My Monday night group have just started playing Spirit of the Century, a free-wheeling pulp role-playing game based on the Fate system. We’re managing to take our time on character creation (three sessions and counting so far), but as we’re really enjoying it, the system’s looking good, and I’m really chuffed about the characters we’re [...]

We’re still in Egypt, and still making slow, slow progress. A load of good quotes of which I can only remember two.
Following from John’s simplifying of a plan I’d had to persuade certain people to give us information (give them a good time and if that doesn’t work, blackmail them):
Me: Hang on a minute! You’ve [...]

People seemed to quite like my Eastercon report, so I figured I’d post some links to previous gaming convention reports I’d done for my roleplaying webzine Critical Miss, just in case anyone was interested. Here they are:
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Gaelcon… Probably The Greatest Convention In The World
While shopping at GenCon we bumped into some [...]

Last night found us facing our biggest challenge of the campaign so far: a sanity test in which the penalty for success was a D10 san loss, with failure incurring a scarcely believable D100 penalty. And the three of us were already had San scores down in the fifties at this point.
For those who don’t [...]

After a hiatus caused by my lack of broadband before, over and through Christmas and New Year, we resumed gaming last week. It’s still going pretty well, albeit it with the occasional interesting visual effect.

This wasn’t actually the best one; the best one – which I missed with the camera – was when General Tangent [...]

Next Saturday (December 28th) the tenth Dragonmeet will take place at its regular venue of Kensington Town Hall. And I’m pretty proud that I will be one of the convention’s guests.
To be an official guest at a convention is quite an honour, and one that I haven’t previously had. I’ve been a trader, and had [...]

The writer and journalist Mark Barrowcliffe seems to be many things to many people. To some, he is the author of the excellent D&D memoir, the Elfish Gene (Amazon.co.uk link). To others, he is the author of the vicious attack on D&D and its players, the Elfish Gene. To me, he is the man who [...]

Towards the end of the weekly start-of-game discussion in which I try to remember what we were doing last time…
Me: [stumped] Sorry, why are we buying a load of cleaning equipment again?
TAFKAC: That’s you saying that, right, not your character? You’d better not be saying that in the shop. If you say that out loud [...]

We’d parked ourselves in an extremely expensive, albeit dubious, club, and had dinner. Post-dinner, talk had moved onto the bill.
General Tangent (GM): The waiter tells you that the bill is three pounds.
[A discussion ensues about the size of the bill. It is eventually, and reluctantly, accepted.]
General Tangent (GM): [To TAFKAC] Okay, make a credit rating [...]

One of the things I find most interesting about reading reviews of stuff I’ve written (I originally wrote that as “reviews of my works” but realised I was pushing the bullshit needle right into the red zone marked “deeply pretentious”) is the degree to which the score, assuming there is one, can often seem to [...]