Most of Intwischa’s best traffic is sent to us by other gaming blogs, and several bloggers have been kind enough to provide commentary or links to one of our articles (and, by extension, grant us a traffic bump). With that in mind, I’d like to share with you five articles that I bookmarked from the…
Author Archives: cwhite
Steal This Idea: Fringe Season 4 “Steal This Idea” is an ongoing series in which an element from the media is examined for use in games. These articles will provide a basic description of the scene in which the element occurs is necessary to introduce the idea for gaming, and hooks to use that idea…
Adventure stories that fuel roleplaying games often focus around people who can change the world. From the starship captain to the prophesied return of the king, we like to tell and participate in tales of epic proportions. However, this competes with the egalitarian concept of player balance. RPGs generally try to balance player ability according…
I don’t know where the concept of the Big Bad Evil Guy (BBEG) came from, but I assume video games had something to do with it. It used to be that a campaign had a BBEG, with maybe a lieutenant or two to harry the players on the way. Then, every arc had to end…
Yesterday, I began to brainstorm a roleplaying game designed to tell heroic stories based on the 3 Questions (+1). I covered what this game would be about, and began to explore how my game would do this. My original intent in writing this article was twofold–to examine the value of the three questions, and to…
At some point in any gamer’s career, he will succumb to the temptation to create a system of his (or her) own. It seems that all of us at Intwischa are suffering this affliction simultaneously. (Must be something in the whiskey.) In this light, I’ve been most intrigued by an article titled The 3 Questions…
Hope felt like an unaffordable luxury in this abandoned city plagued by undead. Geech, an unlikely warrior of the faith, truly questioned his commitment to nonviolence as he and his allies darted through the shadows of the city, seeking out the necromancer who animated all of these foul creatures. Still, hope was something to hold…
As Enyo Tanicus crouched in the rafters of the old village church, waiting to assassinate the village priest, he reflected that a man could get used to religion. He’d been there for three hours, and he’d counted 17 people who entered to give money for no reason at all, compared to only three destitute wretches…
Team Intwischa has another cabin trip coming up. This trip will present the post-penultimate (the way folks in academia say “last”) adventure of “The Krystoran Quest for Purity”–an adventure in a Middle East-type setting featuring characters from a variety of castes. The quest has us searching for many things: personal redemption, a disgraced Sultan, and…
<Life is very noisy> thought the half-orcish monk called Pax Fullblood as he sat with legs folded on the cold stone floor of the dungeon. Around him, his allies engaged poison-taloned harpies in mortal combat: the buffeting sound of monstrous feathers added a resonating and irregular bass thudding to the unnatural clinks of armor plates…