The Watch House

16. Composure

16. One thing that will cause a character to lose their composure?

Paris in Vampire: The Masquerade - City Of Angels would love it if she could go a week without discovering some new atrocity being committed by somebody who’s supposed to be on the same side as her.

(So we’ve had questions about breaking Resolve and losing Composure now. How very Chronicles Of Darkness of us!)

Doomsday special look trailer

Saturday, 15 August 2026

Marvel and Star Wars news

From D23, because Disney has its own Comic Con thank you.

VisionQuest trailer marking it as a sequel to WandaVision and Agatha All Along

Ahsoka season two trailer

More of the MCU X-Men casting, for the film due May 5 2028. Empire news. Dealing with the fact that Professor X is eleven years younger than me. Inde Navarrette as Rogue means now I want a Rogue movie.

RPGaDAY 2026 15. Endurance

15. Endurance

15. How would you organise an endurance session of your favourite game?

I’ve helped organise and run 24 hour charity RPG events, with optional sponsorship for how many hours a player can manage as well as ways to buy powers and equipment and plot twists with donations. I wasn’t one of the GMs who tried to run one game the whole time, however.

I’ve also been in weekend and longer gaming retreats, including one where a three-part game ran every evening, but not one where the group tried to get through a whole campaign in the time.

Marathon sessions need ways for PCs to come and go along with their players. They often go with the classic dungeon crawl tournament style, seeing how long a given PC can survive.

Not something I’m great at - I could probably do it with a horror game though. An always rising threat and lots of PCs to throw at it. Alien looks like a good choice from the games in my to-do-something-with stack.

I could absolutely run a weekend mini-campaign of many games, six sessions or so. If there’s a suitably sized campaign you can do in that time, go for it.

Something like a mini-arc for Buffy like running through the Initiative specific parts of season four, or the Pylea miniseries at the end of Angel season two.

Maybe a Vampire game tracking a small group through history, or to pick an example we’ve had a sourcebook and TV show for since I ran a band game going on tour.

Or a Star Wars game doing a “trilogy” with a rising threat to galactic freedom, starting with a plucky band and ending with massive space battles and also high personal stakes.

Or an MCU-sized superhero adventure.

Or...

Friday, 14 August 2026

RPGaDAY 2026 14. Regard

14. Regard

14. What is a game held in high regard you have yet to play?

They’ve been piling up for the past few years while I mostly run and play (usually new versions of) old favourites.

Blades In The Dark, Daggerheart, Good Society, Masks: A New Generation, Eat The Reich. I’ve looked at some, figured Daggerheart isn’t the sort of thing I’d run, made a Masks character for a CC challenge, that’s all really. I could probably grab some indie RPG types and a long weekend and work on this.

For the longest I haven’t played an acclaimed game, I’ve had a copy of RuneQuest since I was about fifteen and done nothing with it. Call Of Cthulhu yes, Stormbringer yes, anything Glorantha no. Ultimately it’s not really my kind of thing so I don’t much mind, but it’s still on that shelf.

Thursday, 13 August 2026

RPGaDAY 2026 13. Strain

13. Strain

13. So far, what is the heaviest set of RPG things you have carried to play?

Probably the Christmas when I made half a dozen customised six inch scale action figures of the PCs for the players of The Watch House. Not actually that heavy but certainly bulky.

ST starting tips

Five tips, and a bonus, and a second bonus, for VtM but often for city games in general, from Sed8ed Princess

Wednesday, 12 August 2026

Solar Eclipse Near Miss 2026

It is cloudy.

A pigeon outside is a bit confused.

This has been my eclipse report.

RPGaDAY 2026 12. Loss

12. Loss

12. Most things end. What is one RPG loss you still feel?

Steve D.

Among so many other things, he ran the first session I played in online, also the first session of the prototype The Night Watch which led to The Watch House. I got to join a session in Brisbane, one of the two times he hosted me going around the world. More recently I got to playtest his biggest RPG Relics and contribute to sourcebooks. A couple of my ideas got a laugh.

His last Patreon post from December 30th 2025

“You matter, and if you show up, you can change your fate, or someone else’s. And that is everything.”

Tuesday, 11 August 2026

V5: City Of Angels 40

Vampire: The Masquerade - City Of Angels session 40

After a summer hiatus. Paris went to what she thought was the least dangerous of three things she could do that night, found that was pretty wrong, and thanked someone she hates for finding a key piece of information and thus stopping a plan to make a deal with someone she hates more. So, ups and downs.

RPGaDAY 2026 11. Tact

11. Tact

11. A character made great by having or not having tact

Giles: “Cordelia, have you actually ever heard of tact?”

Cordelia: “Tact is just not saying true stuff. I’ll pass.”

Buffy The Vampire Slayer 2.18 Killed By Death

One of my Mage circle Didi’s main weapons is distracting opponents often by confusing or annoying them. She once defeated a probability-altering chaos mage by shouting obvious lies at him. “It’s Wednesday! Your shoes are untied!” Including ones she hoped he’d accidentally make happen. “I just won the lottery! I’m Mrs. Ryan Gosling!”

And after more than twenty-five years, still do I fondly recall the story of a campaign of British indie horror game Principia Malefex that ended early with one of the players having their character knock on a suspected cultist base door and ask “Excuse me, are you a cultist?”

Monday, 10 August 2026

RPGaDAY 2026 10. Secret

10. Secret

10. A secret you hope comes out about a character?

Neither of my current characters have any big secrets.

Not normally, anyway. “I’m actually a time traveller from over a century in the future” is a specific issue for a current adventure. Which I hope doesn’t come out too much as it could destroy the space-time continuum. But a few people finding out makes for fun complications.

We just finished a short Vampire chronicle, a game where this is a natural focus, where the city had a lot of secrets and enough came out in the end to start an open revolt, so that was nice. And my character there, the Tremere occultist, had his share as well, though the other PCs did get to discover the shocking reason he had a Tremere enemy.

HE STOLE SOME BOOKS.

In my long-running Buffy play-by-post there are some secrets about the setting I hope to get to, and at some point the secret that one of the PCs is a robot (which all the players know but none of the other PCs do) really should come out - I’ve resisted a couple of chances for an anticlimactic comedy reveal already, but now have an idea to make it an actual central episode plot.

Purely in-character open secrets and really secret out of character secrets give very different feels to games. IC secrets allow leaning in for oblivious PCs - although I’ve met players who cannot resist acting on OOC knowledge. OOC secrets are better for mysteries, but the lack of openness can affect the group. Best not keep them up for long.

Also, Top Secret. I should run a spy game again sometime.

Sunday, 9 August 2026

RPGaDAY 2026 9. Privilege

9. Privilege

9. Give one reason why it is a privilege to play with your group.

Off and on weekend group, not playing often but setting aside a big chunk of Saturday to do it including eating together ahead of the game, being proper social and all.

A chance to play a game I normally only GM has been grand with the Sunday group too.

And the online groups, being asked to play a specific game, trusted to bring the fun.

Getting to GM for new people and show them different games is a nice rare thing too.

Okay that’s multiple reasons. But for multiple groups!

Saturday, 8 August 2026

RPGaDAY 2026 8. Resolve

8. Resolve

8. A moment when a character kept or broke their resolve?

How much of a character’s resolve is the player’s?

“My character would / wouldn’t do that!” is often a problem in RPGs where a player uses it as an excuse to reject the premise of an adventure or otherwise disrupt things, but sometimes it’s about an issue to be addressed out of character, and sometimes it’s a genuine in character response to something like a moral choice.

My French Revolutionary vampire Matthieu was marked for almost certain death as the Montagnards and their Kindred allies took over, and while the game didn’t progress that far in the timeline I decided in the epilogue that his sincere support of the people would indeed get him killed again like it had the first time. I could have had him run and survive but he was always built to be doomed by his humanity rather than his vampirism.

And in another game, not to get into details, I wish I’d said “My character wouldn’t do that!” a lot earlier than I did due to a mismatch of ideas about what the setting’s main group should be like ethically.

Friday, 7 August 2026

RPGaDAY 2026 7. Mercy

7. Mercy

7. A moment of mercy received or given?

One of the things I often include when running something like Vampire is a choice between the right thing and the expedient thing. Ideally with some nuances in there too so it’s not just obvious.

My 2024-5 Vampire: The Masquerade game ended with some of the PCs deciding that the young hunter cell taking out prominent Kindred in the city were in the right and trying to get them out safely.

And other PCs disagreeing because hunters are still a threat and warning the Camarilla, who sent a hit squad.

And playing in the French Revolution game, Matthieu’s last act was to rescue Charlotte Corday from prison awaiting execution - with the assistance of a vampire loyal to Marie Antoinette, who asked the coterie to save her children as well. From his perspective saving two kids was the expedient choice as well as humane, even though saving royals also felt unjust and a possible threat to the republic.

Thursday, 6 August 2026

Exalted at 25

Exalted, White Wolf’s epic superheroic fantasy and very quickly not the prehistory of World Of Darkness, first came out on this day in 2001. Not my kind of thing but I admired the big swing, and the stepping back from that suggested connection.

John Wick: With The Animals

A video essay on the John Wick series with various asides but mostly about how assassin society works and how it could stop working. Sharing my biggest problem with IV while also having good things to say about some of its featured ideas, And a great point about markers and coins being overridden by the connections and relationships they abstract.

Clive Barker's Underworld

Clive Barker’s Underworld (1985) original trailer for the Arrow 4K rerlease

I once edited together a mood trailer for New Wave Requiem, the 1980s Vampire sourcebook. If I’d known this existed I could have used... basically all of it.

RPGaDAY 2026 6. Reach

6. Reach

6. Who would you like to be able to share RPGs with?

Some people, maybe not a lot but some, would probably be interested in RPGs in their preferred genres outside of the usual SF/F/H which we call genre because we’re in it. Of course I’m saying this as a genre kid, and I know SF/F/H makes the improv with action rules nature of RPGs easier to keep going - it’s much easier to improvise a locked room mystery if you can say “a wizard did it” when you get stuck - but the hobby has definitely grown and expanded when taking in genre edge cases.

Horror and mystery with Call Of Cthulhu - straight mystery largely stayed with prepared one-shots like Murder Mystery Party for the above hard to improvise reasons. Horror with heavy drama and romance with Vampire: The Masquerade, leading to more fully emotionally focused games like MonsterHearts - which still has monsters.

(Though Avery Alder is working on a new no-monsters game based on sports drama like Friday Night Lights.)

Not full-on mundane reality, but genre-ish asides. There aren’t many straight cop games but there are plenty of action movie and TV games where cops taking on somewhat or very heightened criminals works fine.

And in the general SF/F/H space there are a few subgenres that seem like they could be the basis for RPGs.

I’m still puzzled that we didn’t get a big obvious YA Dystopia RPG during the genre’s heyday.

And mentioning romance, there isn’t a big romantasy game yet either. (Blue Rose for its forerunners?) And how come we got an RPG for Battlestar Galactica but not for Outlander? I say this as a non-fan but a romance-focused game with sword fights and time travel seems like it would work.