Ken Newquist 
Nuke(m)Con is coming back with guns blazing. After a one-year hiatus, my gaming group’s homegrown convention returns September 19-21 with a slate of western-themed role-playing games. We’ll be playing Serenity, Dogs in the Vineyard, Aces & Eights and Deadlands: Reloaded. We’re also running two high level Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 adventures on Friday and Saturday. During … Read more
One of the things I’ve always envied about the folks working at Wizards of the Coast is their ability to have a lunch-time game. In thinking about it, the single biggest challenge in running a lunch game is not time, but players. If you can find enough co-workers to get a game together, then time management, rather than time, becomes the challenge.
So the question becomes … how do you run a game in only an hour?
Since I mentioned last week that I thought the RPG blogging community should do more reviews, I thought it might be a good idea to follow-up on that and see what’s available this week. It turns out it’s a good week for reviews, with a slew having been posted for the new D&D 4th Edition … Read more
Rather than just complain about how difficult high level combat is in D&D 3.5, my gaming group’s decided to do something about it. We’ve created a playtest group who’s willing to put in the extra effort it takes to play a high level game … and to figure out what, if anything, we can do … Read more
Superheroes need tall buildings to leap in a single bound … not to mention needing them to serve as backdrops for battles, penthouse homes for their mild-mannered millionaire personas, and possibly even secret lairs.
Freedom City’s Pyramid Plaza offers almost all this, and its entry in the Freedom City Atlas provides everything GMs need to incorporate it into their Mutants & Masterminds games.
We ran our last D&D 4E session on Friday, concluding the playtest campaign that ran all summer. Since this was our last hurrah (at least for a while) we decided to level our characters up from 2nd to 9th level to see how they played. Here are a few random observations that popped up during … Read more
The RPG Bloggers Network has been a tremendous success, sparking plenty of cross-blog traffic and comments. I’ve read lots of great articles and discovered a bunch of new sites, but I think there’s one area where the community can improve: game reviews.
Simply put, there aren’t enough of them. There’s plenty of speculation, analysis and debate but there aren’t nearly enough reviews (or, if they are there, they are quickly lost among the flurry of other posts). The RPG Bloggers guys are working on improvements to bring order to the chaos by adding new categories, but even then I think there will be a need for bloggers to knuckle down and review games.
I have as much work to do as anyone else. It shocked me earlier this week when I looked at my own RPG reviews category and discovered that five months had passed between my Battlestar Galactica RPG review and my new one for Star Wars: Threats of the Galaxy. Now granted, my sense of what I’ve written is distorted by all the writing I do for SCIFI, and I’ve certainly posted a bunch of quasi-reviews in the form of playtest reports, but still … there need to be more.
Today is the last day of our D&D 4th Edition playtest campaign. After adventuring across two Alternative Material Planes and Sigil, City of Doors, we’ve decided to leave the game with a bang. We’ve advanced our heroes from 2nd to 9th level to try out some higher level play as they liberate the ancient ziggurat of … Read more
Shortly after graduating from college, I tried starting a gaming club in the Lehigh Valley, Pa. I was fresh off having helped create the Role-Playing Underground when I was a student at Lock Haven University, and I was desperate to get a new campaign up and running.
It failed. We had a few meetings, and I was able to find enough people to get my own campaign off the ground, but in the end I didn’t understand the fundamental difference between a college game club, and a real-world one. In college, the club was about recruiting people for your game. In the real-world, it was about playing games
Quick note: for those who might have been drawn to this post by the casino going up Bethlehem, Pa., I’m talking about role-playing, card, board and war games, not gambling.
Ultimately, I was able to patch together enough players from the club and some local cons. Once I had a group of my own, the need for the club faded. So did the club.
My good friend (and geeky partner-in-crime at Knights of the Dinner Table) Mur Lafferty launched her the print edition of her superhero novel Playing for Keeps today. Go buy the book. Initially released as a podcast, Playing For Keeps tells the story of Keepsie, a bartender with third-rate superhero powers that kept her out of … Read more