Mysteries of Montreal

RPG a Day 2024, day 24: Acclaimed advice ? Over the years, I have amalgamated a great amount of GM advice, from the books themselves, from playing with others and seeing different styles, from reading books of advice, be it Robin's Laws of Good Games Mastering , the little book of Keeper Tips , or the Ultimate RPG Guide series by James D'Amato. All of which I recommend, and have taken things from. If there is once piece of advice that I can remember clearly when and where It sunk in, it was back with MERP. One thing that the rulebook tries hard to get across was game balance . Now I do not pretend to believe that what I thought of as game balance back then and what I believe now are the same thing at all, but that concept of game balance was required for a game as swingy as MERP, and it meant that even back then, I wasn't throwing things at players that they couldn't handle. This was a game that was really trying to tell the GM that in a case of GM vs Player, the GM ca

 RPG a Day, day 4: RPG with great art ? So we've gone straight from the objective to the subjective. From countable stats on games played to best art.  I am no artist, nor a great critic of art. As with most folks, I know what I like, and that's the sole criteria I'll be judging on here. If we want to go to the foundational works, it terms of foundational RPGs that helped me form my tastes, then there can be no other answer than MERP. With covers painted by the great Angus McBride, and interior works by Liz Danforth, these books cannot be beat. Not to mention those maps. These days, art has come so far from where it was in the beginning, to the point where we have whole RPGs that were based on artwork, like Tales from the Loop . It is in this vein that I choose Vaesen. Based on the artwork of  Johan Egerkrans , this is a world that I eagerly await diving into.

My first RPG was MERP. Middle Earth Role-Playing. Well, actually it wasn't it was Road Hogs, a supplement for TMNT. But lets just skip that for a moment and say that the first game I bought and ran was MERP. We played that game for years, running at least 1 set of characters all the way up to level 10. That may not sound like much, but in MERP, that was pretty huge. I still have all the books, though my original MERP book is now in a well thumbed ring-binder, as the glue on the binding game up the ghost a long time ago. If there is an RPG that will be buried with me, it'll be a copy of MERP (as well as Call of Cthulhu). Add on top of that Tolkien's books, and the films, which I am now passing on to my kids, one could say I have a lot of fondness for gaming in Middle Earth. However, there was a bit of a lull in my TTRPG gaming for a few years as I moved into minis gaming, as they could be played with no prep, and the painting side of the hobby could be done so

Question 11: Which 'dead game' would you like to see reborn? Of course, 'dead game' is in quotations, as that is not dead which can eternal lie . No game is dead as long as the books exist in some form and someone somewhere decides to play it. I guess what the question is aiming at is which unsupported lines, or OOP games would I like to see getting the love! The thing is, in this golden age of RPGs, many of these games have been brought back. I mean, you don't have to look far to get new editions of Paranoia , or Chill , for example. M.E.R.P. Yes, I know that since the demise of this super crunchy and of it's time Lord of the Rings game, there have been many other games that allow you to play in Middle Earth, but the death of MERP  by Iron Crown Enterprises is one that still gets to me. Indeed, even though ICE has lost the license to write products for Middle earth, it seems I am not alone in this, as ICE still has a page to field questions about the