Friday’s game day was supposed to see our lower-level Dark City campaign characters’ wrap up Paizo’s Crown of the Kobold King module and then return to our home city of Obsidian Bay for some much needed down time. And then … Total Party Kill. It was our own fault. We went up against a dozen … Read more
Gary Gygax passed away this week, shocking the geek world and sending a cascade of remembrances surging across the web. My gaming group is no less saddened by this, and in honor of Gygax, we took a one-week break from our campaign to run the classic 1st edition module, White Plume Mountain. Technically, we’re not … Read more
I’ve never been a huge Warhammer 40,000 fan, but it’s been slowly corrupting my brain for the last few weeks as Berin’s been talking about the novels on and off at Uncle Bear and fellow Blackrazor Damon picked up not one, but two copies of the Warhammer 40K: Dark Heresy RPG. I’m sorely tempted to … Read more
Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition is coming, slashing and burning all that has come before to create a new game that ignores the tropes of classic sword-and-sorcery in order to embrace the always-on, always-cool mechanics of digital fantasy. We see it at every turn. The lack of a 3.x-to-4.x conversion guide. The admonishment to wrap-up … Read more
This week’s Game Day sees us returning to the Dark City campaign to wrap-up our quest to save a bunch of kidnapped kids from some dungeon-dwelling kobolds. It’s a fun adventure, but I find myself straining to connect it to a Game Day column. So instead I’m going to stick with the semi-random rambling approach … Read more
I didn’t have enough time for a full-fledged Game Day column this week, so here are some random thoughts relating to Mutants & Masterminds inspired by Friday’s session. The new Infinity Storm blog is coming along nicely. I’ve got an HTML mock-up mostly working in Safari and Firefox; Internet Explorer still has issues (but really, … Read more
Back in November, when I was working on my novel, I wrote a scene in which the main characters got together for a graphic novel book club. When I mentioned this to my gaming group, they thought it was a great idea … and that we should give it a try in the real world.
After much discussion and a few delays, we’re finally doing it. Our first-ever Graphic Novel Book Club will take place tonight at WhichBrew, where we’ll be eating good food, drinking local beers, and discussing Alan Moore’s classic (if highly depressing) graphic novel Watchmen.
It’s a tough novel to start with because it truly feels like a novel. It’s dense and literary, with some chapters that spin the narrative wildly out of control, and an ending so depressing it could drive you to drink. It’s dystopian alternate history 1980s has almost no sympathetic heroes; there are plenty of reasons to hate them, and almost none you can admire.
My brand-new, yellow-painted, Chaosium-sanctioned Call of Cthulhu dice by Q Workshop arrived today from Poland. I’ve got to say — these things are easily the most beautiful, well-crafted dice in my collection, and I’d put them up against any of those meteorite dice in a geek cred show down. I mean, sure, dice made from … Read more
The Savage Worlds: Explorer Edition game book is a slim, seductive little tome that promises to deliver “fast, fun, and furious” action for any genre and in hundreds less pages than Dungeons & Dragons takes to recreate just the fantasy genre. It’s a promise it makes good on … up to a point. This is … Read more
With the Dark City campaign back in full swing, I’m finally able to use my Book of Almost Everything. I created the Book in the waning days of the original Dark City campaign as I realized that I had a treasure trove of instant non-player characters, random encounters, and flavor text lurking in my back … Read more