The New Sword Breaker is the biggest and best looking one yet!
The New Sword Breaker is the biggest and best looking one yet! Check out the fantastic art and layout by Jesse Ross! This one is a Thundarr inspired, science fantasy mashup! There were contributions and some helpful guidance from several Gauntleteers. Special thanks goes out to Jeremy Strandberg, Charles Gatz, Jeremy Scott, Michael G. Barford, and James Etheridge!
Greetings, all. It’s time for the weekly Gauntlet video roundup! Don’t miss any of the great new actual play videos from the past week in the updated playlists and video links below.
– Monsterhearts 2: Mercy Falls 3 session 2, Jason Cordova runs for Lowell Francis, Kevin Lovecraft, Fraser Simons, and Phillip Wessels: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZIHFMQBlYU
Check out all the great videos on The Gauntlet’s YouTube channel, linked below on this post. Don’t forget to subscribe, and check out the playlists to catch up on all your favorite campaigns. Enjoy, and everyone have a great weekend!
Episode 3 of Monsterhearts: Return to Mercy Falls is here!
Episode 3 of Monsterhearts: Return to Mercy Falls is here!
At the top of this one, I talk about “polling the table,” a spotlight management technique I have used for a long time. In the actual gameplay, it’s back to homeroom for the kids and the return of a very menacing figure.
A reminder that our $2 Patreon supporters get early access to the entire series.
You should be participating in Gauntlet Hangouts. Like, seriously.
You should be participating in Gauntlet Hangouts. Like, seriously.
RPG podcasts are awesome, and I think ours are some of the best. RPG zines are great fun, and Codex is absolutely killer. But the crown jewel of the Gauntlet experience is Gauntlet Hangouts. There are presently 115 sessions on the Gauntlet Hangouts calendar through January, spread out over 45 different game events. There will be many more added before the year is up, and I’d wager just a handful will not fill to capacity.
This is not some accident. Gauntlet Hangouts is growing because our play culture is top notch. Imagine going to a convention where the players and GMs always give 100%, where aftercare and good citizenship is practically fetishized, and where the variety of games available to play is downright dazzling.
Now imagine that same convention never ends.
It’s a space where folks are serious about playing games, but equally serious about taking care of one another. I think it’s pretty special, and a lot of other people do, too.
Check out the present game line-up:
7th Sea: Khitai
Monsterhearts 2: Mercy Falls
The ‘Hood
My Life With Master
Blades in the Dark
Chaos Monks: Mountains of the Moon
The Final Girl
The Watch
Masks: Return to Atom City
The Veil: Cascade
Prime (Shadowrun hack of The Sprawl)
Star Wars World
Rolemaster
Dungeon World: Ten Hidden Keys
Dungeon World: Escape on the High Seas
Crossroads Carnival
Spirit of ’77
Mutant: Year Zero
Lord Scurlock
World of Dungeons: Ravenloft
Star Trek Adventures
Bedlam Hall
Mega-Damage! Dog Dudes of the Alamo (play test)
Karma in the Dark (Shadowrun BitD hack; play test)
Fiasco: The Beast of Sucker Creek
Apocalypse World: Fallen Empires West
carry. a game about war
Breakers: Gauntlet City
Follow
Public Access (play test)
Witch: The Road to Lindisfarne
Dungeon World: The High Seas Before the Storm
Neo Shinobi Vendetta (Fate)
World of Dungeons: Seclusium
1%er: Swoop Gang
Cold City
Mystery Academy (Masks)
Dragons & Travellers’ Tales (play test)
Bluebeard’s Bride
Dungeon World: Horror on the Hill
Seco Creek Vigilance Committee
Unknown Armies
Pack of Strays
Monsterhearts; Mercy Falls ’83
Truth or Daring
Join us for a game! You can view the entire schedule right here:
(Pro tip: You can view the events in calendar form or table form by clicking the tabs up top.)
If you like what you see, consider joining our Patreon at the $7 level. Folks at that level get 1 week of RSVP priority on all new events. We will be making more $7 spots available on November 30th, 2017.
We’d like to do some crowdsourcing for the Miscellany in Codex – Hell.
We’d like to do some crowdsourcing for the Miscellany in Codex – Hell. The Miscellany is called “Three-dozen demons and how to bind them.” Submissions need to be a single sentence, or 2-3 very short sentences. By submitting here, you’re agreeing to let us use it (you’ll get a credit on the issue). We’re looking for evocative stuff. The purpose of the Miscellany is to inspire the reader.
Your demon needs three pieces of information: 1) a proper name or nickname; 2) what they are known for; and 3) how to bind them to your service. The tone for these entries can range from humorous to dark.
Here are some examples:
“Lingus, the Everlasting Tongue, a demon of low sensuality. To bind it to your service, put your tongue into thirty-three different holes, reciting the Lord’s Prayer each time you do so.”
“Madame Bogwallow, who appears as a sickly-yellow batrachian the size of a large dog. She is known to reside in the deepest, darkest parts of the swamp, and if you bring her a beautiful blonde child for her supper, she will cure you of any ailment.”
“Kazzgulran, a demon scholar whose studies focus on the secrets of aristocratic human families. He knows where all the bodies are buried and will share this information with you, but only if you speak his name one-hundred times in a summoning circle drawn from sage ash and make an offering of a canary in a silver cage.”
I’m taking a look back over 2017 and my experiences playing and running games.
I’m taking a look back over 2017 and my experiences playing and running games. I track all my games played on RPGGeek, so it was pretty easy to pull all my stats. I then broke it down a few different ways.
– As of November 15th, I’ve played in 202 RPG sessions, the vast majority of them over Hangouts, with face-to-face games happening with my family, at Origins, and GenCon.
– I’ve GMed 112 games, and played in 90 of them. I strive hard to play with different GMs, learn their styles, steal all their good bits for my own games as much as I can. My GM-to-play mix was surprising. I didn’t realize I was GMing only 55% of the time. Yay me!
– I played 38 games new to me, many were Kickstarters, but most of them were from Gauntlet City Limits games or the Carousel with Andrea G, Brice Coolen, and William Nabors. I did not count games that I played during recordings of +1 Forward for any of this, or my new games played would be a bit higher.
– I participated in the Ladder of Insanity again this year, and decided that it wasn’t insane enough so I challenged myself to only count PbtA games. I know, it’s “insane”! As a result of that, as well as my love of exploring PbtA games, I played in 138 sessions of PbtA games. Of those sessions, I was the MC for 85 of them. By the by, I will COMPLETE the Ladder of Insanity next Tuesday when Fraser Simons runs my 10 session of The Veil! I’m so excited! Once I complete it this year, I am retiring from that competition.
– I was able to play in a few games that I’d only ever GMed before this year – Legend of the Elements and Spirit of ’77. I’ve still only ever GMed Impulse Drive and 1%er. I’ve only ever played World Wide Wrestling and 7th Sea 2nd edition.
– I’ve had an average of 3-5 play-by-post games ongoing for the entire year, mixing the games and groups as games come to a conclusion and we start up new ones. It’s a wonderful experience and a vital part of my daily fun.
All in all, it was a wonderful year for gaming for me. I ran 2.1 games a week on average, and played in 1.7 games a week. That’s almost 4 games a week!
In 2018, I’m looking to cut down the quantity of games I’m playing and focus on the quality of them. I want to have some longer arcs and mini-campaigns, I want to develop one or two long-standing gaming groups and get back into that routine of social interaction with people as well as fellow players.
The latest +1 Forward is out! I wanted to share the brilliant panel on PbtA games from Gauntlet Con. The panel is moderated by David LaFreniere, with panelists:
Michael X. Heiligenstein
Lowell Francis
and +1 Forward’s own Rach Shelkey!
I loved this panel, learned a ton about different approaches to playing with this game system. I hope you enjoy it half as much as I did.
Special thanks to Paul Edson for bringing this to your ears.
