Fluff means fiction, framing and flavour; it’s the material around a game’s actual rules, that illustrates and indicates but has no substantive impact on how the game is played.

Rules are crunch. They are – particularly if you’re a serious player or a traditional ludologist – the important bit.

“If your game doesn’t blend the two, it says o…[Read more]

Fluff means fiction, framing and flavour; it’s the material around a game’s actual rules, that illustrates and indicates but has no substantive impact on how the game is played.

Rules are crunch. They are – particularly if you’re a serious player or a traditional ludologist – the important bit.

“If your game doesn’t blend the two, it says o…[Read more]

Roleplaying games have always leaned heavily on their literary sources. System mechanics and character creation options have been tooled toward evoking genre types and aesthetics ever since the first “Vancian wizard” memorised a spell before setting out to adventure.

Naturally, when RPGs turned toward the Gothic, they did the same thing: rif…[Read more]

This paper explores the transmission of Frankenstein’s Creature – or Monster – into tabletop and computer gaming. It briefly covers the ‘Flesh Golem’ archetype and Frankenstein-esque figures as encounters in Dungeons and Dragons – superficial imitations, influenced more by cinematic adaptations than the novel, and emphasising the ‘Monster’ readi…[Read more]