Games

Game Day: MEPACon Spring 2017

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A close-up shot of blue-grey polyhedral dice on a Shadowrun character sheet.

MEPACon is northeast Pennsylvania’s regional gaming convention and it’s one of the go-to conventions for my gaming group. It’s an event I always add to my calendar, but it also has a tendency to get removed because of family and work commitments. I really need to stop doing that. The convention is great for my … 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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Rethinking Encounters and Defeating the Routine

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Green and grey dice rest on a page from Volo's Guide to Monsters

“Rethinking Encounters” is the theme of February 2017’s RPG Blog Carnival, hosted by Table Top Terrors. It’s something I’ve contemplated a lot over the last few years as my gaming group returned to playing Dungeons & Dragons and I struggled to come up with thoughtful and interesting fantasy encounters. That’s because for most of the Blackrazor … Read more

Nuke(m)Con 2016

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Plastic miniatures of the frog-like monsters known as slaadi stand on a battlemap. In the background can be seen several figures representing player characters.

Nuke(m)Con. It’s my gaming group’s homegrown convention which was first held in 2004 as an alternative to going to GenCon. It’s schedule was never formally defined, but for a while we had an every-other-year schedule going with conventions in 2006, 2008, and 2012. Then came the convention drought. It wasn’t for a lack of trying … Read more

Ticket to Ride: Europe

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Multi-colored train pieces represent different routes that have been completed on the Ticket to Ride map.

My extended family started playing Ticket to Ride years ago. It’s one of our go-to games after holiday dinners, and we’re all comfortable with the mechanics, the strategy, and the map. We’ve mixed it up a bit by adding in the 1910 expansion, but for the most part,  the game’s been the same for years. … Read more

Game Day: Battletech

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Two mechs walk down the battle field, which includes a small river and lake cutting across a brown-yellow field.

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

Game Day: Dragonborn of the Wilderlands

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A red-scaled dragonborn charges toward the viewer.

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

Game Day: Of Death and Polearms

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Cover art from the D&D 5th Edition Player's Handbook. Credit: Wizards of the Coast

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

Game Day: Updates from the Frontier

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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