Vampire: the Masquerade 5th Edition won the Origins Awards for Best RPG as well as the fan award. I’m very happy about this. Origins attributes V5 to Modiphius but the original three books of the game were created in-house at White Wolf, before White Wolf was subsumed into its parent Continue Reading
Non-Digital
Non-Digital: Itras by – the Menagerie
The Menagerie is a supplement for the Norwegian roleplaying game Itras by, created by Ole Peder Giæver and Martin Bull Gudmundsen. However, if you’re familiar with roleplaying game supplements, this is definitely something else. As befits the surreal nature of Itras by, the Menagerie calls into question the very meaning of Continue Reading
Non-Digital: Analog Game Studies vol. 2
I’ve read the second of the Analog Game Studies books in my quest to catch up on the series. You can check out the book here or read the articles here. After the introductory first book, this second volume is where the series really gets going. It feels like in Continue Reading
Non-Digital: Slowquest and Roleplaying Game Culture
I was at the Helsinki Comics Festival recently, lured in by the promise of roleplaying game related indie stuff. The Australian illustrator Bodie Hartley was there with a series of little booklets published under the title Slowquest. They’re interesting because while they are not roleplaying games, they are most definitely Continue Reading
Non-Digital: Our History
The Finnish Museum of Games opened a new exhibit on the history of tabletop roleplaying games in Finland yesterday. It’s wonderful stuff and I expected the feelings of nostalgia revisiting all these old things brought me. But the real surprise was in how much there was I’d never heard of Continue Reading
Non-Digital: Analog Game Studies vol. 1
I’ve worked a lot on tabletop games this year because of my involvement with Vampire: the Masquerade 5th Edition, and I developed a yearning for the kind of design writing about tabletop games that we have for larp in the form of the Knutepunkt books. As sometimes happens, it turns Continue Reading
Non-Digital: The Visionary Worldbuilding of 2nd Edition AD&D
I started roleplaying with the Finnish edition of Dungeons & Dragons, and graduated to playing Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition as soon as I learned enough English to read the books. While there’s been good and interesting stuff done in the 3rd, 4th and 5th editions of the game, Continue Reading
Non-Digital: Becoming a Perfect Human
Recently, me, Jaakko Stenros and Tuomas Puikkonen did a larp called Täydellinen ihminen (The Perfect Human). The idea was to delve deep into the clean, bright world of office stock photos. For a few hours, our participants would become these happy, smiling, efficient and joyful people. They would embody a Continue Reading
Non-Digital: Seven Larps, Seven Countries
One of the great things about larp is that it’s such a young medium, we can do things for the first time. Exploring new frontiers of larp is easy since there’s so much that hasn’t been done yet. I worked on the Baltic Warriors project as a larp producer this Continue Reading
Non-Digital: How to Create a Nasty Society
Last week, I wrote about the differences between Vampire: the Masquerade’s “game of personal horror” and the game I run, Verikartta, in which the horror has a more communal bent. The core of the matter is that for the vampires in the game, this is the only community they will Continue Reading