These past few years I’ve been catching up on a lot of classic roleplaying games that I’ve never played before, despite having several decades of play behind me. One of those was Traveller, so I was happy to finally run that with my Friday game! We ran about 15 sessions, across four scenarios, plus the usual extra shenanigans in between.
I liked the game and would like to play more of it, but my players didn’t! Oh noes! They sent Traveller all the way down their list of games! I’m a bit sad but as we’ll see, some of the blame was on me as the gamemaster. Hopefully, these “Notes on Traveller” will be useful for someone introducing Traveller to their group!
Mausritter is a TTRPG in which you play little adventuring mice trying to survive in a world of big dangers. If you’re a fan of the excellent comicbook Mouse Guard, you should already be hooked! The system is as minimalist as its protagonists, with low-prep two-hours adventures, so we played this a dozen times as an “interlude game”: the sort of game you play when a key player is missing, or in between campaign arcs. I also played this several times with TTRPG newbies, with up to 8 players! Here are my notes on Mausritter!
Lately I’ve seen a bit of criticism about TTRPG “reviews” that are mostly about flipping through a book and sharing first impressions. I do agree that it’s wrong to call those “reviews” but frankly, most of their authors actually call them “first looks” or “unboxings” anyway, so I’m pretty sure they are aware of that.
What I disagree with is the criticism that they are “useless”. It generally takes this form: “they only read the back cover and flip through the book, and I can do that myself!” And sure, I could do that myself too… if I had the book.
Numenera is a science-fantasy game set in the far, far, far distant future, with some lightweight and somewhat original system, all written by Monte Cook.
On paper, it ticked a lot of boxes for stuff I’m interested in, so I brought it to my Friday group a few years ago. We played a dozen sessions or so and… well, we weren’t much into it and dropped it for something else. Still, there are a few cool things to take away from Numenera! Here are my notes!
Disclaimer: we played Numenera several years ago, using the game’s first edition. Since then Monte Cook published a new edition, called Numenera Discovery and Destiny. I have no idea what changed in that second edition.
I got my copy of Rosewood Abbey a couple weeks ago! This is a TTRPG based on Brindlewood Bay, in which you play Medieval European monks and other religious-adjacent figures investigating mysteries. Obviously, it’s heavily inspired, among other things, by The Name Of The Rose and Cadfael (both their literary and cinematic versions)
I recently answered a question on Discord about Delta Green1 and since I had seen that question a couple times before I figured I would post (and heavily edit and expand) my answer here for posterity2. The question generally takes the following form:
Playing a character that’s a member of US Federal Agencies such as the FBI or the CIA raises many problematic aspects because of <insert reason here>. Is it possible to play Delta Green while also avoiding this?
This is a totally fair question as far as I’m concerned. There are indeed several good reasons to not want to portray a member of an American (or many other countries’) Law Enforcement organization as the hero of your story. But fear not! Well, I mean, do fear, this is Delta Green after all, but yes, I’ve got some hopefully helpful advice for you.
Travis Miller wrote this interesting article on his Grumpy Wizard blog about “genre emulation” in TTRPGs. He basically argues that games don’t “emulate” a genre as much as they are part of that genre:
To “emulate” is to imitate, simulate, or copy a thing without being the thing itself.
If you are running a game set in the 1870’s, in the western half the United States, the characters are cowboys, ride horses, and get into gun fights with outlaws; you are part of the Western genre.
Every RPG is part of a genre just as every film, novel, short story, and video game are part of a genre.
Thinking that they are “emulating” a genre puts the designer in mindset that they are trying to imitate a genre without being a participant in that genre.
A game designer with that mind set isn’t a contributor. They are copyists.
Having a mindset of contribution not imitation is a big shift.
I found these arguments interesting, especially since frankly I never really thought of it that much before. Travis mentions in particular Vampire: The Masquerade and the broader World of Darkness setting, which took such an integral part in the genre of gothic supernatural fiction (or something) that it affected the movies and books that followed.
However, this made me realize that my understanding of “genre emulation” is different than Travis’. Maybe it’s because of my video game development background, but I interpret the term “emulation” less as “copying” and more like the way we think of a retro console emulator.
For those unfamiliar with it, a retro console emulator (or any emulator in that sense, really) is a software application that allows a modern computer to behave like another, generally older, piece of hardware. The typical use-case is being able to play old games from the SNES or Sega Megadrive or Amiga or whatever else on your PC. A very popular starting point is RetroArch. Recently, Apple even allowed emulators on their App Store.
So in that sense, to me, “genre emulation” is less about copying a genre from the outside, and more about designing a game that mechanically enables, and perhaps even enforces, the tropes of that genre. It’s about creating that “emulator software” that lets you runs one thing on top of another thing. Only it’s not about taking, say, 40-year-old video game code originally meant for an 8-bit console and making it run on a modern 64-bit computer… it’s about taking 40-year-old stories originally written for a book or a movie, and making them run on dice, character sheets, and people around a table. It’s emulation as “translation from one platform to another”, and not emulation as “imitation”.
What does “genre emulation” mean for you?
Either way you want to call it, “genre games” have been increasing in number and narrowing in scope for the past 20 years… on the one hand, I’m sad that it effectively made generic systems (like my beloved GURPS 4th edition) largely irrelevant, but I’m also happy because a lot of these games brought new mechanics and cool niche topics to my attention! Let’s keep emulating!
I didn’t really expect to be interested in this book. “Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground”, by Stu Horvath (of the Vintage RPG podcast, among other things), is a book that looks at the history of tabletop roleplaying games “from D&D to Mothership”, as it says on the cover.
It’s not that I’m uninterested in the history of roleplaying games — I’m very much interested in it, and I have at least half a dozen books on the topic. I just wasn’t necessarily interested in having one more book on that topic. But I got it as a gift a couple months ago, and… I love it. It’s been sitting proudly on my living room table since then, ready to be picked up every now and then for a few minutes of reading some pages picked at random. Let’s dive in!
