As a group we’ve become more tolerant of non-standard character concepts, especially when it comes to the World of Greyhawk. When our Dungeons & Dragons campaign started 20 years ago, we were diehard devotees of Greyhawk canon (there is a reason, after all, why the biggest Greyhawk fan website is called Canonfire). We had holy wars over whether you … Read more
There was once a Blackrazor redshirt named Zilanderan. A strange man, Zilanderan claimed to be part of a larger, near-infinite multiverse of alternate realities. He’d excitedly talk about how this multiverse interacted with this, the Prime Material Plane, boring his cohorts to tears until something happened to break the tension. Alas, the eccentric warrior-mage was … Read more
I played the best convention game of my life at GenCon 2000. It was a multi-round RPGA event called “Barbarian Lives”. It used the newly-released Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition rules to tell a soap opera-inspired tale of romance, heartbreak, and monster hunting. At the time, the Role-playing Gamers Association (RPGA) was still a notable … Read more
Imagination + good rules + group buy-in. Those are the elements that fueled our longest running games, even if the campaigns the RPGs were powering jumped from ruleset to ruleset. Our Blackrazor Guild campaign, now in its second decade, has seen numerous prequels, sequels, and spin-offs. It’s been run using Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition, … Read more
My answer today is very different from my answer 20 years ago. There was a time when I loved a good, crunchy RPG, with a ton of splat books and optional rules (in short, Dungeons & Dragons 3.x). Implicit in the crunchiness was a love of customization and the flexibility that came with it. Now … Read more
Nuke(m)Con. It’s my gaming group’s homegrown convention which was first held in 2004 as an alternative to going to GenCon. It’s schedule was never formally defined, but for a while we had an every-other-year schedule going with conventions in 2006, 2008, and 2012. Then came the convention drought. It wasn’t for a lack of trying … Read more
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
Another MEPACon has come and gone, taking with it two weeks of frantic game preparation and 12 hours of actual play. The convention was held in Clarks Summit, near Scranton Pa. on November 12-14 and looked to have the typical attendance of 100 gamers playing a mix of board games, organized play, and one-shot RPGs. … Read more
Dark Sun, the grim, post-apocalyptic fantasy setting for Dungeons & Dragons is re-launching this summer for D&D 4E. In honor of that, I’m writing my next “Summon WebScryer” column for Knights of the Dinner Table about Dark Sun … but I need your help. I need web sites dedicated to the setting. I’ve found a … Read more
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