Troy Press

You and your fellow villagers know that you can keep the iron-age village of Stonetop safe from the strange creatures of the wider world and even help it prosper. And you’re willing to adventure away from Stonetop to get the resources you need to do so. The GM is given three key resources: Book I, Book II, and Arcana cards. Each expands the state-of-the-art for fantasy PbtA games.

For my TTRPG Planet of the Week, I’ve created adventures on 11 different planets so far. Which has required me to create at least one miniature constructed language (conlang) for each planet. For unlike Star Trek, with its magical, invisible, instantaneous translator, in Planet of the Week the Universal Translator (UT) is a device that has to be trained over time. So characters always hear a bit of the new language before translation kicks in.

I’ve only played Ticket to Ride twice in the past few years, finding it to be rather long for the type of gameplay it offers. I bought Ticket to Ride: San Francisco for a gaming buddy in 2023, and it’s become a staple at our table ever since—it captures the essence of Ticket to Ride in a game that can be played in 20 minutes.

One of my favorite parts of TRON: Ares is when ENCOM’s CEO and her business partner have found a remote complex in Alaska, built by Kevin Flynn. They write a BASIC program to search a file line by line for “PCODE” (in this case, standing for “permanence code”). The first bit of code makes sense (see image).

When you embrace co-creation or shared narration with your players it can sometimes lead to a pastiche, less like Middle Earth and more like Narnia. For instance, my hexcrawl setting was initially conceived of as Iron Age, but my players kept bringing Medieval elements into it.

We surveyed 204 past and current players of D&D to determine what they recalled about the game’s rules, in a survey designed to be representative of the typical player.

Our library ran a one-shot of Shadowdark, the $1.37 million Kickstarter from 2023 that has developed a loyal following. The GM used the “Pipes on Droomen Knoll” adventure starter from the Dolmenwood Campaign Book, while I would have liked a Shadowdark-specific adventure, as Kelsey Dionne, creator of Shadowdark, built a reputation for her 5e adventures.

As I developed the pantheon for Cycladic League, I gradually evolved away from the Classical Greek era towards primordial goddesses.

My youngest son and I have met and talked to Andy Looney, the designer of the Fluxx family of games, a few times at PAX East shows. One year he taught us Homeworlds, another year Time Breaker. So I was eager to interview him about card game design.

My speed-run through The X-Files to come up with a list of the best episodes that form a cohesive whole.

You as GM can certainly handle factions solely through the fiction and the regular rules, but it is great when the game supports factions mechanically. Your characters help this faction, but in doing so run afoul of that faction, and the GM tracks this in some way.

The current IMDB ratings, including the top 3 episodes (the last four of the arc of Paul Giamatti’s villain). Bonus: The 10 Worst Episodes of Star Trek All Time (where one SFA episode has been unfairly consigned).

Skills aren’t commonly used in Powered by the Apocalypse games, and take different forms when they are used.

The episodes of A History of Rock Music by Andrew Hickey aren’t just histories of a song, but broader histories that might be epitomized by the background behind the song, especially the evolution and collision of different music genres and the constant exploitation of African American musicians.