A couple of days ago Spiros Drakatos reached out to me and let me know about Dimday Red, his post-apocalyptical TTRPG and the Kickstarter he’s currently running to finance a zine to expand the setting. In this day and age it’s pretty hard for a game designer and a solo one at that to get word out about one’s new product. With hundreds of new games, supplements, adventures and all that good stuff being released monthly, it’s extremely hard to get noticed. That’s why I immediately agreed to spread the news. Dimday Red is set in a future where Earth was pushed out of its orbit and is slowly gett ..read more

Turning existing movie, book or TV show franchises into tabletop roleplaying campaigns isn’t always a great idea. In many cases the world depicted in these kinds of media exist only to facilitate one particular story. I understand the allure of using a franchise one loves in their roleplaying game campaign, but as I’ve found out in the past several times, it’s not easy as one thinks. There are of course exceptions to the rule and sometimes it might be worth just using the source material as inspiration while basically rewriting the whole thing to make it your own. Please note that there will b ..read more

A while back I bought a used hardcover copy of Open Legend. According to its subtitle it’s an open-source RPG which is right up my alley. I basically bought it on a whim. The cover looked nice and everything open source usually gets a thumbs-up from me. When the book arrived I immediately sat down and gave it a read. It’s only about 140-pages long and has a very nice clean layout, good artwork, and glossy paper. From the cover and the term “legend” in the title one may assume Open Legend being a Fantasy RPG but it can in fact be used for several genres. The mechanics are actually on the light ..read more

So you have watched a season of Critical Role (or another high profile Actual Play series by professional actors/voice actors) and now your are interested in joining a tabletop roleplaying game? Great! But my first advice is: curb your expectations. Many new players expect that any TTRPG session is run like the ones you have watched on Critical Role. This is of course not the case. Most players and GMs are not professional voice actors. Some players (and GMs) are not comfortable with acting out their characters, using funny voices or referring to their characters in the first person. This is t ..read more

For years I have been dealing with a rather severe case of option paralysis. As you probably know I own way too many roleplaying games. I love reading new games and checking out the classics. In a way collecting roleplaying game books is as much a hobby for me as running or playing them. Unfortunately this comes with a heavy price: I can’t make up my mind! Regardless of the genre I want to run a game in I have at least a dozen viable choices. In addition to that I own countless genre-agnostic games like GURPS, Cypher System and others. For each and every game I own I can easily list a number o ..read more

Today I stumbled upon an article by Jeff Rients in which he writes about a rather lengthy Medium post by Dr. Clio Belle Weisman, a psychotherapist and social research scientist. She did a long study about harassment in the D&D community and the focus of her work quickly became Zak Smith. As it turns out – at least according to her research – he was not the harasser but rather the victim. It also seems as if his ex-wife’s accusations of sexual assault were also unfounded. Unfortunately Dr. Weisman quickly removed her post from Medium, but fortunately it has been archived here. The article i ..read more

While checking my blog’s stats, I noticed that the vast majority of readers in the last few days came from Venezuela, of all places. Don’t get me wrong, I feel quite honored that quite a few Venezuelan TTRPG fans read the musings of a German role-playing game fan who posts mostly in English, but I am quite surprised at how you folks actually found out about my blog. It would be brilliant if some of you could let me know the reasons in the comments below ..read more

Just a few minutes ago I noticed a couple of posts on social media about a news article on the site Pandaily (which I have never heard before). I did some googling and found a handful of other sources but unfortunately I don’t know if they are trustworthy or not. The articles claims that Hasbro (which currently owns Wizards of the Coast) are interested in selling the Dungeons & Dragon brand to another company. Larian Studios which created the highly successful Baldur’s Gate 3 video game were supposedly approached by Hasbro but refused out of financial reasons. According to the article they ..read more

A lot if not the vast majority of articles, blog posts, videos about roleplaying games are focused on giving advice to game masters. From my experience and observations, most people writing or producing videos about the hobby are game masters themselves and that’s quite understandable that they focus mostly on giving advice to this group. And with a lot of people getting interested in tabletop roleplaying games after the success of shows like Critical Role, new GMs are in high demand. I’d even go so far as to say that the mainstream success of roleplaying games is mostly held back by the lack ..read more

Back in 2022 I bought the “The Fantasy Trip” bundle on Bundle of Holding. Before that I have been aware of the system and read the clone of TFT released by Dark City Games. For some reason the clone didn’t impress me very much, but I was still intrigued enough to pick up the bundle. So what is The Fantasy Trip? It’s a roleplaying game designed by Steve Jackson back in the late 70s which was initially released by a company called Metagaming. When Steve Jackson left the company he tried to acquire the rights to his game but failed. A couple of years ago he was able to get the rights back and re ..read more