Sons of Liberty: The Swamp Fox
May 17
One of the more challenging design goals I set for myself when developing the core “good guys” in the Sons of Liberty – a sort of early 18th-Century American Avengers — was to ensure that every character had a relatively familiar counterpart in the meta-myth of the comic book universes players were likely to me familiar with. The characters are deliberate pastiches, or...
Cycling to the Apocalypse: Research and the End
Apr 29
I am back! That “restful hiatus” I talked about three months ago took a little longer than I expected. Sorry about that. But I have still be reading and thinking about World War Two, Cthulhu, vast dark conspiracies, and other fun bedtime topics. This post, though, is about research. Setting a game in a real-world historical period, even one you intend to blow up, provides the gamer...
Sons of Liberty: The Minuteman
Apr 22
Having conceived and introduced in general terms a group of American superheroes springing from the Revolutionary War era — the Sons of Liberty — in our last post, it seemed prudent to make your acquaintance with a few of the actual members of the group. This is admittedly a potentially problematic exercise in game design, rather like populating your world with Elminsters and...
Unreal Worlds: Sons of Liberty
Apr 08
So we’ve established previously that we here at the Illuminerdy are big fans of historical games, and it may have become apparent that one of our favorite eras is the 55 years of tumultuous history in North America from 1765 to 1820. This includes the run up to the American Revolution, its aftermath, the formation of two different United States of America, conflicts with North African...
The Arkham Archivist: X Marks the…oh crap
Mar 29
In Captain Vorpatril's Alliance our protagonist, Ivan Vorpatril, ends up entanged with a band of temporary (or are they?) in-laws who are surprisingly like the murder-hobos that comprise many parties of sword-and-sorcery players. The former crime lord and lady parents have discovered a secret treasure on his planet, a cache of gold, jewels, historical loot, and bio-sealed genetic experiments left in a bunker by invaders who had been run off over a hundred years ago but had assumed they'd quickly regain control from the planet's inhabitants.
Unreal Worlds: Seeing Shadows
Mar 25
So the other day, my good friend Ruth (the Arkham Archivist) was complaining that there were no extant conspiracy theories “tying reptoids and Machen-esque little people to Punxatawney Phil,” I suspect in a fit of pique over the increasingly winterish weather assaulting the mid-Atlantic United States this week. Not one to let so blatant a challenge lie, I picked up the gauntlet and...
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