Games With Others

Image from here and here

Image from here and here

Pearce’s blog, Games With Others, has become one of my favorites. It blends streamlined mechanics with evocative psychedelia. Here are some highlights:

  • Simple character sheet that has guided character creation and rules crib sheet.
  • How to approach OD&D (and why incompleteness can be a virtue).
  • From Random Minor Deities: “The local game has a few major deities. Worshiping them is generally what the bad guys do.”
  • Using Apocalypse World countdown clocks as tools for sandbox games.
  • Psionics for older D&D following the attack roll paradigm.
  • Dungeon Genesis: “Abandoned buildings left unused for too long grow grow weedy, dusty, strange. The angles twist and the geometry buckles under the barometric pressure of anti-life. Among the dust and cobwebs, traps blossom. … Sewers have to be regularly patrolled, newly-budded secret doors smashed and burned. … Dungeons swallow adventurers and belch out orcs.”
  • Rules for kluges.
  • Ghostland: “If a ghost is a ghost of pleasure it may desire nothing more than to fill its cavities with dirt and may try to do the same to you, not because it wants to hurt you, but because it needs every open place within you to be packed with dirt because that just feels so good.”
  • Ghostland is Coming to End You: “At a tavern back in town, you hear talk of a second moon approaching the town. That night, the moon draws close enough that you can see a face on the moon and the mouth splits wide to swallow the church spire. The next morning, no one but you remembers anything. The church spire is gone and all the clergy have weird mismatched eyes (one tiny, one enormous and rolling) and their heads are on at weird angles. Pointing that out is extremely impolite and if you keep asking about the church, someone is going to get so offended they come at you with a cleaver.”

Highly recommended.

Edit: I have been informed that the image is Backbaird (バックベアード) from Shigeru Mizuki’s GeGeGe no Kitaro.

3 thoughts on “Games With Others

    1. Brendan Post author

      I actually do read Japanese (a bit), but I was interested more in the source, not the translation (the hiragana character is “ha”).

      Reply

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