Running Trophy Dark: A Giant’s Carcass

I recently ran Trophy Dark using the incursion "The Giant's Carcass". If you just want to watch the actual play, it's embedded further down in this post. First, though, a few words about the game. Thoughts on Trophy Dark Trophy Dark is a one-shot game with very light rules and very dark themes, published by …

My first look at Ghost/Echo

Last night, I played "Ghost/Echo" by John Harper with some friends. The video is embedded at the end of this post, but I'll explain a bit about the game first, because it's not what most people might expect. The actual Ghost/Echo page says: GHOST/ECHO is presented as an 'oracle game'. It provides only a starting point …

Doskvol Dalliances: Session 1

My new Blades in the Dark streamed campaign launched this weekend! The video is at the end of the post, but I'll summarize things here. Doskvol, by John Harper, based on "Shipping on the Clyde (1881)" by John Atkinson Grimshaw First, we ran through safety tools. We talked about the CATS method: Concept, Aim, Tone, …

Success in RPGs and Streaming

Illustration by Arthur Rackham What does "success" mean for you? Why do you create stuff for RPGs, or stream your game, or whatever you do? Growth "Success" looks different for different folks, in whatever area of life. We have varying purposes and principles as we go about whatever we're doing. In my case, playing RPGs …

Updates on upcoming streaming

I sat down this weekend and listed out the three games I currently have planned, then started thinking about what I want to do next. All of my current streams take place on the Variant Roles channel on Twitch, for what it's worth, and are archived on YouTube. "Jayemdae Tome" by Donato Giancola As I've …

Towards a requirements analysis for virtual tabletops

I really have a simple set of use cases for what I want in a virtual tabletop (VTT), even if I'm using a map, and none of them involve the character sheet or an online dice roller. Those things feel like a solution in search of a problem. Technology excels at generating small random integers …

Thoughts on players on streamed games

I somehow picked up the (bad?) habit of treating blog posts as a bit less conversational and a bit more like an article. But with the demise of Google+ and the dumpster fire that Twitter can often be, blogs can fit into a slower conversational rhythm. For the next few weeks, I will experiment with …

Watching D&D: what stands out to me

Street Musician by John Thomas Smith Last summer, Steven Lumpkin ran a survey about watching D&D that should inform the efforts of anybody working in or around "Actual Play"-type media. Despite the name, it also covers "listening to D&D" via podcasts and the like. Note that this is a voluntary survey and susceptible to a …

Signal Boost: D&D YouTubers

I watch YouTube a lot. I work from home, so while I sit on conference calls on average about half of my day, the rest of the day often involves YouTube videos playing on another screen or computer. Some of those need no introduction (Critical Role, Wizards of the Coast's D&D channel, etc.) But I …

Krevborna – Session 6 Review

No more streaming RPGs for me. At least, no more producing streams. It stresses me in unfun ways, especially when I also have the responsibility to run a game. Session 6, despite all the fun we had playing it, did not stream or record correctly. For whatever reason, OBS didn't pick up my microphone despite …