Giants stalk the land, threatening one of the few flickering lights of civilization. Someone needs to deal with the threat ... and it turns out that's us.

My gaming group is returning to Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition with a megashot of Revenge of the Giants, the new super module from Wizards of the Coast. I received a review copy of the book in October, and at the time I knew it was a perfect chance for my group to experiment with 4th Edition again.

We played 4th Edition back in Summer 2008, but decided we didn't want to convert our regular campaign to the new game. A few of us have continued to dabble in 4E however, and there's been interest in getting another game together.

Revenge of the Giants is that game and we're going to carve off a huge chunk of it with an eight-hour marathon post-Thanksgiving session.

The Blackrazor Guild -- my local gaming group -- has had a web site since 1997. It's gone through many iterations over that time, usually in tandem with some project I needed to research at work (being a gamer means never wanting for large reams of test data for web apps).

The site's known as The Griffin's Crier, and for the longest time it was the archive for our Dungeons & Dragons campaign. However, over the last few years our group's changed. Our primary campaign's now Star Wars, half the group is blogging, and we've created a small galaxy of spin-off sites supporting our different efforts.

The GriffCrier needs to reflect these changes. To that end, I'm redesigning the site using Drupal. The new site will serve as a gathering point for our various interests; it will include campaign and group news, links to the latest blog posts from group members (using the Feed API and Views modules), and serve as a jumping off point to our various wikis, web sites, and forums.

"What Earth Would Look Like with Saturn's Rings" is a YouTube video that gives Earth its own ring system. It provides views of the planet and rings from space ... but then takes it a step further and shows what the rings would look like from the planet's surface (a thin edge rising through the sky on the equator, a wide band near the poles). Very, very cool.

The Gates of Hell is a one-shot scenario for the Battlestar Galactica Role-playing Game by Margaret Weis Games. I wrote it for my gaming group’s playtest of the game, which I used as the basis for my subsequent reviews at SCIFI.com and Nuketown.com.

Since that playtest ran, a number of people have asked me for a copy of my scenario notes to get a sense of how I ran the game. I’ll warn you in advance; this is a are fairly rules-light, straightforward scenario. It was designed to be run in a single session, and as a result, it’s exceedingly linear.

 Of course, one of the many cool things about the Battlestar Galactica RPG (and Cortex system that its based on) is that players have the opportunity to hack the scenario by spending Plot Points. What may seem overly linear on paper can bend and change in unexpected ways depending on the player characters. This is the case with most RPGs, but it’s doubly true with Battlestar Galactica,