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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!

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The Giliad (Get it? Because this one's about Greek mythology!)

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No Running by the Pool

  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...

A Double-Header: Games that make you be British

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 ...