On Apple TV Plus, the series, Masters of the Air has just started. Produced by Stephen Spielberg and Tom Hanks, it’s widely considered to be part of a trilogy with Band of Brothers and Pacific two well received HBO dramas. So I foolishly set myself a challenge: if War Stories is inspired by Band of Brothers, and Dave’s Rendezvous with Destiny campaign broadly follows a similar post D-Day arc, and if the company is also working on a Pacific campaign, could I imagine how a Masters of the Air style campaign might work, using the same ruleset? I say it was a foolish challenge because the potential ..read more

I am a bit of a system tart, always attracted by the new. And of course my current favourite, Coriolis, isn’t that old. So what games, even if not my favourite, have stayed with me. Traveller is like a comfortable old shirt. I can just slip it on, pull a character together, and slip into the Imperium, even though I have not played it for years now. I can play with anyone. I think the current integration (2nd Edition Mongoose, not T5) is the perfect distillation of decades of rulesets. Pendragon is a game that I have played a single campaign of, for over 30, getting on for 40 years. I love it’s ..read more

I want to let my British readers (or those that can travel) in on a little secret. D&D in a Castle is all very well, but for the price of that event, you can play all sorts of your favourite games in lots of evocative locations. The Lamdmark Trust a conservation charity saves builds ing by turning them into holiday cottages. On my fiftieth birthday I ran Nights Black Agents for a group of friends at Goddards, an Arts and Crafts house in Surrey. This is one of the most popular houses on the list and phenomenally expensive. A once in a lifetime experience. But other places are cheaper, espe ..read more

Well, my favourite game in Coriolis, that that is set in the future. But there is more to talk about here. I would assume that, given the prominence of D&D, and fantasy gaming in general, that “the past” would be the expected most popular answer. But are fantasy games set in the past? Just because they use mostly medieval technologies it doesn’t mean they are historical. Indeed some, like Numanera are explicitly set in the far future. I have already said that fantasy settings are my least favourite, but historical settings can be fun. Again, I have already said that I am less keen on supe ..read more

When Dave and I recorded answers to these questions for our podcast I flippantly said that my perfect games was the one we have written and are looking into publishing. But it’s not so flippant, in creating Tales of the Old West (still possibly a working title), Dave and I really have made the game we want to play – even where the game each of us wanted to play might differ. So why is Tales of the Old West a perfect game for me? Firstly it is not about supernatural creatures. For a long long time I have resented how RPGs create some sort of evil “other” as an antagonist. I have always much pr ..read more

I have had the pleasure of playing RPGs with a number of GMs, all of very different styles but all great fun to play with. Andy Brick was, a stalwart GM through what many would call their “dark- or ice-age” – when the teen group scatters around the country and many RPGers find themselves playing not all. Through sheer force of will he kept a group going, inviting us to his house to play Traveller or a World of Darkness campaign. His style was very responsive to players, which was good because we would often “turn left” and do something he had not expected, but he improvised very well and good ..read more

Well thank the Icons! One rolled, plus one equals two. Just two games to recommend and two friends to tag. My mate Nick Brook, my RuneQuest GM is not huge fan of games by Robin D Laws, so I am going to recommend Laws’ Hillfolk, which I think is the most distilled version of his gaming philosophy. And while in that circle, my mate Chris Gidlow introduced Nick and I and he hates Dice Pool games. So to him I recommend Alien of course ..read more

I think the real difference between when I started playing RPGs and now is that back then, nobody (except a very few thousand people in the whole world) actually knew what an RPG was. Let me tell you a story. A few years ago my kids were playing with Lego. They had each built a small community of figures (and their houses), who were “mining” the pile of Lego and trading bricks with each other. Eventually a disagreement led to a declaration of hostilities between the two communities, and then between the two children as one of them claimed the other’s action (I can’t recall the specifics) was ..read more

Start? When you put it like that it makes me think I never started. I was always roleplaying. I was a soldier on the playground, I was a trader in my friends shed, I was a superhero as I walked out of class, I was a starship captain as I sat on the bog. All RPGs did was add the Gaming, the rolling of dice, the determining success. And all that stuff I did as a kid. I still do it now, even when I am not gaming ..read more

Burn the land and boil the sea, You can’t take the sky from me, There’s no place, I can be, Since I’ve found Serenity The Ballad of Serenity, lyrics by Joss Whedon I thought this might be hard, but my Co-host Dave knew the answer. And I am there. If anyone argues that both of us can’t live in the ‘Verse, then I call dibs. I was the first one raving about Firefly to my friends. It’s said that Joss Whedon based it in part upon a Traveller RPG he ran or played in when he was at school in London. I have no idea if that’s true but when Jayne tried to take over the ship in the second pilot, The ..read more