The Watch House

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 got 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

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.

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.

Wednesday, 5 August 2026

Lore and unreliable narrators

Jesse Heinig on untrustworthy lore in settings, with Vampire: The Masquerade as a prime example.

One of the great joys of running a Vampire chronicle for people who have never played Vampire before is tossing them into a stew of contradictory conspiracies. Vampires love to present themselves as erudite and sophisticated, but they have very little evidence about their own supernatural world.

So far my group has heard...

* Three different creation myths about vampires

* Two different theoretical ways out of the curse

* About the existence of bloodlines, but not specifics

* About the existence of the Sabbat, with some (useless) history

* About werewolves and ghosts

They also heard about wizards ("they died out in the Middle Ages") shortly before meeting a mage, and about unaligned clans ("mostly weirdos who have very limited power") before running afoul of a Follower of Set/Ministry vampire.

They met a vampire who can survive sunlight at dawn

They met a mortal who can just see through Obfuscate. No idea why

They ran away from mortal hunters wearing FBI jackets, who were obviously not real agents

They have failed several gambits to get blood, and are coming to grips with the fact that they will have to do some questionable things

They discovered that animal blood is not very satisfying, then met a Kindred who feeds on animals exclusively

They heard that the Prince is Malkavian, then met her and the coterie's Malkavian immediately clocked that she is not

The Malkavian learned to aura read and has no idea how to interpret it

Everyone seems to be having a great time. It's a World of Darkness where there is lore, there is history, there are societies, but a rule is only a rule until it's broken. Supernatural things work the way they do because of magic, and symbols, and metaphors, not because of science.

Soon they'll get introduced to Gehenna, the End Times, Gehenna cults, and the mythology of the turning of the age. Probably hand-in-hand with crossing paths with actual Sabbat, an Anarch Revolt in their city, and thin-bloods looking for a place to survive.

The huge, sprawling metaplot of the World of Darkness causes some players to pursue setting mastery, to have full fundamental knowledge of the "truth" of the world, so I've made it pretty clear through events that "truth" is highly subjective and context-driven.

Everyone's got goals and agendas, but at the end of the night, it really comes down to, what will you do to survive? How are you going to make it happen? Where are you going to get blood? And who's going to pay the price for your sins?

RPGaDAY 2026 5. Burden

5. Burden

5. What burden is a character willing to carry until the end?

With great power comes great responsibility.

With that phrase of that idea, Stan Lee defined Spider-Man, why superheroes are heroes and not just super, and a valuable life lesson.

Player characters are often marked out by their power or the opportunity to act when no-one else can. They may not be the only group in the setting doing PC-ish things, but they are the ones that get the focus. Who else is going to save the day?

Some of my more serious character moments are about taking on a burden alone, and why this may not be a good call.

Of course if you really went to get to me emotionally, have someone pitch in to help.

“I can’t carry it for you. But I can carry you!”

Sam in one of the bits that makes me cry in Return Of The King

See also the first episode of Superman: The Animated Series, where Kal-El’s family help to make sure he gets away from Krypton even if they don’t as a result. It’s the only version of the story that gets to me.

Cthulhu Lives!

Cthulhu Lives! and the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society. A history by Thomas Manuel at Rascal.

I knew this tale from The Unspeakable Oath magazine’s history of the game and group, with a lot of the same photos in black and white instead of here in sometimes alarming colour, but it’s such a ride it’s always worth another look, and the bit with the helicopter is new to me.

The HPLHS went on to make printable and mail order props, audio plays, Christmas albums, and films including the silent black and white version of The Call Of Cthulhu (trailer).

And reading back it’s both a tempting thing to try and A Health And Safety Nightmare.

Tuesday, 4 August 2026

RPGaDAY 2026 4. Charm

4. Charm

4. An enjoyable moment of charm gone right or wrong?

There’s nothing like a Fancy Party Episode or other large social event to get people more dressed up than usual and being noticed in unexpected ways.

I have them occasionally in a lot of my games. Sometimes it brings the drama as relationships shift, and often it brings the funny as there’s a misunderstanding or somebody gets flustered.

“Do we get dressed up?”

“Of course.”

“I’m in.”

Angel 3.13 Waiting In The Wings

Which is a Fancy Party Episode which does indeed shift several cast relationships

Of course they’re a sometimes food. Pride And Prejudice has people writing letters and visiting each other’s houses as well as some fancy party chapters. ;) (Comics creator Trung Le Nguyen provides helpful and often hilarious commentary over one of the biggest Bluesky threads I’ve ever seen, collected here in 135 pages.)

Big social events are also good for changing the status quo, introducing new characters, having enemies meet in a situation where they shouldn’t start a fight, and more.

(Lots of NPCs can get hard to track. In some games use a map and tokens for scenes like this more than for combat.)

William and Charlotte got together in The Watch House in the middle of some other adventure when she pointed out they were while he hadn’t quite gotten around to asking her out. That can happen too.

There Will Come Soft Rains

Today is August 4, 2026.

There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury is set today.

PDF for study

Reading by Leonard Nimoy

Russian animated film

Monday, 3 August 2026

Graeme Davis on the history of RPGs in the UK

When Dice Were Made Of Flint, a column at Tabletop Sentinel, begins in 1978 as he plays his first game of D&D and finds his way to Games Workshop.

RPGaDAY 2026 3. Poise

>#RPGaDAY 2026

3. Poise

3. How does one character present themselves?

Of my current PCs this leans towards:

Paris, the Toreador events promoter in Vampire: The Masquerade - City Of Angels. High Charisma and Presence, different outfits for different occasions, active code switching. And the literal poise power of Cat’s Grace which gives her perfect balance, mostly used for running in high heels.

Olivia Holt
Not my original visual reference but Paris went more girlish than expected

And so naturally I talk about all my current PCs - and my first ever - to show variety.

Michael Sorensen, Tremere occult investigator, wears black. He wore black tie to Elysium, saying he’d go full white tie for a special occasion like a formal dance or being sentenced to Final Death.

Matthieu Lasalle, French Revolution Brujah, was scruffily handsome but his main note of poise was his tendency to start an attack on an enemy of the people by kicking a door open, making a proclamation about justice, and either firing his flintlock or otherwise drawing attacks to him.

Elsewhere, Cara Lawson in Mage: The Ascension is mostly practical but will dress up nice if she thinks it won’t stop her fighting. She has to rely on her high Dexterity for running in high heels.

She is currently in the 1880s and hoping that having to dress like a lady doesn’t get her or anyone else killed.

A screenshot from Assassin's Creed Syndicate with the alert
"EVIE's movements are RESTRICTED by her dress"

Captain Diana Carter in current Star Trek Adventures is kind of a Pike, diplomatic but direct, friendly until not. Her main tic is a wry smile when threatened.

A certain amount of looking cool when player charactering goes all the way back to my first session, where despite no rules for elves or archers in Fighting Fantasy I used an elven archer miniature. With an eyepatch, no less.

Oreon, leader of a Regiments Of Renown army set
Painted and photographed by The Stuff Of Legends.
I went more olive drab IIRC

As a GM, I often have a social episode here and there. My Vampire: The Masquerade band game Last Dance was all about that side of the setting, with just a few fights and chases.

Some day I’d like to go full Good Society and run a full high society game... with or without vampires.

Sunday, 2 August 2026

Commonwealth 2026 closing ceremony

No TARDIS.

Weird uplifting choir and jam version of Loaded by Primal Scream.

Good choice for fair play award.

The Vampire Lestat

The Vampire Lestat comes to UK TV and the BBC iPlayer in its entirety, where you can also find both seasons of Interview With The Vampire.

It continues to play fun and often darkly comic twists on Anne Rice’s original material, notably keeping Lestat a highly entertaining character but doesn’t put you on his side like Rice tended to later - he’s a casual murderer and a prick.

I’ll admit I prefer the nu metal in Queen Of The Damned but the glam pastiche here fits.

Also cool that the series promotion included an actual in-character concert.

Vampire V6 playtest AP

Vampire: The Masquerade V6 playtest as run by Alexander Ward

It didn’t hit most of my concerns. I don’t especially like the target taking off dice so we lose big pools and the clatter of may D10s. Glad to be shown Overqualified, the equivalent of taking half, still exists for players.

Drama seems like a minor thing here, which is a concern as one of the bg things being flagged up in the playtest.

X is the thief of Y

Comparison is the thief of joy, they told me, and I said, I’m putting together a team for a heist.

Gareth Hanrahan

This is the best Nobilis pitch I’ve ever read.

The Pod Universe phase two

Slate reveal featuring space horror, space murder, superhero musicals, and an animated family adventure which is a prequel to the space horror.

RPGaDAY 2026 2. Stature

2. Stature

2. What does one character’s stature in their community mean to them?

If my character is someone people will listen to they’ll use that for their ends. A firebrand revolutionary rallying the people, a figure of authority offering to negotiate before a battle starts.

Not for self-indulgent reasons. Usually.

Quite a few are outcasts trying to help without it.

For Stature in general, I have played some notably big characters and some small ones, but no giants offhand.

Saturday, 1 August 2026

RPGaDAY 2026 1. Discipline

#RPGaDAY2026

1. Discipline

1. Share a character or fellow player who is a strong example of discipline.

I can talk about disciplined characters with ease. Starfleet officers, Mages who gained power through study and practice, superheroes who will jump in the path of a bullet or laser beam or thrown bus.

I met a disciplined player once. You could rely on them to be about twenty minutes late every session.