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So an Emissary of the Last Tribe of Man has left Yamtown taking 15 pure strain humans with him. He’s promised to send back 15 pallets of Venusian delicacies. Meanwhile a group of very angry Badders have declared that they will be back soon in order to demand tribute again– and if Yamtown doesn’t pay […]

Yes, Ogre: Designer’s Edition is too danged big. Lugging that giant overproduced kickstarter game is a major hassle. And I don’t use half the stuff in it. I use the classic counter set instead of the colorful new pieces. I don’t bother to get out the fancy 3D pieces. I don’t even use the new […]

Ogre and G.E.V. are easily among the top 100 best games ever created. The gigantic cybernetic battle-tanks tend to get the most attention, and that’s understandable. Winchell Chung’s depictions of the Ogre Mark V is among gaming’s most iconic illustrations of all time. And the awesomeness of one single unit plowing through an entire army […]

The lay of the land surrounding the player’s base of Yam Town comes into one notch better focus: Gordo is partying it down with representatives of the Last Remnants of civilization four days travel to the west. (Two through clear terrain and two through desert.) There’s still some sort of gigantic mutant bug rampaging around […]

Running a game you’ve never run with a group you’ve never run for with people that don’t necessarily know the rules…? It’s tough! Running one that blows away all of your usual tricks and techniques of holding a game session together…? That’s a recipe order of magnitude more referee anxiety right there. Lucky for me, […]

I may be in the minority with this, but I have spent decades of my gaming life in a state of abject fear at the prospects of making up my on rpg campaign setting. I’m just not like Brian Niemeier or Ed Greenwood. I don’t reflexively fill up notebooks of gaming material when I’m prepping […]

The classic D&D line contains some of the worst edited combat rules in game design history. To begin with, everyone seems to interpret them differently. Furthermore, referees of the bad old days tended to take incomplete and incoherent rule sets to make a great many special modifications of their own. The end result of this […]

Gamma World is not D&D. In the first place, it’s not about reenacting the “zero to hero” character arc. It’s also not a funnel; it’s not about creating a deadly environment and then weeding out the weak, the slow, the lame, and the unlucky. The chaos of the Shadow Years has already accomplished that to […]