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: Japan

  • Japanese RPG Double Cross 3: Titus and Lois

    A few weeks ago I played in a Double Cross 3 session, and wrote up a few reports on it. This post constitutes the final report on that session, in which I describe my experience of the Lois and Titus rules and how they affect gameplay. Lois and Titus When you roll up a character…

  • GMing warhammer in Japanese: Initial game report

    Having outlined my thoughts on my first Warhammer 3 session, I will now give the actual session report. This adventure is a preliminary adventure for the adventure An Eye for an Eye, which comes with the basic rules pack and seems a perfectly decent introductory adventure to try out. The plan for today was to…

  • GMing Warhammer 3 in Japanese

    Last night I had the pleasure of running my first ever Warhammer 3 session at my local FLGS. Because my local FLGS is run by a Japanese man in Japan, I naturally had to run the session in Japanese. This obviously raises a lot of challenges, including: Explaining the rules Helping players use cards in…

  • Japanese role-playing game Double Cross 3: Kintaro “The Noble”

    This post, third in a series describing my recent experience playing the Japanese role-playing game Double Cross 3, which I have been reading and recently had the chance to play-test, describes the character I played, Kintaro. Character Concept Kintaro, aka “The Noble,” is a pure-breed Black Dog syndrome male in his mid-20s, who works for…

  • Japanese role-playing game Double Cross 3: Scenario Craft Random Modules

    In my previous post about playing this game on Sunday, I mentioned that we used a type of module called “Scenario Craft,” in which every element of the module except a vague skeleton of the plot is random. This post gives a little more detail about the scenario craft process. The book The scenario craft…

  • Play-testing the Japanese RPG Double Cross 3

    At this month’s Oita Evil Spirts Konkon convention, I got a chance to play in a session of Double Cross 3 (DX3), which is the Japanese RPG I’ve been putting up information about here. This was my first (and only?!) chance to play this game, and so even though I was sorely tempted to join…

  • Grognarding in Japanese

    Is what happened today, at my monthly convention. I turned up at 9:30 with Ms. Uma, on time, carrying a huge bag of rice balls, and thus well placed to hear the introductions to the various games that were being played today. One of the choices, by Mr. 123, was a session of old school…

  • Heian era vox populi

    Because there isn’t a great deal of easy work in steamy Beppu, I’ve taken up some freelance editing work while I wait on certain work opportunities to develop over the next few months. This editing work involves editing about 100 very short (200 word or so) articles by adult Japanese students of English, written casually…

  • Japanese role-playing game Double Cross: Skill resolution

    We saw in my previous post how a simple character is made in the Double Cross role-playing game. I have subsequently skipped across the more complex character generation rules straight to the bit about how the characters operate in practice, i.e. how tasks are resolved. This is basically divided into two parts, the standard skill…

  • Japanese role-playing game “Double Cross 3”: Character Creation

    I promised I would read through this game and give a full report, and by now I’ve read far enough through to make an attempt at character creation. There are two methods of character creation, Quickstart and Construction. The former is done by choosing a sample character and then developing a life-path for it; the…