Broken Land, my lunchtime D&D 5th edition campaign, is ending. Begin in 2015 and consisting of 25 1-hour episodes, the campaign is about to hit it’s finale. It’s a strange sensation. I’ve run a lot of campaigns over the years, but there aren’t a lot of them that have had a true finale. Gone on … Read more
The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan is an Old School death trap of a dungeon. Originally released as a tournament module at Origins in 1979, the adventure was subsequently published as a module for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. In 2017 it was updated to D&D 5th Edition and released as part of the Tales from the … Read more
RPG-a-Day is an annual event in which bloggers spend a month talking about different aspects of role-playing games. Rather than spread this out over several blog posts, I’ve rolled up my entries into one mega-post. Day 1: What published RPG do you wish you were playing right now? Dungeon World (or one of the other … Read more
“Occult Mysteries and Magic”, is topic of the May 2017 RPG Blog Carnival. Although my gaming group has been playing Dungeons & Dragons for decades, a game that has magic as one of its corner stones, we rarely delved into mysteries of the arcane. To be sure, there was ancient magic hidden in Greyhawk’s history, … Read more
April 2017’s RPG Carnival topic is “Carnival of Megadungeons!”, during which the gaming blogosphere looked at this staple of fantasy (and occasionally science fiction) role-playing games. I suspect most gaming groups of a certain age have a megadungeon that they call their own — it’s a trope of Dungeons & Dragos that calls to us like dragons … Read more
MEPACon is northeast Pennsylvania’s regional gaming convention and it’s one of the go-to conventions for my gaming group. It’s an event I always add to my calendar, but it also has a tendency to get removed because of family and work commitments. I really need to stop doing that. The convention is great for my … Read more
“Rethinking Encounters” is the theme of February 2017’s RPG Blog Carnival, hosted by Table Top Terrors. It’s something I’ve contemplated a lot over the last few years as my gaming group returned to playing Dungeons & Dragons and I struggled to come up with thoughtful and interesting fantasy encounters. That’s because for most of the Blackrazor … Read more
Nuke(m)Con. It’s my gaming group’s homegrown convention which was first held in 2004 as an alternative to going to GenCon. It’s schedule was never formally defined, but for a while we had an every-other-year schedule going with conventions in 2006, 2008, and 2012. Then came the convention drought. It wasn’t for a lack of trying … Read more
In prepping for my Saturday group’s D&D 5e playtest I created a dragonborn paladin of Bahamut named Bharosh Goldenscales. The group has been adventuring in the Wilderlands of High Fantasy and although this is mostly a mechanical playtest, I couldn’t resist building out a backstory. That meant figuring out how the dragonborn might fit into … Read more
After a few months of talking about the game, my monthly Saturday gaming group decided to give D&D 5th Edition a try. Rather than run a playtest campaign) like the Blackrazors, our dungeon master is running us through a series of combat encounters at different levels. This lets everyone get a feel for the combat-centric … Read more