Space Invaders – Ready Player One Video Game Replay

8-bit monster aliens appear against a black screen, descending toward orange shields. At the bottom of the screen is the player icon, shooting Space Invaders.

Developed by Tomohiro Nishikado and released in 1978 by Taito in Japan and Bally (via their Midway division) in the US, Space Invaders is one of the quintessential 1980s video games. And, if I’m being honest, a little misunderstood (at least by me). I rarely played the game in the arcade; my exposure was always through the … Read more

Mac RPG Tools

A laptop computer surrounded by role-playing game source books.

I began playing Dungeons & Dragons in grade school, and I used Apple computers almost as long. I started writing up adventures on my Apple II and printing them on an dot matrix printer, took a brief sojourn into the world of Windows PCs during and after college, and then returned to the Mac with the release of Mac OS X.

MEPACon, Fall 2022

Rulebooks for Dungeon Crawl Classics and Gaslands Reloaded

After too many years away, I’m headed back to my regional gaming convention, MEPACon. Held in the Poconos for many years, the convention moved to the Lehigh Valley for Fall 2022. It’s now 15 minutes from my house instead of 50, which means I can easily commute back and forth. The convention runs November 11-13, 2022 … Read more

Game Day: The Fast, The Furious, and the Awesomely Generic with GURPS

A hand-written character sheet lays atop two GURPS rulebooks

Since Fall 2019, the Gamer Working Group (my lunch time gaming group) has been running a new action movie-style campaign. Inspired by the Fast and the Furious franchise, the campaign is about a group of freelance agents undertaking questionable jobs for fun and profit. We started with the climatic scene of our last mission: blowing a … Read more

RPG a Day 2019 – Space

Several RPG books stacked on one of another.

Space. The Final Frontier. These are the science fiction RPGs that I’d love to play, if only I could find the time, crew, and mental bandwidth to play them: Eclipse Phase, 2nd Edition – A new, allegedly easier to play, iteration of the post-human science fiction/horror role-playing game. Paranoia – The satirical (and usually fatal) role-playing game … Read more

Game Day: Chroniclers

A character sheet sits atop two D&D soucebooks for the forgotten realms

For years, we made fun of the Forgotten Realms‘ overpowered completeness. We bled grey, and the World of Greyhawk is where our heroes lived, died, and lived again. Flash forward to our own Middle Ages, and we’re actually adventuring in the Realms … and enjoying it. Our current Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition campaign is set in the … Read more

RPG a Day 2019 – Engage

A picture of the Star Trek core rule book.

I’ve never played a Star Trek role-playing game, but I’m hoping to change that with Modiphius Entertainment’s Star Trek Adventures (Amazon). The core rule book is a hefty but engaging tome. It’s packed full of the lore of Star Trek and it’s far too easy to get lost in it as you read. One of my goals for the summer … Read more