Author Archives: WJ MacGuffin

Free Quickstarter for One by One

We are gearing up for launching One by One, our storytelling RPG of survival horror, in the next few months. That means getting quotes for artwork, experimenting with layout design, and figuring out that hot mess known as Kickstarter. But that also means we have created a free version of the One by One rules.

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The 4 scripts of One by One

As with Fiasco, One by One will have scripts that describe the particular setting to be used in a game session. Four will be included in the rulebook, including: Arkham County: Massachusetts, 1923. You received a letter from an old colleague, begging you to come to Arkham County to help him protect its residents from

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HBG Looking for Playtesters

It’s been a while since we last posted, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been working. In fact, our new game is ready for playtesting. One by One is a story game similar to Fiasco, but where that game focuses on crimes gone wrong, One by One focuses on survival horror. That genre is quite

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Teilhard’s Agents on hiatus

It’s been a while since we discussed Teilhard’s Agents, our upcoming game mixing Jungian psychology, emotion theory, and The Matrix. That’s solely because we’ve needed to focus on our real lives and jobs, and simply didn’t have time for game design. But a funny thing happened during this time. We started thinking about Fiasco and

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Emotions, Opposites, and Dyads

Teilhard’s Agents explores the emotional underpinnings of politics. In the game, you can alter the emotions of entire cultural groups, thereby changing their stance on issues like abortion, taxation, capital punishment, and so on. But before we can explain how that works, we need to explain how we define emotions. We started with the Robert

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Persona/Shadow emotions

Since Teilhard’s Agents focuses on emotions and Jungian psychology, it only makes sense to include personas and shadows for the player-characters. Your persona is your public face; the mask you wear so other people will see you in a positive light. In this game, you pick one emotion as your persona: Trust, Happiness, Optimism, etc.

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Zombies in a Bundle

Ah, the bag of holding. A treasure from old school D&D, it was a sack connected to a pocket dimension. You could put a herd of elephants inside it and still looked like a little bag. Very useful but still not as cool as the Bundle of Holding. This gem is a collection of roleplaying

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It’s the technology

Teilhard’s Agents has two different takes on the traditional rpg attribute scene: It’s the technology and monsters roll on you. Today, we’ll focus on technology. In the game, you play a social scientist who has her mind uploaded into the noosphere, a dimension where emotions and archetypes are real creatures. Because of that, this game does

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