Games like The Blue Way

In a fantasy village, witches exist on the margins of society and are treated very badly.  That is why they become witches in the first place. In The Black Drink, they must choose what indignities are worth enduring. Past that limit, they must go to desperate extremes to summon agreeable demons, gain their help, and learn the secret rituals necessary to repay them. These rituals are capricious and…

Someone has stolen a pig. As a sophisticated traveler you may find this crisis laughable, but for these poor farmers a full-grown pig will fetch the same coin as two months of hard work, and it will keep a family from starving over a hard winter. It isn’t funny to the people who lost the pig—it is a disaster. They want their pig back and they want you to find it, alive or in pieces. And they want …

Ten years after an experiment, a group of clones return to the lab for their last moments, all believing they are the original, and the only one that will not die. Denatured is a live-action roleplaying game by Rachel Rudy Logistics: Participants: Four to six people, with six being the ideal, one of whom facilitates.Time: Roughly two hours plus additional time for an introduction and a debrief.Th…

As you probably know, here at the Time Institute we’ve built enormously expensive machines that generate ultradimensional wormholes and then create Einstein-Rosen bridges that allow us to exchange consciousnesses across time. We manage the destructive positive feedback loop of virtual particles circulating through a wormhole generator by sending returning particles not to their universe of origin …

Space is a huge inconvenience.  It’s big, it’s dangerous, and it is between you and anywhere interesting.  Once upon a time it was so outrageously hazardous that people traveling through it were killed now and then just for being there. Of course today spaceships are safe and sensible and no one dies in old-fashioned ways like “hull depressurization” or “reactor explosion”. Today spaceships are sm…

It's 24 October, 1642.  The English Civil War is in full swing.  The village of Avon Dassett has unwelcome visitors. A handful of ragged soldiers arrive beneath black skies and miserable sheets of cold rain.  They have come to deliver the village to the Royalist cause and ensure that Prince Rupert, bad old Prince Rupert of the Rhine, can pass through unmolested.  They have a sodden, sealed letter …

When adventurers come to town, there is a simple and time-honored checklist. 1. Hide the children. 2. Get out our valuables and put them in a pile. That’s it. That’s the checklist. Then hope they take our things and don’t go looking for our children.  The alternative, of course, is to utter a word of protest, or to stupidly conceal our valuables, or to issue the slightest whiff of resistance. Th…

You are Heroes! By some miracle you’ve returned from something that definitely counts as an adventure—at least in your own minds. Now, safely tucked into a corner booth at your favorite tavern, it’s time to tell everyone all about it. Of course the sort of people who go off on adventures are also the sort of people who lie. About everything. Logistics: Participants: Any number,  2-4 per taleTime…

Spring, 1375 Just after the Feast of the Annunciation Sir William de Cantilupe’s corpse has been found by the side of a road near Grayingham. It was arranged to appear as if he had been attacked by bandits, but the deception was poorly done. De Cantilupe was murdered in a more intimate fashion. In the de Cantilupe manor house in Scotton, Lincolnshire, those who knew him best assemble to remember S…

We are wizards!  We can communicate with one another over great distances from the comfort of our own towers, using crystal balls.  Today, we will meet and solve the problem of how to unite the two proud nations of Black Mountain and Smallwood. Each of you has your own loyalties and agenda that you’ll strive to uphold. How you do it is up to you...but there is one hitch. Wizard decorum forbids …