On this episode of Radio Active, I discuss my daughter StarGirl’s sudden desire to learn chess and my approach to teaching her, contemplate the impending arrival of National Novel Writing Month, check out the Geek Dad Podcast and Simian Farmer blog and offer some thoughts on the 4th edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Getting the Show … Read more
GenCon is over. And now I’ve got a huge pile of loot sitting in my gaming room, just waiting to be read. Amazingly, there’s not a single Dungeons & Dragons book to be found among the stack, not even the Expedition to Castle Greyhawk, which I was sorely tempted to buy, but resisted at the … Read more
Game Day was pretty much a wash yesterday, with everyone except for Evil Genius and I unable to attend. That made for a downer of a game day, but we pressed on, deciding to work on our campaign’s ongoing project: the GriffWiki. Our gaming group’s been campaigning in the World of Greyhawk since 1996, and … Read more
Dozens of pirate ships are coming out of drydock as our gaming group finally gets around to playing Pirates of the Spanish Main, a game that half of us have been collecting for at least three years, but have only played a handful of times. Meanwhile, the arrival of an old friend from Philadelphia has … Read more
After a week away from home at the Portal 2007 higher ed conference at Gettysburg College, I’ve returned home to an inbox overflowing with games. My Xbox 360 will be seeing heavy action this weekend as I put Shadowrun and Forza 2 through its paces, while my non-video game moments will likely be consumed by … Read more
A while back at My Play, Gerald Cameron proposed the idea of the “BHAC” (Big, Hairy, Audacious Campaign), the sort of campaign that’s earth-trembling huge its shear audacity and (I’m assuming) its variance from the norm. He throws out one example: normal D&D campaigns usually have a home town or city … what happens if … Read more
A few years ago, I decided I wanted to try a different kind of role-playing game campaign: a medieval urban fantasy that combined traditional story telling with the sort of open-ended, sandbox-like openness of games like Grand Theft Auto. The setting would be Obsidian Bay, the homegrown metropolis that my friends and I had spent … Read more
This week’s Game Day sees us returning to role-playing with Khelez-Mar: The Dwarven Imperative. If memory serves, our last adventure saw the dwarves at the cusp of entering the Obsidian Maze, a sprawling subterranean dungeon in the Drachensgrab Hills of the Pomarj in the World of Greyhawk. It’s been years since our campaign ventured back … Read more
Wizards of the Coast is releasing a Magic Item Compendium reprinting 750 magic items from previous publications and Dragon Magazine articles, while adding in 500 new items. In anticipation of its release later this month, they’re running a series of articles by Andy Collins, one of the book’s designers. In the first article he talks … Read more
Tonight we’ll be playing Khelez-Mar: The Dwarven Imperative, our dwarf-centric campaign set on the Pomarj in the World of Greyhawk. The last adventure saw the adventurers tracking a large orcish warband comprised of orcs, grey renders and manticores. They engaged and mostly destroyed several of the warbands patrols before breaking off from the main body … Read more