Category: Game planning

  • Ikaho is a hot spring resort in the mountains Northwest of Tokyo, about an hour and a half from Tokyo by bullet train and local train and bus. It is famous for being the historical summer home of emperor’s, and also for having a huge flight of stone stairs that runs from the bottom of…

  • It’s the little things that can do you in, and watching The Walking Dead recently I noticed that the group have made some serious mistakes in choice of vehicle for their road trip. Who is responsible for their vehicular management? That sanctimonious old meddler, Dale, of course. They really need to start viewing him as…

  • … in Japanese, for my work. Yesterday a group of 40 first year high school students came to my department from Soma City, a town in the tsunami-affected region of Tohoku. I’m not sure why, perhaps as a quid pro quo for research we’re doing up there, but they were brought down for the afternoon…

  • This is the plan for a campaign setting in one of the earlier eras of my Compromise and Conceit campaign setting, to be run in English using Warhammer Fantasy Role-play 3. This campaign will be set in Svalbard in summer 1635, early in the period of time in which Europe began to rediscover magic, through…

  • This post continues my thoughts on ideas and inspirations from Iceland. It’s another post about both the social and political structure of a norse campaign, and about insights into how medieval worlds functioned. Again, it’s based largely on what I saw, was told by guides, and read during my stay in Iceland, with maybe a…

  • I gained a great deal of inspiration for role-playing from my trip to Iceland, and I hope that much of what I saw and experienced there will inform a Compromise and Conceit campaign run in Svalbard. Much of the inspiration gained from my trip to Iceland will come simply from amazement at the stark beauty…

  • Summer is nearly here, and I’ve been longing for that great mass of super-heated air to roll in off the Pacific and turn this whole island into a sauna, because since April I’ve had few chances to blog, role-play or really do anything except work, work work. I’ve been teaching to what the Japanese would…

  • Changes in my plans for the next year or two mean I’ve been thinking about future campaigns I could run – possibly even in English! – and this leads me, inevitably, to think about some of the campaigns I’ve thought of running or wanted to run in the past but been unable to, either because…

  • My previous post described some ideas for setting traps in Warhammer 3; in this post I present the pit trap card. The resistance side: This is the disarm side:

  • One of my (several) problems with Warhammer 3 is that it doesn’t contain rules for some basic aspects of adventuring that we all take for granted, including (rather annoyingly) traps. I don’t often use traps in adventures, since I’m not a great fan of dungeon adventures, and I understand that dungeoneering isn’t a big part…