We’re thrilled to have the following games available for the first time at Gen Con 50! You may have played them, perused the PDFs, or paged through your friend’s copy, but now you can pick up your own! Find us...
The Magpie crew will be at Origins Game Fair in Columbus, Ohio from June 14th to 18th, and we hope to see you there! Make sure to stop by the IGDN booth to say hi to Marissa (as well as...
We’re back and (mostly) recovered from Gen Con 50, and what a time was had! From the ENnies to the Indie Groundbreakers to the Magpie Game Room to the Booth to everything else that was Gen Con, it was overall...
Epyllion & Masks: A New Generation up for an ENnie! The ENnie nominations are up, and Epyllion: A Dragon Epic and Masks: A New Generation are in the running for Best Family Game. Please also remember Magpie Games in the...
We saw Spider-Man: Homecoming, and loved it! We were wondering though, do you think Spider-Man is a Janus...or a Protégé? Wake up. Breakfast. School. Work. Homework. Sleep. Repeat. It burns me up, being stuck in this life, unable to make...
Every single RPG with a GM has a motivation to run the game, an agenda, for the GM. Most of those games would be better if they stated that agenda explicitly. Because beyond telling the GM what to aim for,...
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away… The galaxy is under threat from a terrible menace. A shadowy empire, led by a dark lord, is bent on subjugating the free peoples of countless worlds to a new...
As we advance steadily into 2017, we wanted to do a quick look back over some of the best parts of 2016, and look ahead to what they could mean for us moving forward! The Magpie Nest Grew Over the...
I didn't have to do this. I could probably have had a safe, decent, simple life. It'd have been nice, but...come on. Come ON. SUPERPOWERS! ALIENS! WIZARDS! TIME TRAVEL! SOMETIMES ALL OF THEM AT ONCE! Sure, I'm out of my...
Brendan Conway will be at Dreamation 2016, running both his game Masks as well as Wicked Fate. Dreamation runs from Thursday, February 18th through Sunday, February 21st in Morristown, New Jersey, and you will have FIVE chances to play with...
Hey Origins Attendees! Magpie Games is excited to support Games on Demand at Origins 2016. We've got a whole bunch of new stuff to show off, as well as opportunities to play Urban Shadows, Epyllion, and Masks! Here are a...
Although all of us here at Magpie Games keep ourselves pretty busy writing, designing, and publishing games, sometimes we get the chance to talk about them as well! Several of us here have been on podcasts and YouTube videos to...
It’s the end of the year! And that means it’s time to talk about end of year assessments of the most important piece of culture: GAMES! I might come back to this, so I’m not going to cap myself at...
It’s been a bit since GenCon closed off, and we want to cap off how grateful we are for such an awesome convention! Thank you to everyone who came by to the IGDN booth and said hi! Here are some...
It’s been two weeks since Origins Magpie had a whirlwind of a time, and we wanted to look back on some of the awesome games and events we’ve had! We had a blast running a smorgasbord of games! We had...
Since posting “Two Minutes Hate,” I’ve received dozens of emails, read hundreds of comments, and spent 20+ hours talking on phone/Skype with people from multiple communities. After those conversations, I feel I need to both make some apologies and clarify...
UPDATE: I wrote this post in 2016. In the wake of information that has since come to light, including Mandy Morbid’s post <LINK>, it has become apparent to me that I was wrong. I’m leaving the post up so that...
Dark Souls 3 came out recently, spurring much writing on it and the Dark Souls series. In particular, this pair of articles, one from Adam Smith of Rock Paper Shotgun, one from Rob Fearon on his blog We Make The...
You can read part 1 here. Navigating the Territory In the first post of this series, I talked a lot about harder moves and softer moves, how to make them, and what those terms mean. I argued that any move...
In the Powered by the Apocalypse community, we’ve gotten used to a few pieces of terminology we use regularly—in particular, we talk a lot about soft and hard moves. Steve Segedy of Bully Pulpit Games wrote a post all about...
In this series of posts, Brendan will tackle games outside of the tabletop RPG realm, dissecting them for any useful tidbits to apply to tabletop RPG design. XCOM 2: a game of soldiers, aliens, bad calls, upsetting mistakes, a really...
