Category Archives: Role-Playing 101

Role-Playing 101: The Laundry RPG – Session 2

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Hey guys. Going to make this one quick, I’ve got my parents visiting this weekend and I’ve got a lot to do to get ready. It’s time for the report of the second session I ran of Cubicle 7’s game, The Laundry RPG, for my cousin and his friends. You can read the first report here.

A quick recap for anyone just joining us. Over the last year I’ve been occasionally running games for my 14-year-old cousin and his friends in an attempt to get them into tabletop gaming. The endgame is to get them running their own games, but while we work towards that, I’m running games in a bunch of different systems for them so they can decide what they want to play long-term. So far we’ve played Pathfinder and The Laundry RPG, with Shadowrun 5th Edition on the cards next. Before we could do that though, there was one more session of The Laundry RPG to run. It’s a game of Lovecraftian horror, spycraft shenanigans, and bleak humour about the end of the world and British public service bureaucracy, based on The Laundry Files novels by Charles Stross.

The Laundry RPG core book.

The Laundry RPG core book.

So, a week after the first session of The Laundry RPG, I rocked up at my cousin’s house again to run the next adventure. Since I’d had a busy week, I’d decided to stick with the same idea as last time, and run one of the ready to go adventures out of the core book. This time around, I was running The Greys. Everyone already knew the rules, except for one player who joined this session, so we were able to get going with barely any fuss.

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Role-Playing 101: The Laundry RPG – Session 1

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Hey guys,

I’m starting off a new feature for the blog today. Role-Playing 101 is going to document the trials and tribulations that I face as I teach a group of teenagers to role-play. There’ll be some funny moments, occasional glimpses of glory, and a not insignificant amount of frustration (mostly on my part), but also a hell of a lot of fun. It’ll be updated on a very irregular basis, as it generally require me to have actually run a session for the group recently, and it’s not often that we actually get to play. The actual content will be a combination of a session recap and brief discussions about the system (though more in-depth reviews may come later on).

How did I end up running introductory games for teenagers? It’s my attempt to continue the chain that my uncle started when he bought me my first role-playing book for my twelfth birthday, the Player’s Handbook for D&D 3rd Edition. A bit over a year ago, I offered to teach my cousin to play. It took a while to get started, as he needed to gather a group of friends to play with, but eventually we were ready to play. The first session I ran for them was Pathfinder, where I quickly learnt that running for bunch of fourteen year olds is far different to running a game for adults. They picked up the notion of “kill things and take their stuff” very quickly, but were having a bit of difficulty with the idea of “talking to things to see if we can avoid killing them”. Now, to be fair, D&D/Pathfinder is at its core, the game of “killing things and taking their stuff”, but Paizo’s work with Pathfinder has really started to move beyond that, often allowing for other means such as diplomacy or subterfuge to be just as effective as barreling in with swords drawn. Trying to get this concept across sparked an idea, that maybe I could help them learn that there are multiple approaches to these games by running a variety of systems for them, with the added benefit that they’d be able to pick a system they liked when they’re eventually ready to run their own games. So the group agreed that I would run each system for two to three sessions, then pick another one.

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