Blogworthy: Star Wars Backgrounds, COVID-19 Ruminations, Games for Quarantine, Pandemic Brain Fog

Join Meetings From A Galaxy Far, Far Away With These Star Wars Backgrounds – Zoom meetings are exhausting and boring. Make them a little more interesting by throwing Cloud City, and X-Wings, and Death Star ruins into your background. David Brin’s List of “Greatest Science Fiction and Fantasy Tales” – Looking for some new books … Read more

Blogworthy: Believing Virus Myths, NASA Worm, Stargate RPG, Kool Aid Man, Skyrim Mods, Mars Rover, Galactic World Building

Why smart people believe coronavirus myths talks about a phenomenon I’ve seen too many times to count: Otherwise intelligent people retweeting or re-posting questionable content without thinking it through. Case in point: people stating as fact that individuals are getting reinfected with COVID-19. There are certainly cases where people who have had the disease test … Read more

Backing ZineQuest 2

ZineQuest 2 is Kickstarter’s now-annual homage to the handcrafted print zines of yesteryear. As someone who crafted a print zine with my friends using my Commodore 64 and a dot matrix printer, I have a lot of love for the idea. For those who never experienced them, zines are fan-produced publications dedicated to any number of … Read more

Blogworthy: Floating Worlds, Tome of Beasts II, Data Detox, Savage Frontiers, Backpacking Tips

A map of the World of Greyhawk

Artists Creates Floating Worlds In Test Tubes – Rosa de Jong creates tiny models of buildings, trees, and geographic features that float on sculpted, rocky islands in a test tube. Think Avatar’s floating islands meets the traditional ship-in-a-bottle models. Greyhawk CY 576 by Anna B. Myers – Thanks to funding from her Patreon, cartographer Anna B. Myers released a refreshed … Read more

Weather in RPGs – Advice, Generators, and Tables

An example of weather in RPGs - lightning strikes down from clouds over the ocean. Darkened land can be seen to the right.

Bad snow storms and extreme weather scuttled many a Game Day over the years. They throw our RPG gaming lives into chaos, and while being able to fall back to Roll20 can help the game go on … it’s useless when it comes to shoveling snow or bailing out the basement. Just as a Nor’easter … Read more

Blogworthy: Interstellar Salvage, Star Trek, 1990s Video Game Archive, Unproductive Habits

Space-suited explorers enter a derelict starship.

The Last Parsec – Jumpcorp Guide to Interstellar Salvage: The Last Parsec is a space opera setting for Savage Worlds that has a Star Frontiers meets Mass Effect feel. This new sourcebook provides rules and setting material for exploring – and salvaging – derelict spacecraft. It sounds like a great setup for a campaign to me since you could easily … Read more

Game Day: Setting Sail for Saltmarsh

Adventurers battle an aquatic humanoid while a giant octopus attacks a sailing ship in the background.

My gaming group’s preferred campaign setting is the World of Greyhawk. We adventured there for years with our Blackrazor Guild campaign, but while we’ve walked (and been kicked off of) the streets of Greyhawk, battled the humanoid invaders of the Pomarj, and sailed the waters of the Vohoun Ocean, there’s plenty of Greyhawk we’ve haven’t seen. This is … Read more

#RPGaDay2019 – Unique

A powerful being holding two swords stares out from the cover of Amber Diceless.

The most unique RPG on my shelf is the Amber Diceless Role-Playing Game. Released by the now-defunct Phage Press, the innovative RPG eschewed dice in favor of a mechanic that relied on a rock/paper/scissors contest of abilities augmented by situational modifiers. Based on Roger Zelazny’s Amber fantasy novels, allows players to take on the roles of sons and … Read more

#RPGaDay2019 – First

The spines of a dozen or so RPG books.

The opening topic for #RPGaDay2019 is all about firsts. Rather than focus on a particular first, I decided to brainstorm a big list of them. First RPG: Dungeons & Dragons (Basic Set, circa 1981). My mom bought it for me and my world was never the same. First RPG Module: Keep on the Borderlands. I had … Read more