Category: The Gauntlet: Our Community

Play with The Gauntlet long enough, and you’ll eventually run into this fellow (he even showed up on the podcast once). Often he is called Gormakir the Cruel. On Carcosa, he is known as Grzzrkt’taa the Inevitable. No matter what he is called, he’s always up to no good.

This is lovely work by Dirk Detweiler Leichty, part of his new Patreon release, which you should definitely support. 

http://tenthousandmogs.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Gormakir.png

Every now and then, a game comes out of nowhere (like Cheat Your Own Adventure) and you’re really taken aback by how good it is.Andrew Peregrine’s Dance of the Damned is one such game. It’s kind of a mix of RPG plus competitive card game. It has a lot of fast, back and forth narration that reminds you of, well, a dance. The setting is terrific, too: all the lords and nobles are hiding inside a castle, drinking and fucking themselves stupid, while the poors outside die of the plague. The point of the game is to see if your character will succumb to the darkness and ennui, or will they leave the castle filled with hope about the future. 

Lots of fun. Highly recommended. I suspect we’ll talk about it on the podcast episode that lands May 8th. 

Thanks to everyone who came out: Jorge Salazar Daniel Lewis Ferrell Riley and Scott Owen.

The first planning session for The Codex of Wondrous Power (or The Encyclopedia Gauntletica, if you will) is on Thursday, May 7th. I’m not making it a Meetup event, since it’s not a game, so if you’re interested in coming, just post in the comments and I’ll get in touch with you privately. 

I really love the work of Dirk Detweiler Leichty. We have a lot of DW players and GMs in this community, and I think his stuff would be a great addition to any game. 

https://www.patreon.com/dirkleichty

This is a really great photo set. Apart from the amazing and tasteful filter I used, there are some really good action shots. 

We played Jason Morningstar’s The Shab-Al-Hiri Roach. It was a lot of crazy, raucous fun, and many of the scenes were downright repulsive (in a good way!). We have talked about this game before on Episode 10 of the podcast, which you should definitely check out at http://gauntletpodcast.libsyn.com. I’m sure we’ll discuss more of this particular session on Friday’s episode. 

Thanks to everyone who came out: Jeff Burke Steve Mains Ferrell Riley Jessica Scott and David LaFreniere. 

Dungeon World on Thursday was pretty great. We played on a restaurant patio during a nasty storm, which goes to show how dedicated we are. Hopefully everyone got home ok. 

Thanks to everyone who came out: Jeff Burke Jorge Salazar David LaFreniere Kyle McCauley Daniel Fowler and Michael.

Some pics from our Wednesday game night. One table played Eero Tuovinen’s Zombie Cinema and the other played Scott’s hack of The Final Girl in which a daimyo tries to marry off his rude daughter to a number of unlucky suitors.

Zombie Cinema was really cool. It uses a slim, elegant ruleset to successfully pull off what it says on the back of the (literal) box: to tell a story inspired by classic zombie movies. It uses a unique board game-style mechanic, with the zombies getting closer and closer to pawns trying to escape to safety. But rather than the board tracking actual physical distance between the characters and the zombies, it instead tracks the narrative beats of a zombie film, and how “close” the characters are to dying onscreen.

I’ll let someone else chime-in on the Final Girl hack.

Thanks to Scott Owen for sharing his hack with us, and to everyone else who came out : Kristen D David LaFreniere Daniel Lewis Ferrell Riley Daniel Fowler and new guy Michael. 

Today’s session of Grant Howitt’s Warrior Poet was much better than the one we played last year. The game has a few funny things going on, mechanically-speaking, particularly as it relates to turn order and scene-framing, but they are issues that can be easily dealt with by doing a bit of house-ruling.

Importantly, we had a lot more fun with the haiku-fueled duels this time around. We put a strict 1-minute time limit on writing each line of haiku, which sped things up considerably. The time restriction also made the process feel a little more duel-like because of the pressure to get your line done quickly. It felt good.

Ultimately, this is one of those odd games every story gamer worth their salt should try out. The character creation process is still one of the most enjoyable out there, and the mechanics are admirably ambitious, even if they need to be massaged a bit. I don’t think I have as much affection for Warrior Poet as Dan does, but I can’t help but respect it as an artistic effort. 

Thanks to Daniel Lewis, Jeff Burke and Ferrell Riley for being beautiful today. 

I’ll post our haiku record in a comment.