After many months away from the game, my group is returning to Dungeons & Dragond 3rd Edition for an old school dungeon crawl through the Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth using the D&D 3.5 version released in 2007.

I've got mixed feelings about this.

While I owned the Lost Caverns as a kid and read through it cover to cover several times, I never had a chance to run it. Moreover, with this module we're going to continue what we started with our White Plume Mountain run by travelling back into our D&D campaign's history to the founding of the Blackrazor Guild. In White Plume Mountain, guild leader Brant Bladescream recovered the infamous soul-devouring sword Blackrazor (but lost most of his adventuring companions in the process). In The Lost Caverns, he's taking a new band of heroes into the depths of an infamous dungeon in search of even more powerful magical relics.

Fantasy Flight Games has announced the Deathwatch Role-Playing Game, the much-anticipated third core rule book for Warhammer 40k. Players take on the role of Deathwatch Marines fighting a desperate war to restore Imperial oversight of the Jericho Reach. Space Marines are one of the most iconic aspects of the 40K universe, and I know a lot of people have been eager to get their hands on this sort of source book.

The book will use the same ruleset as Dark Heresy and Rogue Trader (so no Warhammer 3rd Edition-style-boxed sets here). It looks to be a more focused game; everyone plays some sort of Space Marine, each an elite warrior drawn from the ranks of Space Marine chapters across the galaxy.

I'm reading through Rogue Trader now, and while I think I prefer its mercantile mix of all-or-nothing trade gambles, utterly self-confident crew, and deep space horrors, Deathwatch may be a game I need to add to my library. If nothing else, I'm sure I could get my gaming group to play a one shot or two.

Ever since Chewbacca defeated R2-D2 in holochess, geeks have wanted a virtual table top for their games. Things have taken a major step in that direction with SurfaceScapes, a proof-of-concept app for Microsoft surface created by students at Carnegie Mellon University. It's based on the D&D 4th Edition rules, and those who've seen it are suitably impressed:

• blog.seattlepi.com: Dungeons & Dragons, Microsoft Surface are a match made in Blackmoor
• KoboldQuarterly.com: The Perfect Table: A Return to D&D SurfaceScapes

For those who haven't seen it before, Microsoft Surface is a sort of digital coffee table; it's got a large, flat touch sensitive screen (kind of like an upsized and hard-to-move iPhone. SurfaceScapes puts an interactive map on the Surface, which you can interact with by moving around specially designed miniatures. All of the rules you need to run the game (e.g. movement, powers, etc.) are built into the game, and you can interact with your character through a handheld device (e.g. an iPod touch or smart phone).

Dragon Ball is a series well known for it's long fight sequences. Some may say too long, and when referring to the anime they would be right.

The popularity of the manga caused the animators to fast track the series, so fast they rand out of source material. To slow down the pace of the anime the animators drew out the fighting sequences, causing the long drawn out fights the series is so infamous for. So it's no surprise the a majority of the games created from the Dragon Ball franchise are fighting games, the latest being Dragon Ball Raging Blast.