202 lbs: The GenCon 6

So that plan I had for GenCon to hit the gym every morning before my games started? Yeah, that didn’t work out so well. Combined with 11 days of family vacation including lots of good food, but not a lot of hard exercise, GenCon saw me gain six pounds.

Battlestar Galactica RPG: Playtest Results

The Hellion-class heavy cruiser Cerberus took flight Friday night as my gaming group put the Battlestar Galactica RPG through its paces. As I wrote in my earlier Game Day column, the players took on the role of members of the Hellfire Aces, an elite squad of Marines and pilots attached to the Cerberus, a decommissioned … Read more

Game Day: Battlestar Galactica: The Flight of the Cerberus

The new Battlestar Galactica RPG was a long time coming, and for a while, it seemed as legendary (and as likely to be found) as Earth is in the television series. But Margaret Weis Productions was selling the game at GenCon, and the general public should be able to get their hands on it by … Read more

Can Preshoolers Get Drunk on Hand Sanitizer?

Can a prescooler get drunk and even die from drinking hand sanitizer? The short answer is … yes, they can. The following e-mail describes swallowing a squirt of hand sanitizer was enough to make a four-year-old loopy and while it gets some of the specifics wrong — namely that the child couldn’t have had an … Read more

GenCon 2007: The Big Pile of Loot

GenCon is over. And now I’ve got a huge pile of loot sitting in my gaming room, just waiting to be read. Amazingly, there’s not a single Dungeons & Dragons book to be found among the stack, not even the Expedition to Castle Greyhawk, which I was sorely tempted to buy, but resisted at the … Read more

GenCon 2007, Day 4: Sundered Skies and Chessex Dice

As the morning sun shone on the final day of GenCon I arrived at my last game of the convention, a Savage Worlds game taking place in a post-apocalyptic fantasy setting called Sundered Skies. After liberating a dragon from the deathly bonds of necromancer, I returned to the exhibition hall to complete one final quest: … Read more

CNN: Google Earth to launch Sky for stargazers

Google is launching a virtual stargazing program called Sky. It will allow users to explore millions of stars, and will support layers for things such as views from the Hubble Space Telescope. One has to wonder how long it will take the Trekkers to start mapping out Gene Roddenbury’s universe in this thing…

GenCon 2007, Day 3: Star Wars, Exhibit Hall, Savage Pirates, RPG Podcast Party, Mall Zombies

I woke up far too early on Saturday to get to an 8 a.m. Star Wars d20 game. The game let out early, which gave me time to wander the exhibit hall until exhaustion sent me retreating to my hotel room … only to be called back by a phone call from Erilar about a … Read more

GenCon 2007, Day 2: Battlestar Galactica, RPG Podcasters, Solomon Kane

Thursday’s D&D 4E buzz subsided by Friday morning, though a bunch of the special 4E t-shirts could be found in the convention hall. I will say there weren’t nearly as many as when 3E was announced in 1999, though admittedly the t-shirts for that edition were much, much cooler (listing all the major changes being … Read more