A Role Playing Games Blog
Posts by HyenaSpotz
Fleeting Moments: RPGs That End
1October 24, 2011
“The best way to plan a chronicle’s size is to come up with a number of sessions or months you’d like to lead it as a Storyteller, then reduce that by 20 percent.”
—Promethean: The Created, by Bill Bridges, Conrad Hubbard, et al.
Chapter 4: “Storytelling and Antagonists”
Everything ends, no matter how we may wish otherwise. Roleplaying games are no different. Sure, there are plenty of stories of twenty-year-long campaigns of Dungeons & Dragons to be heard; you might even know of or participate in one yourself. If so, congratulations! By and large, though, most games will end in a few months to a handful of years. Groups dissolve. Stories reach an end and have few other places to go. It is the way of things.
There are games out there that do not wait for the end to either blindside or creep up on the players. They often avoid the sweeping, epic scope of the “campaign” that is so familiar to Dungeons & Dragons and similar RPGs. These games are small affairs: sometimes filled with whimsy, sometimes bittersweet, and almost always with something to say.
I’m going to talk about those kinds of games for a short while. Then we’ll end.
As we must. (more…)
Losing Faith in Oghma’s Faithful
3September 20, 2011
Not long ago, Wizards of the Coast released the Neverwinter Campaign Setting. It expands upon the information presented in the Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide, released in August 2008, while providing a standalone foundation for adventures set in the region surrounding the formerly great city of Neverwinter.
It’s good. You should get it.
Now, with my review out of the way, I would like to discuss the reason we are all here: Oghma’s Faithful.
Communication Breakdown: Language in RPGs
15June 3, 2011
The other night I got my hands on a copy of Rogue Trader, one of the Warhammer 40,000 role-playing games released by Fantasy Flight Games. Naturally, the most immediate way to give the system a once-over was to craft a character (a Forge World Explorator, if you must know).
I liked what I saw, and recommend giving the game a glance if you ever have the opportunity. I’m not here to review Rogue Trader, however. Do that in your own time! Rogue Trader does include—like so many other RPGs—an aspect I want to talk about: languages.
Cards on the table here: I speak two languages reasonably well (English and Japanese) and a third passably (German). I’ve dabbled in language construction or “conlanging” as it is sometimes known, know a bit of Esperanto, and have glanced at Klingon, Quenya, and recently Dothraki. I consider myself quite the language buff.
That said, my advice to you is this:
Do not include languages in your role-playing games!
“But Shaun!” I hear you beginning to type in the comments. “Languages are a vital part of my campaign world! Just the other day, my players encountered an ancient tablet they had to decipher in order to gain the password they needed to open the Door to Dreams.”
This is a valid point, but let me ask: how did they decipher it? Did they have to track down a skilled linguistic scholar? Was it presented as some kind of letter-substitution cypher? I’m willing to bet none of the characters could actually read the language on the tablet, but that’s also a possibility.
The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game: The Review
4May 2, 2011
Back in 1998 I was just beginning high school (my apologies to any of you who now feel particularly old), and a friend of mine introduced me to this crazy little CCG called Middle Earth: The Wizards by the sadly fading Iron Crown Enterprises. I was well-versed in collectible card games at this point in time; I’d been playing Magic: The Gathering since the Revised Edition, played Netrunner whenever I could find someone with cards, and—though I am loathe to admit it—even spent some time attempting to convince a few friends to get into the ill-fated Sim City CCG.
MECCG was rather different from these, as I recall. You had a deck, sure, but from it you would assemble parties of characters, and they would travel to various locations around Middle Earth, collecting artifacts and attempting to find allies that would assist them in the eventual battle against Sauron. It was pretty epic stuff.
Unfortunately the game ceased production not long after I started playing. I had a reasonable collection of cards, but I’m uncertain what happened to them. I very well may have thrown them away when I moved to college. File that under Things I Greatly Regret.
I skipped The Lord of the Rings Trading Card Game released by Decipher. Art has always been a major factor for me in CCGs, and photos from the movies just don’t cut it. (more…)
Review: Alternity
10March 8, 2011
Alternity, by Bill Slavicsek and Richard Baker, is a science-fiction role-playing game released in 1998 by TSR (now Wizards of the Coast). It bills itself as “a framework for all kinds of contemporary to far-future science fiction adventures.” Indeed, its two original settings are Star*Drive, a far-future space-opera, and Dark•Matter, which is a modern-day game drawing much of its inspiration from conspiracy theories and the X-Files. It was also the game that was home to the fifth edition of Gamma World, and the Starcraft Adventures setting, which was a toned-down version of the system used for an RPG based on Blizzard Entertainment’s well-loved RTS.
I consider Alternity the greatest RPG I have never played.
Frankly I’m a little afraid to play it at this point. It has taken on an almost mythic significance in my mind.
I got my hands on the Player’s Handbook back in ’98, but in typical D&D-like fashion it also required the Gamemaster Guide, which I wouldn’t pick up until some time in 2005 along with most of the other supplements from a used RPG bookshelf at my FLGS of the day.
Anyway, let’s get to the heart of the matter.
Me (of the Dead!)
4February 23, 2011
Hello, I’m Shaun. I live in Maryland, on the east coast of the United States, and I’ve been playing roleplaying games for almost 19 years now. For the first half of that, I never really had a regular group. I was lucky if I could get two people together to game. I played a lot of regular one-on-one sessions with a few friends, and it definitely left its mark on the way I run games and the way I play them.
I enjoy Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition a great deal, as it renewed my interest in the game after I became pretty jaded with 3E/3.5. In the interim I spent a lot of time with World of Darkness, and found out about the Forge. I appreciate the work they do over there, and love a lot of the games such as Polaris, Dogs in the Vineyard, and Donjon to name a few. These games have really changed the way I look at what is possible in the hobby.
I have a blog, Gnoll’s Den, though it isn’t anything special. I also work as an associate editor and content developer over at Nevermet Press. I’ve had a few conversations with Stargazer over on Twitter, where you can find me @HyenaSpotz. I recently started a Tumblr account for non-RP-related art stuff, but be warned: I’m hardly a great artist.
I play a lot of board games, like vinyl toys such as the ones made by Kid Robot, and enjoy foreign languages. I know reasonably good amounts of German and Japanese.
So, that’s me in a nutshell. You’ll likely learn more by reading my posts. I look forward to writing them. They’ll be pretty awesome.
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