RPGaDay – Day 31: Favourite RPG of All Time

This is a near-impossible question to answer and one I feel I’ve answered over and over again this month, because fundamentally my favourite RPG of all time is also likely to be an RPG I’ll keep playing for years to come, an old game I still play, have my favourite game system and produce fantastic experiences I’m likely to remember fondly. So I think it’s a trick. I don’t think anyone can answer it unless they have deliberately limited their playing to one “true” RPG, and I don’t think many people who take part in RPGaDay would do that. I can give you a summary of my top five though. That’s my top five *right now*, but tomorrow it could be different. Hell, it could be different in an hour’s time. None of these will be unfamiliar: in fact, I’ve talked about them all elsewhere extensively. But here they are in one place, in no particular order.

Monsterhearts by Avery Alder (1st or 2nd Edition, as I feel both have interesting differences and my favourite version of this game is sort of stitched together from both editions). A game that made me realise some super important things about my life, explore my lost teenage years in a safe space, and taught me how to become a fan of other players’ characters and love failed rolls. I learned so much through this game and as a queer person it was a core part of helping me understand who I am. It blew my mind how well the mechanics and system pushed each other forward and wove together to create the kind of stories I wanted to play. I love the playbooks and I could literally write a thesis on how complex every part of the mechanics are in narrative terms while they are also based around very simple concepts. It’s a thing of beauty, and a work of art in game design.

Dungeons & Dragons (4th Edition) by Wizards of the Coast. The most brilliant tactical RPG I have ever played, with fantastically rich rules for encounter creation that allow new GMs to build encounters that challenge the players without turning it into TPK central and yet also give experienced GMs a playground to push the mechanics in interesting ways. It may lack some of the flavour of 3.5 and 5e, but it is a surprisingly resilient system even up to 30th level, and elements like 1-hit minions, bloodied values, skill challenges, the power sources/party role axes, and the at will/encounter/daily system are absolutely incredible.

Blades in the Dark by John Harper. This combines the best traits of Powered by the Apocalypse-style improvisation and failing forward with tactical RPG levers to make a game that manages to excel at an incredibly rare thing: an improvisational heist game that genuinely works. I’ve been in so many heist games where we get obsessed with the planning stage, and Blades in the Dark streamlines that beautifully while making it easy for a GM to reward and challenge player actions. It’s great. Near perfect piece of design, beautifully-tuned to do exactly what it intends to.

Chronicles of Darkness (2nd Edition but with a lot of setting material from 1st Edition) by Onyx Path. An incredibly rich and dramatic setting with a high level of customisability for different play styles, and rules that may be inconsistent and patchy but have a strong foundation that could be used for greater things. Many of the innovations of 2nd Edition are really great, like conditions, tilts and the customised morality systems for the different groups (Blood and Bone from Werewolf: The Forsaken 2nd Ed and Clarity from Changeling: The Lost 2nd Ed are particularly wonderful). Others tried very hard to create something new, but fell short when it came to actual execution, like the social Doors system and the investigative Clues system. CofD is unashamedly trashy, deeply interested in the drama of its supernaturals and a flawed but expansive and rich game. I will always love it.

OK, I lied. I always struggle with the fifth choice, because it feels like I’m leaving too many things out. Do I talk about Ironsworn and how it gave me such an excellent paradigm for solo gaming? But Starforged is the superior game system, built on everything Shawn Tompkin has learned since. And that would leave out Utopia and Five Parsecs, which are also amazing. Do I talk about a toolkit system like FATE? But I never really gelled with it, and I haven’t played other games like Genesys or Cortex Prime to comment on them, even if they work slightly better with my style of game. Do I choose Masks, as I hold it in nearly as much esteem as Monsterhearts? I don’t really want to choose multiple PbtA games and there would be little I could say about it that was new. 

The four I’ve listed above are games where there is no doubt in my mind as to whether they belong on the list. They represent different facets of my gaming experience and different chapters of my life. Their rules changed my perspective on gaming, even if I also take a critical eye of what I would personally change. They’re wildly different, from the robust rules sets of Blades in the Dark and 4e to the often frustrating but ambitious mechanics of Chronicles of Darkness, and from the high drama feelings world of Monsterhearts to the mechanical precision and tactical decision-making of 4e. I guess it would possibly be more true to say that these are placed along an axis. Multiple axes. Tactical richness vs. narrative-driven mechanics; feelings-focused high drama vs. encounter or event-focused structures; love of setting vs. love of mechanics. There are probably others. I think if there was a game I wish I could add to this, it would be Cortex Prime as I see so much potential for the kinds of games I like to play and run. I hope I can do that in the future.

For now, I’m going to enjoy the fact that I finally (after ten years) finished an RPGaDay month.

RPGaDay – Day 30: Obscure RPG You’ve Played

Considering the ridiculously huge collection of RPGs I have, I haven’t actually played that many obscure RPGs. There is definitely an “indier than thou” kind of vibe to a lot of indie RPG discussions, which can be fun but also frustrating. I have my issues with mainstream RPG writing, but that’s often to do with accessibility and industry practices rather than the fact that they are mainstream. In fact, I play a lot more mainstream RPGs than weird obscure little RPGs. At the same time, as soon as I got into RPGs, I immediately started searching for games that did things differently. I didn’t start with D&D, which probably contributed to that, but even so I was in D&D groups. I was also lucky enough to be exposed to a wide variety of different RPGs in my immediate environment.

I can absolutely see that if everyone around you is playing and running 5e D&D, it’s probably harder to swing for something a bit different. And I’ve heard a lot of RPG fans talk about how they have struggled to persuade D&D groups to try something new. It’s a big jump outside your comfort zone, and for a less confident GM, you feel like they have to have the best experience ever or they’re going to write off all non-D&D games forever. I’ve felt that pressure when introducing a new game to a group: it’s a vulnerable position, because you’re taking on the burden of processing the rules and recasting them for your players to learn, while also managing the narrative aspects of their experience. I have often felt that I need to apologise for the rules as I run them when a player objects to a particular element. It’s hard not to take it personally, because you’re laying something out as an offering, an experience, for other people. You’re implicitly endorsing it.

At the same time, I very rarely run a game without hacking in some house rules. It’s in my nature to customise the experience for my players. I think it’s healthy to do that, as every group is different and (I say as a game designer) you’re fundamentally writing a game you hope other people will enjoy, and it won’t work for everyone.

I have talked about games that, to me, are pretty obscure before: Draculola, Rifts (it’s obscure these days, shutup), Magical Fury, The Secrets of Cats. The weird thing is that I don’t think of those as obscure. The “obscure” games I think of are things like Red Carnations on a Black Grave, Lacuna and Alice is Dead. Games that are about an experience that not everyone is going to want to play through, with mechanics that aren’t easily adapted to other settings. I like those kinds of games, but I don’t play them very often. Maybe it’s because of my desire to hack every game I run, or maybe it’s because those experiences are often hard going emotionally. I think there always needs to be a balance: I feel that a life made up of one-shots of darkly emotional games about trauma with weird impressionistic mechanics would be both boring and depressing for me.

I’m very happy to admit that even though I can be a bit of a snob about some mainstream games and I love finding weird new indie games, I will always spend most of my gaming time playing games about wonder and drama that don’t have much in the way of “worthiness” or indie cred. I think it is a shame that so few people get a chance to explore games that aren’t the most mainstream ones. There is so much beautiful stuff out there, and there are so many great experiences. If you try those out in good faith and come back to D&D, that’s fine! I’m still tied to some games that I know aren’t everyone’s thing and maybe need a rules overhaul (Chronicles of Darkness; D&D 4e). But I also want to see what’s out there, just in case I stumble across a new favourite or a way of thinking about RPGs that changes my life. It’s happened before, and I know it will again, if I keep looking.

RPGaDay – Day 29: Most Memorable Encounter

I WILL get this done before it’s all technically a month overdue. Somehow.

I have a pretty bad memory for encounters, TBH. There are a lot that I’ve played that have been cool conceptually but a bit frustrating in practice: I have designed some like that, so I know how hard it is when you have a great encounter concept but the rules end up letting you down.

I also play a lot of games that don’t really have encounters per se: they have scenes with fights, and sometimes those scenes are conceptually awesome, but they aren’t so much about the tactics as the feelings involved.

I have, however, played a huge amount of 4e D&D, as I have talked about exhaustively on this blog, and one of the things that 4e does like no other game I’ve seen is allow for the very precise design of encounters. I’m also lucky to have GMs who are absolutely stellar at coming up with original encounter concepts and executing those mechanically. Like the one that took place inside a huge creature as we tried to get to its internal weakspot.

I am constantly in awe of how well my partner conceptualises the encounters he runs for our 1-30+ 4e game. He has made some fairly hefty changes to the core monster design, halving hit points and improving monster damage to turn epic level encounters from a slog into a fast-paced and deadly experience. It works incredibly well and also they still have enough hit points to survive through the first two turns of our party min-maxers unleashing everything into them.

The most recent example, a fight with literally the big bad of the whole campaign, was just…absolutely wild. He was a dragon who had killed and absorbed his other selves from across the multiverse and as a result, which dragon we dealt damage to depended on which way he was facing. He’d linked the encounter to all the other universes he’d visited, meaning we had to figure out how to interrupt his connection to them so he couldn’t use them. He had loads of different initiatives and attacks based on the other dragon selves, and as we took them out we cut off his ability to use those attacks. Plus he had dangerous allies making our lives even more difficult. So we had so much scope to think tactically, but also we were fighting to survive the entire time and had to just do whatever we could. All of us hit the deck at least once and he managed to get to the stage where the Demigod had no ways of resurrecting themselves left.

To a lot of folks, that probably doesn’t sound like a good time. Certainly I know that if a single encounter lasted an entire evening of gaming, as ours often do, in any other system, I would not have had a particularly fun time. But this is legitimately why we play this game. This is where the fun is for us. It’s like playing Gloomhaven but with an encounter specifically tailored to your strengths and weaknesses as a group, with narrative and emotional power behind it.

Do these big set piece encounters always produce a fun experience? No, sometimes there are problems with communicating what the players need to do, sometimes there are mechanics that chain in ways the GM didn’t realise, and sometimes it feels fiddly and complicated where it was meant to be cinematic. But the ambitions that these sort of encounters realise are huge. They feel epic. They feel like something that could end the world if we fail. It is intensely hard to do that with any other system in a meaningful way. 5e has a massive problem where either the characters just pour spells into the bad guy and kill them before they’ve even finished their monologue, or the encounter is designed to make it very annoying for the players to do anything until the GM says it’s OK. 4e has the tools for incredible highs, but that also comes from practice and careful thought. I’m incredibly lucky to have GMs who love the system and really want to push what it can do, but never at the expense of player fun.

RPGaDay – Day 28: Scariest Game You’ve Played

I have admittedly almost lapped the RPGaDay month, but I’m determined to finish this time! It would be the first time in ten years, and I’m so close to managing it.

I generally find RPGs enjoyably spooky and tense rather than actually scary. Video games and films are much more terrifying to me. The most terrifying jump scare I’ve had was during our Sabbat live game when we were guided into a room in a haunted asylum with our eyes closed and opened them to find a bunch of the NPCs and the STs dressed like the inhabitants of the asylum surrounding us and screaming. That was actually horrifying!

Playing Dread is very tense for me because I find block towers collapsing very stressful for neurodivergence reasons, but we also have a friend who runs really good creeping horror games. He ran Dread for us in an American Gothic setting that felt like something right out of a high-budget horror TV show and it was genuinely scary when a shelf collapsed on my character and killed him. He also ran a game (I don’t remember which system) that was basically Silent Hill, and he used static and radio recordings to add to the atmosphere. During his Hunter: The Vigil game, our very ordinary humans had to investigate a haunting and it was a masterclass in how to make the World of Darkness really scary for mortals. I still remember our characters standing in a room listening to the sounds of the ghost above us and it was full Phasmophobia spookiness.

I’ve also run some spooky games – to be honest, I would like to run more genuinely scary encounters! I enjoy the process of building up tension, letting people explore and watching their horror grow as they start to piece together how extremely in danger they are. One of my favourites was when I was running a Vampire: The Requiem live game and a group of characters went to investigate a haunted prison. They ended up taking refuge in a room with a heavy metal door despite being badass vampires who could rip apart humans with their bare hands, listening to the hammering of the ghost on the door.

Most of our games are more action horror or urban fantasy, as we tend to run campaigns that continue existing characters, and combining horror with agency and character growth is intensely hard. It’s one reason I really like Chronicles of Darkness mortals and the God Machine Chronicle – there are rules about how to survive and affect the bad guys, but there are also a lot of situations where you are just not able to fight. You have to run. And that is always a fascinating thing to get players to choose, as long as they feel they have a choice in it. It shouldn’t be “stay and die or run and live”. They could stay, but at what cost? What motivates them to stay other than a desire to see this through? What would they gain, and how would they manage to push through it?

I want to explore running horror more, but the challenge for me is running it in the context of ongoing games rather than as a one-off like Ten Candles, where the characters are all going to die at the end anyway.

RPGaDay – Day 27: Game You’d Like a New Edition Of

I’ve talked elsewhere about my love of Chronicles of Darkness. It’s a tragically dying RPG line (or rather, series of sub-lines under a larger setting) that has a rich backlog of cool setting and rules detail. I’ve probably played it more than any other game except perhaps Dungeons & Dragons. Mage: The Awakening was the second RPG I ever played and I truly love the worlds that the Chronicles of Darkness inhabit. Sadly, it seems to have been supplanted by the resurrection of Vampire: The Masquerade and the other lines in the same Classic/Old World of Darkness mould. Those are good, don’t get me wrong, but my heart belongs to their replacements.

So I suppose I should break down why I love Chronicles of Darkness so much, why I would like to see a new edition, and what I think that new edition could do.

Chronicles of Darkness has two editions, and they are very different mechanically, even though the frame of the system and the settings are shared. First Edition CofD (or New World of Darkness/New WoD as it was known back then) was already a big paradigm shift from what had come before it. I don’t really know the older editions of Vampire: The Masquerade to be able to say what the changes were, but while it still used a set of attributes with dots from 1-5 (e.g. strength, intelligence, wits) and a set of skills with dots from 1-5 (e.g. athletics, firearms, medicine), and you formed a dice pool of d10s based on how many dots you had in that attribute + skill, the Chronicles of Darkness lines sought to make a unified setting out of what was originally a very disparate set of lines that ended up having to be sutured together.

There was a core book (World of Darkness/Chronicles of Darkness/technically sort of God Machine Chronicle), which had existed in past iterations of the World of Darkness but more as an afterthought than the access point for the games. This laid out how to play humans in this messed up horror world where monsters were real. Not badass hunters, but just people who could never unsee the brush they had had with the supernatural. Rules for wackier kinds of mortals (such as people touched by one of the other supernatural lines or humans with psychic powers) were variably part of the core book depending on the edition. But the idea was: you weren’t terrifying and sexy creatures of the night. You weren’t hunters wielding holy magic. You weren’t mages who could change reality. You were just humans. I loved that, from the cosmic horror meets tech conspiracy of The God Machine Chronicle (a specific setting for Chronicles of Darkness) to the game someone ran based on the film ‘The Mist’.

And then there were the actual supernatural lines, really the meat of this setting, for all that I love the core book. Where in the past, the clan of vampires or type of werewolf you played was both your nature and your part of society, all supernaturals now existed at the intersection of two axes: their innate nature, dictated by what kind of vampire Embraced them, or what moon they first changed into a werewolf under, or what they were changed into by the Fae that stole them away, and their chosen societal group, which could be about politics, religion, philosophy, responsibilities, societal role or even an expression of how your character coped with trauma. This revolutionised the lines for me. In Vampire: The Masquerade (which was the Classic WoD game I played the most), you were usually all part of one or maaaaybe two political groups e.g. the Sabbat, the Camarilla, the Anarchs. None of them played well together, though you could run Camarilla and Anarchs in the same game, representing the traditionalists and the revolutionaries in vampire society. Beyond that, you were part of a clan, and that is where a lot of your identity as a character came from. For instance, Tremere were vampire wizards who kept lots of dodgy secrets. Ventrue always think they’re in charge.

In Vampire: The Requiem, there were still clans that related to the archetype of vampire you were e.g. Daeva are the seductive strong vampires, Nosferatu are the unsettling ones, but you also chose whether you were part of The Status Quo (the backbiting Invictus), the Revolutionaries (the chaotic Carthian Movement), the pagan blood cult (the Circle of the Crone), the twisted shadow of religious fanaticism (the Lancea et Sanctum) or the mad scientists (the Ordo Dracul). They all had their own tensions and their own agendas. It made a rich political game filled with drama and divided loyalties (as you could also form groups across these political and religious boundaries). The other lines had similar groupings, and they were a delicious lattice of tensions that I found hugely inspiring.

On top of that, the Second Edition of the lines began to push their mechanics in really interesting directions, using systems like conditions, beats, tilts and more thematic and poignant systems for morality. Some of these changes were more successful than others (I have sadly very rarely found it easy to use Clues or Doors in my games), but they showed what was possible. I would truly love to see a new edition that took these mechanics further, made them more consistent, and applied rigorous quality control throughout. These lines really suffered from lack of consistency, poor rules editing and playtesting, rushed or delayed production schedules, and I suspect a lot of changes to line management behind the scenes.

I would love to see what could be done with these lines for a new edition. More mechanics around the politics of the game (we introduced a “tipping currency” in our live Requiem game because the boons system is largely irrelevant). Pushing the morality mechanics more. Ironing out the Clues, Doors and Crafting systems so they add something to the game organically rather than feeling imposed upon it. Have more consistent rules for games with different supernaturals. Actually flesh out some areas of the games that really needed it (we’ve only recently had some more kiths for Changeling: The Lost and the Sorcery in Requiem is…mediocre, unfortunately). Importantly, I would like to see this in the hands of a publisher who can devote resources to it. Onyx Path has done some great stuff and I don’t mean to malign them (and also I know that the licensing situation for this must be very complicated) but they clearly have other more profitable priorities right now.

I’m still going to be playing Chronicles of Darkness for a long time. I have so many ideas, and our local live games scene has a portion that will likely continue to be dedicated to it going forward. But I also think about what this game could be if it had the level of love and support it once did, and the will for change that produced two editions that created a new paradigm for urban fantasy RPGs. Maybe someday I’ll even get to write on it.

RPGaDay – Day 26: Favourite Character Sheet

Boo, yet again my writing program failed me and lost my post, so this is a shorter one than the 500 words I usually try to manage. I was waxing lyrical about the beautiful design of my favourite sheets.

The short version is: I really like the playbook designs in Monsterhearts, Masks and Blades in the Dark, but Blades in the Dark in particular has a fantastically efficient sheet that is clearly designed with immense love and care for how it supports players through every stage of the game. Not just character creation or play, but the relationship of those two as well. Everything is carefully put in place, from the xp and stress tracks, to the rival and ally notations for playbook NPCs, to the inventory where you record and tick off loadout for each job. It’s a thing of beauty. It feels overwhelming at first, but the PC and crew playbooks do pretty much everything you need, and give you a real sense of progression, risk and reward at the same time. I’d highly recommend taking a look even if it isn’t your thing, to see how they do so much with so little space.

I am also very fond of the Ironsworn character sheet design, with tracks round the edges of the sheet where you use paperclips to record how much of various resources you have. That’s very pleasing and gives a tangible sense of resource management within the game. I do usually write my own out and customise it as I find that I don’t quite gel with the setup of the central bit of the sheet. I usually want more space for recording things like NPC bonds. But I also really love how simple the sheet is. It doesn’t feel like you need to decipher anything to use it.

Another really excellent sheet is specifically the NPC bond record sheet for Utopia. It’s designed around circles fanning out from the centre of the sheet, each relating to their own NPC bond, and gives you an excellent place to keep your antagonists and allies together. I usually fill at least two on any given Utopia play, and I’d love to see more mechanics for linking them up with different relationships, or generating jobs from them more directly going forward. As a game rooted in the community vs. corporate aspects of cyberpunk, it feels like you are building up a network to help you and hinder you as you move through the game. When I’m stuck, I can glance over the sheet and see if the NPCs there spark any inspiration for complications, secondary objectives, or assistance.

RPGaDay – Day 25: Unplayed RPG You Own

There is no way to know how many unplayed RPGs I own. It’s an impossible task that scholars have spent literally years trying to untangle. My RPG collection is some sort of Borges-esque impossible space that can never be truly defined. Which is to say, I don’t really want to have to estimate how many RPGs I have, because it’s a little excessive.

Some highlights from my collection that I truly want to try:

Band of Blades – A Forged in the Dark game about commanding an army and also being soldiers in that army, I need a group who’s willing to do military fantasy with the likelihood that multiple characters will die. I have groups who are willing to try stuff like that, but they’re also booked in for the next two years or so with different campaigns run by other people. So I will have to wait.

Star Wars: Edge of the Empire – I have technically played a one-shot of Edge of the Empire, which was great, but my partner has a campaign planned out and I am SO EXCITED. I am already far too invested in my character, and I am always invested in Star Wars.

Quest – Quest looks like a lovely rules-light and heavily descriptive fantasy RPG. I want to try it, but the physical editions of it are hard and expensive to get in the UK, and it feels like something that could benefit from a physical edition.

Voidheart Symphony – I was planning to run this for my Saturday group as our next campaign, as I love the rules set and the vibes. But I realised as I was trying to plan a campaign that delving too deep into the moral compromises and cruelty of the real world, even through the lens of people trying to fix it, wasn’t something I felt I could handle at the moment. Instead I’m running Thirsty Sword Lesbians, but I really do want to run Voidheart Symphony. The mechanics are beautiful.

Ravenloft – OK, not a game in its own right, but I have somehow never played or run Ravenloft. Despite waves at all my horror obsessions. I have a campaign I really want to run about the Vhage Agency and I’m super excited about it.

DIE – Again, I have technically played a tiny bit of DIE. I was part of a play by post game that stopped due to the GM being busy. I was playing a Neo and the campaign stopped right before I got my first piece of Fair Gold! I really want to play a Neo again, and I had concepts for pretty much all of the classes. I feel I want the right kind of group for DIE, as it can get very dark and I want to feel that there is some hope in the grim games I play (I’d much rather have Hopepunk than Grimdark), but the rules are incredible and I love it so much.

Nova – Literally just Warframe: The RPG. I want to play this so much. We almost played it a while ago when one of my friends offered to run a one-shot, but then stuff happened that meant he couldn’t run it. I am trying to bully him into running it in the future, but we all have so many games we want to play and run that it may never happen.

RPGaDay – Day 24: Complex/Simple RPG You Play

I’m trying not to repeat myself too much, and I’ve already talked about a lot of the complex RPGs I play, whether it’s for tactical depth (D&D 4e), nuance of their mechanical toolkit (Cortex Prime) or just being very oldschool (Rifts, FASERIP Marvel, Cyberpunk 2020).

I would also argue that games based on Powered by the Apocalypse and FATE have a conceptual complexity that can be hard to get your head around.

I guess the simplest games I play and run are the ones that I would consider to be good for one-shots, especially for people who don’t roleplay much. I ran Draculola as a Hallowe’en one-shot and it is very accessible and enjoyable. You all play young monsters in a world of monsters and a lot of the conflict revolves around how you solve problems: do you solve them as a kid would, or a monster? The system is called the Two-Trait System (see the Reference doc here: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/337038/TwoTrait-System-Reference) and can be adapted for any sort of opposed traits that characterise someone’s behaviour and the sides of themselves they’re drawn between.

In Draculola, your traits are Kid and Monster, and the dice system is pretty intuitive. You add dice based on the Origin, Style or Skill you are drawing on, and there’s a handy table to help you calculate it all.

The other system I think I could run for pretty much anyone and they would have fun is Lasers & Feelings. I wrote a full review of that elsewhere on this blog (https://theanxiousgamer.wordpress.com/2018/09/18/review-lasers-and-feelings/) but it is also a delightfully simple system that immediately taps into tropes and terms people can understand. Instead of attack values and armour class calculations and add together x plus x if and only if you are trained in that thing, Lasers & Feelings has some very basic calculations: are you using Lasers or Feelings for this roll? There might be some bonuses or penalties kicking about, and you have to roll over or under depending on whether you are rolling Lasers or Feelings, but it’s very simple, very intuitive, and the decision making process of what to do flows as part of telling the story, even for people who haven’t played RPGs much.

Is your character using logic or are they reacting emotionally? If it isn’t clear, players often instinctively adjust one way or the other to clarify that they aren’t just fighting that alien beastie: they’re wildly throwing themselves into the fray or taking up a disciplined duellist’s stance. The mechanics encourage people to define their character through their actions, through their psychology and motivations. It’s an elegant piece of design that showcases the sort of rich choices RPGs provide without needing several sessions of learning the rules to frame it. You also introduce the idea of rolling a die and the story building on the result.

That for me is simplicity in terms of a rules set. The use of random outcomes mixed with concepts that are easy to grasp in terms of how they impact the story and characters. There are other rules sets that do this too, but I felt these were particularly excellent examples.

RPGaDay – Day 23: Coolest Looking RPG Product

Oh, thank god I already wrote this one (when I was looking at RPGs I had purchased). I had no idea where to start, because I buy things just because they look cool or pretty, and if you asked me tomorrow, I would have a different answer. Today’s answer is VHS – Very Horror Stories from Aces Games. VHS is a game that positively drips with love for trashy video nasties horror. Everything about the design of the game packs is pure joy. I’d highly recommend going and looking at the Kickstarter here to see what I mean in terms of design: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/acesgames/vhs-very-horror-stories

Each individual pack is a self-contained horror story in a box designed to look like a VHS tape. The art is absolutely stunning, and all the characters and monsters have their own art cards in a way that appeals to the part of me that likes collectable card games. The maps are also gorgeous, and it’s really satisfying to fold them out. I haven’t had a chance to read the contents yet, but the physical design and art remind me so strongly of the love put into products like Dead of Night and the Final Girl board game. I can’t wait to sit down with a bunch of players and open up one of these boxes to start laying stuff out for the game.

There is something so awesome about boxed sets. They’re largely used for starter sets these days but they’re such pleasing concepts. We all like unboxing, unfolding, laying out. I was genuinely emotional when I got a contributor copy of the Doctor Who Starter Set I wrote, because having MY VERY OWN BOXED GAME WITH MY NAME IN THE FRONT was incredible. Hell, I did an unboxing of a sealed copy of The Masque of Red Death ten years ago on this very blog (https://wordpress.com/view/theanxiousgamer.wordpress.com).

The problem, of course, is that boxed sets are prohibitively expensive to make, especially for small time creators. So all the more kudos to the Aces Games team for making something so delightful to hold and open and use.

Something I’m not sure if you can get from the Kickstarter images is quite how richly designed the game boxes are. The art on the front is pitch-perfect, the VHS labels are part of the storytelling in and of themselves, and the three core games as a boxed set are just absolutely beautiful. Even the envelope for the spin-off stretch goal content is gorgeous: it makes you feel like you’re opening something forbidden, something no-one should ever see. Aces Games is doing a second VHS Kickstarter from 13th September 2023 called Opening Night with at least three more adventures, and I am so excited. Between this and Season 3 of Final Girl, I will spend all my money on lovingly-designed video nasties, and I have no regrets.

See more about VHS: Opening Night here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/acesgames/vhs-very-horror-stories-opening-night

RPGaDay – Day 22: Best Secondhand RPG Purchase

My best secondhand purchase for someone else was the original Planescape boxed set in near-perfect condition for my partner one birthday. He already owns the Dark Sun original boxed set, and we both really love Planescape. His face when he opened it! I truly appreciate how much digital preservation is going on with classic RPGs right now, with a greater awareness that these items are a part of our shared cultural history meaning that they are being digitised and sold as pdfs these days. But there is something wonderful about physically opening up the map of Sigil. The art style of Planescape is like nothing else, and it conveyed such a deep sense of place and tone that really stands out.

My best secondhand purchase for myself is the full collection of the Orpheus campaign setting for Classic World of Darkness, because it was a truly fortuitous little moment. I was in one of our friendly local game shops (The Games Room in Norwich), which was my guide to gaming for such a long time.

The proprieter, Duncan, is always welcoming and lovely, kind and enthusiastic. He was there when I bought my first set of dice, he was there when I used to drift in to buy whatever FATE or 4e D&D or Chronicles of Darkness books he had in. That shop was where I found Unhallowed Metropolis, Blue Rose, Witch Hunter: The Invisible World, Etherscope, Smallville and a host of other RPGs that sparked my imagination. Duncan also has a little section of secondhand books at the back and one time I found the core book and a couple of the supplements for Orpheus back there.

I vaguely knew Orpheus by reputation, but I flipped through and knew I needed to buy these. I filled in the holes in the collection from online sites (just because they weren’t available anywhere locally) and I am always charmed by them. I keep the Orpheus books on a shelf in the study where I write RPGs so I can flip through them to feel inspired. They represent so much of what I want to be able to do with my RPG writing: mechanically rich, flavourful and memorable worlds for people to play around in.

I love that they are such a weird one-off part of an otherwise sprawling game line. It felt like the writers were very clear about the experience they wanted to convey, one which didn’t necessarily fit with the more lucrative Vampire: The Masquerade and associated lines. More than that, they feel like a labour of love. A toolkit laid out before the GM with excitement to see what you’ll do with it. Rich with plot hooks, but open to your own version of the story.

By the way, if you’re ever down Elm Hill in Norwich, I’d recommend popping in to see the Games Room. It’s a quiet little shop in a historic part of Norwich, and you never know what you’re going to find (make sure to bring cash though – you will almost certainly walk out with something and the nearest cash machine is a bit of a walk!) I wish I had more time to go down there these days, but a lot of my RPG tastes have evolved over the years and the lines I used to buy there are no longer around. Nevertheless, the Games Room will always be a part of my gaming DNA. It will always be part of my journey to becoming an RPG writer, and I’m lucky it was there.