Author Archives: WJ MacGuffin

D&D 4E + Paranoia = Love

Back when I was writing for the Paranoia RPG, I was working on a project called Brave New Complex. It took all that made Paranoia fun to play and put it in different settings, keeping the Paranoia rules but with some modifications. I took on the job of translating Paranoia into your generic fantasy game

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Space Peanut Butter

Triune is set in the future, so we need to describe how the future looks and works in our game books. But where do we stop? A fantasy rpg setting is pretty easy to describe. People already know what castles, horses, swords, and 10′ poles look like. Yes, you might have to explain what a

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Whose game is it, anyway?

I was reading the excellent article (as usual) on the Socratic Design blog when I started to think about design as art and the authority of the artist to define his work. (Yes, this is a high-falutin’ entry today.) I’m designing Triune as a “serious” game akin to Traveller or WoD games. (As opposed to

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Blue Collar Prayers

What do you think the prayers of the working man are like? In Triune, faith isn’t restricted to organized religions such as Christianity or Judaism. Characters can worship Hell by embracing sins such as greed or lust, or they can worship the Hegemony (the human government) by having faith in their career. We are finishing

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Gives us your artworks!

Triune is muddling along, slowly but surely, and we are getting close to finishing the Players Rulebook. That means we need to worry about art–and worry we shall. On one hand, we hate art in rpgs books. Artwork will drive up the cost of our product and, since we have the artistic ability of a

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Out of control writing?

As we commented on before, we are busy fleshing out the world of Triune. In doing so, we have screwed up and made more work for us–but this is probably a good thing. Since the game delves deeply into that wonderful place where religion and law meet, we are committing good space to describing the

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Chrysalis Revolt released

After a long time of editing, re-editing, figuring out how to use InDesign, sleeping, and more editing, Happy Bishop Games is proud to announce the release of its first product: The Chrysalis Revolt 2709-2710. Chrysalis Revolt started as an entry to the 2008 GameChef competition. GameChef is a contest where people design complete roleplaying games

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Fightin’ Buddhists?

How would Buddhists fight back against a government bent on forcing them to renounce Buddhism? We’ve been working on illegal and underground groups in the world of Triune. Since all faith is illegal, the government is tasked with stamping out all religions. That means religions have moved underground. We can see secret Islamic, Jewish, and

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The future of obsolescence

Triune is a science fiction game. As such, it has to have neet-o technology of the future: ray guns, rocket ships, that sort of thing. But rather than list all the cool ideas I’ve stolen from other science fiction stories that players can use in the game … well, OK, we are doing that. Equipment

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