Hobby Dungeon

About 2 years ago I started working on a new game. I had created a handful of very simple games up to that point, and wanted to try my hand at something a bit more developed and a bit more complicated. The concept that I developed came to be known as Anomalous State, and I still can't get it out of my head.    This is not a finished game, and at this point I don't know if it ever will be, but the concept lives rent free in my head. Part of the reason that I don't think I can finish it, is that I don't think it will ever live up to my hopes and expectations - and I don't think any game can live up to the subject matter and aesthetic. This game was heavily inspired by Annihilation, the Southern Reach series, Roadside Picnic, and Stalker (the film). Aesthetically, these worlds bring me so much joy and dread and are the pieces of art that I gravitate towards again and again. They are unsettling and weird, and upsetting, and tragic, and there is so little in them which i...

My friend Dan and I are embarking one of those glorious and fabled campaigns - a multi-system and multi-layered campaign which varies in scale from galactic history, to skirmishes between warbands. Of course this is a dream of many wargamers, but the actual practical considerations have always been very daunting to me. So, today, I'll explain how we have structured our campaign, where we are right now, and where we hope to go with it.   Firstly, this is a narrative campaign - at the current moment, we don't have a scoring system or a way to "win" the campaign, but as you will see there are certainly some ways you could implement that. This whole process started because we were playing OPR Grimdark Future Firefight and found it lacking (I love a lot of OPR games - and we will actually be using a different one in this campaign - but GDFF feels pretty flat). Instead, we decided to play Stargrave - another easy to learn game with more depth and variety, and...