The Arc Campaign

"We never finish anything!", complains the player indignantly. The GM, feeling guilty and sad yet bored with the game they were playing, smiles ruefully. If only there was a way to know when something was ready to finish properly.

For a while now I've been trying to work out my ideas on something I rather lazily refer to as "The Arc Campaign".

This post is really me thinking aloud and working towards two goals:

1. Solving the problem of campaign atrophy.
2. Making one of these actually come to life so we can test a theory.

Read more »

Travelling Again

Inspired by the launch of the Traveller5 Kickstarter project last weekend, I found myself rather impetuously rocking up to the after-school gaming club clutching my copy of Mongoose Traveller and starting to run a game. In short, the guys loved it and there are a couple of really interesting reasons why...

Massive Setting

The players in the group are all between 12 and 14 years of age. They have grown up in a world in which ""Sci-Fi" (yes, I know... I had to tell them that it's "SF", but ho hum) means a combination of Games Workshop's 40K, Japanese anime, games like Halo, and recent SF movies. All of these provide rich settings with cool imagery which appeals to their creativity. 

Read more »

Experiences from the Old School

Last night was very interesting and very entertaining, at least from my vantage as the Referee. We were playing a game of Swords & Wizardry, one of the recently published free 0E clones of the original fantasy RPG. So, what made it interesting?

Tomb of the Iron God

We were playing the introductory adventure for Swords & Wizardry entitled, "Tomb of the Iron God". I have fitted this into my own Tal'Daryn setting, placing it in the hills above the village of Maunder. 

Cutting to the chase, we created some heroes and (to my surprise) I decided to run it from the adventure site itself, skipping over the village warm up. The group had an air of skepticism at first, but this quickly began to dissipate as the story began. 

Read more »

Swords & Wizardry Taran Edition

Next week we've agreed, as it's the holidays and Queen's Jubilee and all that, to run a one-off trial game of Swords & Wizardry. The thing is that, seeing as I am GMing, I couldn't resist taking the adventure that's being planned and sticking it into the Tal'Daryn setting... aka the second face of Taran, my fantasy meta-setting.

What difference does Taran make?

Well... in the scheme of things, it means that I am developing the setting that I enjoy whilst playing a fun game to try some rules.

On top of that, however, it meant that I couldn't sleep without tinkering with the rules set a bit. Or quite a lot.

In short, I've re-imagined the rules so that they more closely fit my initial ideas on how things will work in Taran. This also implies that, as we play, we can evolve the Taran Edition to suit our needs.

Read more »