Primeval Games Press

Trials of the Grail

Assume the role of questing knights in an archetypal Grail Quest of your own making.

City of Birds

Take your place in the greatest of cities through diceless stoytelling.

Blessed

Post-apocalyptic RPG. Serve your corporation; cleanse the world.

Me and the Rat

A tactical parlor game of resource trading and hammy spy action.

Clash of the Ancients

Crush your pitiful enemies in this live-action strategy game.

Two Philosophies: Making Ice-Cream at the Table

After reading a lot of discussionon on this issue, I have to revise my thinking a little. It’s a somewhat hairy topic.

The first big thing to realize, I think, is that "Design What Matters" and "Design What Doesn’t Matter" are not alternate philosophies of game system design. DWDoesn’tM ignores key aspects of system and really doesn’t look at RPing at that level: it doesn’t anticipate that its product will provide system. Rather, its products provide mechanical bits…without much method for using them and certainly without rules that help players create larger "structure" or address a creative agenda.

Two Philosophies

Wow. Read this post at Kallisti Press: RPGs, Pulleys, and Microwave Ovens (It has to do with theory, but if you are opposed or uninterested in Forge theory, you may still want to read it.)

Ice-Cream Metaphor

It’s time for an over-wrought metaphor.

Here’s my situation. Like most people, I like ice-cream. It used to be that all I ate was chocolate. Every time I wanted ice-cream, I would eat chocolate. And I liked it. In fact, I thought chocolate was all there was. Neither I, nor anyone else I knew, ate anything called “vanilla” or “strawberry.” To me, “flavors” were things like “chocolate swirl,” or chocolate with nuts. And those seemed pretty different from regular ice-cream (i.e. chocolate ice-cream).

primeval games press