Zombie Dice is Steve Jackson’s fast playing, push-your-luck dice game in which players take on the role of zombies hunting human prey.
The mechanics are straightforward. The game’s namesake dice represent the not-so-helpless humans and have three possible faces: brains, feet, and shotgun.
Santa’s come and gone, leaving behind a small armada of games for us to try out: Zombie Dice (and Zombie Dice 2) and the Mars Attacks Dice Game, both by Steve Jackson Games, and Star Fluxx by Loony Labs.
I owe most of my esoteric knowledge of mythology, religion, art, and culture to role-playing game. Much of it was learned at the literary knee of Gary Gygax in the form of the Dungeon Master’s Guide and Monster Manual, both of which were packed with strange monster names, advanced vocabulary, and random loot tables. In … Read more
Scavenger’s Guide to Droids is the definitive droid source book for Star Wars: Saga Edition, introducing a new chassis-based system for creating droids, a new streamlined “protocol” format that lets players run droids as equipment rather than NPCs, new droid manufacturing traits and personality quirks and a 96 page codex containing dozens of droids.
One of the great things about Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition is the re-emergence of recommending reading lists. The new lists (Appendix E in the Player’s Handbook, Appendix D in the Dungeon Master’s Guide) are patterned after Gary Gygax’s legendary Appendix N from the original 1st edition AD&D DMG.
Basing a source book on a video game can be a risky business, particularly when that game is an uneven, occasionally gimmicky shooter like The Force Unleashed video game. You run the risk of alienating diehard Star Wars fans who scoff at the idea of Vader having a hidden student, while at the same time running out of content because of the game’s lack of depth. Fortunately The Force Unleashed Campaign Guide avoids all of this.
While researching a column for Knights of the Dinner Table I came across a small meme called “The RPG Bucket List”. Regular bucket lists are the things that people want to do before they die; and RPG bucket list is the list of games people want to play before they expire.
I played D&D at GenCon, got in a few play tests with my regular group, and bought the three corebooks: the Players Handbook, Monster Manual, and Dungeon Master’s Guide. As I write this, my Sunday gaming group is playing D&D again for the first time since 2008. My lunchtime group is playing it.
Civil war engulfs the Republic! Throughout the galaxy Separatist droid armies battle Republic clone troopers and their Jedi generals while Sith Lords manipulate both sides from the shadows. The Clone Wars Campaign Guide for Star Wars: Saga Edition chronicles this era, chronicling the major factions, detailing force powers and talents from the era, and introducing new options for followers and mass combat.
I’m running two D&D 5th Edition sandbox campaigns set in the World of Greyhawk Obsidian Frontier (my Sunday campaign) and Broken Land (my lunchtime game). Both take place in a frontier town in a savage land overrun by monsters.