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Review: Alien Pastoral: The Strain

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A couple of weeks ago, I went to the Chelsea Physic Garden as part of their Summer Lates series, in part because this Late featured a game from David Blandy (Eco Mofos!!, Gathering Storm, and many more) that I’d not come across before, the intriguingly named Alien Pastoral: The Strain . It was the perfect excuse to both touch grass and play games at the same time - how could I pass that up? The Gardens Despite being pretty thoroughly cooked in London’s worst drought (and heatwave) in half a century, the gardens themselves were very interesting! Being originally a working garden for the Worshipful Company of Alchemists, there was a good variety of medicinal plants from across the world, with excellent signage describing exactly what I was looking at (or, to be more precise, what I should have been looking at, rather than the rather sad shrubs I actually was looking at). It also included some lovely, if small, greenhouses including one for carnivorous plants - and another dedicated to ...
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Worldbuildify! Glitch

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Welcome back to Worldbuildify!, the series where we examine a non-interactive property, like a book, a tv series, or even something more abstract like a concept album or a painting and discuss how we’d turn it into a ttrpg. Why? Because sometimes it’s fun to play in a world we’ve become immersed in, and sometimes the process of trying to adapt something gives us ideas for other projects. Such is the case here. Today, we’re turning our gaze to the ABC TV series Glitch (2019) by Louise Fox and Tony Ayre. It follows six individuals who have been brought back from the dead (the Risen) through some sort of occult science, the human connections they left behind and are trying to reconnect with, and the implacable undead hunters that reality sends to put them back in the grave.  Review It’s a great show (for the first two seasons). It’s picked interesting characters, each defined by different periods in Australian history; you have “John Doe”, a British criminal and local highwayman*, Pa...
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Review: Blades in the Dark's Deep Cuts - Setting

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Welcome back to my review of Deep Cuts by John Harper - for my overview and introduction, click here . We’ll be going over the first third of the book here, the Setting. The book goes through three broad sections to expand on the setting - though in the way that Blades is, some of these expansions are also woven into the other sections. They fall into three categories; innovations (new technology), factions (expanding the old and introducing some new), and a catalyst; a world-changing event.
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Review: Blades in the Dark's Deep Cuts

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Deep Cuts is an expansion and set of alternate rules for Blades in the Dark , released late October 2024 and updated earlier this year, written by Blades author John Harper based on his evolving experiences with the game as it has matured over the past eight years. It contains a mix of setting and systems that expand on or tweak mechanics and lore, fleshing out a few more of the factions (and adding some new ones), new technology, and a lot more. It is a fantastic resource - I’ll say that from the jump - it’s great, not just because of the content, but also the way it's presented as a series of individual tweaks and changes; it’s not an overhaul, it’s a la carte.  The book is laid out clearly and effectively. After each module is a list of all the things in the core rules that would need to change - and, more importantly, how to change them - to fit the ruleset in the module. At the back is an extensive, module-by-module set of designer’s notes, going into a great amount of detail ...
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Worldbuildify! The Sword Defiant

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Worldbuildify! is a new series where we’ll be taking a non-interactive property; a book, a movie, a concept album, a series of nightmarish paintings daubed on the walls of an abandoned house, etc, and looking at what we would do if we were tasked with creating a ttrpg setting based on that property.  In this, our first foray,  we’ll be looking at Gareth Hanrahan ’s The Sword Defiant for a couple of reasons. 1) Gareth is an author who straddles both literature and ttrpgs; Trail of Cthulhu, Delta Green, 13th Age, The One Ring, Traveller, and a tonne more on the ttrpg side, and several book series on the lit side; and I think he’s extremely cool and inspirational - there’s a really big section of the ttrpg world that wouldn’t exist without him. 2) As part of his Black Iron Legacy book series, he created a ttrpg adventure called The Walking Wounded , which was exactly what we’re going to do here, taking the world of his book series, and making it gameable, and reading that was th...
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Campaign Retrospective: Comes Now the Godswar

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Comes Now the Godswar was an epic campaign that I ran last year in Blades in the Dark. Heavily inspired by the city of Guerdon from the world of Gareth Hanrahan’s Black Iron Legacy , it saw the city of Doskvol play host to refugees fleeing a catastrophic global conflict, and the struggles and complications such an influx of people would cause.  The players went through a real ‘rags to riches’ arc, starting as refugees having to deal with crises and an incoming deadly winter in an internment camp on some formerly deserted islands (the three unmarked islands off of the coast of Whitecrown Island, which I reworked as the Three Sisters, complete with custom location sheet ). By the end of the campaign, they were shot-callers; defending the city alongside their friends and contacts from an approaching army in an epic showdown. It was a great campaign. One of the best I’ve ever had the privilege of running. A lot of this praise has to go to my players, who each brought skilled and uniqu...
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