Recent content by John Dallman

GURPS 4e Day After Ragnarok, based in Australia Japanese base on volcano? Investigate!

In fact, everyone in those boats had been hit. Four of the occupants of each boat were Africans, in fairly elaborate costumes. These made them look as if they had about two feet of hair all over them, with gloves and shoes that mounted large claws, and huge headpieces with wooden fronts in the...

GURPS 4e Occult WWII, neutral countries strand: Took the hint, left Liberia.

I'm currently playing in a Day After Ragnarok campaign, and the world map in that is extremely evocative. It shows how much the world changed in the apocalypse, and inspires me with scenario ideas.

Art is not very important to me, but it can be influential. That sounds contradictory, but a picture sometimes has a huge influence on the way a species gets played. My best example is the picture of a Gif in the first edition of Spelljammer for AD&D 2e. The monocle. and details of the uniform...

GURPS 4e Anglo-Saxon Britain: Spying for Alfred, reached Staines.

AD&D 1.2e, Avalon Campaign: "Death would let it escape."

It seems to me that there's an important difference between "this scenario is about solving a mystery" and "the mystery in this scenario is part of a larger story arc." In the second case, some things about the mystery are predetermined, and much of the significance of the mystery is tied into...

One of the important forces in game selection is "We want it to be just as much fun as the old days, when we were new to TTRPGs." Parts of that are impossible: no experience can be as much fun as the first time you got it to work right, and it was really cool. To achieve that feeling again, you...

AD&D 1.6e, Avalon campaign in Greensward Enemy's rival will use us.

With our magician unavailable, the other two characters were asked to go to Taronga Zoo (North side of Sydney Harbour), to look over specimens collected by an expedition to North America. North America was badly contaminated by the venom of the Midgard Serpent: the eastern half of the continent...

GURPS 4e Day After Ragnarok, in Australia: Expedition to Texas collected were-snake.

GURPS 4e occult WWII campaign, India strand: Trying to prevent Anglo-Iraqi War.

Not practical in my homebrew D&D setting. The world is too large, and most of it is unknown. There are no known places on most of it to put the way-stations, and there's nothing remotely resembling the Pathfinder Society. Also, the world is cube-shaped and magic is quite strange near the...

I ran it a few times, always as one-shots. It needs to be played at breakneck speed, without thought or planning, so I found sessions had to be fairly short, and were quite tiring.