Author: Phil Vecchione

I love my Underground campaign. Its been one of the best things I have run in some time, and it has done wonders for breaking me out of my slump. The game has been rolling along well, until we came to a small bump in the road…the rules. After some debate, we decided to pull a rules shift, and swap out one set of rules for another. This is the first of two articles about Rules Shifting. In this article I will talk about the…

Last week, one of the groups I play in decided to end our Pathfinder campaign, and after some discussion it was decided that Bob is going to run Numenera for us. It has been a little while since Bob has run something, and we got to talking about getting back behind the screen again, along with some concerns that Bob might have. Having just come back from my own slump, I thought I would share some advice with Bob…and you all as well. A Little Background Our group…

Recently, one of the groups I play in started a Dungeon World campaign. With a few sessions under our belts, I can say for sure that I love this game with an excitement that I have not had since my days of playing Basic D&D. After talking to the other players and the GM about it, there are a number of things that Dungeon World does right. They are things that any GM could be doing…should be doing in their games. To keep me from having too…

I hate to kill characters. I am not opposed to it in the right dramatic circumstances, but for the most part I do not like killing characters. That flies in the face of my old school upbringing, and likely came about by the arbitrary deaths of some of my favorite D&D characters in my youth. Regardless of the reasons, I don’t like to kill characters. When this problem came up with a well placed rocket attack in my Underground game, it made me think that…

We all have those games that we have always wanted to run, but they either psyche us out or our gaming groups do not want to play them. They sit on our shelves taunting us between each campaign. We make pacts with ourselves to one day run those games, to live the dream. When that day comes, will the game live up to your dreams? Well I have been to the edge and back, and for me, the answer was yes. Dream Games Every GM…

With the new year, I started up a game of Underground as my way to break out of my slump. The results have been quite promising, and I am having a lot of fun running this game. Part of my pledge in breaking my slump was to shake things up and do things differently from how I have run games in the past. To that end, I implemented some new techniques for managing this campaign. One of those techniques includes a more formalized way of reviewing…

This article is long overdue. I had intentions of playing SoE before I wrote the article about the game mechanics, but alas the Autumn is a very busy time for me at work, and quickly my time to organize a game and test drive SoE evaporated. As not to delay things too long, I will review the game mechanics as someone who has 30 years of gaming, and hundreds of systems under my belt. So let’s take a tour of the mechanics of Shadows of…