August 2025 – Refereeing and Reflection
2 posts published by Arthur during August 2025| Refereeing and Reflection
2 posts published by Arthur during August 2025| Refereeing and Reflection
Time for another entry in my occasional series of mini-reviews on game supplements I have thoughts substantial enough to write about, but lean enough that I don’t want to dedicate a whole art…| Refereeing and Reflection
This article was previously published on Ferretbrain; due to the imminent closure of that site, I’m moving it over here so that it can remain available. This Kickstopper is going to delve qui…| Refereeing and Reflection
Late last year I crewed at the first event of Falling Down, a LARP event of what I’d describe as a low-medium scale (more than a dozen players, less than a hundred) based on Tribe 8 (with the…| Refereeing and Reflection
This is a post prompted by Shimmin, who was asking after a simple introduction to subjects surrounding the Forge. I realised that I couldn’t think of many that weren’t highly biased one…| Refereeing and Reflection
What is it about Scottish RPG publishers and offbeat game settings? Contested Ground Studios had A|State, Nightfall Games gave us SLA Industries, and – perhaps most obscurely of all – …| Refereeing and Reflection
More or less emerging simultaneously with the release of Vampire: the Masquerade (the two games being published within a month or two of each other), Kult hit the RPG scene at just the right time t…| Refereeing and Reflection
So, in my Monday evening group we’re starting a Technocracy-based Mage: the Ascension campaign, so I decided to get the main books. The main reference for the campaign is going to be the Guid…| Refereeing and Reflection
6 posts published by Arthur during January 2015| Refereeing and Reflection
3 posts published by Arthur during September 2024| Refereeing and Reflection
Though Star Trek Adventures, particularly in its tightened-up second edition, is my current gold standard when it comes to Trek-based tabletop RPGs, it’s hardly the first game in that sphere. As I outlined in my review of Star Trek Adventures‘ first edition, there were a fair few officially licensed Trek RPGs that preceded it – … Continue reading Star Trek: The FASA Frontier (and Philosophical Theories On Spiritual Successors)| Refereeing and Reflection
Although Chaosium have provided at least some support for the popular 1890s-based Cthulhu By Gaslight setting for Call of Cthulhu during the game’s 7th Edition era thanks to the Cthulhu Through the Ages supplement, which provides 7th Edition guidance for creating Investigators in a number of eras (and thus provides all you need to use … Continue reading A Victorian Antique Restored: Cthulhu By Gaslight Investigators’ Guide| Refereeing and Reflection
Extremely online billionaire and corrupt barnacle on the hull of the American ship of state Elon Musk recently stirred up some controversy by hinting he might buy out Hasbro. This may or may not be serious – he talks about buying lots of things he doesn’t end up touching, he only went through on the … Continue reading The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons: The Manufacture of a Controversy| Refereeing and Reflection
Time for another entry in my occasional series covering RPG supplements I want to comment on but don’t fancy doing a fully-developed article on individually. This time around, I’ve got some Call of Cthulhu scenarios, some Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay releases that recently slipped out in hard copy, and the RuneQuest supplement Chaosium has been building … Continue reading Supplement Supplemental! (Lands of RuneQuest, Horrors of the Cthulhu Mythos, and Typos of Warhammer)| Refereeing and Reflection
A little while back I reviewed Heroic Worlds, a Herculean endeavour from Lawrence Schick which emerged in 1991. Rather than being put out by one section of the RPG industry or another, this came ou…| Refereeing and Reflection
Tangled Thoughts On RPGs and Related Hobbies| Refereeing and Reflection
3 posts published by Arthur during December 2024| Refereeing and Reflection
4 posts published by Arthur during January 2016| Refereeing and Reflection
1 post published by Arthur during June 2025| Refereeing and Reflection
Age of Vikings is a brand-new RPG from Chaosium… or rather, it is and it isn’t. Age of Vikings is certainly a new brand for them – but its author, Pedro Ziviani, had previously wr…| Refereeing and Reflection
In my Monday evening group we’ve started up our occasional Werewolf: the Apocalypse game again, so I thought the time had come for me to properly digest the tattered second-hand 1st Edition r…| Refereeing and Reflection
A while back I went to the British Library’s Medieval Women: In Their Own Worlds exhibition. As well as being absolutely fascinating in its own right, it was a decidedly worthwhile visit from…| Refereeing and Reflection
The Gardens of Ynn and The Stygian Library are a pair of scenarios for old-school D&D and its close relatives, designed by Emmy Allen, who I previously interviewed to showcase her Esoteric Ente…| Refereeing and Reflection
Last year, Modiphius released the second edition rulebook for their Star Trek Adventures RPG. Back when I reviewed the first edition, I was rather favourably impressed, though when my Wednesday nig…| Refereeing and Reflection
WFRP 4th edition is here! As the back cover blurb proudly puts it (beneath the classic tagline of “A Grim World of Perilous Adventure”), “Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay takes you back…| Refereeing and Reflection
The Elusive Shift, published as part of MIT Press’s Game Histories range, can be seen as Jon Peterson’s followup to Playing At the World, picking up on some subjects alluded to in there…| Refereeing and Reflection
In the early days of RuneQuest, the old guard at Chaosium made the game a major success, a serious challenger to Dungeons & Dragons, and arguably the most groundbreaking and sophisticated RPG o…| Refereeing and Reflection
The physical copies of Cubicle 7’s new Wrath & Glory rulebook have now emerged. For those who aren’t up on the backstory here, a quick summary: after Fantasy Flight Games and G…| Refereeing and Reflection
RPG starter sets are in vogue again. There was a time when they more or less went extinct, except for extremely desultory efforts by TSR or Wizards of the Coast, partly because they can be tricky t…| Refereeing and Reflection
Despite its first wave of products coming out and its core rules being pretty solid as far as I was concerned, there’s been a concerning silence about Wrath & Glory. Aside from a few…| Refereeing and Reflection
Wrath & Glory is here! This is the brand new Warhammer 40,000 RPG system from the North American branch of Ulisses Spiele, who took over the 40K RPG licence after Fantasy Flight Games…| Refereeing and Reflection
Chaosium’s new Starter Set for Call of Cthulhu, whilst attractively presented, doesn’t seem to have required an awful amount of work in terms of generating raw text. The individual comp…| Refereeing and Reflection
So, once upon a time Cubicle 7 had a licence to put out third-party Call of Cthulhu products. They do not have the licence any more; word is that they are going to put out their own D100-based…| Refereeing and Reflection
After the infamous corporate drama which saw a new regime take over at Chaosium in order to save the Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition Kickstarter from disaster, Greg Stafford and Sandy Petersen arr…| Refereeing and Reflection
The Tekumel setting, designed by Professor Muhammad Abd-al-Rahman Barker, has the distinction of being the oldest published roleplaying game world. (Though Greyhawk lent its name to the first …| Refereeing and Reflection
(Note: I know I try to keep this blog mostly devoted to documentation of actual play, but I think this is the appropriate place to put this. I started this review thinking it might be interesting r…| Refereeing and Reflection
A while back I reviewed Jon Peterson’s Playing At the World, the first of his in-depth books of RPG history. Though very good, the book’s got the drawback of having spent a fair bit of …| Refereeing and Reflection
Cubicle 7’s history, as is the often the case with RPG publishers who base significant chunks of their portfolio on licensed settings, has had its share of ups and downs. They decided to not …| Refereeing and Reflection
I’ve gone on the record as saying that I consider the core rules of The One Ring to be the best rules for Middle-Earth gaming so far in terms of capturing the distinctive themes and flavour o…| Refereeing and Reflection
It’s been a couple of years or so since Free League released their new edition of The One Ring. The pace of releasing new products seems a little slower than when the line was under Cubicle 7…| Refereeing and Reflection
So a while back I managed to get my hand on a few pre-5th Edition Pendragon bits and pieces, and I could have sworn I’d reviewed them here but I hadn’t, so here’s my quick th…| Refereeing and Reflection
So, my long-running Pendragon game seems to be more or less officially dead – it’s been on hiatus for a good long while, at any rate, and nobody seems especially anxious to rekindle it.…| Refereeing and Reflection
Rolemaster, in terms of its official editions, is stagnant. I know that’s a stark statement, but it’s essentially true. No major new version of the game has come out for over two decade…| Refereeing and Reflection
People like to express doubts as to whether Tolkien’s legendarium is really suited for adapting to tabletop RPGs, but people keep doing it anyway. Over the years we’ve seen the licensin…| Refereeing and Reflection
Rolemaster as an RPG system gets a lot of shit. For about as long as I can remember being involved with the hobby (so since the early 1990s at least) it’s been the butt of every joke about sy…| Refereeing and Reflection
So far, Wizards haven’t offered that much in the way of setting material for 5E, but with the release next week (or this week if you happen to be close to one of Wizards’ favoured shops…| Refereeing and Reflection
It seems genuinely difficult for a 100% new tabletop RPG to take off these days, especially one with a brand new system and an original setting. New editions, hacks of existing games, new applicati…| Refereeing and Reflection
So by now, it’s looking like 5E is going to be my preferred edition of Dungeons & Dragons for the foreseeable future, and it doesn’t look like I’m alone in enjoying it. I…| Refereeing and Reflection
