Role-Playing Games

It began with a sword called Winter. Jorm, one of the party's dwarven heroes, found the long sword still clutched in the skeletal hand of a Northman barbarian. It will end at the The Lost Sky Citadel of Akrafell, a dwarven fortress at the top of the world of Golarion.

The Dragon Age Role-Playing Game is a rules-light, fast-playing pen-and-paper game based on Bioware's computer RPG of the same name. It's published by Green Ronin. My lunchtime gaming group is currently running through "The Dalish Curse" introductory adventure from Set 1, and I've decided to assemble a list of resources for the game.

Star Wars: The Essential Atlas is the best source book never released for any edition of the Star Wars RPG. While Del Rey is publishing the Atlas as a general interest reference book, it's beautiful maps, graphical timelines, and planetary write-ups make the book an excellent for gamers, regardless of whether they're playing d6, Saga Edition, or a homebrew of their own design.

Inspired by the Wil Wheaton's Tabletop episodes, my lunchtime gaming group decided to put Ragnarok on hold and try our hand at Green Ronin's Dragon Age RPG.

We're using Dragon Age RPG Set 1, which meant rolling up characters Old School-style rather than using the point buy system from Set 2.

My Second Darkness Pathfinder campaign is rapidly approaching its climax. The heroes recently started Book 4: Eternal Night but, as is often the case with my group, they quickly went off the proscribed path. Far off the proscribed path.

It illustrates one of the big lessons I learned while running an adventure path.

My group's been playing Second Darkness for over a year now, and if there's one weakness we've found in the Golarion campaign setting, it's religion.

The setting is geopolitically diverse, with the same sort of kitchen-sink-of-cultures approach that made Greyhawk our go-to setting for so long. But what it lacks are gods.

I love Delta Green. I rarely get to run it, but Delta Green and its sequel, Countdown have more than earned their place on my game bookshelf. This is thanks to its modern horror take on the Chtulhu mythos and compelling scenarios like "The Night Floors", in which a certain play dooms an entire apartment building.

A few years ago I picked up Weird War II by Pinnacle Entertainment Group to supplement my The Day After Ragnarok book with World War II Savage Worlds rules. The rules were fine -- it helped with the demolitions skill and gave me access to an armory of guns and vehicles -- but just wasn't weird enough for my taste. The history of the weird war was pretty much the same as the history of our war; the weirdness was at the edges and never infected the larger narrative in the way that, say, Delta Green did.