Invulnerablog

A quick post this time. This sort of thing shouldn’t be necessary, but this is the world we live in now (and in particular, the nation I live in now). https://www.tenkarstavern.com/2020/02/announcements-regarding-judges-guild.html I believe that racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, anti-semitism, and bigotry of any kind have absolutely no place in our hobby. Imperfekt Gammes has been proud […]

  Many space opera games have a built-in or implied setting, but some don’t. The original Traveller LBBs existed before the Third Imperium, and the Frontier in Star Frontiers is at best a sketch before Zebulon’s Guide to Frontier Space. Based on the inestimable Jeff Rients’ blog article, Twenty Quick Questions for your Campaign Setting, […]

To make my wife less nervous about apex predator lawyer-enabled megacorporations, my space opera game is now renamed to Wormholes & Waystations. As before, it will include appendices for kitchen-sink fantasy gaming in my Five Free Cities setting, in an appendix called Advanced Bugbears & Ballistas. It’ll also have a four-color supers setting, based on […]

I think this: http://boingboing.net/2015/02/02/lets-put-the-guilt-back-in-g.html Is the perfect answer to this: http://www.gnomestew.com/hot-buttons/an-open-letter-to-game-publishers-please-stop-trying-to-make-me-feel-like-a-sleaze/ “the only people who believe in some kind of universal taste—a consensual demarcation between what’s artistically good and what’s artistically bad—are insecure, uncreative elitists who need to use somebody else’s art to validate their own limited worldview. It never matters what you like; what […]

What a strange, exciting year. In the last pile of months, I moved to a new home 3 hours away, did some state government IT work, was unemployed s0me more, was a student some more, and got a very interesting and fun new job in the familiar field of health care IT. And, I got a […]

A lot of folks these days express an appreciation for rules-light games. And with good reason! A lot of us are busy, and gaming can take up a lot of time. This is part of the reason why I wrote Nigh-Invulnerable: The Guide to Simplified Supers (available here: http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/106156/Nigh-Invulnerable-The-Guide-to-Simplified-Supers). Invulnerable is kind of crunchy, and […]

So lately gamers have been squabbling over the relative merits of roleplaying games vs. story games. Roleplaying games allow you to create a character, who runs through a scenario created by a Game Master. Story games do pretty much the same thing, but the players take on some of the narrative duties. To me, it’s […]

Long one today. Be warned. Occasionally, a new person comes into our game group, or I meet a new gamer, and when Invulnerable RPG comes up, people say, “I don’t like super heroes.” I understand. Sometimes, I don’t like them either. I like good stories. And while there are a lot of cheesey stories in […]

So here’s the story. I got into gaming in junior high, in the mid-80s. My friends were the artsy crowd in school, smart outcasts, and it gave us a way to tell our own stories and work in our own artwork, to make (as TSR said) “products of our imagination.” My grades slipped later in […]

I think everyone has a hard time answering the questions, ‘what are roleplaying games?’ My new answer is, they’re collaborative, open-source story gambling. Collaborative: Everyone gets to participate. Open-Source: You’re making the story, you’re not a passive participant. Story: You’ve got characters, a setting, and events they enact and respond to. Gambling: There’s an element […]