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: Horror

  • Rats in the Ranks Session 9: Corruption and Lies

    The final session continued where the previous session left off, with our heroes standing on a pile of corpses… again.Having looted their victims, but none the wiser as to the purpose of the rat-catchers’ guild they were so efficiently destroying, they decided to go back to the start of the sewer complex and explore every…

  • Current Viewing: The Road

    The Road is a nasty post-apocalypse movie by John Hillcoat, based on the novel of the same name by Cormac McCarthy. The basic story is very simple – a man and his son are walking south towards the coast through a post-apocalyptic landscape, trying to survive while they head for the sea. The cause of…

  • Cthulhu in the Eye of the Storm

  • Flying Vampire Slaad

    I always liked the Slaad, those vicious froggy bastards from another plane. Recently the Australian Museum discovered a flying vampire frog[1] in Vietnam, which would surely be the inspiration for an excellent and very terrifying undead Slaad. — fn1: This is a slight exaggeration

  • The Implausibility of World War Z

    I started reading World War Z this morning, and so far it’s excellent but the central conceit – that it’s a factual account written in the aftermath of a zombie plague – just doesn’t hold up, because the introduction presents information so implausible that you can’t trust the credibility of the author. I mean, sure,…

  • Rats in the Ranks Session 7: Mutant Frenzy in Heideldorf

    NOTE: this post contains spoilers for the WFRP 1st Edition adventure Fear the Worst, so if you’re planning on playing it (which I recommend you badger your GM into doing) you should stop reading here. We left our PCs in a state of near death, surrounded by the bodies of 7 vanquished mutants, with only…

  • Torture in RPGs

    Last night my players got to do some, ah, enhanced interrogation while wearing smug smiles, and I found myself pondering how far we can come from our real-life moralities when we play. The Warhammer world is constructed so that you really have nothing to lose from torture. The only possible question that can arise when…

  • Rats in the Ranks Session 6: Dubious German Sausage

    Last night was the 6th session of the Rats in the Ranks campaign, so about my 9th session of Warhammer 3rd Edition. This time, we again were missing one of our players (Mr. Camphor) so we again decided to put off the main plot of the campaign for a random side adventure, which is fine…

  • Photos from the End Times…

    The Guardian today has a series of pictures from deserted buildings in Detroit, USA, where the economy (particularly, I suspect, the housing sector) has been slowly collapsing. These pictures are exactly how I imagine the world after a zombipocalypse. Who leaves a library deserted but full of books, except someone fleeing a zombie assault? I…

  • Current Reading: Psychic Detective Yakumo

    As part of my new year plan to improve my Japanese, I am on a manga collecting binge, starting with Psychic Detective Yakumo (Shinrei Tantei Yakumo,心霊探偵八雲) by Manabu Kaminaga. This is a series of case files about a cynical and slightly misanthropic college student called Yakumo, seen mostly through the perspective of the slightly eccentric…