Game Day: 5th Year Clix, Lost Dwarves, RPG Glossary, Game Widgets

Despite having written Game Day columns the last two weeks, I haven’t actually played much. Two weeks ago I was sidelined by pink eye, while last week a March snowstorm destroyed our plans to conquer the world with Risk 2210. This week it’s raining, but unless the Delaware and Lehigh Rivers rise up to devour Easton again, we’ll be gaming.

5th Year Clix

Pre-gaming tonight will be HeroClix, with the likely match-up being my rebuilt Excalibur team battling against one of Evil Genius’s Marvel armies played by Erilar, and possibly a third team fielded by the Genius himself … assuming that the shield monkey has his adventure notes done in time.

It’s hard to believe that it’s been five years since we first playtested HeroClix for my Science Fiction Weekly review. It’s been a hell of a ride, from the days when we used to buy Clix by the case and play twice a week to the present day when we’re lucky to get in a game a month.  WizKids is celebrating the 5th anniversary of the game by tweaking its packaging and game mechanics. The first of the new sets — HeroClix: Avengers — will include new figure bases that list each pieces rarity, new character cards that detail a character’s powers and introduce new special powers, and new, larger boosters that include five figures instead of four.

They’re also mixing up the character builds, ditching the Rookie/Experience/Veteran system (entirely or just for a few characters I don’t know) for single characters whose powers are explained via the character card. That last bit expands the number of different characters in the set (from 40 to 60) but I liked the old REV system.

Lost Dwarves

Tonight we’ll be playing our Khelez-Mar dwarven campaign. I’ve been talking with Evil Genius about looking at ways to explore dwarven culture and society through the campaign, and that led me to search for some good dwarven source books for d20 (or any system for that matter). So far I haven’t found one — if anyone has any ideas or suggestions, please post a comment or e-mail me at nuketown@gmail.com.

RPG Glossary

The game master advice site Treasure Tables has compiled an RPG glossary defining more than 200 gaming terms, from “adventure” to “XP sponge”. It’s a good mix of common terms, jargon, and slay, and should help inexperienced gamers figure out what the old guys are saying.

Yahoo Game Widgets

Yahoo’s just released the fourth iteration of its Yahoo Widgets engine. I still prefer Mac OS X’s Dashboard widgets — I don’t really need all these mini-programs living on my desktop; they do just find living in the otherworldly ether of Dashboard — but if you’re trying out the updated engine there are a few geek/game widgets worth checking out.

The Dice Roller is a straight-forward widget that does exactly what it says: generates random numbers using standard dice notation (e.g. 3d4). It might be useful for GMs who find themselves needing to throw down 20d6 … or wanting to do some rolling on the sly.

Google Calculator is a widget interface for the Google tool of the same name, allowing you to do basic math calculations as well as various conversions (like feet to yards, teaspoons in cups, etc.). It could be a useful tool for ending those inevitable game night arguments about measurements.

Want to keep up with the RPG Net forums? Then get the RPG Net widget, an RSS reader that snags the top headlines from the forums and displays them on your desktop.

Finally, the Harry Potter Quote Conjurer is a nifty widget that snags random quotes from the Harry Potter novels. It could be just the thing for the game master looking for a little fantasy inspiration.

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