Category: Roleplaying

Domain Science Letters is a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the latest in Mythos Science. Utterly cool, this is a beautiful background element you can plug into a Delta Green campaign – although it’s distinct enough to use it elsewhere (hint hint, mumble mumble, Shadowrun, mumble).

The implied historical background to this site is that experiments to detect Dark Matter accidentally lead to contact with intelligent entities.

This ties into The End Times , another cool addition to Delta Green, this time detailing a Cthulhu campaign setting in the 2040s.

An interesting thread where Paul Elliott describes a collaborative roleplaying exercise with 11 year old kids.

Legends Walk! by Tim Gray is a fairly massive (169 pages!) shareware roleplaying game about superheroes in a modern setting with their powers derived from mythological sources. A lot of work has gone into this, with detailed descriptions of gods and the powers each one can provide, lots of background, detailed rules for combat and everything else, a skill list, GMing advice – there’s a professional level of detail here.

The mechanics use a simple dice pool (similar to something I thought of myself, actually), with nice explanations of the design decisions for certain features (why dice don’t “explode” in the default rules, even though it’s suggested as an option). And the attributes are a bit peculiar, with intelligence split into “wisdom” and “ingenuity” (perhaps to simulate differences between specific gods?). But very impressive overall.

I think I’ll still go with Powergame this Bigor, though, because preversely, because it’s so much shorter and fannishly presented, it’s much simpler to wrap my head around.

Rock Scissors Blog is a cooperative blog written by a group of (roleplaying) game writers and developers.

Here’s one interesting idea from there: Forever Young, or Nearly So, which proposes that the various classic D&D demi-humans (halflings, gnomes, elves, dwarves) might be considered as different generations of a single highly long-lived race.

Greg Costikyan, game designer and SF writer (and probably one of the most insightful writers to write about game design) has a blog (found on boingboing). Also with RSS feed.

High art is dead art. It’s art that gets show in museums, played in symphony halls, buried in dusty tomes. It’s worth preserving for the sake of the continuity of our culture, and because a self-selected elite loves it. But it’s museum art, it’s museum music, it’s museum prose. All those silly wine-swilling artists in Soho; all those academic musicians composing “new” symphonies; all those university professors writing novels, stuck in academia because they can’t make enough money to survive from their actual writing–they have a role to play in our culture, of course, but what they’re doing isn’t really very interesting.

Is it?

Low art is what’s fundamentally important. Low art reflects what’s actually going on in our culture today. Low art expands the boundaries of the possible. Low art is vital, exciting, vibrant, disturbing, cool–and, generally, fun. Popular music, genre fiction, comics, independent film, weird shit on the Internet–and games.

That’s where it’s at, man.

Grand Theft Auto isn’t art? Then I guess neither is Fatboy Slim, Sandman, or King Rat.