Colin Sinclair's Blog

RPGaDAY2024: Day Thirty-One

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Game or gamer you miss?

Rather than depress myself by dwelling on people I’ve lost or simply lost touch with, I shall instead only slightly depress myself by saying that the gamer I miss is this guy right here:

Gamer-me, late 1900s style…

That’s me in the 80s, that’s me in the kitchen (of a friend’s parents house), probably just about to play some game or other. Back then summers were no job, no school/college, playing D&D, Cthulhu or Runequest every day for what see...

RPGaDAY2024 Day Eighteen

Memorable moment of play?

There have been a great number of them – that time my character had a heart attack trying to stop a bomb; once in a James Bond RPG where the two ’00’ agents were killed and we just started the game again from the day before like a save point; I’ve probably mentioned this previously but ‘Before?’ – and the D&D I’m currently running for the family gaming group is basically just a string of memorable moments as the party: (1) attempt to befriend everything that’s not ac...

RPGaDAY2024: Day Sixteen and Day Seventeen

I’m not running behind, you’re running behind…

A game that’s quick to learn?

I’d vote for Cairn again for this one, as everyone in the group seemed to take to it pretty swiftly during the first session. Second edition will be out soon and I’m not sure if that will complicate matters. The book’s certainly a lot longer now, but at lot of that is monster creation stuff and world building advice – so far as I can tell from the preview PDFs, the core rules are still short and to the point.

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RPGaDAY2024: Day Fifteen

Great Character Gear?

I love the Chromebook stuff from Cyberpunk, and the massive lists of equipment you find D&D stuff, not to mention the heaps of 1920s-esque gear from Call of Cthulhu et al.

I really like the equipment system from Apocalypse World.

Everything is simple and to the point, described in clear rules-ish terms.

Weapons do a certain value of Harm, a bullet-proof vest provides a certain amount of Armour, a fast vehicle gets +1 Speed etc.

Then you can also use descripti...

RPGaDAY2024: Day Fourteen

Compelling Characters?

My main issue with RPGs… or maybe it’s not an ‘issue’ so much as a thing that I love about them, is that I find almost all characters compelling. Any random selection of numbers or traits you hand me and I start to wonder what they’re thinking, what their plans are, what happens next…

Obviously, it’s great to come up with detailed and specific characters, min-maxed to perfection, but literally anything also works for me.

For example, look at this random image I fo...

RPGaDAY2024: Day Thirteen

The question for the day is: Evocative environments?

My answer for this is (amusingly for those who know) Broken Rooms.

But first, a quick shout out to the ‘realms’ creation section of Kevin Crawford’s Silent Legions RPG.

Silent Legions is a Cthulhu Mythos-esque game, run using old school D20 rules, with the twist being that you get to create your very own mythos and an entire pantheon of godlike things to trouble mankind. Part of the process offers the opportunity to create sub-worlds ...

RPGaDAY2024: Day Eleven and Day Twelve

I wrote a bunch of these weeks ago and then spent so very long faffing around trying to choose images that I never bothered to get around to posting any of them. So the last few days of RPGaDay month will be playing catch-up. As is traditional for me at this point tbh.

The questions for days 11/12: and RPG with well supported one-shots/an RPG with well supported campaigns.

There’s a bunch of them, to be fair, but for both these questions I’m going to settle for D&D, mostly because I’ve bee...

RPGaDAY2024: Day Ten

RPG I’d like to see on television?

This is an easy one – Broken Rooms.

“Discover the Nearside, a network of 13 doomed parallel worlds. As a Nearsider, one of the rare few who can travel this network of worlds, you can discover broken rooms, the nexus where worlds touch, allowing you to cross over. Will you bring solace to these dying worlds or will you treat the Nearside like your personal playground?”

Endless possibilities for stories in that kind of setting.

I may already have wr...

RPGaDAY2024: Day Nine

From the alternate RPGaDAY options list – Present an idea for a random encounter.

The Treasure Hunters…

As the player characters are travelling through any marsh, woodland or wasteland area, they reach an old and much overgrown graveyard, glimpsing beyond this what seems to be a barrow mound from an ancient time. There are two figures in the graveyard. They are digging in a grave, and there is evidence that other graves have been dug up already…

This pair is Grob and Tuko.

Grob is cl...

RPGaDAY2024: Day Eight

An accessory you appreciate?

A blue dice tray with a lid, from a company called Siquk.

I don’t use one, but my son likes to have all of his dice together, and somewhere handy to roll them so they don’t fly off the table. Also it’s covered in what purports to be blue dragon skin or something, so that’s cool.

Blue dice for a blue tray