Radio Active #101: Return of the Zine Scene
On this special edition of Radio Active, we venture to the Zine Scene, that mystical, half-remembered place of photocopied pages and hand-stapled booklets, in its 2023 iteration.
Role-Playing Games
Follow Me to Dice.Camp!
With Twitter in a state of near-constant chaos thanks to Elon Musk’s chaotic neutral leadership style, many of my online friends have migrated to Mastodon-based social media alternatives. In particular, many in the RPG community have either moved or set up outposts on, Dice.Camp. Mastodon is an open-source social media application that anyone can use … Read more
Searching for Introductory Mothership Adventures
Mothership is a rules-lite, science fiction horror RPG inspired by the likes of Alien and similar creature features. The “Zero Edition” by Tuesday Night Games was available for years; the 2021 kickstarter saw 15,699 backers pledge $1,405,569 to fund its first edition. I backed it at the deluxe level, which should yield a very impressive boxed set. The target ship … Read more
Four Role-Playing Games I Will Play in 2023
We’re approaching the New Year, a traditional time for resolutions. But frak that – December is my birthday month, and I’ve got some goals for my 51st year. One of them is to play four new games, some of which have been on my gaming bookshelves for years because of the pandemic. Now that the … Read more
Mac RPG Tools
I began playing Dungeons & Dragons in grade school, and I used Apple computers almost as long. I started writing up adventures on my Apple II and printing them on an dot matrix printer, took a brief sojourn into the world of Windows PCs during and after college, and then returned to the Mac with the release of Mac OS X.
Game Day: Scum & Villainy
Scum & Villainy took over the Lair of Secrets podcast for six episodes in 2022 as we ran a short-run campaign of the Blades in the Dark spin-off game. This post looks at the campaign, its players, and what we learned.
Game Day: Fast, The Furious, and the Awesomely Generic with GURPS
Since Fall 2019, the Gamer Working Group (my lunch time gaming group) has been running a new action movie-style campaign. Inspired by the Fast and the Furious franchise, the campaign is about a group of freelance agents undertaking questionable jobs for fun and profit. We started with the climatic scene of our last mission: blowing a … Read more
RPG a Day 2019 – Space
Space. The Final Frontier. These are the science fiction RPGs that I’d love to play, if only I could find the time, crew, and mental bandwidth to play them: Eclipse Phase, 2nd Edition – A new, allegedly easier to play, iteration of the post-human science fiction/horror role-playing game. Paranoia – The satirical (and usually fatal) role-playing game … Read more
RPG a Day 2019 – Share
Once upon a time, I loved engaging with social media. Back when Web 2.0 was new and new social media services seemed to spawn weekly, my friends and I would jump from service to service, looking for one that fit our needs. Over time, things settled into a predictable pattern – Twitter for engaging with … Read more
RPG a Day 2019 – Engage
I’ve never played a Star Trek role-playing game, but I’m hoping to change that with Modiphius Entertainment’s Star Trek Adventures (Amazon). The core rule book is a hefty but engaging tome. It’s packed full of the lore of Star Trek and it’s far too easy to get lost in it as you read. One of my goals for the summer … Read more