Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai


Leave a comment

Back to the Hollow Earth

I mentioned how this whole lockdown thing has not impacted dramatically my lifestyle – I can be worried about my income as projects are fizzing out and it looks like we’ll have a long dry summer and a cold winter, but my day-to-day routine and my general activities are the same as they have been since 2013.

Case in point: roleplaying games.
I have been playing with a regular team since the early ’90s, and when I moved to the countryside, 80 miles from our gaming table, I moved my games online. At the time I was still accessing the web via my coal-powered, copper-cable system, and the games where a chore. Paradoxically, when I finally landed a good, stable, high-volume connection, my old team fizzed out, and I remained player-less.

Continue reading


Leave a comment

Fantasy AGE for free

I mentioned Chris Pramas’ Fantasy AGE roleplaying game in a post a few days back – and now you can get a copy of the Basic Rulebook in PDF for free from the Green Ronin website, as a special offer in these days of quarantine.
The Basic Rulebook is all you need to play one of the best fantasy roleplaying systems I’ve seen in recent times.
Check it out.


4 Comments

Fantasy AGE – fast and cool

I do not have many opportunities of playing roleplaying games anymore these days – I live in a place in which RPGs are either too modern (because a lot of old people stick to billiards and games of cards, and consider weird any game with a thick rulebook) or too ancient (because younger people play massive online games and consider dice and hex paper quaint).
But I still like reading games, and last night I received a gift card for DriveThruRPG just in time to take advantage of a 40% discount campaign for DM Day.
So I looked into a few things I had on my list.
And I discovered Fantasy AGE.

Continue reading


4 Comments

Three bucks well spent

As I said, after spending a whole day writing, I have no energy for reading, and so I devote my attention to music or movies or TV to decompress after the long day.
But yesterday I blew 3 of my hard-earned euros for something different: a videogame, that hopefully will keep me amused during the quarantine.

As a Linux user, I spent most of the last fifteen years not playing on my PC – if we except playing Go on various online servers. But recently,m through the never-praised-enough Humble Bundle, I was able to restore my ages-old and never used Steam account, and buy a few games for real cheap.
Case in point, my latest purchase – 3 euro and change of Shadowrun Returns.

Continue reading


Leave a comment

Introducing the Bigàt

Among the too many projects I am currently juggling, there is a side gig as the only person with a iota of sense and some manners in Brancalonia, a project for a D&D 5th Edition sourcebook and resource that will allow brave players to explore the world of Italian folklore, Medieval and Renaissance literature, and spaghetti fantasy.
The sort of game in which Bud Spencer and Terence Hill team up with a non-Disney Pinocchio-style living puppet to go treasure-hunting in the plague-ridden, ghost-haunted, brigand-infested countryside straight out of Verhoeven’s Flesh + Blood.

Cover art by Lorenzo Nuti
Continue reading


2 Comments

Worthless

Today an old gaming supplement I wrote a few years back was reviewed by an Italian webzine. It was described as “rough and noisome”, but I understand that these are currently considered compliments in the national panorama of fantasy fiction and gaming, in which being “ignorant” has become something we are supposed to be proud of.
So it’s OK.
Always good to be reviewed, especially if it’s a generally positive review.

Alas, the book in question, that I pitched, designed and wrote in 2015, was presented as somebody else’s project, to which I was attached as “compatriot”, essentially a second fiddle on somebody’s else’s gig.

For someone who is trying to make a living writing, seeing one’s work attributed to someone else is the ultimate sign of one’s worthlessness.
It is not pleasant.

And mind you, I know and respect the person that was indicated as the originator of my book – we are friends, and I like his work. And he was fast to point out the error, and the reviewer corrected immediately.
It all ended in a good laugh.
After all, what’s so bad about such a thing, right?

And yet all this basically means that nobody bothered to check out my book in the first place, not enough to read the title page and see who was the author. As I said, a measure of my worthlessness, and of my work’s.
It is not pleasant at all.


Leave a comment

Playing along the Frontier

So you are working not on one, not on two, but on THREE big huge projects, each on of them with a deadline ticking. One project is fun, another is just what you always wanted to write, and the third you hate every minute of it but is paying the bills, so bend on that oar and push!
What do you do, then?
Simple, you invent a fourth big huge project just for yourself.

Continue reading