Topping Tables

 Alright, first thing's first: I love   Alien . It's probably my most-listened-to episode of the Film Reroll, and after my thirtieth time re-listening to Pitr talk about "this bonus situation" and Paulo execute the Tactical Hemingway, I decided to sit down and watch the movie for myself. And I spent the whole time fiddling on my phone and got nothing out of it, like a fucking idiot .  But then , I watched Aliens . And boy howdy, that one stuck. I'm not generally much of a sci-fi nut (not much for genre fiction in general, honestly), but Aliens spoke to me. A lot of that comes down to the character of Ripley: we see in the first movie that she is a take-no-shit badass, but the sequel also lets us see that she is capable of warmth, and vulnerability, and pain. Not to mix my Gender Content in with my RPG Content, but in Ellen Ripley I see the kind of woman I want to be.  Aliens is also a great movie outside of Ripley: the script is really fun and punchy, if at times ...

It's been a hot second since I last did a review, and originally I was working my way through the hyper-simulationist cowboy game Aces and Eights. Unfortunately, despite having a lot of design elements I really liked  A&8  is pretty much terminally boring, so even though I've already read through all the rules I've decided to spare my readers the fate of having to hear about how many inches of tin a bullet has to pass through in order to lose 1 point of attack damage. There are some nice pictures of horsies, though. I love a good horse. I also fucking love western shit so who knows, maybe I'll end up reviewing the book at some point after all.  Anyway, I decided to do a sort of double-feature for this one: they're both games about life in 19th century Britain and and they're both by Storybrewers Roleplaying, an indie studio out of Australia (I think). However, that's pretty much where the similarities end: in setting, tone, and design philosophy, these ...

I fucking love pirates. I'm not really sure why , but I think it's because it's a genre that includes many of my favorite things: Swordplay The ocean Women in corsets  Sea shanties Crime What's not to love? I also think that the crew of scallywags doing piracy on their ship is one of the closer historical (or at the very least, historical-fiction) equivalents for the classic D&D adventuring party, so it seems to me like pirate TTRPGs should be a significant part of the market. Unfortunately, this doesn't appear to be the case; upon doing some Reddit digging on recommended pirate systems, I was recommended only two books consistently: Beat to Quarters , a Napoleonic-era game which is incredibly  far up its own ass with historical accuracy and only lets you play as the crew of a naval vessel; and 7th Sea.  So here we are, reviewing the latter. Boy oh boy, I did not like this book. I slammed all 250-odd pages of the Player's Guide in one sitting, and for the fi...

A couple months ago, I pre-ordered AGON , a brand-new TTRPG by John Harper (of Blades in the Dark fame) and Sean Nittner (whose work is less familiar to me). I've actually had the PDF since I put in the pre-order, but I decided to hold off on reading it through until I got my physical copy. I also want to say that the fact that I shelled out for a hard copy instead of just buying (or, god forbid, pirating ) the PDF is a testament to how much I love John Harper's work. For a lot of reasons, some of which I'll be touching on here, I think he's a goddamn genius and probably the best RPG designer/writer currently working.  So, on to the game!  AGON is a sword-and-sandals system with a very narrow focus: it's meant for playing stories of heroes of the type you'd find in Greek mythology. The game hews pretty closely to the conventions and tone found in those myths; the basic structure of the game is episodic, with each session consisting of the party arriving on a new...

  Yesterday I finished the last assignment for my summer class and announced the theatre season that I've spent the last four months working on, so I've decided that this weekend I'm taking a goddamn vacation and getting some me time. I got up at 9 AM to throw a new recipe in the slow cooker, and while I was hanging around between steps of cooking I decided to read another RPG for review, and I'd made a promise that my next post would be about Prawn, a LARP set in a fishtank and played in a pool. So this morning I made my way through the forty-odd page PDF for this system. What a weird fucking game.  Okay, I should add some context: I have zero experience with LARPs (never read or played one), so a lot of my comments and things I find surprising in here are probably just part of the genre in general. LARP fans, don't @ me, I'm sure you guys have lots of fun. The premise is basically this: the player characters are various (edible) aquatic creatures living in the...

Ever since I heard the Film Reroll episodes where they played through Ocean's 11, I'd been obsessing over the idea of running my players through that same movie heist. Legitimately one of my favorite things about any TTRPG campaign  getting really deep in the paint and making elaborate plans (I still have pictures from a storm-the-palace session from my high school D&D campaign where the players actually commandeered my whiteboard to write out their whole attack strategy), which is something that our usual system, Blades in the Dark, completely glosses over (intentionally and defensibly, to be sure, but this isn't a Blades post so I'm not going to get into it).  When I found out that Paulo had published all the NPC descriptions he made on the Film Reroll Patreon, I became hellbent on the idea of running the heist for real, and my players (very graciously) indulged me and agreed to play.  And you know what? It was a goofy good time. Here were some of the things that...