Crawling through Maure Castle

My gaming group is comprised of mid-twentysomething-to-mid-thirtysomething gamers who love role-playing, who enjoy delving deep into the intricacies of a plot, running down leads, fleshing out a setting, and generally immersing themselves in the campaign. Yes, there’s hacking, and yes, there’s slashing, but we’re just as likely to spend a night doing nothing but role-playing. … Read more

Contemplating the Dragon, Dungeon Magazine Changes

Paizo Publishing’s announced some major changes to its flagship Dragon and Dungeon magazines. The changes, apparently based on market research and feedback from readers, are pretty major. Dragon is going to become a more broad-based D&D magazine, focusing not only on the pen-and-paper RPG, but on its various electronic spawn as well. It’s also adding … Read more

Uncover Variant D&D Rules With Unearthed Arcana

The thing that Dungeons & Dragons 3.0/3.5 excels at most is its flexibility: its possible to play the same class for years and never play the same kind of character twice. Unearthed Arcana expands that flexibility by adding hundreds of new options to the game. Unearthed Arcana (Amazon) is not the sort of rulebook that … Read more

Pale Designs Slips Deadly Poisons Into d20

After four years of playing Dungeons & Dragons 3.0 and its kin , poisons are old hat for most players. Depending on the situation, the rules lawyers, power gamers, and even that guy who spends most of the night exploring the nasal possibilities of his dice know what poison a Game Master is talking about … Read more

RPG Xplorer Debuts

Another d20/OGL character generator has hit the Windows platform. It’s called RPG Xplorer, and it’s got a full-page ad in Dragon 331. I’m always happy to see more RPG utilities — heaven knows Game Master’s need all the help they can get — but looking over the site, I couldn’t help but think did we … Read more

MepaCon Spring 2005: Day 3

The third day of MEPACon saw dozens of people walking around in that state of happy exhaustion that can only come from playing games for 48 hours straight (or at least, for what felt like 48 hours straight). Refreshed after heading to bed early (the others finished up their dungeon crawl at 4 a.m.) I … Read more

MepaCon Spring 2005: Day 2

The long, brutal game of Risk: Godstorm that kept me up until 5 a.m. also kept me from hitting the 9 a.m. gaming slot at MepaCon, despite the fact that it was for a game I really, really wanted to play: InSpectres. Unfortunately, while chasing ghosts around for fun and profit is appealing, sleeping was … Read more

RPG Wishlist, Spring 2005

It’s been a long time since I did one of these columns, mostly because most of my gaming wishes came true for Christmas and I went hogwild during Bastion Press’s big January sale, buying five new source books. I’ve finally worked my way through all those books and the itch to expand my collection is … Read more