Ben Lehman

You all play Mud Dragons, the generally inferior but more survivable cousins of the big guys, up to some sort of hijinks such as: stealing candy from children, fighting over shiny glass beads, having a farting contest, trying to capture a princess, or building a flying machine.

Except for the GM, of course, who pretty much just exists to make your life miserable.
Dragons are great creatures, majestic, wise, and magical, possessed of great treasures, fiery breath, jeweled scales, ferocious appetites, and knowledge beyond the ken of mortal man. Once, they soared through the airs over the land, leaving shadows miles long, devouring whole herds of sheep and cows, kidnapping princesses, demanding tribute from even the greatest of kings and the mightiest of sorcerers.

Unfortunately, not even regarding such trivialities as the square-cube law, the local ecology could scarcely support such gargantuan megafauna, let alone one that reproduced in clutches! Food pressure has driven such the great beasts to near or total extinction, leaving only a few hibernating on the highest mountaintops, deep beneath the earth, and at the bottom of the sea.

In truth, what with the industrialization and rationalization and possibly other -alizations, there is little place for the dragons of old within the modern world.

The Drifter’s Escape is a game of men wandering America’s highways and byways, looking for their dreams, pursued by their pain, and hounded by both the Devil and the Man.

My traveling companions are an old yellow dog with the devil?s own farts and about a dozen loose and lonesome men we picked up somewhere. There are a few old soldiers less some of their body parts, a skin and bones mountaineer with a beard down to his rotting buckskin belt, a merchant marine with a terrible cough, a dready white girl with eyes like punched-out aces of spades, and some old hoboes who just won?t die.

A game of suburban desperation

I wrote Want as part of my participation in the first round of the Ronnies, a 24-hour RPG contest sponsored by Ron Edwards and his Adept Press. The challenge is to make a complete role-playing game in 24 hours, using as core elements exactly two of the following four terms: Suburban, Girlfriend, Hatred, and Rat. Want is, quite clearly, making use of Suburban and Hatred. Whether or not it is a role-playing game I leave as an exercise to the reader.

Quite honestly, the game creeps me out more than a little. I think it may be the most depressing thing I?ve written, and I?m the guy who wrote the game about fighting the totally unavoidable end of the world.

I?d like to play it, if I could find a group that knows the genre.

Philosophical Masters travel the tumultuous roads of Warring States period China, seeking a ruler who will accept their philsophy and make them Minister. A strategic board-game overlay belies a subtle role-playing game of moral conundrums and the price of power.