Steve Jackson's Blog, page 17

May 15, 2025: Play Car Wars And The Fantasy Trip At BGG.SPRING!

BGG.SPRING, an annual event in Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas, will be held this year over Memorial Day weekend from May 22-26 at the Hyatt Regency DFW Airport. The spring verson of the long-running BGG.CON convention is geared toward families, with no minimum age requirement. There will be dedicated rooms for different age groups, including a special area for younger players called Gamers-in-Training.

In attendance will be Nathaniel, a friend of Steve Jackson Games, who will host two exciting (and free!) events.

Learn to Melee the Steve Jackson Way is an introductory session that will welcome both those who have never tried The Fantasy Trip: Melee  and those who are long-time fans. You will learn how to create characters and fight using the  Fantasy Trip Legacy Edition rules. This event will be held on Friday, May 23, at 7:00 pm in the Wetzel RPG room.

Autoduelling aficionados can sign up for DEATHRACE 2025, a Circus Maximus-style race to the finish line. While the event, held in the Vandergriff room, begins Sunday, May 25, at 7:00 pm, anyone new to Car Wars Sixth Edition can arrive at 6:00 pm for Nathaniel's Autoduel Academy and learn how to play!

I plan to be at the convention as well, and can say with absolute certainty that it will be tons of fun, with many options for events and a huge library of games.

Limited badges for BGG.SPRING and tickets for the Steve Jackson Games events remain, so act fast if you'd like to participate!

– Michelle Richardson

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

May 14, 2025: Hello, Bun-Buns!

It's a lovely time of year as a Hoosier, when the days are long and the evening is coming off the winter chill but not yet summer hot. And that means . . . bunnies.

Since we typically walk at dusk, more often than not lately, we've been seeing rabbits (because they're crepuscular ). We try to play it as cool as we can, but . . . BUNNIES!!!!!

I like to bring my camera on these walks, so I can hang back and take pictures. But I don't want to get too close because then the power of my love overwhelms the little fuzzballs and they run off.

Anyway . . . bunnies. We love them. And if there are any rabbits reading this, please feel free to come say hi to us; we will give you carrots, cuddles, and Munchkin promo cards.

– Steven Marsh

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

May 13, 2025: Reduce, Reuse, Replay

It took me a while to come up with an angle for this article. I considered framing it as a conversation about manufacturing in the U.S., due to our ongoing concerns with what it might cost to print games overseas. I also thought this might be a good way to justify a conversation about the amount of waste that our industry produces. But in the end, I decided that it was just a cool thing to bring to your attention.

Our friends over at Atlas Games have an interesting range of products sold through their Replay Workshop store. Yes, they have game accessories like miniature bases and dice, but they also have crafting materials like turning blanks for making cool things on lathes. What makes these items most interesting, though, is that they are locally made from recycled materials. Give their store a look and help them return a bit of discard plastic to a more usable form.

– Will Schoonover

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

May 12, 2025: Dribs And Drabs Or Meaty Slabs?

I play a lot of tabletop games that feature ongoing support, such as Marvel Champions , Arkham Horror: The Card Game , and ‐ of course – Munchkin .

Since I sometimes can't come back to a game for weeks or even months, I've often built up a small collection of "new stuff" to add to the game when I return. One challenge I often face is whether I mix in smaller amounts of my "backlog," or I go hog wild by including large chunks of the new content.

I've found either option has its advantages. If I trickle in new content more cautiously, then I can draw out that "revitalized-game feeling" even longer as new cards pop up for many games in a row. However, if I just go ahead and add lots of new content all at once, then the game can feel amazingly fresh, with practically every draw of a card revealing something novel and exciting.

For those of you who've faced similar temptations, do you have any thoughts? Feel free to drop me a line or .

– Steven Marsh

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

May 11, 2025: Prints Charming

A while ago I wrote about the reasons you should make maps as player handouts. Here are some suggestions for using authentic-looking materials:

You might be familiar with the process of "tea aging": Take your printed paper and soak it for some time (the duration being, basically, "until it looks right") in a container. A 9" x 13" glass dish is perfect. Use strong tea, and remember that the document will lighten as it dries. You don't want to put a water-soluble printout into a tea bath, of course, but you can dye the paper first, iron it flat, and then print on it.

Or, if you're lazy like me, visit your local office supply store and look at both the interesting paper and the decorative designs that people get for certificates, signs, and awful Christmas letters. Imagine if your group arrives for the game session and sees a "wanted" poster with their faces on it! Craft stores sometimes also sell interesting things, like printable fabric panels (intended for things like printing photographs to sew onto fabric art), that can be wonderful for this.

It is possible to print on papyrus! I've done it. There are three critical things to remember: First, pick out the lightest and most uniform-looking pieces from your package of papyrus sheets (which you can get on Amazon). That will help minimize ink spread, or at least make it uniform. Second, get your papyrus as flat as humanly possible. I sprayed mine with a bit of water and put it under a stack of books for a week. Papyrus has a tendency to curl; you have to be very careful to prevent that. And third, only use an ink-jet printer for this. You absolutely do not want your papyrus sheet to catch fire inside a laser printer – at the very least it will cost you your printer, and possibly your house. I cannot emphasize this enough. The fuser is hot! Use the printer settings for heavy cardstock and go for it. You might need to experiment to get everything right, but papyrus usually sells in multi-packs! You don't need to stick with Egyptian themes, either – other ancient societies used papyrus, and in fantasy, the field is wide open.

And once you have your prop printed, there are other things you might want to do to it . . .

– Jean Mcguire

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

May 10, 2025: Dahlia's Diversions For Peculiar Parties Live On BackerKit

What if Lemony Snicket were a punctilious old woman whose parlor game collection comprised exclusively indie RPG zines?

Well, her name was Dahlia, and she apparently bequeathed her "best of" collection to Steve some years ago . . . I found it while exploring the Deep Archives, and somehow wound up responsible for fulfilling an old promise and getting these games to print.

Dahlia's Diversions for Peculiar Parties is a set of eight short roleplaying games, a sampler of the wide world of RPG zines. The formats range from the familiar (a GM and players rolling dice to succeed or fail) to the esoteric (a solo LARP that you play on a train), and from the most wholesome themes (day-saving grannies) to your most twisted sense of humor (a blood-soaked retelling of your favorite childhood story). Dahlia presents the set with a letter, and has left her mark on the games – a familiar cursive offering words of wisdom for new GMs and players, alternate flavor, and the occasional joke.



The campaign is live on BackerKit now, and after a little over a day it's just past 2/3 of the way to its funding goal. This party's just getting started, so come find out what's on Dahlia's table!

This project saw some last-minute changes when tariffs plunged our initial plan of a boxed set into oblivion. We're working with a local printer in Atlanta, and assembly will be "in house" – literally at SJ's. I'm really proud of the work that went into each of these games, and hope you'll like them too!

– Irene Zielinski

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

May 9, 2025: Daily Game Quirk: Connecting Wordles?

As longtime readers of the Daily Illuminator might have noticed, I enjoy a number of daily games, including Raddle and Align. In the past few months, I've also started mixing up one of the other games I've been playing . . . by combining it with another.

The New York Times has a daily Connections puzzle that challenges you to sort 16 answers into four categories. (Irene Zielinski recently posted her own homage to the format.)

One of the more-venerable daily puzzles is Wordle, which challenges you to guess a five-letter word within six guesses.

Since I'd been getting a bit burnt out on the daily "Wordle" strategies, I decided to mix things up for myself by combining these two games.

Once I solve a Connections puzzle, I take a five-letter word from that puzzle as my first guess. (I originally had it as the first five-letter word, but I realized I could "cheat" and just coordinate my Connections answers to make the five-letter word I wanted appear first. Nowadays, I just pick the word that seems most interesting to me.) In this way, I'm always starting out with some word that wasn't on my mind until a few minutes prior. And it's satisfying when I get a two- or three-answer guess with an oddball starting word.

Of course, sometimes I'm hoisted on my own petard with this methodology, and the only five-letter word is something like MUMMY . . .

– Steven Marsh

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

May 8, 2025: Maps, Locales, And Sites

In my , I talked about enhancing your RPG campaign by using maps for props. Here are some more ideas:

If your campaign is set in a recent era and in an actual city, find a map of that city and add a few captions, like "BBEG Building." With a bit of web searching, you can scare up historical maps, too; they are particularly handy for a Call of Cthulhu game. If it's fantasy, draw out a rough version of your GM's map of the kingdom. Weathering and aging it a bit (I used to put maps in the bottom of my backpack; after a week, they were perfect!) will add to the authenticity. For a futuristic game, if you want to go all the way for a future milieu, build a simple website (there's actually a service called Neocities that is striving to be the modern equivalent of the old Geocities).

A stylized planetary map so players know Wons is up in the Arctic and Dnas is 1,000 kilometers away in the desert could be done in an hour; a whole "Welcome to Dlrow Downport" site with details like a list of port charges for berthing, fuel, etc., and maybe even ads for local products and events (clues!) would take only a few hours, and could be used as a template to make others for various places.

Make maps. The time you spend will be more than made up in the time and hassle you don't have to spend saying "No, that's to the north of where you are."

Stay tuned for my next post in this continuing saga!

– Jean Mcguire

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

May 7, 2025: Daily Game Recommendation: Align

I recently recommended a daily online game called Raddle. Now I have another one that's pretty fun. It's from the Boston Globe, and it's called Align.

Envision a five-by-five square of letters. Each "line" of that square reading across or down forms a word (so there are 10 words total). Now you know how an answer to an Align puzzle looks. Mix up most of the letters but leave enough "in place" to form the clues, and that's how the beginning of the puzzle might look.

The trick is to look at the letters that are locked in place and try to figure out if the letters you can swap around will be useful: "Hmm . . . I see C _ R _ L. That could be CORAL or CAROL. Is there an A and an O kicking around?"

Sometimes the puzzles mix things up by having the swappable letter actually be two letters.

I like it because, unlike a lot of daily games, there isn't a way to "lose" per se; it's like a crossword puzzle or a word search, where the idea is to just solve the puzzle. You can try to challenge yourself to do it as quickly as possible or in as few a swaps as you can, but I prefer a more leisurely approach.

– Steven Marsh

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

May 6, 2025: Welcome To The Shipname!

Reading Steven Marsh's Daily Illuminator about making fake podcasts for game props got me thinking. I love using props. I'm the one who'll make fake newspaper articles or produce torn scraps of secret messages – you name it. I even cooked a meal for my gaming group once. But some of the best props are the simplest: maps.

Back in the 1980s, I was running a Traveller game, and I had a scenario set in a starship. I also had something very few people had at the time: a computer and a (9-pin, dot-matrix) printer, plus a graphics program that would be laughable today. I created a little pamphlet that was ostensibly from the management: "Welcome to the [Shipname]." It was about what you'd expect from a travel brochure: It was heavy on "you're going to have a great time on our starship," but it had, as real brochures for things like resorts often do, a map of the ship. That served a very important purpose in the game by giving the players a reference they could check without having to keep asking "Where is the passenger lounge? Is it forward or aft from our rooms?" It's something their characters would have had in-game that also helped with actual gameplay.

Nowadays, of course, one could create a very realistic brochure with a word processor and some clipart grabbed off the Net. And it's useful for the exact same reasons.

In my next post, I'll follow up with a few ideas!

– Jean Mcguire

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!