Robot Viking

Marge Fulton offers up some taut tales set in Appalachia, while Jason Walters takes us on a tour of the bizarre in the Black Rock Desert.

For the last year, whenever I’ve reviewed one of White Wolf’s World of Darkness books, I’ve raved about how the books were full of amazing background stories, fantastic characters and fascinating plot hooks, and how you could easily transmute them into another RPG. I’m finally putting my money where my mouth is (or my fluff, [...]

Would you like to battle other-dimensional horrors in an original sci-fi setting with battlemechs and cyborg demons? Why do I even ask these questions? Of course you would. Right now, you can download the 50-page CthulhuTech Quickstart rules for free.

In White Wolf’s Mage: The Awakening, the characters control magic. But do they really? In The Unbidden, we find proof that magic is a force of nature, and tapping into it can lead to disaster and tragedy.

I’ve become a regular contributor to sci-fi culture blog io9.com again, and while most of the time my weekly articles there will be about cutting edge science and technology, this week io9 Overlord Annalee Newitz suggested…nay, demanded that I write about gaming instead. So today I’m sending you away from Robot Viking to visit io9’s [...]

A few years ago, we started a Halloween tradition with our gaming group. Every Halloween, we get together and play an appropriately themed game for a few hours, often with some kind of house rule that lets the players earn the right to eat candy. If we can manage it, we play on Halloween night, [...]

Proverbial Monsters is a World of Darkness sourcebook from White Wolf that takes nine oft-repeated aphorisms, wives’ tales, sayings — proverbs, by any other name — and constructs nine fiendish creatures out of them, with nine scenarios for storytellers to drop their hapless players into. Just remember to take anything I say in this review [...]

When the bizarre magical world of Changeling bleeds over into the mortal realm, fairy tales and urban legends take shape as living, breathing beings. Most of them aren’t especially friendly.

A close brush with death, a step across the line into the Beyond, a knowing nod to What Lies on the Other Side, an unwanted familiarity with the Underworld, a strange worldwide community of dual souls with one foot in the grave: this is White Wolf’s newest World of Darkness RPG, Geist: The Sin-Eaters.

Rogue Games released the revised edition of their Colonial Gothic RPG this week, and contributing writer Joe Grabianowski (no relation to me) has a full review (ok, I’ll admit it, he’s my brother). The colonial era was a trying period in reality, with brutal wars, political upheaval and a merciless wilderness that brought death to [...]

Things that are forbidden and mysterious hold such terrible allure. Whether you are a vampire or not, you may find it difficult to resist reading this expanded account of the vampire Anti-Christ, Longinus. Can an RPG supplement with no rules or art find a place on your bookshelf? Depends how weird you are.

Vampire: the Requiem exists in a more mysterious World of Darkness than the previous incarnation of the game. Without a sourcebook for every city and clan, there is much still to be discovered about this strange version of reality. Ancient Bloodlines begins to shed some light on the ways vampires have been shaped by the [...]

World of Darkness RPGs are primarily focused on the collective storytelling aspect of role-playing. The players and the storyteller work together to create a deep, pervasive atmosphere of horror while exploring the twists and turns of the plot. But what if you want to splatter some zombies with an AK-47, or explore brutal hand-to-hand combat [...]

White Wolf has been releasing a steady stream (nearly a deluge, really) of small PDF files designed to be dropped into your Hunter: the Vigil campaign. Each one presents an NPC, group, or location that can act as a major plot thread or just extra flavor, and comes with a cool prop to help bring [...]