The Gaming Philosopher

If you have any interest at all in pen and paper RPGs, you should get the Indie Intiative Bundle of Holding (for sale for another 20 hours, so be quick). It contains many of the most important games to start the indie RPG movement. So much so, in fact, that the list of games basically is a list of everything I bought and played between 2002 and 2007. I can assure you that the following games are all excellent, both to play and to study: Breaking the Ice The Shadow of Yesterday Trollbabe Dogs in the Vineyard Inspectres My Life with Master Polaris Sorcerer Universalis I have not played octaNe and Munchhausen, but they are well spoken off. All for less than 23$! It's an offer you should not refuse. I didn't refuse, even though I already owned nine of them in physical book form.

This is a post about Ron Edward's RPG Trollbabe (2002) and Vincent Baker's RPG Dogs in the Vineyard (2004). I'm not completely sure which of the two I played first, though I think it was Dogs . It has definitely been the case that I've seen and played Trollbabe in the past as if it was a somewhat simpler version of Dogs , though of course set in a rather different setting. Why would you think the two games are closely related? Well, Trollbabe is acknowledged as an important influence in the text of Dogs . But looking at the games themselves, we can see three very important similarities: The protagonists of both games are outsiders who come to a community in trouble, will influence that community throughout what is probably a single play session, and will then leave for a new "adventure". In both games, the GM prepares by thinking up something that is at stake or going wrong in the community, and preparing a couple of characters that have views about th...