When the iPad hit a little over a year ago, there was a flurry of posts in RPG circles about tablet gaming. Since then we haven’t seen a lot of talk about them – I’m not sure if folks grew bored with the topic, or if they’ve now become so common place that they’re not … Read more
Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom is an action-adventure game set in a new fantasy setting. Typical of the genre, you’ll also solve various types of puzzles as you explore and defeat enemies. Released about a month before Christmas, this game was quickly lost in the plethora of new games at that time. I never let … Read more
Munchkin is a reality-mashing, planet-destroying “let’s see you try and save this Earth, Superman!” cross-genre machine. After 10 years of expansions, Steve Jackson’s opus to killing monsters and taking their stuff has incorporated almost every speculative fiction genre imaginable, all of which beg – nay demand — that gamers combine them. Given that this month’s … Read more
For years, Order 66 was the only Star Wars: Saga Edition podcast. Now there are two, thanks to Threat Detected, a show dedicated to playing through the Dawn of Defiance campaign. In other Star Wars RPG news, Saga-Edition.com resumes publication with write-ups for the VCX-700 Heavy Courier and the HWK-290 while Dice of Doom tries … Read more
It’s Game Day, and for the first time in years I’m running Dungeons & Dragons. Well, technically I’m running Pathfinder, but in all the ways that matter it’s the thematic and mechanical successor to the flavor of D&D my group liked best. This session is a long time coming. I’ll save the story of the … Read more
A round of Star Wars RPG-related posts and web links, including Sterling Hershey’s “Star Wars Wednesday” posts about “Adventuring in the Tree”, “Running Published Campaigns” and “Species Creation”. There are also revised vehicle design rules for Star Wars d6, an adaptation of the AGE system from Green Ronin’s Dragon Age RPG, a love letter to … Read more
MEPACon Spring 2011 is being held Friday, April 8 through Sunday, April 10. It’s the 10th anniversary of the convention, and they’re going to be having a special reception Friday night. As always I’m looking forward to the convention, but this time around I’m taking my own advice and only running two RPGs. Given that … Read more
One of the big differences between running a fantasy campaign and a science fiction campaign is that when playing SF, I find myself constantly looking for starship deckplans.
With a fantasy campaign, many of the maps revolved around buildings, dungeons or overland adventures, and those sorts of maps were easy to knock out over lunch. Failing that, I had plenty of maps from 20+ years of Dungeons & Dragons that I could fall back on.
With my Star Wars campaign though, the adventures are split between world-based exploration and starship- or space station-based combat. Starship based adventures represent perhaps 1/8 to 1/4 of the encounters I run, but when I do run them I often find myself scrambling for deckplans.
The big reason there is that it takes more effort to come up with a rational-seeming starship. A dungeon can be as simple as a series of rooms, but with a starship players always want to know where to find the bridge, engineering, jeffries tubes, etc.
The Dragon Age RPG intrigues me. With a lightweight rules system, mana pool-based magic, and a killer background setting, it seems like the sort of game that could help pull me back into fantasy role-playing. After spending a night learning more about the game for a Knights of the Dinner Table column, I decided to … Read more
Master mapmaker Chris West has launched a kickstarter project to fund “Deep Vistas”, his latest collection of maps. These six maps are focused on underground adventuring and include: Stalactite Gate, Slave Pits, Chapel of Scarabs, Dark Elf Courtyard, Silent Garden and Chasm Bridge. They’re gorgeous looking maps, and although they’re obviously fantasy themed, and have a very “Vault of the Drow” feeling to them, it’d be easy enough to use them in horror or science fiction campaigns as well. There are different funding options but the best is likely the $36 for all three double-sided maps.
