I have talked at some length about board games, and a little about one specific roleplaying game, but I haven’t yet talked in general about my favourite kind of games: roleplaying games. It’s not surprising that I enjoy RPGs; as I’ve mentioned here before, I am a storyteller player type, which means that I most enjoy games that follow Freytag’s pyramid, especially if they involve character growth and the development of interpersonal relationships. Given the right gaming group, roleplaying games are the best vehicle for telling stories as a game that you can hope to find. So I’m going to talk today about this wonderful type of game.
Author Archives: PinkFae Archives
Board Game Review: Theseus – The Dark Orbit
Time has come for another board game review. This time around, I will discuss a really nifty game to which I was recently introduced: Theseus: The Dark Orbit. In Theseus, you control one of four factions (or more, if you have any of the expansions) trapped on a space station in deep space. These factions are fighting for control of the station; only one can be victorious! Let’s look the ratings for this game
Changeling: the Dreaming – Why I love it so much
Last week, I wrote an article about the tabletop roleplaying game Changeling: the Dreaming. Included in that article were links to descriptions of the setting and in-game history. Anyone who is familiar with the Storyteller System (the original World of Darkness in particular) already knows the basics of the system. But what I didn’t describe was why I am such a fan of the game. So I think I will do that today.
Video Game Review: Sherlock Holmes and The Hound of The Baskervilles
I had to play through Sherlock Holmes and The Hound of The Baskervilles three times to get the last achievement (Golden Hound – for having all the other achievements), which would not unlock despite me indeed having all the other achievements, because my two games (normal and hard) were done on two different profiles and they needed to be done on the same one. And the only reason I needed to do more than one anyway was that apparently finishing it on hard does not count as finishing it on normal.. what? That and the “finish 10 hidden object puzzles in under 3 minutes each” achievement is dumb since you get no feedback to tell you if you fail.
Oh, and I couldn’t find the actual save game file, no idea where it’s hidden, so good luck to you if you mess up! I did find the save game screenshot thumbnail folder (inside %appdata%\roaming\frogwares\sherlock holmes and the hound of the baskervilles), and when those thumbnails were deleted/restored, it messed up and broke my existing test profiles, so that was fun too. My profile reset to a player name of “Katy” or something just before it broke completely. I wonder who that is.
Transgender Changeling: Adapting the Changeling Way
As a gamer who is a fan of stories and storytelling, I tend to be drawn towards games that allow and encourage the telling of stories. This is why I became a fan of roleplaying games; they are the single best framework for telling stories as a game. Of all the RPGs I’ve tried (and I have tried many), my favourite is, without question, Changeling: the Dreaming. It emphasises creativity, and is set in a world which includes a vast realm made entirely of dreams. This allows you to play in any setting you can imagine. The important thing right now is that the characters in this story are faeries inhabiting human bodies. Normally, players assume that the human body in which a fae spirit is housed matches the demographics of the fae spirit itself. But as I find myself thinking more about Changeling as a result of the recent 20th Anniversary Kickstarter, I realise that nowhere in the rules does it say that this is necessarily the case. In fact, there are places where it hints that it isn’t always the case; specifically, it mentions that the Eshu, an African kith, are not always born into host bodies of African descent. Thus, I begin to wonder if there are other ways in which this disconnect can be expanded. And my first thought is: what if the human body is of a different gender than the fae spirit born into it? And thus I find myself contemplating the possibility of Transgender Changeling.