I’ve been taking part in #RPGaDay again this year, posting daily on Twitter X, Mastodon, and Threads, but thought I’d do a round up on here too. Here’s part 1.
1 – First RPG played this year was my Empire of the Ghouls game on New Year’s Day 💀
2 – My first DM was a guy in the 1st year at school who ran me through a dungeon he’d created.
3 – The first RPG I bought this year was Keys from the Golden Vault – got the alt cover at Orc’s Nest. I love Dusk City Outlaws & Blades in the Dark so it was fun to see a #dnd book tackle heists. My favourite is Affair on the Concordant Express featuring a planar train staffed by modrons.
4 – Most recent game bought was the Kobold Guide to Dungeons from Kobold Press. Started reading it this week and there are some great essays in it.
5 – The oldest games I’ve played are AD&D 1st edition/Basic D&D (frequently mashed up) and Traveller. Here’s my original GW paperback Player’s Handbook.
6 – My favourite game that I never get to play is Dusk City Outlaws which is always great fun. Haven’t played it for 4 years I think. It’s been much longer since I’ve played games in my two favourite D&D settings – Planescape & Spelljammer.
7 – Smartest RPG you’ve played. I love Blades in the Dark and how it works at the table, so cool. I’ve never run it, though – it feels daunting!
8 – Not sure if I have a favourite character but I particularly enjoyed playing Kamalesh, light-fingered vanara cleric of Hanuman, and Chip Hazard, pranga-wielding investigator and pulp novelist 😀
9 – I don’t really have any favourite dice. They all seem to hate me when I’m playing 🤣
10 – I haven’t read any tie-in fiction for a while but I still have fond memories of the Finder’s Stone Trilogy by Jeff Grubb & Kate Novak.
11 – Weirdest game I’ve played (that’s meant to be weird) is Over the Edge 1st edition, an excellent RPG involving occult conspiracies on the Mediterranean island of Al Amarja. More weirdly, I played an indie RPG called Schemers & Scoundrels at Dragonmeet which went in a very gonzo direction with PCs wearing bouncy shoes made from jellyfish.
12 – Old game you still play. I know D&D isn’t the same game it was back in the 80s but I’m still playing it. And we’re still playing Cthulhu too although we’ve switched to Trail. Would be fun to play some Traveller again 🚀
13 – Most memorable death. Enemies surround Ug the paladin and their attacks take him down. He fails his first death save. As the other PCs retreat, the bard grabs the unconscious paladin and throws him down the stairs “to safety”. Ug rolls another death save and gets a 1. He tumbles down the stairs, lying in a crumpled heap at the bottom, his neck twisted at a horrible angle. I found it very hard to stop laughing!
14 – Favourite convention purchase. I’ve got two, both from when we went to Gen Con in 2014. The first is my 5e Player’s Handbook which I got signed by members of the D&D team. The second is this awesome signed print of the cover art for The Astromundi Cluster by David Miller.
15 – My favourite convention game was the D&D Open at UK Games Expo 2019. In Forged in Fire, written by Will Doyle, James Introcaso & Shawn Mersin, we played pairs of paladins & warlocks chained together, overcoming challenges in Avernus. Amazing!
16 – There are two games I wished I owned. The first is Steam and Brass, the very first Open Design project by Wolfgang Baur. It’s incredibly rare. The second is Invisible Sun from Monte Cook Games which I got to play at Dragonmeet a few years ago. I have the digital version but the Black Cube really takes the physical presentation of an RPG to 11!
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Richard Green | Game Designer 