From a marketing and design perspective, Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition. After 4e split the fan base, 5e reunited it by streamlining the game, resurrecting elements that people loved, and bounding the math so that bonus stacking (and the GM/player arms race it forced) was no longer a thing. It runs fast at low, mid, … Read more
Favorite game you never get to play? Easy: the ALIEN RPG by Free League. I bought the books and boxed sets during the pandemic, slowly accumulating a collection I never got to play. I love ALIEN and ALIENS, but even I admit that getting killed by alien monsters was a bit too much during the … Read more
The oldest RPG I played is also the first game I played: D&D Basic Set. It was the red boxed set, where species was your class. Want to play a wizard/fighter? Be an elf. Otherwise, be a human … and a wizard OR a fighter The Basic Set went to level 3, at which point … Read more
Thanks to GenCon, the answer to the question “Most Recent RPG Bought?” is a two-way tie between the Marvel Multiverse RPG (which I played at the con as well) and the Captain’s Log Solo RPG for Star Trek Adventures. The Marvel Multiverse RPG captures the feel of superhero play very, very well … and does … Read more
Forbidden Lands is the first RPG I bought this year and I ended up with two copies: one in English … and one in Swedish. The Swedish one arrived first due to a shipping mishap. Now granted, my family is Swedish – my grandfather and grandmother came to America as teenagers – so I’ve always … Read more
Vince Hendricks was my first RPG game master. There were other game masters before him, but Vince ran the first real, ongoing, sustained campaign I played in. Vince was my first college roommate – a senior when I was a sophomore (I transferred in that year) and he introduced me to a ton of gamers … Read more
My first RPG played this year was Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, but that’s almost always the answer. I started 2023 by pitching my Elemental Apocalypse game to the Blackrazor Guild (my Sunday online game). The campaign asks the question: “What if the Temple of Elemental Evil rose … and the World of Greyhawk fell?” Eight months … Read more
I’m going to GenCon! For the first time since 2014, I’ll be in Indianapolis, Indiana playing games and geeking out with gamers, fans, and publishers. I’ll be tag-teaming the event with David Moore, my co-host at the Lair of Secrets podcast. In previous years, I focused on playing as many games as possible. This year, it’s … Read more
After the move to online gaming during the pandemic, I found that our virtual battle maps shrank. At first glance, it’s confounding – after all, it was our real-world battle maps that were constrained by either the size of our gaming tables or the size of our Chessex battle maps. Online, though, the horizons are … Read more
On this special edition of Radio Active, we venture to the Zine Scene, that mystical, half-remembered place of photocopied pages and hand-stapled booklets, in its 2023 iteration.