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A seriously talented English female ATA pilot, Jackie Bishop. A slightly less talented Norwegian pilot and engineer with shamanic abilities, Svend Nordmann. A Scottish RAF reserve officer who's a navigation specialist and ritual magician, Iain Ferguson. An English/Norwegian engineer and...

I haven't played very much Dragonquest, but I got good use out of the College of Illusion. The ability to make yourself invisible while projecting an image a few feet away can be quite effective. The less-good use I heard about was whichever college - one of the nasty ones - gets Agony. The PC...

At the end of the last session, we had got the Duke & Duchess of Windsor aboard our Empire "C" flying boat and left Lisbon at about 7pm local time. Our assignment is to get them to the Bahamas, where the Duke has been appointed governor. An Empire boat does not have the range for a direct...

GURPS 4e occult WWII, neutral countries strand To Canaries, via illusionary Bavaria.

GURPS 4e Cold War Pulp: PCs beat up Romanian "vampire."

AD&D1e, Avalon campaign: Cancelled, 'cos French rail strikes.

A line I came up with while playing Pathfinder: Kingmaker under GURPS 4e: "Do you want to quit while you've a head?"

I don't do that deliberately, but unconscious bias is a thing, so I'm happy if the players plan outside sessions, and do anything else that doesn't require GM decisions. Giving feedback on player's plans before they start to implement them is tricky. I'll happily remind them of things the...

Um . . . combat with lethal force needs to be taken seriously, even if you expect to win. Yup. I've also imprisoned a character for a decade, for murder. Claiming that he was allowed to kill people because he was an Assassin didn't go down well with the judge.

Honor & Intrigue, Privateers of the Complications: Avoided piranha attacks, just about.

I don't worry about that in the slightest, because I take a pretty loose attitude to rules, and am always willing to discard them. I prefer not to have copies of the character sheets, because if I know the fine details of the characters' abilities, I'm concerned that I will target events in the...

I've spent a lot of my gaming time in groups where everyone is experienced and most are skilled GMs. In those, everyone tracks their own damage and related matters, everyone jointly tracks the combat turns, and rule lookups are done by whoever isn't busy at the moment. As a GM, I'll occasionally...

On a hill outside the borders of Fairie, we found a very lifelike stone statue, in warrior's gear of ancient style, with no plinth and significant wear on exposed parts like ears and nose. Historical information is quite interesting in Avalon, because it's subject to occasional cataclysms that...

AD&D1e, Avalon campaign: Rescued an ancient petrified warrior.

It may be my unfamiliarity with this kind of document, but it is not easy to read, nor does it make its case clearly. If I was told it was mainly an attempt by the lawyer to satisfy a client who was trying to run the case himself, I wouldn't be surprised.

I've spent a lot of time playing games where you can get killed pretty easily (RQ and GURPS), and it makes a profound difference to how players approach fights. You don't just wade in; you look for advantages, try to limit the number of opponents you'll be engaging at once, and generally use...

Being someone else for a few hours. Having the past become far more real to me. Facing different challenges from the everyday world. Creating memories and stories.

The fifth issue of The Path of Cunning, the world’s largest GURPS fanzine, is now freely available here. Written by Shimmin Beg, Josh Kilburn, Phil Masters, Sean Punch, Roger Bell_West and John Dallman. Artwork by Dan "Smif" Smith and moltenraven, plus Wikimedia Commons, Dover Books and...

I forgot to mention it, but the post of monarch still exists. It is rented out by the day to anyone who feels like paying to feel like a king or queen. There is no power or authority, but you get to invite people to a banquet, and have a parade. This is a deliberate parody of monarchy, created...

Some of us try to create governmental structures that are influenced by the actual distribution of power, and the interest in using it, in the societies we imagine. In my long-running AD&D campaign, there are a couple of small monarchies, both of who have rulers who are accepted because...