Radio Active #72: Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition

Nuketown Radio Active #72 contemplates the best way to organize a geeky bookshelf, takes another turn at chess with kids, finds out that Neutron Lad has a lot to talk about, and asks questions about Nuketown’s long-dormant RADIATIONS newsletter. Finally I review Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, the latest edition of the venerable role-playing game by … Read more

Game Day: Setting up a KOTOR Campaign

An armored Sith lord and a woman in brown clothing hold lightsabers aloft.

As my group’s D&D Dark City campaign winds down, the Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic game is ramping up. This week sees the group off because of a combination of family colds and Celtic Fest (which, given the rainy weekend forecast, will likely result in more colds, but I digress) but we’ve spent … Read more

Gaming in the Verse

The cast of the movie Serenity stands in a desert, ready for battle.

Prepping for my “Unification Day” adventure for the Serenity Role-Playing Game at Nuke(m)Con 2008 sent me wandering the web for inspiration, references and shortcuts.

Unfortunately, the official Serenity web site at http://www.serenity-rpg.com is dead, but it seems Margaret Weis Productions is working on moving material from the old site to their new one. The most important of these is the PDF of the Official Serenity Character Sheet. The site also has news on the new Serenity Adventures book, which features a number of related scenarios for the game. The PDF is available now, the print version will hopefully be out soon.

The official site is down, but the unofficial one at FireflyRPG.com may be the next best thing. It’s got a beautiful poster map of the Serenity solar system, 3D renderings of ground and air vehicles, weapon reference cards, and deck plans for 28 different ships. There are also two rules quick reference sheets, but unfortunately during the playtest I found they had too many house rules to be useful.

Nuke(m)Con 2008: The Wild, Weird West

The cast of the movie Serenity stands in a desert, ready for battle.

Like a twister carving its way through a Midwestern cornfield, Nuke(m)Con has come and gone. My gaming group held its annual (well, almost annual) home-grown convention over the weekend. In a break from previous years, which typically saw a mix of Dungeons & Dragons and board games, this year’s Nuke(m)Con had a western theme. We … Read more

Reboot your game with Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition

An armored reptilian humanoid (left) and a red-robed female spellcaster (right) stand in combat stances.

There’s an old Star Trek acronym called “IDIC”, which stands for “Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations”. Dungeons & Dragons Third Edition was all about IDIC, with infinite combinations of characters played out across thousands of campaigns and dozens of different game systems. Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition is about FDFC — Finite Diversity in Finite … Read more

Game Day: Shoot’em, Nuke’em

Cowboys on horseback.

Nuke(m)Con is coming back with guns blazing. After a one-year hiatus, my gaming group’s homegrown convention returns September 19-21 with a slate of western-themed role-playing games. We’ll be playing Serenity, Dogs in the Vineyard, Aces & Eights and Deadlands: Reloaded. We’re also running two high level Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 adventures on Friday and Saturday. During … Read more

The Art of the Lunchtime Gaming

One of the things I’ve always envied about the folks working at Wizards of the Coast is their ability to have a lunch-time game. In thinking about it, the single biggest challenge in running a lunch game is not time, but players. If you can find enough co-workers to get a game together, then time management, rather than time, becomes the challenge.

So the question becomes … how do you run a game in only an hour?

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RPG Review Digest: Forgotten Realms, Battlestar Galactica, LOT5R

Since I mentioned last week that I thought the RPG blogging community should do more reviews, I thought it might be a good idea to follow-up on that and see what’s available this week. It turns out it’s a good week for reviews, with a slew having been posted for the new D&D 4th Edition … Read more

Asgard Project: High-level D&D 3.5 Playtest

Rather than just complain about how difficult high level combat is in D&D 3.5, my gaming group’s decided to do something about it. We’ve created a playtest group who’s willing to put in the extra effort it takes to play a high level game … and to figure out what, if anything, we can do … Read more

Freedom City Atlas: Pyramid Plaza

Superheroes need tall buildings to leap in a single bound … not to mention needing them to serve as backdrops for battles, penthouse homes for their mild-mannered millionaire personas, and possibly even secret lairs.

Freedom City’s Pyramid Plaza offers almost all this, and its entry in the Freedom City Atlas provides everything GMs need to incorporate it into their Mutants & Masterminds games.

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