David Chart's Blog

Category: Roleplaying

  • Home Front: Philadelphia

    Home Front: Philadelphia is another short supplement for Torg Eternity. In Torg Eternity, Earth has been invaded by different realities, and much of North America is under the influence of a primitive action reality called The Living Land. The city of Philadelphia, however, is an island of Earth’s old reality, called Core Earth in the…

  • 8 Million Gods

    8 Million Gods is another supplement that I wrote for Torg Eternity. As you might be able to guess from the cover image, it is an adaptation of Shinto to work within the game world. One of my reasons for writing this is that I wanted to be able to create and play Shinto characters…

  • 12 Perils for the Living Land

    12 Perils for the Living Land is not really a book; it is a very short supplement for Torg Eternity, specifically for the Living Land, as you might be able to guess from the title. The Living Land is a primitive reality, complete with jungles, dinosaurs, and lost ruins, which has primarily taken over parts…

  • Road to Philadelphia

    Torg was a roleplaying game released about thirty years ago in which earth was invaded by different realities, different genres of roleplaying game, and you played characters from these different realities who all worked together to fight the invaders. Thus, fantasy wizards worked with cyberpunk hackers and two-fisted pulp detectives to defeat dinosaur-riding lizardmen. It…

  • Corellon Larethian

    I have just published a short, new roleplaying book. Corellon Larethian is the chief deity of the elves in the Forgotten Realms setting for Dungeons and Dragons. The Forgotten Realms setting was released when I was a teenager, and I have loved it ever since. In a lot of ways, it is the classic RPG…

  • Playtest Results

    I am currently designing a new roleplaying game, with the working title of Universitas Magarum. It is a GM-less, co-operative roleplaying game, and, as one playtest group said, it is sufficiently different from those currently on the market to avoid the question of why you would play this game rather than something else. If you…

  • Playtest Scenario Draft Finished

    I have a complete first draft of the playtest scenario for the Universitas Magarum game. It’s about 17,000 words long, and has five situations, introducing all the major rules for the game and the background, just like a playtest and introductory scenario should. I’ve already played through it by myself, because the rules do support…

  • Opening the Way

    In this post, I want to write about practical things that publishers can do to increase diversity among the authors of tabletop role-playing games. I suspect that some, even most, of these points will apply to related fields, but I am writing based on my experience of 14 years as the Line Editor for Ars…

  • Starting the Playtest Scenario

    I have started work on the playtest scenario for Universitas Magarum, the current name for the School of Magic game. I’m not absolutely confident that I’ll finish it by the end of this month, but that is looking entirely realistic, and even if I fall behind, I might well be close enough to motivate a…

  • You Are The Hero

    Recently, there has been a lot of discussion of the importance of having diverse characters in fiction, so that everyone has someone to identify with. It is possible, nay, easy, to make this discussion sound really, really stupid. “I can identify with an immortal, magic-wielding elf in an entirely fictional world, but only if it…