In hindsight, we played Dungeons & Dragons for too long. Our World of Greyhawk campaign lasted 12 years, included dozens of characters, hundreds of plots, and forays into Castle Greyhawk, the Temple of Elemental Evil and our own homegrown creations. It spanned the 2nd and 3rd editions of the game and saw us buy hundreds … Read more
The Dragon Age RPG intrigues me. With a lightweight rules system, mana pool-based magic, and a killer background setting, it seems like the sort of game that could help pull me back into fantasy role-playing. After spending a night learning more about the game for a Knights of the Dinner Table column, I decided to … Read more
The Dark Sun has risen again on the parched, magically devastated world of Athas, bringing with it the new rules and mindset of Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition. First introduced in the early 1990s during D&D 2nd Edition, Dark Sun was meant to be a brutal, unforgiving dark fantasy setting unlike anything the game had … Read more
My events for MEPACon Fall 2010 are up and ready for registration on Warhorn. The convention is being held Friday, 11/12/10 through Sunday, 11/14/10 at the Ramada Clarks Summit in Clarks Summit, PA. I’ll be running three events — “Catch and Release” (Star Wars: Saga Edition), “The Champions of New York” (The Day After Ragnarok), … Read more
Harrowing Halls is a Dungeon Tiles set for Dungeons & Dragons that takes the long-running line to new heights. That’s because they’re not just dungeon tiles … they’re three dimensional dungeon tiles that can be used to build a staircase, raised platforms, tables, and pedestals, all of which player characters can jump on, leap off … Read more
Remodeling my game room gave me a chance to re-organizing my role-playing game collection and dig out books I haven’t touched in years. As I shelved them, I couldn’t help but start to mentally order my favorite and/or most influential games. This list is the result; this is Part 2, which covers games #10 through … Read more
When I ran my Dungeons & Dragons/World of Greyhawk campaign, I constantly spawned new subplots, new NPCs, and new locations. It was intentional; my goal was to throw a wide net of possible plotlines, and let the players choose which ones to follow. By campaign’s end we probably had hundreds of unresolved storylines, but it wasn’t a problem because the important storylines – the defeat of the giants in the Grand Duchy of Geoff, the defeat of the orcish overlord Turrosh Mak, the liberation of Obsidian Bay – did reach their climatic ends.
After many months away from the game, my group is returning to Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition for an old school dungeon crawl through the Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth using the D&D 3.5 version released in 2007. I’ve got mixed feelings about this. While I owned the Lost Caverns as a kid and read through … Read more
The redesigned version of the Griffin’s Crier, my gaming group’s web site, is now up and running — you can check it out at www.griffcrier.com. The GriffCrier has been around for more than a decade; our Blackrazor Guild gaming group first launched the site in 1998 as an archive for our World of Greyhawk campaign. Over time, our gaming group’s evolved and added new web apps — we now have a dedicated forum for in and out of game conversations, the archival D&D content has been moved to a Greyhawk wiki, and we’ve spawned several additional blogs and wikis in support of the other RPGs we play
Over time, the role of the Griffin’s Crier diminished, and it was time to bring it back. Four of us are blogging now, and even more are using Twitter. We’ve got two campaign blogs and two corresponding wikis, all of which are producing RSS. In recent years, the home page of the Crier had been static as content was updated elsewhere; I wanted to change that by pulling in headlines from across the Blackrazor blogosphere.
When I ran my 4E D&D playtest campaign, I decided to make it larger than life. That meant going planer. The churning unpredictability of the planes, the potential for exotic locations, the alienness of its inhabitants calls to my imagination. The Plane Below: Secrets of the Elemental Chaos, which details 4E’s churning elemental wastes, is … Read more