Happy new year to my fellow fans of all things epic! I certainly hope we all have a better year in 2021. It's been a quiet holiday for me, as can be expected with COVID lockdowns and whatnot. But I've managed to keep things epic with a rewatch of the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy. (I've always felt those movies are particularly Xmas holiday-themed.) I've also been running an online Burning Wheel campaign for the past couple months. One of the players, my good friend Tom, recently came up with a great idea which inspired me to write this blog post. I'll just go ahead and quote him below: "I want to make an epic continent-spanning campaign where the players are from a society that doesn't have the tech for maps and they have to navigate via peripli and itinerania — I guess these are basically just real world node maps." -- Tom  OK, so chances are you're having the same initial reaction as I did to this and are wondering what peripli and itineraria ...

Well, 2020 is nearly finished and it's been a doozy of a year, I think we can all agree. It hasn't actually been terribly bad for my family (knock on wood), just very busy. Working remotely with a kid home from daycare has meant much less time for writing and lots more time spent watching family movies and drinking. >.< In search of new entertainment, I recently introduced my four-year-old daughter to Dungeons & Dragons (kinda). Readers might recall that I actually started playing a simplified version of the Mouse Guard RPG with my kid when she was just two and a half. She still likes playing it with me sometimes (I should write another episode of Mousling Guard, come to think of it), but she doesn't want to play very often. And even when she does, it just turns into a LARP every single time, lol. A short attention span plus a love for roleplaying with dolls does not work well for rules crunchy systems, no matter how much you dumb it down. What I've learned, ...

One roleplaying game I am particularly fond of is  Trail of Cthulhu  by Robin Laws and Kenneth Hite. It’s the perfect blend of old-school Lovecraftian horror with new-school rules, and its  Gumshoe engine -based mystery clue mechanics are brilliant. However, there are two things I am not particularly fond of with this game: I don’t care for how pacing works in Trail of Cthulhu. It uses a skill point pool mechanic that works excellently for extended game sessions, creating a feeling of building suspense and impending doom. But if you ever try breaking a mystery up into a few shorter sessions, you’ll quickly see the suspense factor only really comes into play when you get closer to the climax — which is a problem when a single mystery spans the course of a month. This also makes the game rather inappropriate for narrative Play by Post or Play by Email mysteries, which can take even longer than that. The game’s mechanics also don’t lend themselves well to improvisa...

Note : This is part two of a series about my homebrew game system, Peasants & Pitchforks. In this post, we take a look at the gameplay mechanics.  Please see post number 1 to learn how to generate a P&P character. To recap from last post, every P&P PC will have the following written on their character sheet: Three stats (Handy, Tricky, Lucky) with values ranging from 1 to 6 (with a possible +2 in Lucky) Three descriptors: a physical characteristic, a character trait and an occupation One piece of gear With that in mind, let's move onward to the game mechanics: ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ Doing Stuff Throwin’ Dice : During play, just  tell the   Elder  what you want your character to do. If it’s risky, you’ll have to roll for it: Roll  Handy  to perform most actions: Throw 1d8. You want to score equal to or lower than your Handy stat. Success only applies to your single action, and creates little extra benefit beyo...

NOTE : This is part one of an ongoing series, and only describes character generation mechanics.  For gameplay mechanics, please see part two of the series . ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ Peasants & Pitchforks  is a fun little gaming project I’ve been working on. The basic concept is very much inspired by Dungeon Crawl Classics’ zero-level funnels, except redesigned purely with one-shot or convention play in mind. If you don’t know about DCC’s funnels, basically instead of playing one character, everybody plays a crowd of super-weak 0-level characters who take on a super-lethal meat-grinder dungeon module. There are tons of hilarious deaths, and only a handful of characters come out alive. My problem with DCC’s funnel modules is that they’re meant to be used as campaign openers and are not really optimized for one-shots. You end up playing these weak characters with a whole ton of rules you have no use for running in the background. For con games, I prefer rules s...