Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

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An Australian statistician and role-player living in Japan, interested in the theory and practice of role-playing…

Category: Gaming material

  • A Haul of Japanese Old School Gaming Products

    During my otaku bonenkai party, Mr. Shuto opened one of his many storage cabinets and revealed a huge haul of old school gaming products, almost all Japanese translations of originals, that he had collected from Yahoo Auction over the years. Most were in near-mint condition, some he had never played, and some of them I…

  • Constructing a Save-or-die Challenge in Warhammer 3

    In the last session of Rats in the Ranks, the PCs had to escape from a slowly collapsing dungeon before it crushed them alive. I’m not sure how I would have handled this in previous systems (never done it!) but the Warhammer 3 Progress Tracker gave me an excellent mechanism for doing it, not necessarily…

  • Fashioning Random Encounters in Warhammer 3

    During their recent dungeon-delving, our heroes ran into some scary zombie children, and after a surprisingly challenging battle they had to retreat from the dungeon to recover from wounds, fatigue and stress. One character was carrying such a high load of fatigue and stress that he was essentially in a state of high panic, and…

  • Agricultural Heritage Systems

    This is a completely off-topic post, but I thought it covers an interesting topic in one of those areas that it benefits everyone to know something about. Last night I found myself accidentally at diner with the director of the Land and Water Division of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).  His particular interest at…

  • Some monsters from the Japanese RPG “Make You Kingdom”

    Having presented a random table and monster from the game Make You Kingdom, here are a few more monsters from the game. I have to return the book tomorrow, so there’ll be no more posts about it until I buy my own. Here is a translation of the monster in the main picture, General Winter.…

  • On the importance of learning from Computer and Board Games

        Many people in the RPG world think what I’m about to say is heresy, but I actually think that board games and computer games have some interesting ideas to teach RPG makers and players, and a lot of them are based on making available new and specialized content – that is, objects and…

  • An example random dungeon table from Make You Kingdom

    Continuing my series of posts on the Japanese RPG Make You Kingdom, here I present a single table from the random Kingdom generation section. In this section you choose how many rooms your Kingdom will have (1 to 9), then you generate each room randomly. To do this, you first roll a d6 to see…

  • Life imitates China Mieville

    In the Grauniad today, an excellent article about the disappearing aquatic nomads of the Coral Triangle, the Bajau, complete with cool picture of boy with pet shark. Apparently these people live almost their entire lives on boats, like tropical gypsies, trading sea products for rice and kerosene. Some of them still don’t even have motors…

  • Perfidious accusations of sandboxery

    In a recent skype conversation, one of my players from London accused my GMing style of being “very sandbox,” and even went so far as to imply that there is little difference between me and the OSR. This has me a little confused as to what sandboxing is, since I don’t do any of the…

  • Preparation: an example session plan

    Fame & Fortune is running this month’s blog carnival on the theme of preparation, which has inspired me to do something I had been thinking about for a while but never got around to – posting up the contents of one of my session preparation documents, in order to show what I do to prepare…