Skip to main content

About the Author

Diana Gil Hamel is an American-born undergraduate student at the University of Toronto specializing in Linguistics. In her spare time, she also works as a producer for student theatre on-campus. 

Gil's interest in TTRPGs began in middle school when she played Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition with some friends and the rest, as they say, is history. She's an avid reader and collector of RPG rulebooks as well as a consistent GM and player. Currently, she's running a regular Blades in the Dark game for her two best friends. Red Rabbits forever! 

She hopes that, through discussing and reviewing games on this blog, she might build up enough knowledge and confidence to write a game or system-hack of her own. She also hopes this blog can help her realize her dream of making all her friends read her aimless ramblings about an opaque and unpopular hobby. 

She entreats you to click the "Subscribe" button at the top of this page to stay up-to-date with new posts and follow her on Twitter @gil_hamel!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Takeaways from Playing Dialect

If there were ever a game that seems to be tailor-made specifically for me, it's Dialect : an RPG about linguistics with a really gorgeous art-style that's right up my aesthetic alley. I'd skimmed the PDF a few years ago, but I really started wanting to play it this spring when I bought the physical book (and deck of cards) in one of my late-night "I want to buy an RPG" moods. It sat on my shelf from the time it arrived until yesterday, when my usual RPG group (read: very patient friends) indulged me in a session. Originally, we were planning another game of The Quiet Year (we played for the first time a few weeks ago and quite liked it), but I suggested this as a different take on the diceless story-game genre. I want to talk about Dialect , and also in particular about our session.  Dialect is, as the subtitle has it, "a game about language and how it dies." Players take control of a community living in some kind of isolation from the outside world, a...

I Was Promised a Pirate Game

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...

Alien: The Roleplaying Game: The Review

 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 ...