RPG Blog Carnival

Visiting All Those Worlds…

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The swirling clouds of Jupiter.

November is done and with it, Nuketown’s first-ever turn at hosting the RPG Blog Carnival. Inspired by the “All These Worlds” line from 2010: A Space Odyssey Two, the carnival explored all manners of world-building, from new planets to undersea realms to stellar frontiers. In total eight blogs contributed 15 entries to the carnival. The Expanding Frontier kicked things off “Expanded … Read more

The Refuge of Durak

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A series of stone walls, with archways leading onward.

The Refuge of Durak is a pocket dimension that served as an oasis of law for the planar explorer known as Durak the Rigid. An archmage and planar explorer, Durak held to his moral code in any situation, steadfastly embracing his ideals even in the face of absolute chaos. Durak the Rigid’s home — the alternative material … Read more

All These Worlds…

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A view of Saturn backlit by the sun.

Whether it’s the subterranean world beneath our feet, other planets racing through the sky, or intersections with other planes of existence, the worlds we can visit through role-playing games are infinite. The November 2018 RPG Blog Carnival hopes to capture a few of them. The topic is inspired by the final message from the David … Read more

Of Prequels and Legacies

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Two RPG boxed sets and two RPG books, all connected to the World of Greyhak campaign setting.

February’s RPG Blog Carnival topic is “Time Marches On”. Hosted by Daemons & Deathrays, the topic looks at the role of time in role-playing campaigns. Time’s very much at the heart of our two ongoing D&D 5th Edition campaigns. The campaigns were created as bookends for our 10+ year Blackrazor Guild campaign. The campaign took … Read more

Gaming on a Budget

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A stack of role-playing-game related books.

January’s RPG Blog topic is “Tabletop Gaming on a Budget”, hosted by Renaissance Gamer. A lot of folks equated gaming on a budget with gaming on the cheap, which is a perfectly reasonable (and entertaining) approach. For me, the hardest part of gaming on a budget is actually having a budget. Exactly what a budget … Read more

The Library of Obsidian Bay

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An arcane sphere illuminates stacks of books in a fantasy library.

“It’s In a Book” is the theme for December 2017’s RPG Blog Carnival. Books — and the libraries that hold them — drove the later half of our Obsidian Frontier campaign, leading us to explore the written word in the World of Greyhawk campaign setting. It began with the players. After 30-odd chapters in the campaign, we’d hit a natural … Read more

The Three-Page Manifesto, Revisited

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A hand-drawn dungeon map and gray dice with red pipes cover typed game notes.

The latest RPG Blog Carnival encourages us to “revisit the past”. Hosted by GameMastery, the kickoff post discusses writing a follow-up or sequel to a prior post. For me, that’s revisiting “The Three-Page Manifesto”. Written in 2008, the column saw me grappling with balancing gaming and fatherhood. At the time my kids were 6 and 3 and my … Read more

The Lost Continents and Ancient Magic of Weird Pulp

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A map of the lost continent of Mu, indicating that it is in the Pacific Ocean.

“Occult Mysteries and Magic”, is topic of the May 2017 RPG Blog Carnival. Although my gaming group has been playing Dungeons & Dragons for decades, a game that has magic as one of its corner stones, we rarely delved into mysteries of the arcane. To be sure, there was ancient magic hidden in Greyhawk’s history, … Read more

Into the Obsidian Maze

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A sprawling map of a dungeon; orange and yellow areas represent rooms and corridors; black represents the walls/mountain.

April 2017’s RPG Carnival topic is “Carnival of Megadungeons!”, during which the gaming blogosphere looked at this staple of fantasy (and occasionally science fiction) role-playing games. I suspect most gaming groups of a certain age have a megadungeon that they call their own — it’s a trope of Dungeons & Dragos that calls to us like dragons … Read more

Games by Candlelight

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A close up view of the Curse of Straud cover, with a camp fire visible to the left side of the picture.

RPG Blog Carnival logoMarch 2017’s RPG Carnival is “Things in the Dark”, and for many people that’s about things that go bump in the night. For me, it’s about playing games in the dark … when there’s nothing to hold back the night save candles, lanterns, and camp fires.

Each summer my family goes to Lake Champlain to spend a week or two with our friends. It’s a rustic cabin experience — no indoor plumbing, no electric lights, and when the sun goes down, we play board and card games by kerosine lanterns and candle light. The last two summers we’ve added Dungeons & Dragons to the mix as the kids learned how to play the game and we started racing against the setting sun to get our last round of combat in.

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