As part of my Curse of Strahd campaign, I recently ran Winter’s Daughter. Ever since it was released, I had wanted to run it, but could not find a good spot to put it in. Eventually, I did, and here we are. It took about two 4 hour sessions to play through. Since I’ve run it, I feel I can give it a review.  Winter’s Daughter is written by Gavin Norman of Necrotic Gnome and was published April 27, 2019. The pdf clocks in at 32 pages. Warning, this review contains some spoilers. 

This week I got to playtest Revenant’s Hack in the sci-fi sandbox I am developing . I was joined by three players from the Free Kriegsspiel Roleplaying discord. Here is a brief recap of the events that took place. Character creation Character creation went fast for all players involved. There isn’t that much to do in Revenant’s Hack besides distributing 2 points over 3 stats. However, I also tested out a skill list which they got to distribute 4 points over. Besides the stats, I also asked them “Why did you die and wake up in a cryogenics correctional facility?” which sparked a brainstorm about why these characters were in their predicament.  It turns out that Terry died in a car crash, allegedly escaping from law enforcement. Silas apparently shot Malik, but it was unclear why this happened. Discovering their past becomes a mystery that they would like to uncover, but due to their cyberbrains being installed in new bodies, their memories are vague and unreliable.  In the co...

Last week, I made the case for writing adventures, not systems . This week, I decided to follow my own advice and continue the preparation for my sci-fi sandbox. I’ve posted before about the most important NPC in your sandbox , but I haven’t addressed the sandbox itself. So this is the entry in which I start the work on a sandbox!  Behold, the Revenant Sector! The black dots are solar systems without descriptions.

For the last ten years, I have been really committed to making stuff for tabletop games. Despite that amount of time, I have only ever published one thing for roleplaying games - that’s an 18-page zine. Yet, I have a digital graveyard of games projects on my Google Drive account.  What is happening here? 

  Recently, I was a player in a campaign using the Knave rules. The setting was inspired by Norse mythology close to the end times - Ragnarok. Amongst many locations, the Referee had put in set-dressed versions of Keep on the Borderlands and Barrowmaze. Despite the delves and riches, I never actually reached level 3 or higher with any of the characters I played. I delved deep with only 5 hit points, and it was great!  They all have 5 hit points, but so do you.