Shannon Appelcline


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Shannon Appelcline

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June 2012

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Shannon Appelcline Chaosium's classic RuneQuest. Most people loved RQ2, but my best experiences were with RQ3.

I'm actually a fan of most of the BRP family of games. Mos…more
Chaosium's classic RuneQuest. Most people loved RQ2, but my best experiences were with RQ3.

I'm actually a fan of most of the BRP family of games. Most of my roleplaying writing experience before Designers & Dragons was in that category, with publications for Call of Cthulhu, Pendragon, Nephilim, and some scattered, small stuff for RuneQuest itself as well as Elric. (less)
Shannon Appelcline The Platinum Appendix for Designers & Dragons contains a history article on my own roleplaying group, the RuneQuest Mafia. You can also find it on RPG…moreThe Platinum Appendix for Designers & Dragons contains a history article on my own roleplaying group, the RuneQuest Mafia. You can also find it on RPGnet in my Advanced Designers & Dragons column.

For the last decade or so, I've mostly been running games. There have been notable campaigns for AD&D 1e, Elric, D&D 3.5e, Mongoose Traveller, and Pathfinder. I most recently ran a short game of Mouse Guard that was warm up for a Burning Wheel game that I'm hoping to debut in the near future. You can find Actual Play (AP) writeups of all of those at RPGnet. I believe the Pathfinder was the longest of those, at 71 sessions over four and a half years.

The longest-running games that I've run in have been Ars Magica and RuneQuest. The Ars Magica games ran as four different campaigns from 1991-1999. The first two were connected and ran somewhere over 100 sessions and led to my writing _The Roman Tribunal_ book for Ars Magica, which was my first RPG supplement. The RuneQuest campaigns were all set in the same world, my friend's Erzo, and also ran as a number of different campaigns: 3 or 4, depending on how you count it. They also ran sporadically, with the earliest beginning in 1989 and the last ending in 2004. I have no idea of the count of those games, but I'm sure they exceeded 100 together as they ran weekly for a couple of years at a time for each campaign.

My longest running character in Ars Magica was probably Rupes, an annoying and manipulative elementalist. (My own web site, erzo.org, has write-ups of many of those Ars Magica games.) My longest running character in RuneQuest was probably Kidzen Teko, an annoying giant rabbit fighter. Generally, my characters are troublemakers. Those guys both fit the giant-lug-who-gets-into-trouble-because-he-doesn't-better archetype, as opposed to the mischevious-troublemaker archetype.
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Average rating: 4.11 · 1,323 ratings · 198 reviews · 30 distinct worksSimilar authors
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Designers & Dragons: The '8...

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Designers & Dragons: The '9...

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Designers & Dragons: The '0...

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Designers & Dragons

4.50 avg rating — 32 ratings — published 2011
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Designers & Dragons: Platin...

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The Science Fiction In Trav...

3.54 avg rating — 35 ratings — published 2016 — 3 editions
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This is Free Trader Beowulf...

4.13 avg rating — 24 ratings — published 2024 — 2 editions
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Nephilim Gamemaster's Compa...

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really liked it 4.00 avg rating — 9 ratings — published 1996 — 3 editions
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Chronicle of the Awakenings

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3.88 avg rating — 8 ratings — published 1995 — 2 editions
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Designers & Dragons Designers & Dragons: The '70s Designers & Dragons: The '80s Designers & Dragons: The '90s Designers & Dragons: The '00s Designers & Dragons: Platin...
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The Amazing Spide...
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The Bright Sword
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by Lev Grossman (Goodreads Author)
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Twelve Months
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Hellverine by Benjamin Percy
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I had mixed feelings about this book. I was eager to see Percy given the opportunity to write more Wolverine post-Krakoa, but I thought the Hellverine foundation was really, really stupid.

I was pleasantly surprised. There's a notable twist that was
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The Amazing Spider-Man by Dan Slott
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Resurrection Man by Ram V
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I can certainly understand why some folks find this confusing. It's because Ram V is trying to wrap almost 30 years worth of Resurrection Man comics into a single möbius loop of a story. We're walking in and out of classic Resurrection Man tales, in ...more
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Friday by Ed Brubaker
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Ed Brubaker has previously written of his love for Encyclopedia Brown (in an article for Criminal). Here we see what his own take would look like, and it's a pretty amazing 9-issue story. He gets the YA-detective genre down pat, but it's a very moder ...more
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Phoenix by Wendy Pini
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The early part of this book is mired in the wheel-spinning of the previous books, and that sours the read, even when things FINALLY get moving again. But still, it's the same trips in and out of Door's city, the same meetings with the human outcasts ...more
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Alpha Flight By Mantlo & Lee Omnibus (Alpha Flight by Bill Mantlo
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One of the joys of Alpha Flight was its constantly changing roster. And here in the long-awaited Mantlo run we see that in spades, as he slowly dissolves the original Alphans. We get life, death, and resurrection, all something you wouldn't find in a ...more
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Resurrection Man by Ram V
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This Ends Tonight by Gerry Duggan
This Ends Tonight
by Gerry Duggan (Goodreads Author)
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DNF. What a disappointment from Duggan. The "interwoven" plots turn out to be just random intersections during moments of extreme violence. And extreme violence is all that defines these books. Page. After page. After page. The first one tries to off ...more
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Dream's End by Wendy Pini
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Barry Blair's ElfQuest storyline continues to be intriguing, but this volume spins its wheels for too long, as Windkin is captured then not captured then captured and as humans increasingly threaten Sorrow's End.

By the time we get to the end of the v
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Forevergreen by Wendy Pini
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Barry Blair was a top indie comics creator from the '80s through the early '00s, with Elflord being his best-known title. It unfortunately has never been well-collected, but we are lucky enough to have this, the first of three books reprinting his lo ...more
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