Say you want to make characters who are all from the same small town. Or from related noble houses. Or who all came to this planet on the same generation ship. Maybe you just want to make up their backstories, or maybe these are characters you’re actually going to play in a campaign. Normally you […]

You and your friends are trapped on a desert island. What better way to pass the time than to play games? But you have no dice! What do you do? You could whittle some out of coconut, but instead here’s an easy way for a group of people to simulate rolling a six-sided die. I […]

The only thing I love more than making intricate, fascinating worlds when I game is making intricate, fascinating worlds and then watching them burn. Which is why I love Caroline’s game, Downfall. I love making the world and fleshing out all the traditions, and I love the tight personal tensions. And I’m guessing a lot […]

If you’re playing a multi-session Kingdom campaign, what do you do if someone can’t make it? How do you play without them? When someone asked this, my first instinct was: never play without the whole crew. Just play another one-shot if someone can’t make it. But then I thought about it a bit… and started […]

I was reading about how during the American Revolutionary War, Henry Knox hauled an entire battery of cannons from captured Fort Ticonderoga 300 miles through the dead of winter to give George Washington’s army the artillery it vitally needed to threaten the fortified British. It sounded like an epic trek: cannons falling through the ice […]

Forget all that mythic tragedy beneath the fading stars stuff: I wanted to try Polaris as a modern spy game. It seemed perfect for the job, since the key conflict phrases looked like they would work really well for rapidly spawning the kinds of twists and revelations that are the meat of espionage. Flexible, but […]