Nuketown

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What I want from D&D Next

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Sun, 01/22/2012 - 11:12pm

Wizards of the Coast has announced D&D Next, the successor to D&D 4th Edition aimed squarely at unifying the game's fractured fan base. My gaming group is practically a case study for 5th Edition -- we played 2nd Edition, 3rd Edition (both flavors), and 4th Edition, but finally gave up on the game when the group couldn't agree on which version to play. 60% of the group wanted to play D&D 3x or the Pathfinder Beta, 40% wanted to play D&D 4th Edition. We split the difference and played Star Wars: Saga Edition, which addressed many of our issues with both systems, and gave us a much needed break from the fantasy genre.

We've since returned to fantasy ... but not D&D. Instead we're playing the Pathfinder RPG and Paizo's Second Darkness adventure path. I can't speculate on what it would take to bring the Blackrazor Guild back to D&D -- we simply haven't talked about it enough -- but I know that I am looking for.

Game Day: Noble Armada

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Sun, 01/08/2012 - 1:23pm

The Blackrazors’ annual holiday hiatus will come to an end in a hail of laser fire and missile explosions as we play A Call to Arms: Noble Armada. The Fading Suns-themed successor to Mongoose Publishing’s Babylon 5: A Call to Arms starship battle is fast, fun and often brutal.

It faithfully recreates Wrath of Khan-style slugfests between ships of the line, with the initial weathering of the ship’s shields and hull, and then punch through into critical systems. We’ve had fun in our first three playtests, and I expect more of the same tonight.

Game Day: Second Darkness

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Sun, 10/16/2011 - 5:00am

I did something I've never done before in September: I kicked off someone else's campaign. Ok, technically it's still my campaign, but material belongs to Pazio. The campaign is the Second Darkness adventure path, and if all goes according to plan, it will see our seven freshly-minted heroes face the ancient hidden evil of the drow in an attempt to save the world from a second apocalypse.

I've been running my own campaigns -- for D&D, Star Wars, and Savage Worlds -- for 15 years. Over that time I've made liberal use of material from a variety of source books, including more than a few one-shot adventures, but by and large I was the one writing each week's episode. It was fun ... but it was also tremendously time consuming.

When the time game to launch a new campaign, Paizo's Pathfinder Role-Playing Game was an obvious choice. It preserved the strain of Dungeons & Dragons that my gaming group preferred, and enhanced it just enough to get rid of the things that had been driving us crazy in the 3.x branch. But the challenge with Pathfinder is that it's a crunchy, rules heavy game. When we ran Star Wars, I could easily knock out non-player characters in a night, but going with Pathfinder meant a return to magic and all its inherent complexity.

Finding the Path back to Fantasy RPGs

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Wed, 08/31/2011 - 7:44am

Inner Sea World GuideIn hindsight, we played Dungeons & Dragons for too long. Our World of Greyhawk campaign lasted 12 years, included dozens of characters, hundreds of plots, and forays into Castle Greyhawk, the Temple of Elemental Evil and our own homegrown creations. It spanned the 2nd and 3rd editions of the game and saw us buy hundreds of books.

At first glance, it might seem like D&D 4th Edition, with its wildly different ruleset, is what killed the campaign, but that was only part of it. Burnout had struck several other players (myself included), driven by both genre and rules fatigue. Not all felt that way, but after our D&D 4E playtest, it was clear we needed a change.

Game Day: The Saga Ends

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Sun, 08/28/2011 - 1:36pm

Cover: Star Wars: Saga Edition Core RulebookAfter 47 chapters, 10 episodes, and 2.5 years, our Star Wars: Shadows of the Force campaign has come to an end. What started with a fight against pirates on the jungle world of Zebulon Prime ended with against grey market salvagers in the depths of a planetary nebula. In between we saw the rise of Binary Transports, the promotion of three Jedi Knights, the training of two padawans, the discovery of an alien holocron , and numerous battles against the Force knowledge cult known as the Sith Ascendancy.

But the campaign was about far more than numbers. Along the way we changed how we play RPGs, incorporating narrative mechanics like skill challenges that created truly exceptional, truly memorable encounters, including hot-wiring a speeder while fending off high plains lizards and bouncing a starship through a proto-star nebula. We also told some really cool stories, including the adoption of a young Force sensitive Twi’lik and his training as a padawan, the epic battle with the fleet of the pirate lord Ral Duris, and lightsaber duels amid alien ruins in the sunward desert of Ryloth.

Searching for Mac RPG Tools

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Sun, 07/24/2011 - 4:30am

I'm in the progress of updating Nuketown's Mac Role-Playing Game Tools page, which has developed an embarassing case of bitrot.

Unfortunately some of the more stalwart tools, like Crystal Ball, as well as one-offs like the Town Creator and D&D Manager, are no longer available, and their sites have gone to the Great Bit Bucket in the Sky. Still others, like Dunjinni, no longer work with under Mac OS Lion and don't seem likely to be updated any time soon.

As such, there's aren't a whole lot of tools featured on the page that are actually still working. And yet, I know from researching my "Summon Web Scryer" columns for Knights of the Dinner Table that Mac compatible tools do still exist. Many of these are Java based apps that are platform indepenent, which may make them even more appealing to gamers who want to share their creations with other players.

Know of a Mac-centric app that deserves promotion? Post it as a comment below, and I'll add it to the features page as I rebuild it.

Savage Insider Issue 1 released

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Wed, 07/06/2011 - 4:54am

Savage Insider #1Savage Insider Issue 1 is a new Savage Worlds PDF magazine by Mystical Throne Entertainment. You can download it via RPGDriveThru.

Included in its inaugural pages is a one-sheet adventure, the first part of a The Crypts of the Crystal Lich serial fiction series, and a round robin Q&A session with Savage Worlds licensees.

It's nice to see Savage Worlds getting some periodical support; there's a lot of third-party product out there, but there hasn't been much in the way of a periodical to help keep the community informed about what's available. With any luck, the Savage Insider will help with that.

Savage Worlds Deluxe on sale at DriveThru RPG

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Tue, 07/05/2011 - 4:40am

Savage Worlds Explorers EditionSavage Worlds Deluxe, a hardcover version of the Savage Worlds core rules, is available as a PDF through DriveThruRPG.com. It's being pitched as a sort of special edition of the rules that expands upon, but doesn't invalidate, what came before. This version adds new setting-specific options, rules for social conflict, better and expanded examples, new artwork, and rules commentary from the creators.

I'm looking forward to the new book. I love the Explorers Edition's sleek digest format, which launched a Savage Worlds renaissance in my gaming group, but there are aspects of the rules (movement, rate of fire, vehicle chases) that I'd appreciate some elaboration on.

GameCryer.com: Unspeakable Oath #18

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Thu, 06/23/2011 - 4:55am

My review of The Unspeakable Oath #18 is up at GameCryer.com. This issue resurrects the 1990s horror RPG magazine in digital and print format, bringing with it new scenarios for Call of Cthulhu, horror reviews, and numerous adventure seeds.

Tablets at the Table, 2011 Edition

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Tue, 05/31/2011 - 7:29am

When the iPad hit a little over a year ago, there was a flurry of posts in RPG circles about tablet gaming. Since then we haven’t seen a lot of talk about them – I’m not sure if folks grew bored with the topic, or if they’ve now become so common place that they’re not worth commenting on any more.

I suspect it could be the latter. At my game table we have three iPads (two first generation, one second) and an Android tablet. For my last two sessions I ran Paizo’s Crypt of the Everflame for Pathfinder almost entirely off the iPad, using the PDF of the module and the iTunes Remote app to control music playlists on my Mac. I wasn’t entirely digital – I still used index cards to track initiative (old habits diehard) and looked up a few rules in the Pathfinder core book and the Bestiary, but I was just as likely to look up something in the Pathfinder SRD.