Delta Green available in PDF, Print on Demand

 Delta GreenDelta Green, the 1990s era game of espionage, intrigue, and cyclopian madness, is available in PDF and print-on-demand formats from DriveThru RPG. Released by by Pagan Publishing, the new high-quality PDFs scans of the original books. So far the sourcebooks Delta Green and Delta Green: Countdown and Delta Green have been released. Two short fiction anthologies, Alien Intelligence and Dark Theatres, are also available.

This is great news. Although it’s dated now, Delta Green remains a fantastic read, and it perfectly captures the conspiratorial/millennial anxiety that was so common in the late 1990s. The books have long been out of print, and at times have been hard to find, so it’s good to seem them back in print (or something resembling print)

Exploring RPG Uses of Pinterest

A variety of pulp and weird science related photos that represent "pins" on a Pinterest pinboard.

Pinterest is a social bookmarking site for images: you find photographs, illustrations, or posters or other images that you like an “pin” them to a collection of boards. It’s like dumping a stack of art catalogs onto your desk, cutting out the illustrations you like best, and then thumbtacking them to your bulletin board.

The site’s popular with crafters, and when I was casting about for ideas for a recent “Summon WebScryer” column for Knights of the Dinner Table I decided to see if it could be used for gaming.

Star Wars Round Up: AGE of Rebellion, X-Wing Mini Game, new d20 rules

It is a dark time for Star Wars role-playing games. There’s no official role-playing game being released, and fan-generated content for older games is tapering off. Fortunately though the Order 66 podcast continues to pump out new content for Saga Edition, there’s a new AGE-powered Rebellion Era playtest document, and an X-Wing miniatures game from … Read more

Star Wars Round Up: Starships, Dragon Age, Rodney Thompson interviewed

It’s been a long time since I did a Star Wars RPG round up — unfortunately without an active campaign I find it’s all to easy to let the months slip by without searching the internet for material. For my part, my campaign isn’t entirely dead. I ran a Star Wars: Saga Edition one shot … Read more

D&D Next: You had me at “Pelor”

After braving the rings of fire, the digital quicksand, and the firewall of eternity, I managed to download a copy of the D&D Next playtest. Unpacking the zip file and looking over the files, I had to smile. There was the cleric of Pelor. And a cleric of Moradin. A high elf wizard. A dungeon called “Caves of Chaos”.

A strong wave of nostalgia hit me, bringing with it memories of cracking open an ancient Red Boxed set and finding a module called “B2 Keep of the Borderlands” inside. A thousand memories of my Greyhawk campaign came rushing forward, carrying names like Kalib, Scrappy, Merwyn, Tanevier, Obsidian Bay and the Cult of Death Undying.

And all that was without opening the PDFs.

Get lost in a new reality with the Inner Sea World Guide

The Inner Sea World Guide is Paizo’s third iteration of its Golarion campaign guide. The first was released when D&D 3.5 was still Wizard of the Coast’s flagship fantasy game; the second came with the release of Paizo’s own 3.5-derived Pathfinder RPG. The latest iteration reflects the growing maturity of the Pathfinder product line. Within its pages players will find that redundant material – such as class write-ups now included in the Pathfinder core rulebook – removed in favor of extended write-ups on the world itself.

And what a world it is. While evoking spirit of World of Greyhawk, Golarion excels at tweaking standard fantasy formula. Within its pages – including 64 pages of new content – you’ll find Cheliax, a kingdom that embraced devil worship in order to save its empire, as well as Galt, a country that threw off its imperial Cheliax masters and descended into a never-ending bloodthirsty revolution. There are the mountaintop citadels constructed after the dwarves completed their quest for the sky, and a frozen kingdom ruled by the daughters of Baba Yaga. It’s a setting that feels familiar and new at the same time, and like Pathfinder itself, it’s a worthy successor to the worlds of Dungeons & Dragons.

Speculating on Skills in D&D Next

Skills are a hot button subject for my gaming group. Most of the guys in my group loved D&D 3.x’s approach to skills, which allowed a high degree of granularity and focus in such mundane concerns as crafting and professions. When the D&D 4th Edition dismissed Craft and Profession as un-fun skills, half our group saw red. They still fume about that given time. Others liked 4th Edition’s condensed skill list, and focus on adventuring applications over crafting arrows or performing songs.

Naturally D&D Next is concerned about skills, and based on a recent blog post they are clearly looking to retain the customization options that 3.x offers, while making things more streamlined. First, they’re talking about making a lot of your day to day “skill checks” using the ability scores. So instead of making a “Climb check”, you’d presumably make a Strength check. Second, they also explicitly state they want to retain true skills so that they have a meaningful impact on the game and allow the sort of customization that we saw in 3E (and to a certain extent, 4E).