Topping Tables

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...

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...