ZineQuest 2 is Kickstarter’s now-annual homage to the handcrafted print zines of yesteryear. As someone who crafted a print zine with my friends using my Commodore 64 and a dot matrix printer, I have a lot of love for the idea. For those who never experienced them, zines are fan-produced publications dedicated to any number of … Read more
Artists Creates Floating Worlds In Test Tubes – Rosa de Jong creates tiny models of buildings, trees, and geographic features that float on sculpted, rocky islands in a test tube. Think Avatar’s floating islands meets the traditional ship-in-a-bottle models. Greyhawk CY 576 by Anna B. Myers – Thanks to funding from her Patreon, cartographer Anna B. Myers released a refreshed … Read more
Bad snow storms and extreme weather scuttled many a Game Day over the years. They throw our RPG gaming lives into chaos, and while being able to fall back to Roll20 can help the game go on … it’s useless when it comes to shoveling snow or bailing out the basement. Just as a Nor’easter … Read more
The most unique RPG on my shelf is the Amber Diceless Role-Playing Game. Released by the now-defunct Phage Press, the innovative RPG eschewed dice in favor of a mechanic that relied on a rock/paper/scissors contest of abilities augmented by situational modifiers. Based on Roger Zelazny’s Amber fantasy novels, allows players to take on the roles of sons and … Read more
The opening topic for #RPGaDay2019 is all about firsts. Rather than focus on a particular first, I decided to brainstorm a big list of them. First RPG: Dungeons & Dragons (Basic Set, circa 1981). My mom bought it for me and my world was never the same. First RPG Module: Keep on the Borderlands. I had … Read more
RPG a Day is an annual celebration of role-playing games in which bloggers, podcasters, vidcasts, and streams come together to talk about the hobby. Nuketown participated in 2017 and 2018. With 2019, they’ve changed the format up a bit. Instead of single sentence prompts for each day, they’ve gone with a single word. This Nuketown page serves … Read more
My weekly gaming group took a break from our regular Dungeons & Dragons campaigns to play Fiasco … in space! Fiasco (Amazon/Indie Press Revolution ) by Bully Pulpit Games is a role-playing game of ordinary people with powerful ambition and poor impulse control. It’s a role-playing game for 3-5 players and no game master inspired by movies such as Fargo, A Simple Plan, and The Way … Read more
The many names of spells and how to change them: Tenser’s Floating Disc. Bigby’s Crushing Hand. Mordenkainen’s Mansion. Named spells defined Dungeons & Dragons from its earliest days while hinting at a greater world. Jeremiah McCoy talks about how to bring the magic of such signature arcana to your campaign. If You’re Gonna Fail, Fail Spectacularly: Troy Taylor talks about … Read more
After the end of our long-running Obsidian Frontier campaign, we decided to venture to a little-explored region of Greyhawk: the Archbarony of Blackmoor. Inspired by Dave Arneson‘s legendary campaign setting of the same name (one of Dungeons & Dragons first-ever settings), Blackmoor promises a mix of ancient magic, weird technology, and the strangeness of the Egg of … Read more
Several years ago the Gamer Working Group — my lunchtime gaming crew — chose to playtest Numenera. I created the wandering town of Walkabout for what I expected to be a short campaign, but alas, the game never really clicked with the group. That was largely because of the lack of literal world building; the game was all … Read more