Paizo Publishing’s announced some major changes to its flagship Dragon and Dungeon magazines. The changes, apparently based on market research and feedback from readers, are pretty major. Dragon is going to become a more broad-based D&D magazine, focusing not only on the pen-and-paper RPG, but on its various electronic spawn as well. It’s also adding … Read more
The thing that Dungeons & Dragons 3.0/3.5 excels at most is its flexibility: its possible to play the same class for years and never play the same kind of character twice. Unearthed Arcana expands that flexibility by adding hundreds of new options to the game. Unearthed Arcana (Amazon) is not the sort of rulebook that … Read more
After four years of playing Dungeons & Dragons 3.0 and its kin , poisons are old hat for most players. Depending on the situation, the rules lawyers, power gamers, and even that guy who spends most of the night exploring the nasal possibilities of his dice know what poison a Game Master is talking about … Read more
It’s been a long time since I did one of these columns, mostly because most of my gaming wishes came true for Christmas and I went hogwild during Bastion Press’s big January sale, buying five new source books. I’ve finally worked my way through all those books and the itch to expand my collection is … Read more
CrystalBall is the best damn D&D RPG tool on the Mac. The fact that it’s also one of the only D&D RPG tools for the Mac is beside the point. Available as a shareware trial download (Internet Archive), the program is comprised of a dozen or so different utilities for your game that can be … Read more
The latest editions of Dungeons & Dragons went to great lengths to abstract the combat system, eliminating weapon speeds, dropping call shots, and creating area-of-effect templates. All of this abstraction comes at a price though. Some of the exceptional aspects of the game — liking being able to put an arrow through an enemy’s eye … Read more
In the last issue of the Libertarian Gamer, I laid the ground work for a libertarian campaign set in the classic post-apocalyptic setting known as Gamma World, laying down some campaign guidelines and destroying the world. Now it’s time to rebuild it. Into the Vaults Every Gamma World (Amazon) game worth its salt has vaults — … Read more
When Eberron, Dungeons & Dragons’ latest campaign setting, was announced, I was less than excited. Descriptions of it — with its “lightening road” trains, airships, and various “modern” convinces powered by magic, struck me as being too much like “magepunk”, and too little like fantasy D&D. And there was the spectre of the Forgotten Realms, … Read more
My gaming group is contemplating our first new Greyhawk campaign in about two and a half years. It’s going to be a first-level campaign, set in our homegrown city of Obsidian Bay, and I’m going to be the primary DM. The game is still in its planning stages, but I’ve already identified a few themes. … Read more
The stirge. It is a monster whose name echoes down the halls of dungeon crawling history, evoking terror and scorn as it does so (terror for low-level characters trapped in a cavern with them, scorn for high-level adventurers all but immune to their blood-sucking attacks). This monster, whose roots date back to the dawn of … Read more