Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Category Archives: roleplaying games


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Back to Planescape, sort of

I loved the Planescape setting for the old AD&D.
Somebody described it as “philosophy with sticks”, and it was all right with me. I liked the way in which the game setting was presented, with the incredible Tony Di Terlizzi Illustrations and all the little bits of fun such as the slang, and the strange mix of Elizabethan, not-exactly-steampunk, sword & sorcery and, yes, philosophy.
Planescape was the sort of setting in which you ended up investigating who had actually killed a god, but in the meantime had the opportunity for a lot of weird shenanigans, swordplay and wordplay.
It was great.

My small collection of Planescape books is still here on my special RPG shelf, and sometimes I fantasize about setting up a new campaign.
Shake the pillars of creation for one last time.

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Not all the boxes were red, back then

I keep seeing posts on social media about people that wax nostalgic about the wonderful time they had as kids, playing D&D Red Box – what was at the time known as the D&D Basic Set. The long hours spent with their friends, the simple joy of adventure in a more innocent time, the thrills and the laughs and the excitement of being heroes in their own adventures, fighting monsters in a fantasy world.

My memories are somewhat different.

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Sky Pirates of the Mediterranean

Another gift for my birthday (my brother was feeling generous), another pulp roleplaying game campaign for my collection, and one that really clicks all the right buttons. And so, after spending a few hours checking the material, why not do a proper review here on Karavansara?
After all it features pirates, biplanes and airships, an alternate history of post-WW1 Europe, and enough nifty tricks to leave everybody happy.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you, Scott Rhymer’s Sky Pirates of the Mediterranean.

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Four Against Darkness: Heart of the Lizard

And so it’s out, and I can finally post the cover – that I had shown you a while back, I think – and a link to buy my novella Heart of the Lizard, the fist (hopefully) story in a series set in the world of Andrea Sfiligoi’s game Four Against Darkness.
The book is published by Ganesha Games, and includes a novella and a big appendix with all the gaming material you need to use in your games the magic, creatures, monsters and treasures you read about. Andrea wrote the appendix, and also illustrated the book.
The book is currently available as a pdf, with the paperback coming soon.

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Rat-men in the sewers

I dug out my old copy of the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying Game, the other day, while I was trying – not very successfully – to put some order on my shelves.
I have two copies of this one – the Italian translation published by Nexus in 1994 and the Hogshead version of the first edition published in 1995. Before that there were photocopies, and notes, and pages clipped from White Dwarf magazine and what else.
And I thought, why not write something about it.
And by the way, yes, I am old.

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Scaring people for fun and (sometimes) profit

Kids these days!
On a roleplaying forum a discussion starts about horror RPGs and how you create fear. And everybody starts talking about game rules and mechanics.
Which is oh, so wonderfully naive, and misses the mark by a half-mile.

In a roleplaying game, we get players playing the roles of characters.
Scaring the characters is easy.
The Game Master says “Your characters are scared.”
Done.
There can be specific rules to simulate fear – the old Ravenloft setting used a Saving Throw vs Death and Paralysis or a Will check. Fail that, your character is scared. Other games used different formulas. Done.

But if one of the the purposes of horror fiction (and horror roleplaying is interactive, shared fiction) is for the end user to experience the frisson of fear, then the fact the characters in the stories are scared witless is not enough. We need to get to the end user – the player.
And here’s something I learned in my long life as a Game Master – nobody’s scared of a roll of dice or a table.

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The RPG Shelf: Basic RolePlaying

In the end I always go back to the first gaming system I really worked to exhaustion – the engine of The Call of Cthulhu, of Stormbringer, of Runequest. My goodness, of the ElfQuest RPG. Thieves’ World!
The game engine they call Basic RolePlaying (aka BRP).
I spent so many hours in my life playing with these rules, I could reasonably sit at a table without the handbook right now, and still be able to run a game with a minimum of fuss. More about this later.

And yes, this is a post mostly aimed at roleplayers, so maybe you might find it boring, or obscure, maybe even cryptic. I am sorry. Feel free to skip this.

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