Roleplay Rescue’s Blog's Avatar

Roleplay Rescue’s Blog

@roleplayrescue.com.web.brid.gy

Murmurings from beneath the beard [bridged from https://roleplayrescue.com/ on the web: https://fed.brid.gy/web/roleplayrescue.com ]

9
Followers 0
Following 97
Posts 08.03.2025
Joined
Posts Following

Latest posts by Roleplay Rescue’s Blog @roleplayrescue.com.web.brid.gy

Preview
Musings On Cypher I am developing a somewhat unexpected love of the Cypher System for reasons that tend to push against my usual roleplaying game preferences. The ongoing experiment with Ariadne’s Thread, while very much a lumbering effort on my part, has proven very enjoyable and intriguing. The premise was to mash-up 1977 Traveller with the vibe of […]
28.02.2026 18:33 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Preview
Picking Different Play Goals One area of reflection has been the idea that I enjoy several variations of game play that are often lumped together into the category of “roleplaying games”. While many folk tend to assume that the term “roleplaying game” (RPG) is a firm one, the reality is nuanced. Being able to “attempt any action” is perhaps […]
21.02.2026 07:13 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Preview
Exiting Treacle The past three months have felt like wading through treacle. Work has been… intense. No mental energy at the end of the day. Weekends have been busy. This past week of half-term has been a slow exit from the treacle bath. Not sure I am totally out of it but… The games continue. Karameikos tomorrow. […]
20.02.2026 19:45 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Preview
Into The Wilderness I’ve been working on some Wilderness Travel rules for Karameikos powered by GURPS. This has become necessary as the party prepares to leave Threshold and travel to the village of Vander’s Hollow some 16 miles northeast. Why do I need such rules? Two reasons: 1) the Hiking rules on B351 seem ridiculous and one of […]
29.12.2025 15:42 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Preview
The Joy of Karameikos Two experiences within the last 24 hours have reinforced the belief that I have found my tribe: the fourth session of Karameikos and editing the seventeenth episode of GURPStalk. Taken together, there’s a palpable sense of the joy that can arise from role-playing games. Sitting at the PC last night, running the Karameikos game for […]
30.11.2025 15:15 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Preview
On Player-Directed Roleplay Today was Session #3 of Ariadne’s Thread – our SF game powered by Cypher – and once again the player-directed goals and relationships established during character creation have yielded an excellent experience at the table. For those who’ve not been listening to RPR, I’ve focused on trialling Jamison’s methodology outlined in his book, “Gamemastering” (2011). […]
22.11.2025 17:42 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Preview
TFT V: The Lost Lair Last week I ran my first session with The Fantasy Trip by Steve Jackson Games as part of my most recent hobby pact. This weekend, after a positive session of something completely different, I found myself designing a simple TFT dungeon called, “The Lost Lair”. “Run a TFT open table megadungeon at the school club […]
09.11.2025 15:19 👍 0 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
Preview
On Ariadne’s Thread Listeners to the podcast will know that I recently began running a couple of new role-playing game campaigns. One of those was (eventually) named by the group Ariadne’s Thread, the title coming from the name of their starship. Today was Session #2 and, although very different in feel and tone to the previous one, a […]
08.11.2025 18:21 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Preview
TFT IV: Og Smash! The pact was that I will run a TFT open table megadungeon at the school club for 6 weekly sessions. Today was session one and… we played The Fantasy Trip but not in a dungeon. This is fine because the heart of this is keeping an experimental mindset. Remember the Hypothesis: the School RP Club […]
04.11.2025 19:07 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Preview
Movember 2025 Men will die on average 4.9 years earlier than women and for reasons that are largely preventable, which means that it doesn’t have to be that way. Once again, I am supporting the Movember Foundation and trying to raise (at least) £100 by shaving off the beard and growing a dodgy moustache. I’ve faced my […]
01.11.2025 10:12 👍 0 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
Preview
TFT III: Quick Characters In The Labyrinth is the point at which Melee and Wizard grow into a role-playing game. If you’ve been following my delve into The Fantasy Trip, this is where the game transcends the battlefield. This book covers roleplaying, character creation and experience, and advanced magic and combat rules… I’ve been reading through it for a […]
30.10.2025 00:15 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Preview
TFT Experiment II: Wizard Having not given Wizard a play, this is the part of the experiment with The Fantasy Trip where it all gets a little more strange. As we go forward, I’m going to assume that you’ve been following along and already read Part I. Step One: Creating a Figure Wizard is a game of magical combat, […]
29.10.2025 02:20 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Preview
TFT Experiment I: Melee Continuing my path towards running an Open Table megadungeon game powered by The Fantasy Trip, I’ve cracked open the big box to dig out the little box named Melee. The whole system is modular, starting with “Man-to-Man Combat With Archaic Weapons”. Melee is a free .PDF download on Warehouse23 for those who are curious and […]
28.10.2025 02:40 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Preview
TFT Open Table Experiment Last week, after a particularly disappointing D&D Club session at school, wherein none of the players for my game showed up, I noticed that there were quite a few students drifting between games as observers. They were happy enough but… Hypothesis: the School RP Club needs an Open Table as per The Alexandrian’s manifesto. Why […]
27.10.2025 07:16 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Preview
Rules Get Out Of The Way For years, fans of so-called ‘rules lite’ games have been telling us that the big benefit of such systems is that the “rules get out of the way during play”. The claim is that by having fewer rules to learn, we can be free to improvise the results as we make rulings during the game. […]
19.10.2025 17:29 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Preview
Finding What’s True I started this roleplaying games thing when I was pre-teen, during Middle School in the days when RPGs were finding their identity. Before going to Secondary School, I liked to imagine and explore. I would play games and I would hang out with friends. It was an innocent time. As we transitioned into Secondary School, […]
12.10.2025 15:38 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Preview
Steps To Karameikos Two months ago I asked: What if we were to set up a campaign within the lands of Karameikos as inspired by that old supplement but run it with the much more grounded GURPS game system? Today, we begin Session #1 of the Karameikos campaign powered by GURPS. The journey began with that post in […]
04.10.2025 07:23 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Preview
Engaging Belief The blog and the podcast were always a means by which I could work out my thinking around the roleplaying games hobby that I have enjoyed so much throughout my life. This post is no different, being a reflection on what I would seek in my play. To say that you “need” something when we […]
06.09.2025 07:39 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Preview
Threshold of Karameikos This morning I woke up with the crazy idea of running a 100-points Dungeon Fantasy game set in the realm of Karameikos and starting in the town of Threshold. The thought of a low-powered classical adventure campaign powered by GURPS but inspired by my favourite edition of Dungeons & Dragons seems exciting. Let me tell […]
06.08.2025 11:14 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Preview
Back To The (Mega)Dungeon After waking in the night with a panic attack, I wrote something on the RPR Discord that was somewhat of a revelation. In the pre-dawn light of the hobby room, there was a sense that I needed to get back to something simpler: I’m starting to realise that while I might feel drawn to a […]
04.08.2025 10:50 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Preview
GURPStalk This week we launched the GURPStalk podcast, a collaboration between myself and Patrick Mullen who is a long-time GURPS Game Master and newfound friend. The show is where we talk about GURPS – the Generic Universal Role-Playing System published by Steve Jackson Games – and using it to run long-form roleplaying campaigns. Both Pat and myself are interested in […]
30.07.2025 08:12 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Preview
Star Trek Adventures Being a long-term fan of Star Trek, I’ve been drawn back to watching episodes of the various TV shows. Doing so reminded me of the Star Trek Adventures roleplaying game from which, back at Christmas, my good friend Derek bought me a copy of the Starter Set for the second edition. I’ve taken things a […]
27.07.2025 10:14 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Preview
Mythic, Again Two more days at work and then it’s the holidays and, frankly, I have no idea what to do with myself and the hobby. Ideally, I would be digging in to develop the After Ruin fantasy campaign that’s running with the Nottingham Dice Cup crew and working up a fresh online RPG offer. In reality, […]
23.07.2025 18:12 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Preview
Why Tear Down Others? Why do people feel an incessant need to criticize and tear down the work of others? For sure, some things are objectively crap – the machine that simply doesn’t work. When it comes to works of creativity and imagination, however, we enter into the realm of the personal and subjective. As Monte Cook has observed, […]
20.07.2025 05:30 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Preview
Halfway Down Moonspike Lots I could talk about this week, but the most enjoyable and memorable stuff happened today during the latest session of After Ruin, our dark fantasy campaign in the realm of Mystamyr. Fittingly, the player characters found their way to one of the more iconic locations in my personal canon: Moonspike Tower. Back in 2016, […]
19.07.2025 16:19 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Preview
Fellmyr and Edition 5.5 This week has offered a journey back into the realm of Dungeons & Dragons. Specifically, I’ve begun to read the 2024 edition of the game which I will refer to simply as 5.5e because, frankly, that’s exactly what it is: an update of the core Fifth Edition rules with significant changes but still recognisably rooted […]
12.07.2025 14:55 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Preview
Simple Character Sheets As a person who introduces lots of new players to Dungeons & Dragons, and to other RPGs too, the biggest thing I have come to value as a tool is a nice simple character sheet. The Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Game starter set from 2000 has just the kind of sheets that I love to […]
05.07.2025 06:11 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Preview
Spirit of the Third Edition Every time I think that I am done with Dungeons & Dragons, it comes back into my life with force. There has been a weird confluence of experiences over the past 24 hours that have brought me back to the question of what exactly lies unresolved in my experience with D&D. I’m not quite sure […]
04.07.2025 17:34 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Preview
3 Reasons to Use GURPS Magic Confession: I like the GURPS Magic system as presented in both introductory chapter in Basic Set and the full treatment in GURPS Magic. Over the past four years, I’ve run several fantasy genre games and never needed anything more. Here’s three reasons why. 1. Pick Up and Play GURPS is a pretty easy game system […]
28.06.2025 18:25 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Preview
Recovering FRP There must be a point at which one stops theorising and moves towards action. Over the past couple of years, I’ve been running games in a manner which has proven more satisfying to me as Game Master and given great enjoyment to the players. The philosophy of role-play that I am using is assembled from […]
21.06.2025 08:35 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0