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5 days ago | 
geekeratimedia.com | Christian Lindke
While I cannot say with any certainty what my favorite horror novel/story is, I can say that the one I’ve been thinking about most lately is Mary Shelley’s classic tale Frankenstein. While it might be folly to say that Shelley was the first person to tell a horror story, I think that a pretty good case can be made that she helped to invent the Science Fiction genre.
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1 week ago | 
geekeratimedia.com | Christian Lindke
In the first entry in my series on “Strange Licensed Role Playing Games,” I argued that one of the reasons companies choose to publish licensed games is that it gives them the opportunity to expand their player base. This was certainly the case for the early licensed games like Heritage’s Star Trek and even more recent introductory games like the Pokémon Jr. game I wrote about in that first entry.
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2 weeks ago | 
geekeratimedia.com | Christian Lindke
Though role playing games have become more mainstream in recent years, the biggest challenge the hobby faces on a regular basis is bringing in new fans. Most normies like the idea of role playing games. After all, who doesn’t love making collaborative stories about you favorite genres with friends? Games like Clue (Cluedo for those of you across the pond) are popular, in part, because they contain the root of a shared experience.
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2 weeks ago | 
geekeratimedia.com | Christian Lindke
Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.
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3 weeks ago | 
geekeratimedia.com | Christian Lindke
During my finale class session with my students, I held an Ask Me Anything session where I allow the students to ask me any question that isn’t related to my personal politics. Since I teach Political Science, I believe that it is important that my students can trust that I am presenting multiple ideologies with an even hand.
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1 month ago | 
geekeratimedia.com | Christian Lindke
I’ve mentioned a couple of times that one of the ways I paid my way through undergraduate education was as a 21/Craps dealer in a small Reno casino. My time in the profession had two significant effects upon me. It took the interest in statistics that playing role playing games had given me and dialed it to 11. I love examining the statistics of things and examining all kinds of games of chance. It also removed from me any desire to gamble.
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1 month ago | 
open.substack.com | Christian Lindke
I was in the process of my bi-weekly perusal of the Bundle of Holding website, when I noticed that they have Shannon Appelcline’s detailed history of the Traveller roleplaying game available for one-quarter the price in a short term bundle (only for the next few days, after that you’ll have to buy it for full price).
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1 month ago | 
geekeratimedia.com | Christian Lindke
There has recently been a bit of a hubbub in the Role Playing Game social media sphere about whether a person should be giving game mastering advice if they have not read the Dungeon Masters Guide (sic) from cover to cover. I will answer that question in a future post in this series but I want to start from first principles before I answer that question and in process provide parts of my eventual answer to the initial question above regarding reading the DMG.
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1 month ago | 
geekeratimedia.com | Christian Lindke
In my most recent Weekly Geekly Rundown, I mentioned that I worked on a Fantasy Heartbreaker called The Secret Fire and has expressed an interest in learning more about this game. All these years later, I’m still very proud of the game we put together. I think we could have deviated even more from the Open Source Document for the 3.5 Open Gaming License because I think the ways we pulled away from that were the spaces where really interesting design happened.
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2 months ago | 
geekeratimedia.substack.com | Christian Lindke |Mike Morgan |Ryan Howard |Rebekah King
As someone who has played a lot of games, I am always interested in seeing how a game addresses the issue of which player goes first. Turn order and initiative systems are fundamental design choices. Having the ability to act first can give a strategic or tactical advantage to the “first mover” in achieving the game’s winning conditions. Like the first mover advantage in business, this potential is dependent on many other factors.
