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
In Part 1 of this column, I gave an overview of Monte Cook’s Diamond Throne (Amazon) campaign setting for Arcana Unearthed (Amazon) and talked about the sort of adventures I’d like to run there. In Part 2, I talk about the races and classes I’d use to achieve the goals set out in the first column. One … Read more
In WISH 99, Ginger asked (Internet Archive): Pick three to five genres and name the best RPG for that genre. Why do you think it’s the best? What makes it better than others? What are its downsides? Fantasy / Dungeons & Dragons: What makes Dungeons & Dragons the best fantasy game out there isn’t its … Read more
Monte Cooke’s Arcana Unearthed (Amazon) is an alternative Players Handbook for Dungeons & Dragons that ditches the game’s time-honored fantasy classes in favor of wholly new classes that contain echoes of their predecessors, but represent something entirely different. It does an excellent job of breaking the fantasy molds, and it’s surprisingly well-suited for a libertarian campaign. … Read more
In WISH #96, Ginger asked (Internet Archive): Describe one or more occasions when a game went click for you and things fell together. Why do you think this happened? What factors made it possible? What were the consequences? It just happened this past Saturday. It was in the Scarred Lands campaign where I’m a player, … Read more
NukemCon has come and gone, and now that I’ve caught up on my sleep and my caffeine twitches have faded, it’s time to evaluate our first-ever home-grown convention. Overall, I think it went quite well. We got to play a heck of a lot games, although not nearly as many as I’d hoped. The final … Read more
The sun rose on NukemCon to find many a bleary-eyed gamer driving through Phillipsburg looking for breakfast. After snagging sustenance at McDonald’s and Manhattan Bagel, the stalwart dice-throwers returned to Easton and the first session of the day: Dungeons & Dragons. It was the third part of the D&D adventure we’d been playing all weekend, … Read more
The Blackrazor Motor Pool was forced into action on Day 2 of NukemCon, as car troubles harried our otherwise excellent day of gaming. It started with Bill’s car; when we went to get the third television out for our Xbox network, he caught a glimpse of something gleaming in his tire. Yes, in his tire. … Read more
Day One of NukemCon arrived yesterday, bringing with it HeroClix, Illuminati, Dungeons & Dragons and plenty of Halo. We kicked off 12+ hours of gaming by opening a case of HeroClix: Ultimates, the new latest expansion for WizKids’ superhero miniatures game. Then came three increasingly cutthroat games of Illuminati; Jon won the first one, Bob … Read more