Freakshow: MCU Gotham in the Marvel Universe

Freakshow: MCU Gotham in the Marvel Universe

One of the funnest RPG campaigns I ran was MCU: Gotham, basically a police procedural drama set in Batman’s Gotham City. Now, thanks to the imminent release of Marvel Heroic Roleplaying and a misheard line on this week’s Castle, I want to run a similar game, set in the Marvel universe: Freakshow. Where MCU: Gotham’s villains were nicknames that the cops or press used for more-or-less ordinary criminals, the cops in Freakshow know that they’re not just dealing with men in tights. A simple bank robbery could just be a standard call, but there’s always the possibility that the perp can breathe fire. We’re talking more like Bendis’ POWERS comic book than Rucka’s Gotham Central.

Continue reading →

BattleTech DMG (not much of an) update

Long time, no update on the BattleTech DMG. In short, I’ve moved cross country and we’re finally more or less recovered from the big move. Feedback from the demo at GenCon was positive, as I’ve mentioned here and at some other places. Now that things are looking like I have some more time coming up, I’m interested in developing the game a bit more before my next soft deadline to re-pitch the game. The month of December is, well, December, and that means family visits and the like. So while I’m planning on having a new version done over the next few weeks, I don’t think I’ll have anything on the BattleTech Deckbuilding ‘Mechfighting Game ready to show until January ((Oh hi, it’s March!)). Keep checking out this site — I’ll be in touch a bit more over the next few weeks.

Redacted: a [ ] game about [ ]

Notes from an older RPG prototype from the LiveJournal Years. The game is tentatively titled Redacted: a role-playing game about Cold War espionage.

Cold War espionage. Spy game. In Redacted, your character sheet is a dossier that looks like a memo or personnel file. You start off with one sheet and, after each game session, you add another sheet of information; your write-up of the previous game session. As you play more sessions, your character dossier gets larger and larger. When you attempt tasks in the game, you start redacting things from your dossier—take that big black Sharpie marker and start marking out words. The more you redact, the better your chances of succeeding. If part of what you redact is relevant to the scene or action, you get a bigger advantage.

Continue reading →