Often when I'm running a game, I focus on antagonist NPCs, characters who force me to think about what they're doing and how the player characters can react to their activities. It is rare when an allied NPC gets spotlight time, which brings me to this idea of "checklist NPCs". The NPC is associated with a checklist of prompts or events that best represent their purpose in the game. A player can check an item off the list to bring that event into play.
My online group decided to keep going with Monster of the Week, where the weeks are fast and the monsters are furious. This mystery owes everything to The Wraith, Blacktop Wasteland, Christine, Death Proof, Ghost Rider, Fast & Furious, and my childhood obsession with cars that drove by themselves.
Car chases in TTRPGs continue to be my white whale. I've watched a ton of car chases in movies, real life, and video games, but the problem is you don't often read car chases. It's primarily a visual spectacle, and so the challenge in translating a good chase to a roleplaying game lies in finding where the decision points are.
YOU ARE A STARFIGHTER. You dance through the void, strapped into a fragile hypervelocity shell capable of glassing moons. Now your colony worlds burn. Your fleets are scattered. The false prophets and traitor kings call you renegade. They hound you through uncharted space while billions of ghosts cry out for vengeance. Let them come. Show them how easily the hunter can become the prey.
BREACH is my first submission to Jason Tocci's 24XX game jam over at itch.io. His 2400 series of microgames are one-page rpgs that range from psionic thriller to cyberpunk to space horror, and I appreciate this small format. He's used Creative Commons art by BEEPLE on all his covers, and I continued the trend. Finding … Continue reading 24XX: BREACH
My followup to Insomniacs this week is a space opera meets office politics playset for the excellent new edition of Fiasco.
Don't Roll a One 