Signs & Portents 10th Anniversary Issue Available
Wizards.com: Dark Legacy of Evard Begins May 11, 2011
Wizards of the Coast's new season of Dungeons & Dragons Encounters begins on May 11, 2011 with Dark Legacy of Evard, a series of linked 1-hour scenarios that involve one of D&D's classic wizards.
Duponde may look like nothing more than a sleepy little stopover along the broad banks of the Nentir River. But the village harbors a dark secret: The tomb of the notorious Evard the Black, master of shadow magic, lies in the town’s cemetery.
Dragon Age, Set 2 available for pre-order
Green Ronin's Dragon Age: Set 2 is available for pre-order as a print-and-pdf bundle: buy the boxed set for $39.95 and get the PDF for $5. The new set looks like it'll throw some meat onto Dragon Age's efficient skeleton by expanding the game to level's 6-10.
SF Site: May 2011 Review List
SF Site's May 2011 reviews are now online.
GameCryer.com: Pandemic
My review of the infectious board game Pandemic is up on GameCryer.com.
My gaming group enjoys collaborative board games, but the biggest and best of those – Arkham Horror – can be a grueling marathon. We were looking for a faster game that delivered the same level of intense, collaborative game play, and we found it in Pandemic. The game’s easily playable in 60 minutes and while we lost the game three times in as many hours, they were enjoyable defeats.
Radio Active #85: War of the Pod People
Spring is looming larger, but just incase it gets waylaid by a late-winter storm, I decided to have a spring-themed surprise party for my wife.
In geekier news, I started up a "Gamer Working Group" at my dayjob and re-launched my gaming group's GriffCrier.com web site. There are no netheads in this show, but don't worry -- you'll still be able to feed that net addiction with a round up of the podcasts I'm listening to.
Star Wars Roundup: Mysticism, Chevin, Vehicle Rules, Dragon Age Adaptions
A round of Star Wars RPG-related posts and web links, including Sterling Hershey's "Star Wars Wednesday" posts about "Adventuring in the Tree", "Running Published Campaigns" and "Species Creation". There are also revised vehicle design rules for Star Wars d6, an adaptation of the AGE system from Green Ronin's Dragon Age RPG, a love letter to the d6 system, and a discussion of story reverals in RPGs.
Picture of the Day: Castle Ravenloft
My Picture of the Day project is continuing -- progress has been somewhat haphazard, but I have been taking and posting pictures.
This one's from Game Day on March 4, 2011. It was a board game week, so we decided to give the Castle Ravenloft boardgame another try. A separate set of Blackrazors had tried it a few weeks earlier and had been underwhelmed. This week's didn't fair much better.
The game is essentially a stripped-down version of D&D 4E. That's not a bad thing (at least for the half of the group that likes 4E) and tt runs well enough. The problem we found was there wasn't enough immergent story in the game -- meaning unlike Arkham Horror's expansions, there wasn't much story meat holding the game's adventure skeleton together.
MEPACON Spring 2011 Events: Savage Worlds, Dragon Age, Pandemic
MEPACon Spring 2011 is being held Friday, April 8 through Sunday, April 10. It's the 10th anniversary of the convention, and they're going to be having a special reception Friday night. As always I'm looking forward to the convention, but this time around I'm taking my own advice and only running two RPGs.
GameCryer.com: Gamma World
My review of Gamma World is up at GameCryer.com. As an introductory game I think it's superior to the D&D Red Box. While the Red Box gives you a map, some tokens, dice and a barebones version of the rules, once you get past the initial adventure you need to jump to the Essentials books.