Recent content by John Dallman

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.

The two long-term campaigns I mentioned are both set in an alternate-history WWII. That provides vast amounts of source material, and those campaigns are the second and third passes through the timeline. The first ran from 2007 to 2021, with characters based in the UK. The new strands are...

If my experience on Stack Overflow: Worldbuilding is any guide, there are quite a few people out who think that comic-book super-powers are "realistic" and can have "hard science" explanations. To me, "simulationist" means there is significant verisimilitude, and that asking "how has this...

To describe it from the victim's point of view: You're the sole crewman on board the sub. The other three left two days ago to go onto land on an uninhabited island, light a fire, cook some of the penguins there and generally relax a bit. You've been living with them in this sub for several...

GURPS 4e Day After Ragnarok, in Australia: Japanese mini-sub caught napping, captured.

I wrote about immersion at some length in issue 5 of The Path of Cunning, the GURPS fanzine I co-edit. It's a bit long to repeat all of here, but the 'zine is free for the downloading. To summarise, immersion is my desired state when role-playing, both as player and GM. It isn't something I can...

Most fantasy settings certainly do. There are two homebrewed ones that I find interesting, and they have some common features: They are science-fictional, in that they have reasons why the world is the way it is. They feel that's necessary, because without explanation, a D&D style fantasy...

There is another form of skill, which is skill in operating as a team. This was forcibly brought home to me on Saturday, watching a different party in the Avalon campaign. They are 6th-8th level AD&D, having played together since first level. A couple of the players have been playing for...

You've just caused me to realise that I need to use a trap that has gone off prematurely, killing the person who was installing it. Their body is still inside it.

AD&D 1.6e, Avalon campaign, Greensward strand. Plan: contact enemy of enemy.

Improvised Radio Theatre - With Dice is done by a couple of friends of mine, and is pretty good.