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The Fantasy Trip. It was 1982. I started playing a few other people's favourite games about then too, such as Traveller, Call of Cthulhu, and Rolemaster, Bushido, Champions….

Rather than making a laboured joke about appreciating the appearance of the Pyramids more when they were clad in gleaming white limestone I shall instead concede that you are right and I was wrong.

Except that the Pyramids have shrunk in the last five millennia, owing to their use as quarries to provide building material for Cairo.

My favourite is ForeSight, but these days I can hardly find anyone to play it. I use GURPS more often than any other because I can find people to play it and because it suits my needs for frequent changes of genre and setting, in particular covering SF gaming. I'm trying out the new FATE Core...

Naturally it is often a mix of motives. I chose "patronage" because that is most often my main motive when I back a kickstarter. Timing is the my main motive other times. Though in principle I would back a Kickstarter mainly to benefit the creators (either out of actual altruism or becasue I...

Indeed. Disbelief in the established gods is either a new religion or it is atheism, neither of which is heresy. You might consider Christianity to be a heresy of Judaism, but it is certainly not a heresy of the Ancient Greek religion, even though it taught a disbelief in the gods who supported...

Spoiler warning: if you are going to play in my campaign Red-Blooded Earth-Men, reading this thread will materially diminish your enjoyment thereof. If you go ahead anyway, please do not convey spoilers to the other players. If you do, your character will be skinned alive, and I will not give...

Making it hard to get worked up about a question that the god manifestly doesn't care about.

He was condemned to death for corrupting the minds of the young and teaching disbelief in the gods that supported the State. It was a wholly secular prosecution, too.

Well, that's a tricky question. On one hand all my designs have significant features in them that are designed to make them RP settings and adventures as contrasted with, say, plausibly world-building or writeable stories. I design stuff and set it up to be fun to play, which necessarily means...

Pope Innocent III excommunicated King John of England in 1209 and told the French they could conquer England. Pope Pius V declared Elizabeth I of England a heretic and excommunicate in 1570, declared that all her subjects were released from their allegiance, and threatened excommunication...

Heresy is a disease of religions that hold that what matters to God is what you believe, so that persuading someone of a false belief does them great harm. Contrary to Western experience with Christianity, Islam, and modern Judaism, most religions, including the polytheistic religions on which...

I prefer to have everyone gathered around a table, but with the GM sitting at the middle of one of the long sides. I also prefer a game that emphasises roleplaying (i.e. participative, collaborative, extemporary story-telling) more than combat. So that's some from column one and some from column...

G'day I'm starting up a new campaign which I am going to run at a mate's house in Jesmond, one Friday night per month. Besides myself with have three players signed up, but I'd be happier with four or five character-players. The campaign will involve (as PCs) war-weary Australian soldiers...

Try H. Beam Piper's Federation, I think you'll like it.

The Dumarest saga by E.C. Tubb is a more obvious influence on Traveller than Asimov's stuff. I'd even rate Poul Anderson's Technic History (Polesotechnic League stories and Flandry of Terra) as more Traveller-like than Asimov's Foundation setting.

I would find it interesting and helpful to know what space opera you had lately read and enjoyed.

By the same token a chessboard does what is needed for the game to work, and as an abstract game chess is a lot more successful than realistic wargames. Realistic terrain is fiddly to represent, and getting all the units in each army to move and fight at once, making the outcomes of fights...

At the cost of being grotesquely unrealistic. It's like the difference between chess and a wargame: the chequerboard and the funny pieces and moving only one piece on each turn makes things a lot simpler, but the result is just not a representation of a battlefield. Indeed. But at that scope...

A 2-D universe is no improvement. You can visualise it on the page, but every time you look at it or make decisions based on it it screams "I am not Space". I did that with earlier versions of my setting: location had been important during the exodus from Earth, but developments had made...