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Our very first workshop, Spence decided to bring in their friend and creative whirlwind, Mitchell Wallace who is one of the founders of the Penny For A Tale Twitch channel and has written for several other games since the recording of this episode. Together Mitchell and Spence make a light hearted ghost hunting game: Not Your Cousin’s Ghost Hunt.   Find Mitchell Wallace online at www.pennyforatale.com and www.twitch.tv/pennyforatale.     Music in this episode of Game School Workshops is Pump Sting by Kevin MacLeod https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4251-pump-sting License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Game School went to TotalCon and played Top Secret: New World Order with Merle Rassmussen, Allen Hammack, and Jayson Elliot. Top Secret is the new espionage role-playing game from Merle M. Rasmussen, creator of the first espionage role-playing game. Your mission: preserve peace and stability in a world rife with conflict, mistrust, duplicity, and shadowy organizations. You are an agent of ICON: The International Covert Operatives Network. You have been recruited from your former life, trained in the ways of tradecraft, and sent into the field to handle the missions that other agencies cannot, or will not handle. Tense negotiations, dangerous combat, thrilling car chases, tradecraft, surveillance, intrigue, and subterfuge are all at hand with the roll of the dice.  http://store.tsrgames.com/top-secret-new-world-order-box-set/

Spence ran a Children of the Fall Live Play for Peter, James, and Mary. This is the audio from a live video broadcast we did earlier this year.

James, Spence, Peter Bryant, Mary Lindholm, and Steven Wollett went to TotalCon and played  Andre Kruppa's game Lucid Dreams. Lucid Dreams is a d10 pool system geared toward the darker, grittier aspects of roleplaying. It has no particular setting, but is designed to handle anything from the Stone Age all the way to near-future settings. Popular settings such as the world of H.P. Lovecraft will port easily into this game system. Lucid Dreams is meant to be fast paced and focused on the story.

Prowlers & Paragons is a narration-driven, rules-light system designed to emulate four-color superhero comics. The rules, for the most part, don’t tell you what happens. Instead, they tell you who gets to describe what happens. Both the players and the gamemaster take turns narrating events in the game world. However, there are rules that help determine what characters can do and how they compare to one another. With the streamlined rules, once you know what you’re doing, you should be able to play without ever opening the book. P&P was designed to let you play stories about super heroes who save the world and beat the snot out of villains who richly deserve it. Like so much of the genre, P&P is a gleefully unapologetic exercise in heroic wish fulfillment. http://www.evilbeaglegames.com

WARNING - This is a Detention episode. As such it may not be suitable for all listeners. There are themes of domination, bondage, and slavery. Tales of Gor brings you into a striking world of science-fantasy roleplaying. Born from the Gorean Cycle (34 books) by John Norman, Tales of Gor brings you to The Counter Earth. A world of contradictions, freedom and slavery, science and fantasy, primitive violence and high technology ripe for adventure. While two great alien powers vie for control of the solar system their plans play out on two worlds, Earth and Gor. Will you take sides or simply strive to survive in a hostile world of gigantic animals, powerful city states and cunning machinations? Powered by Open D6, Tales of Gor lets you step into this long-running series of science-fantasy novels and carve your own future on the Counter-Earth.  Illustrated in striking style by celebrated fetish and comic book artist Michael Manning (Spider Garden, Tranceptor) this book is also a visual treat for fans of Gor, giving his unique interpretation to Gor, its creatures and its people. https://post-mort.com/collections/roleplaying-games/products/tales-of-gor-gorean-roleplaying

Champions was one of the first role-playing games and was published by Hero Games. It was designed to simulate and function in a four-color superhero comic book world. https://www.herogames.com/

Splintered Godhood, a one-night, improvisational cooperative horror role-playing game for 4 to 5 mature players and one storyteller where each player plays a role in weaving a story of inverted and interwoven layers of reality within which each player is touched by the caress of infinity and eternity. With a divine spark infusing their Flesh, Voice, Will, and Awareness, they can build and twist the worlds around them, touching and overlapping them to form a malleable shared universe. https://www.makeyourgamelegendary.com/products-page/all-products/splintered-godhood/

This lightweight-yet-complete role-playing game is an homage to the "Easy-to-Master" black box of the first role-playing game that does everything the creator wished the original did. Overall the game has a similar feel to the original role-playing game, but there are a number of differences. Listen in while Spence and James go over this awesome game. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/5695/Awful-Good-Games/

The Deryni Adventure Game is based on the popular “Deryni” series of fantasy books by Katherine Kurtz. The novels weave a rich tapestry of romantic chivalry, medieval kings, a powerful Church, and the Deryni, a persecuted race of humans with the gift of magic. Now you can share in the magic! Create characters – human or Deryni! – and experience the Eleven Kingdoms through their marvelous adventures! Uncover intrigue in the courts of kings, defend the Deryni from persecution, explore the world, and experience all manner of medieval majesty!

Everyverse RPG features five methods of character generation to suit every situation and taste. It uses the same scale as used to measure Real-world IQ to provide more meaningful information at a glance. Along with tree-like skill arrays go from general to specific. Choose your own ease/realism trade-off. Giving players a single method to resolve all actions to keep everyone's nose out of the book. Players follow the same path or improve characters over several lifetimes. https://www.pardenusgaming.com/    

It's time to meet the hosts of Game School. Spence and JC spend the hour interviewing each other. This one is just for the fans!

On this episode JC and Spence interview Jay Little. He is a developer and one of the lead designers of Fantasy Flight Games' Star Wars: Edge of the Empire roleplaying series. https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/products/#/universe/star-wars  

An action-heavy tabletop RPG of gunslingers, samurai, gangsters, barbarians, steampunk, and superpowers on the brink of destruction. There is a world beyond our own steeped in darkness and struggling in the aftermath of a divine war; a world where its people fight not only to survive but to amass power, riches, and honour. A place of intense, high-octane wire-fu action set against the background of desert landscapes, high speed train robberies, and mutant warriors battling it out for supremacy.   Nothing is as it seems in this world, and everything is possible. We call it... High Plains Samurai. https://brokenrulergames.net/high-plains-samurai/

The following episode is a Detention episode. The game that we are reviewing has themes that may not be suitable for all listeners. The game we review in this episode is Hot Guys Making Out. As the title implies, the game has homosexual romantic themes. If these themes are not to your taste, we encourage you to tune in for our next episode. Otherwise please enjoy this exploration of a unique game mechanic using a deck of playing cards, set in 1930's Spain with our heroes Honore and Gonsalvo. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/156244/Hot-Guys-Making-Out

Victorious is a superhero steampunk RPG where heroes from the future have traveled back in time and altered the time-line. Through their influence, inadvertent or deliberate, technology has had a jump-start. A series of advancements, based on steam-driven technology, have arisen. The player characters can either be born into this era or can have arrived from the future. http://www.trolllord.com/

Cortex Prime is a highly modular analog game system that focuses on storytelling and the ability to switch out blocks of core rules like Lego bricks.

Swords and Wizardry Light combines fast play and introducing new players with nostalgia for the grizzled rpg veterans. Using pen, paper, two types of dice, and two foldable cards, the game can be played with only a few minutes of setup. It is easy to understand the mechanics and has a simple approach to the rest of traditional gaming that will have newbies playing without the confusion or frustration of a long character creation session. https://froggodgames.com/product-category/free-stuff/ http://www.tenkarstavern.com/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/849179298513223/

Children of the Fall is a post-cataclysmic game with a Lord of the Flies vibe where the players play children around their teen years. All the adults are mindless, vicious savages trying to eat them and when a child reaches adulthood at about seventeen or eighteen, they go mad too. This is a game of survival and has a level of fatalism to it that makes it far darker and scarier than games where the monsters are mostly external. Rating - PG-16 Website

James and Spence interview Andre Kruppa about his game Lucid Dreams. Lucid Dreams is a d10 pool system geared toward the darker, grittier aspects of roleplaying. It has no particular setting, but is designed to handle anything from the Stone Age all the way to near-future settings. Popular settings such as the world of H.P. Lovecraft will port easily into this game system. Lucid Dreams is meant to be fast paced and focused on the story. You can read the game review by Ernie Laurence at: http://multiverse.world/blog/2018/08/23/lucid-dreams-role-playing-engine/