Every game makes you a promise: the game will be about this thing and will support you this way. Some games wisely under-promise and over-deliver. That’s just good life advice. But under-promising is hard to do when you need to generate excitement for your game, otherwise people won’t buy and, hopefully, play it. So we live in a world where games frequently over-promise and under-deliver. I’ve never liked writing critique that lands on “this is good” or “this is bad.” My interests don’t lie in making purchase recommendations. Instead, I look at the game’s promises, how it delivers on that, and ..read more

This is part 9 of our 10-part text AP of Stonetop. We posted part 8 a few weeks back, and if you want to start from the beginning here’s part 1. If you want to see what all the fuss is about, here’s the deep dive on Stonetop I posted a few weeks ago. Enjoy! Sometimes I get very excited to nail down all the fun details of our sessions right away. Sometimes I just want to sit with what happened for a while. This session was one of those: emotional, fraught, as intense as anything I’ve played at any table. Honestly, a level of intensity I found a bit s ..read more

This is part 8 of our 10-part text AP of Stonetop. We posted part 6 a few weeks back, and if you want to start from the beginning here’s part 1. If you want to see what all the fuss is about, here’s the deep dive on Stonetop I posted a few weeks ago. Enjoy! In November 2023, it had been really hard to get sequential sessions into this game. The holidays are where campaigns go to die, after all. I was starting to sense the stress cracks of trying to keep this thing together over many months with long weeks of breaks here lately. The biggest problem h ..read more

This is part 7 of our 10-part text AP of Stonetop. We posted part 6 a few weeks back, and if you want to start from the beginning here’s part 1. If you want to see what all the fuss is about, here’s the deep dive on Stonetop I posted a few weeks ago. Enjoy! Content warning for self-harm in this episode. We played this session in mid-November. When we were circling the holiday season, it got hard to hit our weekly sessions consistently. It had been, I think, three weeks since we last played? Before we started the session I was at about a 30% chance o ..read more

One of the most frustrating things about being deep into RPGs in a serious way for a very long time is that the same conversations seem to keep coming up. Year after year, decade after decade. Every few years a new cohort comes along and convinces itself they’re the first ones to have thought of these questions or these answers. I’m not sure what to tell you other than…sometimes that’s true. Mostly it’s not.  It’s not true because, in most cases, the evergreen topics are by definition unanswerable. Isn’t that exciting? I love that there are fundamental questions about gaming you literally ..read more

I have a theory: there are two kinds of licensed games. Or, perhaps, licensed games fall on a continuum. The first kind is where the rules provide as little friction as possible while you Do License Things. The game expects you to bring lots of knowledge of the license to bear, and the system does the bare minimum (usually some flavor of task resolution). They rely on the facilitator and players to know what works in the license. Doesn’t mean they’re all traddy by any means! On one end of the continuum you’ve got The Terminator RPG and a very straightforward skill plus die against target thing ..read more

This is part 6 of our 10-part text AP of Stonetop. We posted  part 5 last week, and if you want to start from the beginning here’s part 1. If you want to see what all the fuss is about, here’s the deep dive on Stonetop I posted a few weeks ago. Enjoy! This session’s theme: I’ll take imperfect, messy, emergent play over clever clockwork precision play any day.  Finally our guys got out of Stonetop. They headed to the Steplands ostensibly to broker a peace with the angry Hillfolk bands but also to go rooting around in the ruins of the Stone Lords. The ..read more

This is part 5 of our 10-part text AP of Stonetop. We posted the love letters that set up this session last week. If you want to see what all the fuss is about, here’s the deep dive on Stonetop I posted a few weeks ago. Enjoy! It’s been a month since we played but we finally got our Stonetop game back up and running. A month is the longest I’ve ever let a game go and attempted to restart it. I think it worked! The bulk of the work started with the love letters I wrote for each character. They all got each player aligned with what I understood to be their primary interest areas ..read more

This is part 4 of our 10-part text AP of Stonetop. We posted part 3 last week. If you want to see what all the fuss is about, here’s the deep dive on Stonetop I posted a few weeks ago. Enjoy! This was our last Stonetop thread until mid-October 2023. Lots of scheduling hiccups came up! But we had our first sesh fully back-home. I hesitate to call it downtime because that feels real structured like Torchbearer town phase or Blades-style downtime. Which Stonetop doesn’t do, exactly. The deal with Stonetop is that there’s sort of an implied downtime insofar as there being a whole se ..read more

This is part 3 of our 10-part text AP of Stonetop. We posted part 2 last week. If you want to see what all the fuss is about, here’s the deep dive on Stonetop I posted a few weeks ago. Enjoy! Our heroes finally, finally got to deal with their gwead-spirit problem and all it took was a visionquest, folk magic and murder. <figure>All hail Helior! May his light cleanse the darkness!</figure> We left off last week with Carwyn, the Fox, slipping off into the night to go and steal the weather-watching stone off some treasure hunters they’d run into on the Maker’s Road. The ..read more