Saturday, September 5, 2026

The Muppet Show

The Muppet Show started 50 years ago, making life a little weirder in a good way

Tuesday, September 1, 2026

September

New academic year, new games at the club!

I should probably think of something.

Monday, August 31, 2026

RPGaDAY 2026 overview

RPGaDAY 2026

These are always fun, seeing responses far and wide, especially on Bluesky this year. Got some inevitable New Bremen nostalgia in with the Vampire talk, also a fair bit of Mage as is active and long-running and a few others like supers and Star Wars. What will I be doing and talking about next year? We shall see!

Saturday, August 29, 2026

New Bremen venues, what if

I was briefly imagining what a game chat like New Bremen would have looked like if we had players self-select into soft play and hard play characters, but stayed within the same setting. We had "unmoderated" chats where people went off and did whatever, but some of those folks might have stayed in the main community if they could soft play. I think the tag would need to be a clearly marked longterm choice, meaning no convenient ripcording out of hard play the moment something went wrong. Probably the Storytellers could have focused mostly on the hard play parts of the game if only because those required the most adjudication. Anyway, just idle thoughts about what could have been. Maybe subconsciously prompted because I ended up wearing an old Vampire T-shirt today.

Conrad Hubbard

And yes, I know some players effectively already did this by holing up in locked chat rooms.

--

RC

I feel like this would have addressed some issues.

One of the things I wonder about was also just a significant ratio of players to STs - where I wonder if there were enough people offering content to satisfy the intense demand. For some of the most popular venues - it would seem there was players present to consume content all hours of the day and no way to be able to reasonably have content ready to go for enough of them. As a consequence - for idle people who aren't against stirring the pot, they'd go off and cause a ruckus

Wednesday, August 26, 2026

Vampire: The Masquerade V6 alpha

If that's what it comes out like then it will be okay after we houserule out about half the new ideas.

Friday, August 14, 2026

Spooky Cowboys

Am I thinking of doing a light spooky cowboy WoD game because of the light spooky cowboy band I just heard for the first time?

Bridge City Sinners

... Maybe.

Or, Mage session where Didi and Michael have to form a band to defeat the Crossroads Devil.

Wednesday, August 5, 2026

Lore from a certain point of view

One of the great joys of running a Vampire chronicle for people who have never played Vampire before is tossing them into a stew of contradictory conspiracies. Vampires love to present themselves as erudite and sophisticated, but they have very little evidence about their own supernatural world.

So far my group has heard...
* Three different creation myths about vampires
* Two different theoretical ways out of the curse
* About the existence of bloodlines, but not specifics
* About the existence of the Sabbat, with some (useless) history
* About werewolves and ghosts

They also heard about wizards ("they died out in the Middle Ages") shortly before meeting a mage, and about unaligned clans ("mostly weirdos who have very limited power") before running afoul of a Follower of Set/Ministry vampire.

They met a vampire who can survive sunlight at dawn

They met a mortal who can just see through Obfuscate. No idea why

They ran away from mortal hunters wearing FBI jackets, who were obviously not real agents

They have failed several gambits to get blood, and are coming to grips with the fact that they will have to do some questionable things

They discovered that animal blood is not very satisfying, then met a Kindred who feeds on animals exclusively

They heard that the Prince is Malkavian, then met her and the coterie's Malkavian immediately clocked that she is not

The Malkavian learned to aura read and has no idea how to interpret it

Everyone seems to be having a great time. It's a World of Darkness where there is lore, there is history, there are societies, but a rule is only a rule until it's broken. Supernatural things work the way they do because of magic, and symbols, and metaphors, not because of science.

Soon they'll get introduced to Gehenna, the End Times, Gehenna cults, and the mythology of the turning of the age. Probably hand-in-hand with crossing paths with actual Sabbat, an Anarch Revolt in their city, and thin-bloods looking for a place to survive.

The huge, sprawling metaplot of the World of Darkness causes some players to pursue setting mastery, to have full fundamental knowledge of the "truth" of the world, so I've made it pretty clear through events that "truth" is highly subjective and context-driven.

Everyone's got goals and agendas, but at the end of the night, it really comes down to, what will you do to survive? How are you going to make it happen? Where are you going to get blood? And who's going to pay the price for your sins?

Tuesday, July 28, 2026

The Odyssey

The Odyssey is big, beautifully done, sad about the people and the world, doesn't give Penelope enough to do but they never do, shows Christopher Nolan could do horror if he feels like it (the Circe sequence could have been designed to squick me) and could have been two regular sized movies that would both work fine.

Monday, July 27, 2026

Mage: The Ascension - Sunrise City action figures



And if we ever figure out a design for fashion dolls those are definitely happening.

Set 1: Arrival

Our heroes meet up for the first time in 1883.


Each comes with a hat, gloved and ungloved hands. Simon comes with an openable umbrella, doctor's bag and book, Michael with his revolvers and Bowie knife, and the ladies with an openable parasol and fan and a reticule purse.

TPO Cara: "Michael's figure gets two guns and a Bowie knife and all we get is a parasol, a fan and a purse?"
ST: "Like you couldn't kill somebody with any of those."

Sunday, July 26, 2026

Mage: The Ascension - Sunrise City

Mage: The Ascension - Sunrise City

The further adventures of a circle of mages in San Francisco

Sunset City 1 (not yet called that)
Sunset City 4

Cara Lawson, Akashayana
In every generation there is a chosen one

Simon Donovan, Hermetic
May have consulted on the new season of The Librarians

Alissa Kwan, Ecstatic
All the pretty girls and all the pretty boys they get dressed up and go out dancing

Michael Lang, Verbena
Cowboy Druid

And last but definitely least:
Didi Duvall, Hollow One
Wants to be Agatha Harkness when she grows up

4A.01: Into The Portal
26/07

Our heroes (and Didi) have been enjoying relative peace and quiet - cut to Cara kicking a ghoul in the face and Simon casting out a demon - when Martin, the master of Time magic who pressed them into rewriting history to save his wife a while back, approaches them seeming tense.

Someone is planning to launch an attack on the city's Tradition Library, the base of the mages on the west coast.

When it was built.

Over a century ago.

It's been well enough concealed that he just detected it.

We go to try and stop the time warping ritual before it activates.

But it's too late.

So Martin throws us back in time to stop it.

At least this time he tells us that's all he can do and gives us a moment to nod before he widens the portal and in we go.

Promising a soft landing.

--

Didi wakes to find herself in a nice bed. In a nice room.

With a couple of women in old-fashioned maid uniforms coming to help her get ready for the day.

II's 1883.


Surprise! Mage: The Ascension - Victorian Age

Didi tries not to look too stoked about getting a wardrobe full of Victorian dresses in mourning colours.

Miss Didi Duvall

Saturday, July 25, 2026

Pride And Prejudice And Panic

Writer and cartoonist Trang Le Nguyen reads Pride And Prejudice and Bluskey-s along. A LOT.

Collected doc thanks to Benjamin

Mrs B: Jane is unwell! We must go to her!
Mr B: Yes, certainly. 
Mrs B: And I’m bringing all the girls. 
Mr B: Oh, this is a You project.

1-2-3-4-5-6-6-6

When you want the team to win but you're also wholly supportive of the sermons of Caine and smashing the corruption of the antediluvians (art by Emma Beatrez)



Well it took 35 years but I finally have a Sabbat character idea
Me

Thursday, July 23, 2026

100 days to Halloween

100 days to Halloween
Halloween
Halloween
100 days to Halloween
Not that I'm counting

Monday, July 20, 2026

Anne Rice's Immortal Universe RPG

Anne Rice's Immortal Universe RPG coming soon from Renegade Game Studios

Interesting. Especially coming from the main recent licensed publishers for World Of Darkness.