A Role Playing Games Blog
Microlite Games
10 RPG geeks you should follow on Twitter
4October 14, 2009
The main problem when you start with Twitter is that you often don’t know who to follow. Aside from millions of spammers, internet marketers and people who just tweet about what they had for breakfast, there are actually quite a few RPG geeks that are worth your time:
@unclebear
Uncle Bear aka Berin Kinsman is AFAIK the only member of the RPG Bloggers Network who made it into the famous “100 Geeks You Should Be Following On Twitter” post. He was called the father figure of RPG blogging and rightfully so!
@chgowiz
Chgwoiz aka Michael Shorten is my personal expert on all things old-school. His excellent Swords & Wizardry Quick Start was my first introduction into retro-gaming.
@chattydm
Philippe-Antoine Ménard aka ChattyDM writes one of the top blogs of the RPG Bloggers Network, “Musings of the Chatty DM” and is one of its “founding fathers”.
@rdonoghue
Rob Donoghue is one of the guys behind Evil Hat Productions, the company that brought you RPGs like FATE, Spirit of the Century or Don’t Rest Your Head. His tweets are protected so you have to ask nicely to get permission to follow him. But don’t worry, he doesn’t bite.
@thefreerpgblog
Rob Lang is not only the writer of the Free RPG Blog but also the designer of ICAR (a free SF RPG) and an awesome 24-hour-RPG called “Cloudship Atlantis”. If you are into free roleplaying games, he’s the guy to follow!
@robindlaws
Robin D. Laws is a game industry veteran and designer of a lot of interesting games including Heroquest, the Gumshoe system, the Dying Earth RPG and many more.
@rpgcircus
RPG Circus is a podcast hosted by Jeff Uurtamo, Mark Meredith and Zachary Houghton, who are all members of the RPG Bloggers Network. RPG Circus is my favorite RPG related podcast and if you want to keep up with all their updates, you should follow them on Twitter. The three hosts are also on Twitter, so you might be interested in following their respective tweets as well.
@greywulf
Greywulf aka Robin Stacey is a RPG blogger from the UK who is known for his awesome CGI renderings, his love for Mutants & Masterminds and recently for some great posts about the modern age D&D 4th Edition campaign he’s currently running. And not to forget that he wrote the awesome Microlite20!
@majyc
Joshua Macy (I hope this time I spelled his name right) is another member of our RPG Bloggers Network. He helped me a lot when I was writing my film noir roleplaying game (thanks a lot, Joshua!) and currently he’s also working on his own superhero game called “Kapow!”
@viricordova
Viriatha Cordova (I still don’t know her real name) is one of the few female RPG bloggers out there and she’s even more special because she is also a 40-something housewife. I always enjoy reading her blog and I always enjoy chatting with her over Twitter.
Of course this list is far from exhaustive, but these guys should be enough to get you started. If you feel I missed a few important people feel free to post their Twitter ID into the comments below!
Guide to retro-clone roleplaying games
0August 31, 2009
It’s probably pretty obvious that I recently discovered the world of old-school gaming for me. In a way this new passion started with Dungeonslayers (which is actually not old-school at all) and later I stumbled upon X-plorers. Since I love SF and it seemed easy to run, I gave it a try and this paved the road for me having a look at the real retro-clones like Swords & Wizardry.
One thing that bugged me for quite a while was the question what the differences between the various retro-clones are. The most well known are obviously Swords & Wizardry (which itself is available in two distinct versions), Microlite74, OSRIC, Labyrinth Lord and Basic Fantasy RPG.
All of those games are inspired by early editions of D&D and make use of the d20 Fantasy SRD under the terms of the OGL and they are all available for free as PDF. But what versions of D&D do they try to emulate and what version is the right one for me?
I initially wanted to write a big post about all this, but when I started doing research I stumbled upon the perfect article about retro-clone roleplaying games at the “To The Blogmobile!” blog. The post not only describes the various games in detail it also links a few interesting reviews.
If you are interested in playing any retro-clone, you should probably read “Old is new again: a guide to ‘retro-clone’ roleplaying games" before doing so.
Gaming on the cheap
12June 22, 2009
Roleplaying games can be an expensive hobby, especially when you are the game master. Imagine you want to run games using everyone’s favorite fantasy game. You usually need at least one copy of each core book, perhaps a couple of miniatures and a few dice. Let’s say you already own dice and miniatures, so you just need the core books. Each core book is about 25$, so at the end of the day you’ve been set back 75$. Phew! If you are not sure, if you are really GM material, that’s quite a hefty sum. So, are there any alternatives?
I am a great fan of free games and I’ve written about quite a few free roleplaying games in the past (and I even helped translate one). I’ve reviewed or at least mentioned the following games so far:
- Treasure RPG – Fantasy
- Crimefighters! – Pulp
- Two Worlds RPG – Fantasy
- GORE – Multi-Genre
- Runequest SRD Deluxe – Fantasy
- Microlite20 – Fantasy
- FATE – Multi-Genre
- Dungeonslayers – Fantasy
- Mutant Future – Post-Apocalytic
- Labyrinth Lord – Fantasy
- OSRIC – Fantasy
- SLA Industries – Urban Horror/SF
- Tri-Stat/dX – Multi-Genre
- CJ Carrella’s WitchCraft – Modern Horror
- HARP Lite – Fantasy
- Ars Magica 4th Edition – Medieval Fantasy
All these games you can get for totally free. So, if you have a few dice, pencils and scrap paper and some imagination you can start playing. Even without leaving the better half of your monthly wages in the game store.
From all the commercial games I’ve played, Savage Worlds was probably one of the most inexpensive. You can get the Savage World Explorer Handbook for just $10 and that’s everything you need to start playing. Of course there are various campaign settings and supplements available for Savage Worlds but if you are willing to play in a campaign of your own design, the rule book for $10 is enough. Heck, you can even run complete games just with the Savage World Test Drive rules, that you can download for free. If you are a friend of one-shots, just download a couple one-sheet adventures and you’re done!
If everything else fails, there are a lot of sites out there that host and/or review free roleplaying games. My favorite free RPG sites are The Free RPG Blog (which reviews free RPGs on a regular basis) and 1KM1KT (which hosts free RPGs). Between those two sites you should find enough interesting games to keep you occupied quite some time.
So, what is your favorite free or cheap game? What game can you recommend the player/gamemaster who doesn’t want to spend his kids’ college fund on roleplaying games? What are your thoughts on free games in general? As always I am very interested in your thoughts. So let your voices be heard in the comments below!
Review: Microlite20 purest essence
5March 5, 2009
I am always interested in roleplaying games I haven’t played before and especially when they are free. One of the free roleplaying games that grabbed my attention recently was Microlite20.
What is Microlite20?
According to the Microlite20 website it’s the following:
Microlite20 is a free role-playing game containing character generation, combat and rules for magic, monsters and level advancement. We have ripped the guts out of d20 leaving just the essence of the game. Skills are much simplified, there are no feats and combat is as simple as it gets.
So instead of all the retro-clones like OSRIC and the like you get a stripped down version of d20 that is supposed to be compatible with almost all existing material. So, one could for example run Eberron using Microlite20.
Microlite20 purest essence
Paul Lessack created a beautifully laid-out version of Microlite20 that includes Character Generation, Combat, Advancement, Monsters, Equipment, Spells and the full Expert rules and GM Guide. In my opinion it’s the PDF you should download and print when you want to start running a Microlite20 campaign, so I used it for my review of Microlite20. I will abbreviate Microlite20 purest essence as M20PE in the context of this review.
You can download M20PE here.
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