Assorted roleplaying links, to clear out my bookmarks.
What is Romantic Fantasy? by John Snead – The developer of Blue Rose defines the sub-genre of his game. Interesting thoughts on a whole swath of Fantasy writing that is usually looked down upon, but which pretty much defines many of the basic assumptions of “generic” fantasy. Proves my old point that RPGs are habitual scavangers of the corpses of sub-genres, i.e, that once a sub-genre has been defined into a shape you can do as an RPG, it has hardened into a list of cliches and trademark ticks.
Which is a problem for something like Cyberpunk, which has lost all novelty from it’s eighties snarl, but not for Fantasy, which thrives on comfortable familiarity.
The Primeval Games Press website has a series of interviews with indie roleplaying game designers. Here’s one with the interesting Vincent Baker, (whose game-theory blog is worth looking at) but it’s interesting to compare it to others on the site, in particular to that with the one with Chad Underkoffler, who’s much more “traditional” in outlook.
Finally, Darkpages claims to be a roleplaying game, but so far is a set of short fanfics, trying to set the mood of a dark, occultish super-hero world, similar I think to what I tried to do with “They Fight Crime!”.
Oh heck, I’ll stick this in as a PS: a summary of a talk given by the head of Guardians of Order to a group of Amber Diceless gamers about GOO’s plans for ADRPG.