Ken Newquist 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
Now that it looks like my gaming group’s long-proposed Knights of the Old Republic campaign may actually be coming to fruition, I’ve been stocking up on source books. The first of these is Star Wars: Threats of the Galaxy, which I hoped would provide me with a toolbox of non-player characters, monsters and other challenges … Read more
I write too much. This is not a new or sudden revelation. I’ve known since college that I could fill a notebook with ideas when preparing for a night’s game of Dungeons & Dragons. I might write 12,000 words to describe a three-story arc adventure, and use 1/4 of what I wrote. That’s grossly inefficient, … Read more
It’s appropriate that the Pathfinder RPG Beta would be released while my gaming group’s taking a two-week break from our D&D 4th Edition playtest. During the hiatus we’re tying up some loose ends in our D&D 3.5 Dark City campaign, which is a role-playing intensive, urban campaign set in the World of Greyhawk. Dark City’s … Read more
High-level play within D&D 3rd Edition is hard. Whether you’re playing 3.0 or 3.5, the end result is the same: thousands of feats, hundreds of prestige classes and gods-only-know how many spells give rise to complicated game mechanics that slow play to a crawl. Iterative attacks, in which high-level martial classes like the fighter or … Read more
I went to my first-ever baseball game with my dad last night, as we watched the Lehigh Valley IronPigs take on the Buffalo Bisons at Coca-Cola Park in Allentown, Pa.
It took us a while to get there, seeing as how I’m 36 and he’s 66, but it was worth the wait. The IronPigs are the AAA affiliate of the Philadelphia Phillies, which means they’re one step down from the Show. The new stadium reflects that; it’s a first-rate, beautiful stadium. I doubt there’s a bad seat in the house; we had field-level seats down the first-base line and even we had a good view. It was also cheap; tickets were $9 a person, and even with the entire family there — my parents, Sue and the two kids — the whole thing end up costing me about $60.
It was fantastic being there with the kids, sitting in foul ball territory with Jordan, gloves in hand, waiting for fly balls to come soaring our way. None came close, but it was fun to watch and wait all the same. Jordan was half-crazy with excitement about being at the game, and while she got a little wild at the end, she loved it. It was a good trial run for going to a big league game — like watching the Mets at Citi Field next year.
After about almost four weeks of consistent (ok, more consistent) exercise, I’ve reached 208 lbs., down 6 lbs. from my starting weight of 214. It’s nice to see progress, and I’m hoping to do as well in the next four weeks. That said … it’s going to be tough. The start of the semester is … Read more
One of Luke’s first words was “elmo”. No, not the Sesame Street character. He rarely watches TV, and when he does, it’s not Sesame Street. No, “elmo” was his word for truck. Cars he calls go-gos (no doubt from the many readings of Go Dogs Go he’s enjoyed) but trucks have always been elmos. In recent months, he’s mixed this up. Dump trucks? Dumpy elmos. Big trucks? Bumpy elmos. No matter how many times we said otherwise, trucks were elmos.
Until last week. When, while walking up the stairs to his room, he decided to call them trucks, and keep calling them trucks. They’re simply not elmos any more. Infact, if you say “elmo”, he corrects you and says “truck”.
All of this is part of his toddler word explosion. Car. Grass. Green. Money. Bike. Blue. Saint. Move. Play. The words just keep coming, as do the combinations, as he tells the dog (that’d be saint) to move, points out blue trucks, and exclaims that he wants to play on his bike.