Review: Midnight Chronicles
It isn’t often that a movie is made based on a roleplaying game. There are a few, of course, and they’re all best enjoyed with a bunch of friends and possibly alcohol. We all remember the execrable Dungeons & Dragons. There’s also a sequel, rumours of another, and the Dragonlance cartoon, and that sci-fi flick from last year I ripped into last winter, Mutant Chronicles. Now, then, we have Midnight Chronicles. It’s based on Fantasy Flight Games’ D20 setting, Midnight, whi

The RPG Course – A Session of Praedor
This is, yet again, a post on the roleplaying studies course I took at the University. By the way, I received my grade a couple of days ago. On the scale of 1-5, it ranked a full five. I am currently very satisfied with myself, which probably has to change since my ego is currently so bloated I have to buy it a separate ticket on the bus. Aaaaanyway. As I’ve mentioned, the requirements of the course decreed that I had to study two games from a preset list, and play or run one of these. I’d never played any of them, but Praedor was the one closest to my usual style. Access wasn’t an issue with any of the games, since most of them were included

Castle Caldwell and Yog-Sothoth
Today, I played a session of old-school D&D. The Red Box, to be precise, or Labyrinth Lord, its retroclone. We had both the Red Box books and the Labyrinth Lord hardcover at the game table and used them more or less interchangeably. The adventure was the famous B9 Castle Caldwell and Beyond, the iconic Christmas calendar dungeon (you open a door and something completely random pops out). The module holds a special place in the Finnish gaming culture, because it was one of the few modules that got translated into Finnish and some elements of it are completely ridiculous. A few years ago, some people associated with the Roolipelaaja magazi

The RPG Course – Lecture Seven
I should be getting my grade for the course soon. I already received feedback on my study journal, the tone of which suggests that I probably have not failed the course. The final lecture of the course discussed roleplaying games in society and culture. It’s been a few weeks since then, and my memory is not perfect, so there may be inaccuracies and rambling. Examples of roleplaying games used outside of pure entertainment context include educational uses, product development, crisis therapy, and, interestingly, product development. Apparently Nokia’s got a patent pending for something that was thought up during a Shadowrun game. There are als

The RPG Course – Lecture Six
Well, it’s been a while. Soon after writing the last post, I found myself with all sorts of deadlines and duties and even parties, which, among other things, led to me finishing the study journal for this course two days late, writing the last pages in a hurry with a second-degree burn on my left hand. I managed to steam-cook my hand in the afterparty sauna of the Helsinki University RPG club’s anniversary celebrations. While alcohol was involved, I hold that it was mostly my own stupidity. The study journal required for the completion of the course is now finished, though I haven’t yet received a grade. I will probably not post it here, because in the