When Pennsylvania went to full-on “stay at home” to combat the spread of the novel coronavirus, my gaming group went fully online. We put our Saltmarsh campaign on hold and launched a new Star Wars campaign using the Saga Edition rules. The campaign is set in 9 ABY (after the Battle of Yavin), which is … Read more
Star Wars. I’d love to run the legacy follow-up to our Shadows of the Force campaign. Set in the Dark Times following the Mandalorian Wars, it would feature the descendants of our earlier campaign struggling to survive after the collapse of the Jedi Order. It would take place 30 or so years after the end of the previous … Read more
It varies greatly based on the game we are playing and the campaign I’m running. Typically at the start of a campaign I’ll set out to find art that either matches my vision or helps inspire me. This is particularly helpful when launching non-fantasy game as it helps people grok the tone, atmosphere, and/or vibe … Read more
It’s been an exceedingly long day at work and home, so to avoid falling behind on #RPGaDay2018, I’m going to point to a blog post I wrote about the life and times of the Aeon Harrier, one of the signature starships from our Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic campaign. Its flight through a protostar nebula (a … Read more
By getting the players and their characters emotionally invested in the world … and then leveraging that investment. Both of my RPG entries for #RPGaDay2018 — “Most memorable NPC” and “Favorite recurring NPC” — used this technique. Damocles Everton worked because the players were already heavily invested in the Blackrazor Guild, having saved it from the … 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
While revisiting the past as part of November’s RPG Carnival, I realized that Nuketown’s Game Day column debuted February 2007. I was stunned to realize I’d been writing it for over a decade, and that I’d written 110 entries in the series. That makes it the longest running and most prolific column in the ol’thermonuclear burg’s history. There … Read more
“Rethinking Encounters” is the theme of February 2017’s RPG Blog Carnival, hosted by Table Top Terrors. It’s something I’ve contemplated a lot over the last few years as my gaming group returned to playing Dungeons & Dragons and I struggled to come up with thoughtful and interesting fantasy encounters. That’s because for most of the Blackrazor … Read more
Scavenger’s Guide to Droids is the definitive droid source book for Star Wars: Saga Edition, introducing a new chassis-based system for creating droids, a new streamlined “protocol” format that lets players run droids as equipment rather than NPCs, new droid manufacturing traits and personality quirks and a 96 page codex containing dozens of droids.
Basing a source book on a video game can be a risky business, particularly when that game is an uneven, occasionally gimmicky shooter like The Force Unleashed video game. You run the risk of alienating diehard Star Wars fans who scoff at the idea of Vader having a hidden student, while at the same time running out of content because of the game’s lack of depth. Fortunately The Force Unleashed Campaign Guide avoids all of this.