Yung Chang’s documentary China Heavyweight, now streaming at a video service near you, follows the impact of a high-school boxing program meant to recruit amateur fighters on two young men who buy their coaches’ promises of a way out of their poor tobacco-farming community. In addition to providing a window into cultural change in today’s […]
Tag Archives: robin d laws
NASA’s Cassini probe has detected any icy object in Saturn’s rings that may be a nascent moon. The small object may already be falling apart, making for a story less less impressive than the “baby moon” headlines suggest. So let’s fix that by ripping it from the science headlines for Ashen Stars. The lasers snag […]
A Calgary dentist who bought John Lennon’s tooth at auction says that he looks forward to cloning him in the near future. After finding a jurisdiction with loose bio-ethical regulation, he intends to raise the child in a music-friendly environment—though without exposure to drugs and cigarettes. Rip this story from the headlines for Mutant City […]
…or, When Your Car Battery Goes Dead Outside the Jorgamundr’s Lair, It Ain’t No Coincidence A Column on Roleplaying by Robin D. Laws Your assignments for the Ordo Veritatis take you into zones where the membrane between our reality and the terrifying realm of the Outer Dark nears the breaking point. In such places you […]
Excerpt from interview conducted at Debriefing Center Xenon, 9/12/12 Subject: Nathan Cox, age 27 Interviewer: So what do you think you did to attract their attention? Subject: Attract her attention, you mean? Interviewer: However you want to answer the question, Nathan. Subject: Don’t call me by my first name like you know me. I […]
Planets of Peril and Vengeance, Arranged From A-Z An impossibly distant future. A vast sprawl of planets, each without parallel, with its own bizarre customs, bedeviling procedures, and wily inhabitants. As one of the implacable revenge-seekers populating The Gaean Reach Roleplaying Game, you know that correct intelligence on these worlds makes all the difference between […]
To accompany my Dreamhounds of Paris game sessions, I created a playlist on Rdio. (Search for “Dreamhounds of Paris” should the link betray us.) If that happens to be your streaming music service of choice, you can use it as is. Otherwise, these notes can help you recreate it elsewhere. The playlist contains: Kiki de […]
A column about roleplaying by Robin D. Laws I designed DramaSystem to allow groups to impose their own dynamic on play. It gives you a framework and lets you decide what to do with it. So when it turns out that one-shot games tend to take on a cutthroat edge, that’s not because I installed […]
A column about roleplaying by Robin D. Laws Hillfolk and Blood on the Show present a couple of series pitches that cross the streams with our flagship GUMSHOE games. Chris Lackey’s “The Whateleys” lets you play in Lovecraft territory from the cultists’ point of view. My own “Mutant City: HCIU” flips the police procedural […]
See P. XX A column on roleplaying by Robin D. Laws Roleplaying offers a pleasure we don’t much mention or, for that matter, particularly think about. When you play with a group, you get to see how each of its members thinks. Here I’m speaking not so much of the content of their thought—about resource […]