Robot Viking

Halloween week is a good time to take a fond look back at one of my favorite RPGs. Chill isn’t perfect, but it’s a good, straightforward look at a world being encroached upon by the supernatural.

Halloween week continues – today we’ll examine five horror movie plots that you can steal and adapt for your fantasy RPG campaign.

What’s six feet tall, sucks blood and is way, way creepier than Dracula? A giant humanoid mosquito, that’s what.

Since it’s Halloween week, we’ll be focused on the scary, spooky and horrific every day until the Festival of Samhain has been celebrated to its sanguine (or sacchariferous) conclusion. If you want to run a horror RPG that truly creeps your players out and makes them shiver in fear, you’d do well to follow some [...]

I’m under a bunch of work deadlines today and won’t have time for a proper post, but here’s a few quick ideas for mechanics for our hypothetical Magic set, for those who’ve been involved in that.

If you’re not totally sure if Gamma World is right for you, this weekend is the perfect opportunity to take it for a test run. It’s Worldwide Gamma World Game Day on October 3rd.

You step up to the table only 60 minutes before game time. You’re armed with your minis, dice, notebooks and a few maps you’ve created yourself. Oh, and your wits. You’ll need those, because the host just announced the three secret ingredients: Frost Giants, Flashbacks, Funeral. Craft a clever and fun adventure out of those [...]

Shock: Human Contact is a hard sci-fi RPG in which the players construct a story around the first meeting between an egalitarian, advanced civilization and the alien cultures they encounter when they travel through wormholes in space.

Tricky Owlbear Publishing is clearly the best named publishing group in all of history. Achievement Feats is a collection of 51 feats designed as traits to be acquired by a character through the course of a game. These feats cannot be taken at character creation, and instead must be earned by meeting certain non-stat requirements. [...]

Blackbyrne Publishing has released the second adventure in their Dark Veil Campaign, Manor of Deceit. Designed for a 4e party of 3rd level characters, it’s a major leap forward from the series’ first installment. Fun combat, interesting skill challenges and an intriguing, creepy story make for an excellent adventure.

My excitement about Gamma World has been inescapable for Robot Viking readers, the many people who watched the unboxing video, friends and family, random strangers, etc. Maybe I was a little too excited, since I ended up not liking Gamma World as much as I thought. The good news is, there’s a lot of awesomeness [...]

Arcane Archetypes is another edition of archetype packages from the good folks at Super Genius Games. Like the last batch of archetypes I reviewed, these are alternate takes on a theme that can be used in place of some of the normal class features characters gain. This time, however, it’s magic, not archery.

I wrote almost 3,000 words about Magic for the Great Designer Search’s first round. Might as well get some more mileage out of those answers (and all the other bloogs are doing it).

The Robot Viking entry into Magic’s Great Designer Search 2 passed muster, so we’re on to the second round (it’s not quite as exciting as it sounds). The third round requires that entrants create their own Magic set, based on a new world that will bring the card designs to life. We’ve got an interesting [...]