Did I miss it or was there no (spoiler for season 2) baby in the trailer? Don’t do this to me, game!

...and then the Technocracy will throw magical neutron bombs on Ravnos, and thus accidentaly destroying the underworld of the ghosts.

Trails of Cold Steel II on my lovely Vita. It just came out here in Europe. The first part ended on a massive cliffhanger, so I’m glad the second part didn’t take as long as Trails in the Sky to be published.

I’m a big fan of romance as well. I find it works better between PCs, because NPCs normally don’t hang around all the time (or the GM doesn’t have that much time to play your love interest). It’s also something that requires a certain level of trust between the players. I hesitate to add in-game flirting if I’m not…

My problem with very complex premade adventures is my horrible memory. Ten NPCs with long backstories? I’ll trip over some super important detail sooner or later (“Oh! He’s actually her brother, sorry, I forgot. Maybe I should have mentioned that before you planned the wedding.”)

Have you tried online gaming yet? It’s not that different from offline tabletop rpgs if you use a webcam. Roll20 is a virtual table for rpgs, and you can search for groups/players as well.

Didn’t Think Geek once sell a Tauntaun sleeping bag or was that just a April’s Fool joke?

I’m so happy the stranger outliers of tabletop gaming get some love here, thank you for that! I own The Quiet Year, but I have yet to play it.

The Deep Forest sounds really cool, I need to check it out. Thanks for mentioning it!

I also recommend online gaming. With webcams and virtual game tables, it’s pretty close to sitting at a real table. The big advantage is that you can find all kinds of players for all kinds of systems online. It’s easier to find people you really click with, and it’s easier to find people for the more unusual games.

Horror where the monsters and terrifying stuff stands for something else. Think Babadook or Silent Hill 2. There is probably a more elegant name for the genre (personal horror?), I simply wanted to distinguish it from “roll to run away from zombie” (not that running away from zombies isn’t fun... well, fun in an RPG).

Great article! Tabletop RPGs really scratch that storytelling itch for me. There something special about getting into a flow with your friends, throwing ideas around, and building on their input.

I seem to remember that some people found her annoying. I don’t get it either, I loved her.

I enjoyed Cold Steel, but I liked it less than Trails in the Sky. Even though the characters gain more depth over the course of the game, I found the characters in Sky somehow more... charming. One reason might also be that Rean is the typical bland anime-protagonist. Estelle, even if you don’t like her, had a lot…

I was pretty baffled when the twelve-year old daughter of a co-worker told me she was going to cosplay as “Yandere-chan”. I had no idea that game was actually popular in that age group. Interesting to know.

“So son, you want to know where babies come from. Well, a man and a woman meet and then it’s X - Triangle - Shoulder Button, Shoulder Button - roll left stick, roll right stick - OOOOO. That’s where babies come from. And free orbs.”

True, that could very well be a grittyfied Tex Hex. My mind went more in the direction of the tabletop RPG “Deadlands”, which is something like a horror-cyberpunk-western.

I see! Thanks for the info. The shotgun even had its (her?) own name, Sara Jane. That’s pretty unusual for a kids show (of course it shot “energy”, not bullets).

I think that’s the cyborg horse from the cartoon “Marshall Bravestarr”. (Wikipedia says its name is “Thirty/Thirty”, for whatever reason.) The cartoon was mediocre, but... cyborg horse.

Fate/Zero is also much tighter written than Unlimited Blade Works. I loved the first half of UBW, and it’s super beautiful, but man, the ending was... not good. It felt like they wanted to add all the details from the VN, but did not have the time to properly prepare it. Which meant monologues. Incomprehensible…