The Watch House

29. Labour

29. Labour: Thing you are most willing to work on for a game.

I often focus on visuals as my memory works more that way, so my recurring cast of Vampire: The Masquerade NPCs all have photo references and hardly any of them have character sheets.

Printing them out also meant I could map out who was standing with whom at Elysium.

This visual focus extends to cutting together video trailers and title sequences, making custom action figures and miniatures, commissioning art including mini painting, and even actually drawing myself.

Wednesday, 26 August 2026

RPGaDAY 2026 26. Regret

26. Regret

26. One game you regret not trying?

Having read the full adventure series for Orpheus I couldn’t really play it when offered a chance, though it was a few years later. I’d really have to run it.

And scheduling has prevented me playing Buffy and Adventure! at the Nationals, Alien and Mothership in the last two years at GEAS, and more.

As a GM there are... let’s say a few I’d like to get to the table someday. Including a break from “first chance to play this, do something normal” setups for the games I do run, like high society historical Vampire instead of usually scuzzy modern, or going all-in on the black market and thief setup that didn’t come together last year. Running Trinity Continuum would be nice too.

Okay, Orpheus is a good choice for one, as it’s a reference to someone who regrets looking back. Ha ha.

Saturday, 15 August 2026

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...

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

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.