The Watch House

23. Fortune

23. An enjoyable moment of good or bad fortune.

Sometimes I want the system to add unpredictability to RPGs but quite often I don’t really.

A statistically odd roll can derail a cool moment, and that’s why most of the games I run have limited pools that players can use to convert failure to success. So my “and then I rolled a 1” stories are more about being annoyed.

The only system where I really like the risk in every “roll” is Dread, the horror RPG with Jenga as the mechanic where the tower falling when you pull out a brick writes out your character.

But there are influences outside of the way the dice fall which can affect a game too. Like the perfectly timed crash of thunder when a player mentioned a cult threatening the city.

Saturday, 22 August 2026

RPGaDAY 2026 22. Grit

22. Grit

22. An enjoyable moment of grit PCs did or did not tough out.

Sometimes it’s fun to play the muscle. Especially when the system and group work to make that feel valid and badass.

Playing the bodyguard for a Rebel cell in Star Wars (d6 Revised) in the hold of a stolen AT-AT full of thermal detonators our pilot was driving towards a recently unearthed Sith temple to blow it up. A Sith Adept with Temple Of Doom style killer hands jumped into the hold to stop us. None of the PCs had any Force so this was not going to be a fair fight. I charged him, grabbed his wrists and bull rushed him back out the open side door, just catching the ledge and hauling myself up. The Adept jumped back up - and that was when he discovered that while I was wrestling him out the cell’s thief had slipped a detonator into his robes.

Friday, 21 August 2026

Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma

Jane Schoenbrun follows We’re All Going To The World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow with Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma, in a which a young indie filmmaker with a longstanding interest in horror gets to make a bigger studio picture reviving a slasher franchise and it all goes a bit sideways. Funny, weird, deeply meta, gory, much more interested in the sexuality of the slashers than the slashers themselves. My favourite little trick is the soundtrack which gets all horror for various false alarms and then doesn’t for the massacre scene recreation.

RPGaDAY 2026 21. Charity

21. Charity

21. Share an RPG charity past or present that moved you.

Tim Bradstreet had his signed early Vampire: The Masquerade art portfolios for sale at the 2011 Grand Masquerade convention in the US and I went to get one to put into the Conpulsion auction here, I mentioned this and he gave me it for free. (I bought another for myself, naturally!) And I was glad to let him know it was the first lot to go for more than £100 that year.

Photo by Martin Ericsson

There was also the time a family illness led to Conpulsion switching charity for the auction, for which I am forever grateful.

And as GM Ian mentions, the long-running Marvel SAGA game where I played Charity Chance, Agent Of SABER!

Thursday, 20 August 2026

Adventure! Is! 25!

Adventure! Is! 25!

RPGaDAY 2026 20. Promise

20. Promise

20. Have the characters kept or broken more promises?

Overall, I go for characters who keep their word, with the power to make plans and promises and act on them. I don’t play helpless or struggling very often, and when I do they rarely have much of a chance to promise anything.

As a GM do I especially punish treacherous PCs? Hmm...

Currently in the captain’s chair in Star Trek Adventures, and I keep offering to negotiate with Romulans invading our side of the Neutral Zone. Hopefully they’ll listen one of these times since the game is set just before Nemesis.

Wednesday, 19 August 2026

RPGaDAY 2026 19. Desire

19. Desire

19. A huge risk taken because of desire?

A two-player Vampire: The Requiem game I observed about a vampire boy and a mortal girl.

Tuesday, 18 August 2026

RPGaDAY 2026 18. Directness

18. Directness

18. A fast introduction of a new PC or player?

If I know players are likely to come and go I’ll try to have onboarding options and avoid cliffhangers. Emphasis on try.

Some games and settings are better for this than others, mechanically and narratively.

Overlooking the old “why do we trust this total stranger walking up to us in the middle of a secret mission?” and the magic power of the PC Glow...

D&D style fantasy calls it “West Marches” when every session begins and ends with the PCs in their base and venturing out from it. That cuts off things like multi-session dungeons and heavier ongoing plots unless you use the old un-narrative kludge of teleporting PCs in, but it’s a good idea for an open table.

Star Trek (a setting where characters can just teleport in and out mid adventure) would do this if it were realistic about its Luxury Space Communism and faster-than-light travel. Ha ha. Star Trek Adventures makes you pay player resources to get specialist NPC crew to go on camera, which is the model-the-show way of dealing with this. Star Fleet Battles RPG Prime Directive goes the other way and has a completely different command structure for its variant universe.

Mission: Impossible on TV started with selecting agents with relevant skillsets. I’ve seen someone suggest pregens in dossiers before.

(Note that the films acquire a consistent team as they go along, leading to narrative issues like needing something for both the computer geniuses to do.)

Last academic year I had a large amount of player turnover in Vampire: The Masquerade and that isn’t ideal for it or how I run it. Even then, if I’d known I could have tailored the chronicle setup to PCs being part of a group that could explain PCs coming and going and make sessions less serialised. Not ideal for personal horror or slow unravelling of mysteries but I could give it a go. Hmm.

My most setting-of-the-week one-and-done game is Doctor Who, which also has fast character creation... but following the series model really expects the PCs to be the one point of consistency.

If I want to go full “jump in any session” open table, I might go with a light superhero game like ICONS with a big team. Fast character creation, largely self-contained adventures. I’m sure threads would reappear at some point, but I can juggle and improvise so we don’t end up with too many “this should be a Penguin adventure but Batman’s player isn’t here” situations.

A large kitchen sink also helps if I want to come up with a largely standalone adventure every week.

Hey, Buffy is a light superhero game too! Albeit one that also expects a consistent Scooby Gang.

Monday, 17 August 2026

The Pod Universe expands on Insidious

Guest pitch by writer and artist Kendra Wells turns Insidious upside down, gives it a good shake, with makes for a great example of brainstorming a setting from a handful of disparate elements. It overlaps somewhat with the Dark Universe version of The Exorcist in the improvised expansions as a horror setting looks at a confirmed scary afterlife and how religions might deal with it, which is an idea worth another look. Maybe it fits here better than there?

RPGaDAY 2026 17. Integrity

17. Integrity

17. A satisfying example of a character’s integrity.

Matthieu Lasalle, doctor turned street medic for the French Revolution turned vampire, died fighting for the rights of the people twice.

Alternate word:

Intensity

I suppose my games are fairly chill usually. I can dial it up for horror and the like, but usually have space for a tension breaker.

Hayden Panettiere was 36. No kind of age at all.

Sunday, 16 August 2026

Hope (2026)

I’ve now seen Na Hong-jin’s SF action horror comedy Hope thanks to the Film Festival getting its UK premiere. It’s a mix of tones that just about works, it’s a lot funnier than the trailer makes it look although it does include one of the best jokes, and the use of some European stars is hilarious.

RPGaDAY 2026 16. Composure

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.