The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers Soundtrack

The Two Towers provides gamers with a second invigorating soundtrack to augment their campaign’s audiospace, albeit one that isn’t quite as successful as its predecessor, The Fellowship of the Ring. As a movie soundtrack, The Two Towers is very enjoyable, providing an epic, cinematic score to a movie that sweeps across the vast lands of … Read more

Sleepless Nights in Nuketown

What a weekend. It started with a fun game of Settlers of Catan, and ended with a 2 a.m. trip for StarGirl to the emergency room. It started on Thursday, when StarGirl became cranky and moody. She was drooling too, so figured she was getting another tooth. But with 16 teeth already, we were surprised … Read more

The Libertarian Gamer: Spycraft, Part 2

In The Libertarian Gamer: Spycraft, Part 1, I discussed the basic outline of the campaign and possible heroic organizations. But what’s a hero without a villain? The Villains Fortunately, when you’re running an espionage game, there are plenty to choose from! The traditional mad dictator, hellbent on world domination via some sort of super weapon, … Read more

The Libertarian Gamer: Spycraft, Part 1

Spycraft (Amazon) is Alderac’s d20-based game of modern espionage. It draws upon the classics of the genre — James Bond, Mission: Impossible, The A Team, Sneakers, Alias — to create a game that’s reminiscent of classic RPGs like James Bond: 007 and Top Secret. By default, the Spycraft source book assumes that the players are … Read more

Browncoats Unite!

The Web site for Joss Whedon’s upcoming Serenity movie, based on his “failed” series Firefly is online. Although Firefly was cancelled by Fox after only a handful of episodes, it managed to garner a small band of fans in the short time it was on the air. When it was released on DVD, those fans … Read more

Get Caught In A Game of Thrones

George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones offers fantasy fans a gritty, realistic medieval adventure that stands in sharp contrast to the aloof elves and all-pervasive magic populating endless Tolkien knockoffs. The book is set in the land of Westeros, a fantastic realm removed in time and space from our own medieval period. In this … Read more

NukemCon: Afterthoughts

Grey and white robot-like figurines battle on a hexagonal map.

NukemCon has come and gone, and now that I’ve caught up on my sleep and my caffeine twitches have faded, it’s time to evaluate our first-ever home-grown convention. Overall, I think it went quite well. We got to play a heck of a lot games, although not nearly as many as I’d hoped. The final … Read more

Nancy Drew and the Lords of Destruction

I love Amazon’s personalization features, constantly offering up new products for me to check out, but occasionally its recommendations veer into the surreal. Take, for example, this recent recommendation: Nancy Drew: The Secret of Shadow Ranch was released just 4 days ago on July 16, 2004; We thought you’d be interested because you bought Diablo … Read more

NukemCon: Day 3

A close-up view of small fantasy figures on a gridded battle map.

The sun rose on NukemCon to find many a bleary-eyed gamer driving through Phillipsburg looking for breakfast. After snagging sustenance at McDonald’s and Manhattan Bagel, the stalwart dice-throwers returned to Easton and the first session of the day: Dungeons & Dragons. It was the third part of the D&D adventure we’d been playing all weekend, … Read more