After the move to online gaming during the pandemic, I found that our virtual battle maps shrank. At first glance, it’s confounding – after all, it was our real-world battle maps that were constrained by either the size of our gaming tables or the size of our Chessex battle maps. Online, though, the horizons are … Read more
November is done and with it, Nuketown’s first-ever turn at hosting the RPG Blog Carnival. Inspired by the “All These Worlds” line from 2010: A Space Odyssey Two, the carnival explored all manners of world-building, from new planets to undersea realms to stellar frontiers. In total eight blogs contributed 15 entries to the carnival. The Expanding Frontier kicked things off “Expanded … Read more
The Refuge of Durak is a pocket dimension that served as an oasis of law for the planar explorer known as Durak the Rigid. An archmage and planar explorer, Durak held to his moral code in any situation, steadfastly embracing his ideals even in the face of absolute chaos. Durak the Rigid’s home — the alternative material … Read more
Whether it’s the subterranean world beneath our feet, other planets racing through the sky, or intersections with other planes of existence, the worlds we can visit through role-playing games are infinite. The November 2018 RPG Blog Carnival hopes to capture a few of them. The topic is inspired by the final message from the David … Read more
February’s RPG Blog Carnival topic is “Time Marches On”. Hosted by Daemons & Deathrays, the topic looks at the role of time in role-playing campaigns. Time’s very much at the heart of our two ongoing D&D 5th Edition campaigns. The campaigns were created as bookends for our 10+ year Blackrazor Guild campaign. The campaign took … Read more
January’s RPG Blog topic is “Tabletop Gaming on a Budget”, hosted by Renaissance Gamer. A lot of folks equated gaming on a budget with gaming on the cheap, which is a perfectly reasonable (and entertaining) approach. For me, the hardest part of gaming on a budget is actually having a budget. Exactly what a budget … Read more
“It’s In a Book” is the theme for December 2017’s RPG Blog Carnival. Books — and the libraries that hold them — drove the later half of our Obsidian Frontier campaign, leading us to explore the written word in the World of Greyhawk campaign setting. It began with the players. After 30-odd chapters in the campaign, we’d hit a natural … Read more
The latest RPG Blog Carnival encourages us to “revisit the past”. Hosted by GameMastery, the kickoff post discusses writing a follow-up or sequel to a prior post. For me, that’s revisiting “The Three-Page Manifesto”. Written in 2008, the column saw me grappling with balancing gaming and fatherhood. At the time my kids were 6 and 3 and my … Read more
“Occult Mysteries and Magic”, is topic of the May 2017 RPG Blog Carnival. Although my gaming group has been playing Dungeons & Dragons for decades, a game that has magic as one of its corner stones, we rarely delved into mysteries of the arcane. To be sure, there was ancient magic hidden in Greyhawk’s history, … Read more
April 2017’s RPG Carnival topic is “Carnival of Megadungeons!”, during which the gaming blogosphere looked at this staple of fantasy (and occasionally science fiction) role-playing games. I suspect most gaming groups of a certain age have a megadungeon that they call their own — it’s a trope of Dungeons & Dragos that calls to us like dragons … Read more