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: Monsters

  • Mutant 1: A Trip To the Markets

    Maybe, maybe it’s the clothes we wear, The tasteless bracelets and the dye in our hair, Maybe it’s our kookiness, Or maybe, maybe it’s our nowhere towns, Our nothing places and our cellophane sounds, Maybe it’s our looseness, But we’re trash, you and me, We’re the litter on the breeze, We’re the lovers on the…

  • Undriel Introduction: Strangers with the Eyes of Men

    They stand together in our wildest dreams We invoke the Fomori Strangers with the eyes of men And they fall from grace And they fall from light Two hundred angels Black rain from the clouds And they fall from grace And they fall from light Blackened forsaken tears Snake down my face The high order…

  • Barbarians of Lemuria: Strife and Sacrifice in Malukut

    On the 30th December I ran a one-off session of Barbarians of Lemuria, a sword and sorcery RPG with a simple engine and stripped down rules that I wanted to try out. This is the game report. There were three PCs: Kazaam, hunter and assassin from the lost Bone-Eye clan of the Beshaar desert Batiz,…

  • Fantastic Beasts: Great Fun, but an Idea that is Unravelling

    On the weekend I saw Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the new offering from JK Rowling. This movie is set in the Harry Potter world before the events of the Potter books, and I guess is intended to flesh out that world for a new generation of audiences. The movie itself is great…

  • Delicious in Dungeon: A Dungeon-crawl Manga Cooking Show with Extra Gross

    I just finished reading episode 1 of this entertaining and weird manga, called Dungeon meshi in Japanese, by Ryoko Kui. It’s the tale of a group of adventurers – Raios the fighter, Kilchack the halfling thief, and Marshille the elven wizard – who are exploring a dungeon that is rumoured to lead to a golden…

  • Random Thoughts on the Recent Unpleasantness

    I’m not going to write anything specific about what yesterday’s election results mean for America or the world, but in this post I thought I’d make a few random observations about the electoral process, polling and Democratic strategy, followed by two comments relating this election to past role-playing campaigns of mine. The US electoral process…

  • Grunt Rules for Traveler

    My Spiral Confederacy campaign is heading towards its conclusion, which means bigger battles and more annoying enemies, which (just as happened in Cyberpunk) inevitably requires rules for handling minions. Combat in Traveler tends to be quick and brutal but it also involves a lot of tricky management of attributes and penalties as the damage grinds…

  • One Ring Session 1: The Long Lake

    When late summer comes to middle earth, conversations in the taverns and marketplaces of Anduin naturally turn to the most hideous forms of arachnoid death. As the oppressive heat of summer fades from Mirkwood’s dim reaches, to be replaced by the moldering stillness of autumn, and the first red tips can be seen on the…

  • VTM Characters: Johnny Falco and the Vampire Queen

    [This is a guest post by one of my group’s players, Eddie, about his Vampire characters] Lady Ashira (Elder) A protecting mother, a lover of beauty, self involved survivor. “ The most beautiful people are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths.…

  • VTM Domain: Atlantic City’s Crumbling Towers

    Edgar Evans is an eighth generation kindred character in the new Vampire The Masquerade short campaign my group has started. The campaign is intended to involve not just the vampire characters, but also their elders (6th generation legends) and also one ghoul in the service of the ancilla. Edgar Evans is a rich man with…