Ken Newquist 
I began playing Dungeons & Dragons in grade school, and I used Apple computers almost as long. I started writing up adventures on my Apple II and printing them on an dot matrix printer, took a brief sojourn into the world of Windows PCs during and after college, and then returned to the Mac with the release of Mac OS X.
After too many years away, I’m headed back to my regional gaming convention, MEPACon. Held in the Poconos for many years, the convention moved to the Lehigh Valley for Fall 2022. It’s now 15 minutes from my house instead of 50, which means I can easily commute back and forth. The convention runs November 11-13, 2022 … Read more
Scum & Villainy took over the Lair of Secrets podcast for six episodes in 2022 as we ran a short-run campaign of the Blades in the Dark spin-off game. This post looks at the campaign, its players, and what we learned.
Since Fall 2019, the Gamer Working Group (my lunch time gaming group) has been running a new action movie-style campaign. Inspired by the Fast and the Furious franchise, the campaign is about a group of freelance agents undertaking questionable jobs for fun and profit. We started with the climatic scene of our last mission: blowing a … Read more
Space. The Final Frontier. These are the science fiction RPGs that I’d love to play, if only I could find the time, crew, and mental bandwidth to play them: Eclipse Phase, 2nd Edition – A new, allegedly easier to play, iteration of the post-human science fiction/horror role-playing game. Paranoia – The satirical (and usually fatal) role-playing game … Read more
For years, we made fun of the Forgotten Realms‘ overpowered completeness. We bled grey, and the World of Greyhawk is where our heroes lived, died, and lived again. Flash forward to our own Middle Ages, and we’re actually adventuring in the Realms … and enjoying it. Our current Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition campaign is set in the … Read more
Summer 2022 is over, but the Nuketown summer reading list continues. I didn’t make as much progress on the list as I’d hoped this summer. I never quite got into that morning walk & audio book routine, nor the morning coffee and print book routine, so progress was slow. I also only made it to the … Read more
Once upon a time, I loved engaging with social media. Back when Web 2.0 was new and new social media services seemed to spawn weekly, my friends and I would jump from service to service, looking for one that fit our needs. Over time, things settled into a predictable pattern – Twitter for engaging with … Read more
Nuketown social media posts for, well, pretty much Summer 2022. BOOKS | Reason – How Slaughterhouse-Five Became a Repeated Target of Book Burners GAMES | Looper – Tiny Fonts That Almost Ruined Great Games GAMES | The Breach This looks interesting: “a game set in a dystopian retro-future. Inspired by the great science fiction novels of the 70s, The Breach … Read more
I’ve never played a Star Trek role-playing game, but I’m hoping to change that with Modiphius Entertainment’s Star Trek Adventures (Amazon). The core rule book is a hefty but engaging tome. It’s packed full of the lore of Star Trek and it’s far too easy to get lost in it as you read. One of my goals for the summer … Read more