One of the most important things I ever read was a tiny RPG fanzine called SNOWED INN. Actually it wasn’t even a fanzine in its own right. It was a bonus edition of a zine called ASLAN, which was – or so I was given to believe – the most contro[…]

I was suspicious of Live Action Role Playing for a long time. I had three excellent reasons: it couldn’t possibly work, it verged dangerously close to SPORTS, and most of all White Dwarf strongly hinted it was a stupid idea. At the time I took […]

We resurrect I Was A Goblin to bring you a link to this visionary post: “Personal Branding is a Real Life RPG”.
“Every person on this planet is playing the same game as you – the game of life. We are the ones who realize this […]

Live role-playing is a great idea. YES IT IS. All the stuff 95% of gamesmasters are really terrible at – verbal scene setting, establishing who is where when, getting across the physicality of the gameworld (and, indeed, the physics) – de[…]

One of the great corny running jokes in the early days of gaming was the idea of a game in which people would play white-collar workers. The standard format of the gag would involve a bunch of dwarves or elves sitting round a gaming table making “s[…]

The World Of Darkness series of RPGs, beginning with Vampire: The Masquerade, were nineties gaming’s great success story. They appealed to an older audience than D&D and its imitators; they brought new gamers, including a lot of women, into the[…]

As the eighties progressed, one-size-fits-all patchwork “campaign worlds” fell from fashion in the RPG world. They didn’t initially lose their market dominance – most Dungeons and Dragons products, for instance, were set in its smorgasbord Fo[…]

In my teens and early twenties I made three sustained attempts to create worlds.
The first two were for AD&D games, the third was for a freeform – i.e. largely ruleless – role-playing campaign. Each of them ran into two basic problems[…]

A big selling-point of tabletop RPGs – possibly a legacy of the era they appeared in, the liberal 1970s – was their non-competitive, open-ended aspect. Individual players wouldn’t “win” games, the group would only achiev[…]

After playing Dungeons and Dragons and other games for a couple of years, I found myself firmly on the ‘storytelling’ side, not the ‘point-scoring’ side, of the gaming divide. I also had precious few people to play with and &#[…]