The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan is an Old School death trap of a dungeon. Originally released as a tournament module at Origins in 1979, the adventure was subsequently published as a module for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. In 2017 it was updated to D&D 5th Edition and released as part of the Tales from the … Read more
When D&D 5th Edition came out, my gaming group launched two playtest campaigns. Obsidian Frontier was a sandbox campaign set in the early days of our homegrown city, Obsidian Bay. It was focused on trying out the new rules and running a typical D&D campaign. The second campaign was Heart of Darkness, a story-driven game … Read more
Classic Battletech is an old favorite of my gaming group. A few years ago we flirted with the idea of a Battletech campaign using a variety of possible rules (Battletech A Time of War, Risus, Savage Worlds) but it never quite took off Instead most of our games have been one-shots at Nuke(m)Con or on … Read more
In prepping for my Saturday group’s D&D 5e playtest I created a dragonborn paladin of Bahamut named Bharosh Goldenscales. The group has been adventuring in the Wilderlands of High Fantasy and although this is mostly a mechanical playtest, I couldn’t resist building out a backstory. That meant figuring out how the dragonborn might fit into … Read more
After a few months of talking about the game, my monthly Saturday gaming group decided to give D&D 5th Edition a try. Rather than run a playtest campaign) like the Blackrazors, our dungeon master is running us through a series of combat encounters at different levels. This lets everyone get a feel for the combat-centric … Read more
It’s a funny thing to sit down to write your next adventure in a campaign and realize that somewhere along the line it went from “campaign” to “long-running campaign”. That’s what happened with Obsidian Frontier, a sandbox-style campaign set in the World of Greyhawk in the early CY 500s. We launched it as a playtest … Read more
As I wrote last week, the Blackrazors and their children will be running through the venerable module B2: The Keep on the Borderlands as part of our D&D Kids campaign. We’re playing D&D 5th Edition, and are running a version of the module updated for that edition. We chose B2 for a couple of reasons: … Read more
The next generation of Blackrazor Guilders have strapped on their fathers’ swords, sat down at the gaming table, and begun slinging dice. We have three kids (two boys, one girl) in the immediate group who want to play, and we have two of my son’s friends (both boys) who are also eager to start casting … Read more
I finally knocked one of the items off my RPG bucket list: “Play Eclipse Phase“. My gaming group has been kicking around ideas for an alternate game we can run when we’re not playing D&D and Eclipse Phase is a game that two of us had wanted to play for a while. The game is … Read more
This winter’s never-ending parade of Northeastern snowstorms has played havoc with two things in my life: skiing and gaming. The storms marched through the region with exhausting regularity on Sundays and Mondays, spoiling the Sunday game and then canceling skiing.