Nuketown

First Impressions

First Impressions: Innsmouth Horror Expansion

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Wed, 12/30/2009 - 2:54pm

The Innsmouth Horror expansion for Arkham Horror showed up under the Geek Tree this holiday season, and the day after Christmas some friends and I broke it out for a Saturday afternoon horrorfest.

It's an impressive expansion. Unlike our last expansion, The Black Goat of the Woods, this one is a full expansion with its own sideboard for the village of Innsmouth.  Innsmouth adds 12 new locations (along with their own location decks), 16 new characters, 12 new Great Old Ones, story quests for characters (including the base game, and the expansions), and a new Deep Uprising mechanic.

Anticipating Bioware's Dragon Age

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Sun, 09/27/2009 - 5:30am

When it comes to western-style Computer RPGs, the single best designers around have to be Bioware. They created the fantastic high magic, D&D-spawned Balder's Gate, the Star Wars-themed Knights of the Old Republic, the Oriental adventure Jade Empire and the space opera Mass Effect.

This fall they're returning to their fantasy roots with Dragon Age: Origins, a surprisingly blood-drenched sword-and-sorcery RPG. I say "surprisingly" because although my friends have been talking about it for months, I hadn't actually gone looking for any of the promotional videos. After being approached about reviewing the game at Nuketown, I decided to go and browse YouTube for Dragon Age: Origins videos, and found a small horde of them.

Initial Thoughts about HackMaster Basic

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Wed, 07/22/2009 - 4:30pm

HackMaster BasicAt Origins 2009 I had the pleasure of playing in an Introduction to HackMaster Basic session run by Steve Johansson, one of the designers (Dave Kenzer, another designer, was running the other table). Full disclosure: I'm a staff writer for Knights of the Dinner Table but when it comes to HackMaster I'm as much newbie as anyone else.

HackMaster Basic ($19.99, Kenzer & Co.) is a new beginning for HackMaster; the first edition of the game was based on Advanced Dungeons & Dragons with a number of supplementary (and often humerous) mechanics tagged on. After losing the D&D 1E license , KenzerCo decided to reboot HackMaster with their own game engine.

The end result, featured in HackMaster Basic, is a mix of old and new. It's touted as being the very best in old school gaming, but in truth it manages to sneak in a number of innovations into the old beast. The end result is something that I think could work for a lot of folks who enjoyed the older editions of D&D, but are looking to mix up their games.

And in my 37th Year I Conquered the Inner Sphere

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Wed, 12/17/2008 - 8:33pm
Classic Battletech Introductory Box Set: A look at all the good stuff that comes with the boxed set, including maps, minis, setting history, intro rules, and mech technical readoutsClassic Battletech Introductory Box Set: A look at all the good stuff that comes with the boxed set, including maps, minis, setting history, intro rules, and mech technical readouts

It's my birthday today, and I've been having fun playing with my toys, foremost of which is the Classic Battletech Introductory Box Set that my sister Kristen and her husband got me.

The box set has led to something of a resurgence of the game in my group. We've played Battletech on and off for years, but the cool thing about this game is that it puts us all on even footing.

D&D 4E Annotated Playtest: Goblin Smackdown

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Thu, 06/19/2008 - 1:44pm

My gaming group held our first 4th edition playtest this week, pitting a group of first-level characters against a wandering band of goblins. The battle took place among a couple of low hills, with the adventurers surprising a band of goblins eating roasted dog around a guttering campfire. There was no role-playing component to the encounter; this was strictly a mechanical test.

First Impressions of D&D 4th Edition

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Tue, 06/17/2008 - 12:07pm

D&D 4E Players Handbook Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition is upon us. I've spent last two weeks or so readying through the Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition core rule books, and my gaming group had our first character creation session two weeks ago. We'd hoped to jump into the game sooner, but alas I had a business trip to Tacoma last week, which delayed the first round of playtesting and the formal launch of the campaign to this week. Fortunately, the trip gave me plenty of time to read the books, and garner some some solid impressions of the new game.

Game Day: How I learned to stop fearing and love D&D 4E

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Fri, 06/06/2008 - 1:18pm

Ok, maybe "love" isn't the right word. "Tolerate" might be better, but the sentiment is the same: for the first time in months, I'm looking forward to my gaming group's playtest of Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition.

First, some background. My gaming group's been together for 12 years and we've played in the World of Greyhawk that entire time. We've had a bunch of different campaigns, adventuring in our home grown city of Obsidian Bay, dealing with the rising threat of the Temple of Elemental Evil, and liberating the Grand Duchy of Geoff from the giant menace, but all that time we were in Greyhawk.

So yeah, our gaming group has some serious history.

My First D&D 4E Character: Field General Zhoran

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Fri, 06/06/2008 - 1:04pm

D&D 4E is upon us ... and I've created my first character for the game. If I’ve learned one thing about the game in doing this, it’s that the 4E's mechanics don’t fit easily into the old fantasy molds. To that end, I’ve been building out my own 4E campaign setting called Planetorn (detailed in a previous "Game Theory" post), in which a terrible war is ripping through the planes, destroying worlds and tearing people from their realities.

Field General Zhoran is the first 4E character I’ve created for this setting, but he’s not the first character for the campaign setting: that honor belongs to Zilanderan the Second, the Book of Nine Swords swordmage I created for our D&D 3.x campaign.

Can the Pathfinder RPG divine the path to D&D’s future?

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Tue, 04/01/2008 - 9:56pm
Cover: Pathfinder RPG

My gaming group’s been playing in the World of Greyhawk for more than a decade. Greyhawk’s a traditional fantasy setting, one of the first for D&D, and it’s very much inspired by the likes of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. It’s a sword and sorcery realm in which the story revolves around rank-and-file adventurers, rather than the antics of super-powered heroics of uber-mages or unstoppable drow warriors.

The setting, and our campaign, has a lot of history. We’re not eager to give up either.

Toybox Wars Playtest

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Sat, 03/22/2008 - 5:01pm

Toybox WarsToybox Wars is a table-top miniatures game in which the inhabitants of your toybox rise up to fight each other to the death. The core mechanic is simple. Each toy -- be it a miniature car, squad of army men, teddybear -- is represented by 10 six-sided dice divided into one of three pools: Dodge Dice, Attack Dice, Floating Dice. At the start of every turn, players allocate their dice between the pools, depending on whether they want to focus on offense or defense, or hedge their bets with the floating dice, which can be used for both.