Geek Holiday Shopping List for 2009

Looking for ideas for the geek on your Christmas List? Are you a geek looking for ideas about what to ask for? Nuketown has you covered (albiet, a bit late in the shopping cycle but hey, there’s still nearly two weeks until Christmas). Two quick notes: 1) all of the items on this list link … Read more

Game Day: Return to D&D 4E

Two frost giants stand ready to fight.

Giants stalk the land, threatening one of the few flickering lights of civilization. Someone needs to deal with the threat … and it turns out that’s us. My gaming group is returning to Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition with a megashot of Revenge of the Giants, the new super module from Wizards of the Coast. … Read more

Rebuilding the Griffin’s Crier

The Blackrazor Guild — my local gaming group — has had a web site since 1997. It’s gone through many iterations over that time, usually in tandem with some project I needed to research at work (being a gamer means never wanting for large reams of test data for web apps).

The site’s known as The Griffin’s Crier, and for the longest time it was the archive for our Dungeons & Dragons campaign. However, over the last few years our group’s changed. Our primary campaign’s now Star Wars, half the group is blogging, and we’ve created a small galaxy of spin-off sites supporting our different efforts.

The GriffCrier needs to reflect these changes. To that end, I’m redesigning the site using Drupal. The new site will serve as a gathering point for our various interests; it will include campaign and group news, links to the latest blog posts from group members (using the Feed API and Views modules), and serve as a jumping off point to our various wikis, web sites, and forums.

MEPACon Fall 2009 Recap

After a few years away, the Blackazor Guild and I returned to MEPACon last weekend, our local gaming convention held near Scranton, Pa. every spring and fall. We used to be regulars at the local convention scene, but over the last few years we been running our own homegrown Nuke(m)Con instead. We decided to return … Read more

Borderlands: Find Your Very Favorite Gun

“Six men came to kill me one time. And the best of ’em carried this. It’s a Callahan full-bore auto-lock. Customized trigger, double cartridge thorough gauge. It is my very favorite gun.” — Janye, Firefly That quote is the reason why Borderlands rocks. Sure, it’s a competent shooter with some basic role-playing aspects thrown in, … Read more

The Ruins of New York: Jason Freewalker

 The Day After RagnarokJason Freewalker is a second-generation lawman, his father having become a Texas Ranger just after Serpentfall. In the early days after Serpentfall, he rode with his father, battling scaly monsters crawled out of the Rio Grande to drink the blood of children and the Serpent cults arose from the Gulf looking to spawn realms of madness.

He’s been riding and shooting since he could walk, and he’s wanted nothing more or less than to walk in his father’s footsteps. Tragically, he’s done just that; the year he became a Ranger, his father died at his side, fighting an infestation of ghouls in Houston. He now proudly wields his father’s gun – a pearl-inlaid, silver-gilded Colt .45 – and wears his steel-toed, Serpent-skinned boots (their skin being about the only good thing to come out of those Fallspawn).

The Ruins of New York: Ollivander Ellis

In another life, Ollivander Ellis might have been a physicist or astronomer, but instead he grew up in the world of the Serpentfall. It’s lead him to dedicate his life to understanding its arcane secrets … and fighting them when they’re unleashed upon the world. He’s battled latter-day Nazi mystics in Argentina, negotiated with the … Read more