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

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ocean's 7: Or, Terry Benedict and His Boy-Toy

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

My Love-Hate Relationship with Blades in the Dark

For the last few months, I've been running a Blades in the Dark campaign for a couple of my friends from back home. We play probably every two or three weeks, so it's by far the most consistent game I've ever run (most of the games I've run didn't make it past the second session, and even my high school D&D campaign played, like, twice a year). It's also the first time I've run a game that ISN'T 5e (not counting one session of GURPS in 2017 and another GURPS mini-campaign that I ran in the last few weeks).  So, I'm definitely still learning Blades and the way it runs best, but safe to say I already have Thoughts^TM.  In case you haven't read or played it, crash course: Blades in the Dark is an RPG where the PCs are a crew of criminals pulling scores (whether those be robberies, assassinations, smugglings, or basically any other kind of illicit activity) and progressing through the ranks of the various factions in the city of Duskwall, a dir...
Post a Comment
Read more