RPGs. Telling a compelling, interactive story together that is about the PCs in a world that reacts to the things they do like no other media is capable of. It is an experience unique to roleplaying games and I absolutely love it, whether playing or GMing. Continue reading…

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• Reverb Gamers #31 – What If I Had Never Gotten Into Gaming?
• Reverb Gamers #30 – What Gaming Taught Me About Real Life
• Reverb Gamers #29 – What Does ‘Gamer’ Mean To You?
• Reverb Gamers #28 – House Rules
• Reverb Gamers #27 – What Monster Would You Be?

You may have heard that Atlas Games is doing this blogging prompt thing called Reverb Gamers 2012. There are 31 questions to prompt blog posts, one for each day of January. I’m a day late already but I’m going to try to get some of these done. Length of posts could vary a lot. So here’s number one and you’ll find two and three in a separate post today. Check out the Reverb Gamers Facebook page too, where lots of people are posting their answers.

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #1: What was your first roleplaying experience? Who introduced you to it? How did that introduction shape the gamer you’ve become?

What was your first roleplaying experience? Who introduced you to it?

I roleplayed before I knew what it was. I had a friend who kept getting in trouble in high school for eating chips in class. So we developed a system called Sneaky Points. He would get different numbers of points for how sneaky he was and the actions he took (e.g. more points if the teacher was looking, etc.). I drew up characters and equipment and so on for him to spend his Sneaky Points on and had baddies for his characters to fight. No dungeons or adventures, but it was RPG-ish.

Same friend later on explained to me what D&D was and we went back to his place to check out his books. It was 3.0 at the time and 3.5 was brand new or just around the corner. I soon joined a game as a cleric, I think. It was short lived, maybe only the one session, but I met some gaming friends through that experience and we soon started up a year-long campaign. I remember asking lots of questions about how GMing worked and my friend could see I was obviously really interested in worldbuilding.

In the first long campaign was a rogue, Barabas, who was quickly killed when the dwarf when insane (played by the friend who introduced me; someone else was running the game). Barabas was replaced by a human druid who lived a good life, found his elven foster tribe and retired to be replaced by Talmir the elven druid who was the only PC to come out the end alive and in good health. Continue reading…

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• Reverb Gamers #30 – What Gaming Taught Me About Real Life
• Reverb Gamers #29 – What Does ‘Gamer’ Mean To You?
• Reverb Gamers #28 – House Rules
• Reverb Gamers #27 – What Monster Would You Be?

Noisms of Monsters and Manuals posted some interesting roleplaying related questions that are relevant to our hobby but that role playing bloggers tend not to write about. Check out his post for the original questions, plus lots of responses in the comments (some people did it right there, some people linked to blog posts, like this). Following are my answers to these questions, as the GM of my group that include my wife and three long term friends. EDIT: After writing this post stream-of-conciousness-style I realise that my Nanowrimo brain is still on. Sorry for the word count.

In some settings magic is treated as an inherited or natural ability. What if we took this idea further and called ‘magical ability’ a mutation? In X-Men: First Class, Xavier talks about Neanderthals who saw Homosapiens as mutants but were wiped out by these more evolved kin. Accurate or not, this idea intrigued me. Much like the mutants in X-Men, spellcasters and mages are often feared for their power and because they are ‘other’. Let’s look at what a fantasy world would where mages are not just the ‘other’ but are the next step in human evolution.

Full Disclosure: I received a free PDF copy of the Midgard Bestiary after providing feedback and a playtest report of the draft version.

Kobold Quarterly and Open Design should be familiar to a lot of you by now, and those kobolds just keep going! Currently underway is one of their biggest projects ever: the Midgard Campaign Setting. If you’re interested in collaborative worldbuilding and shaping a new setting, you should check it out.

Lots of Open Design projects in the past have been for the Pathfinder RPG, but Green Ronin’s AGE system (used for the Dragon Age RPG) is enjoying a surge of popularity these days too. Hence, the Midgard Bestiary. It’s packed full of 50 monsters and adversaries newly statted up for the AGE system and is a very welcome addition to any AGE GM’s tool kit. I highly recommend it. Read on for the full review.

I just finished playing the demo for Dragon Age II and I found it had an interesting take on storytelling. Gameplay was sometimes cut with scenes of a character, in the future, talking about the hero. It was interesting because a) the storyteller was alluding to events that had yet to unfold, and b) the storyteller sometimes lied. What was cool, though, was that you played those lies and then played the truth. This technique is a kind of frame narrative (a story within a story), and twists on storytelling like this can be interesting in pen and paper roleplaying games too.