Here are some tidbits from the chat that I enjoyed:

• Mearls: Hmmm... let's see. I've been DMing mostly, and the rules have changed a lot over the past few days. Probably the funniest thing was guest starring as a librarian in a playtest game at DDXP. Also, I got to test the DR rules when the players had to cut open a dead wererat's stomach to find a gem it had swallowed. That was not how I expected to test those rules.
• The packet will have five pregen characters, Caves of Chaos adventure, bestiary for the adventure, and rules for [...]

Yesterday, WotC held an open D&D Next Chat with Mike Mearles and Jeremy Crawford where a few people got some of their questions answered by the lead developers of D&D Next.  You can access the chat transcript here.  If you encounter problems getting Cover It Live to work for you, you can find the chat transcript below, too.

 10:51
Trevor: I've just opened the chat so people should be making their way in now. Once we're about to start, I'll do another couple announcements. 10:55
Trevor: Hah! You're all awesome with your questions, but we haven't started quite yet. You can keep them coming in, just know that we'll be starting this party in about five to ten minutes. 11:00
Trevor: For a few of you asking about a transcript - yes, the contents of this chat will be available on the site after we're done. 11:01

Voices in the Dark The Adventurers could barely see by the light of Star of Justice's mystical 'Aura of Retribution'. There was a dark narrow corridor on their left while ahead of them the metal tracks lead to a soft gold light that came from a rectangular opening along the side of the corridor. "No! I need an A5312!" a gravely cantankerous voice could be heard echoing from where the

"Characters get four things--skills or traits." 

This model kind of reminds me of a combination of 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons and Exalted, in that skills grant a flat bonus to a variety of related things, but you can opt to nab other things if you want. A workshop was specifically mentioned, but I could also see something like influence, followers, a familiar, and more. Not sure about languages. They would have to be pretty darned useful, or other things less so, to make them a compelling choice. This--along with wizards getting at-will spells without having to burn a feat, themes granting [...]

A friend of mine's L5R game just ended recently, and with the friend only going to be in the area for a few more months we've decided to pass the GMing mantle from him to me and switch games up. This works out just fine for me, because now I get to run another game and I can try out  a new system. Now, my intention is to set this game in the Marvel universe, being as the system we'll be using is the new Marvel Heroic RPG. Today I want to talk about some of the things I've been [...]

There is a planet whose source of mana is Ink. There are two mediums used for the Ink. They are Parchment and Tattoos. The spells are written in Runes on the parchment or tattooed on the mage. The use of magic in this realm is very difficult to come by. Even though anyone has the opportunity to become a "magic user" the application of Ink is "taught" to those of worth. The Ink Masters decide who benefit from their craft. If one is fortunate enough to understand the use of Ink, then they decide who is taught its secrets. There [...]

Well met, gentle Readers! I hope this week finds you all in good spirits, and enjoying many wonderful gaming pursuits! Most likely, I'd imagine many fantasy gamers are giving the new Diablo III a try, since it just came out yesterday. I'm a huge fan of the game series myself, and just downloaded the client today -- and after I get this blog posted, I plan to storm the gates of Hell!

I had been trying out The Secret World beta a bit, but I'm not sure if I like it or not yet. What I like in the [...]

I noticed recently that the "Follow" link/button no longer appears at the top left of my Blogger page when I visit a new blog. This isn't a glitch - Google recently removed this option, as discussed here.
This was how I normally started following new blogs, so it wasn't immediately apparent that I could still follow a blog. Poking around, I found there are still two ways to follow a blog, neither of which is as easy as the old way.
1. Go to your Blogger Dashboard, where there's a button right below "Reading List" that says "Add". Once clicked, [...]

Hey Gang,

I'll be running three Mutant Future games at Gen Con this year (the only Mutant Future games, it appears). If you'll be in Indy and would like to traipse through the wastelands with yours truly, here are the events I'll be running:

RPG1230160 - Thundarr the Barbarian: Across the Dimensional Divide
Mutant Future - 6 players - 4 hours
Thursday, August 16 at noon
Location: Marriott :: Indiana Ballroom C :: Table 1
Demon Dogs! A dimensional time-rip has appeared near "Indeenapliss". It must be the work of an evil wizard, but who? Join Thundarr, Ookla, and Princess [...]

Used with permission from Dezilon @ http://dezilon.deviantart.com/

My powers grow daily. Soon I shall unlock the secrets of the soul itself! The ancient tomes I have been studying teach me of the powers of flesh and bone. The dead provide ample resources for those with the strength of will to use the forbidden magic. None can stand before the very forces of the grave!

This article is a doozy. Learn to summon banshees, flesh golems, shadowy steeds, and clouds of noxious fumes that raise the dead to fight on your behalf.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD PDF

Special thanks to Dezilon for giving permission to [...]

For those keeping track, I ended off with the Elder Scrolls in this challenge. I've been absent for quite some time. Between just not being around and a curiously dodgy internet connection, there's been little time for the web, or Blogger for that matter. Now, instead of spamming everyone's blog watch I'll condense the rest of my list into one post, that you may at least know where I was going to go.

Frank Herbert - the mastermind behind Dune and various other works of science fiction. Besides my long-standing love for Dune, his Destination: Void (The Jesus Incident [...]

I'm pleased to report that Dan Houser and I have released the first installment of Golden Age Thrilling Action from Stark City Press this week at RPGNow!

Written by Line Artist for ICONS Dan Houser and myself (Joe Bardales), this is a Golden Age character pack with a pair of characters from the classic public domain pulp comics of the 40s, and a sample battleground. Dan also does all the amazing artwork.

This supplement is to be used to either run a quick battle scene for one-on-one play, or to have a few more [...]

Our Last Best Hope (+ death cards) by Mark Truman / Magpie Games The Good: It's a good use of the theme, you've got that whole Armageddon, it's the end of the world thing and you have to fix it. The Death Cards are great though, here's you're one moment to beat the odds but you have to fulfill your destiny later. The Bad: It doesn't say how many tokens you start out with. Even if it's

I have just won the auction for the charity seat at the North Texas Role-Playing Games Convention (NTRPG Con, see here). I am so excited. If someone had told my younger self that someday I would be playing in a game with some of the big names of the early days of Dungeons and Dragons (and Call of Cthulhu as well) I would have immediately replied “how much?”.

Well it turns out the answer in my case was $152.50. For that amount I get to play in a game of AD&D with the following people: Tim Kask, Frank Mentzer, Jim [...]

Studying for my State Agent License exam. Hope to be back to regular posting, soon. Got a game, Friday night. Woo-hoo!

Made a map.

This is a long chat to chew.  I may have to break this into two separate parts.  Lets see how much actual meat there is as I chew the fat ;)

10:51
Trevor: I've just opened the chat so people should be making their way in now. Once we're about to start, I'll do another couple announcements.

10:55
Trevor: Hah! You're all awesome with your questions, but we haven't started quite yet. You can keep them coming in, just know that we'll be starting this party in about five to ten minutes.

11:00
Trevor: For a few of you asking about a transcript - yes, the contents of this chat will be available on the site after we're done.

11:01
Mearls: [...]

As a writer/publisher/designer guy, I feel obligated to keep up with what’s going on in the wide world around me (at least, insofar, as it impacts my sphere and that of my demographic). I know. I know. It sounds so dispassionate and distant and absolutely uncaring. Not so, I avow. The thing is, the clock has so many ticks in each minute which, in turn, are swallowed up by hours and flow into days.

We are in a world where we are inundated with some fantastic stuff. These things assail us remorselessly. We, in turn, cannot help but be [...]

In Magic: the Gathering, most of the creatures traditionally have a single trait defining their race (eg. Elf, Dwarf, Goblin, Merfolk, etc.), some of the more recent sets have creatures bearing two traits, one of which is the race while the other might be an occupation (eg. Elf Farmer, Dwarf Miner, etc). But then there are specific game effects that might target cards based on their name, not just their traits. It's a simple system, and the forerunner for a lot of similar card systems.
I'm actually fonder of the trait system in the Asian inspired card game L5R. [...]

Just for the heck of it I'm posting a sketch I did of one of my "Super Citizens" members, Mach - Duck the avian speedster.

Tourq Stevens invited me to put in a guest post over at Stuffer Shack. I’m honored to oblige.

A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats

Check it out and leave a comment with your thoughts.

The fifth installment of Raging Swan Press's So what's for sale..."-Series is 20 pages long, 1 page front cover, 2 pages editorial, 1 page ToC/foreword, 1 page advertisement, 1 page SRD and 1 page back cover, leaving 13 pages of content, so let's check out what exactly we get here!

Rendered Nightmares is a website dedicated to the artwork of Tymothi. A native new yorker, who uses various computer art programs to create works of art, he hopes will inspire people to see how dark the world around us truly is.

I'm now working my through the monster chapter doing a first pass on editing before it goes to Tanner for a more thorough look, and I decided "Why not preview a few monsters on the blog". (i.e. I needed a quick and easy post for the day because I'm busy as spit).

I figure this can give folks an idea about the format (different than in earlier previews - a format I liked but just became too difficult to layout effectively and make the info easy for the TK to access during play) and maybe preview a few of [...]

I was born into a catholic family,my uncle was a brother in the franciscan order and he showed me what the power of real faith is. Now 42 years later, I do not find myself believing in one faction. I... Rendered Nightmares is a website dedicated to the artwork of Tymothi. A native new yorker, who uses various computer art programs to create works of art, he hopes will inspire people to see how dark the world around us truly is.

As a fan of Westerns, I've always wanted to play Boot Hill. I've owned a copy of the Second Edition of the game -- the one that came in the box and was published in 1979 -- for many years, but I have never had the chance to sit down and actually play a session of the game.



This isn't to say that the players I have gamed with over the years haven't been up for Western themed gaming.  I've played sessions of Avalon Hill's Gunslinger (not an rpg) and sessions of Deadlands.  We've always had a [...]

A problem with the random generation of worlds in Traveller is that for small worlds (where size < 4) is that these worlds might get an ordinary breathable atmosphere. This is a problem, since the minimum molecular weight retained for a planet shouldn’t allow that. EDG has explained minimum molecular weight retained here, and here is a nice visual tool for checking what gases will be retained depending on size, density and temperature.

This problem leads to silly explanations. Like the one in both the GURPS and Mongoose Sword Worlds modules where a planet (Enos) is made of Osmium. Other explanations [...]

A member of my regular D&D group is about to defend her master's thesis tomorrow. She posted a query to her Facebook today, asking what she should wear to her defense. Naturally, upon seeing the question, I popped over to that bastion for defensive clothing ideas, Women Fighters in Reasonable Armor.
I have picked out a couple of options. Which do you like best? Keep in mind, she is a bit of a crusader for education reform.
Alchemical Advocate for practical STEM education

A defender of the arts

She chose... wiselyA proponent of better school nutritionOr, dire-weasels, because... [...]

Werewolves and vampires may grab most of the headlines, but there’s no keeping those zombies down. For a long time they were all about movies and videogames, but there’s no stopping them now:

Alternate Reality Gaming: 2.8 Hours Later

Counter Boardgaming: All Things [...]

The Asheville gaming community is buzzing with excitement about the awesome day of gaming at GeekOut 2012! If you live anywhere near the Asheville area, and you haven’t signed up for games at the warhorn, what are you waiting for?! IT’S TOMORROW!

My gold-foil copy of DCCRPG showed up on my doorstep just in the nick of time. I’ll be running Portal to the Stars for both the 10AM slot, and the 6PM slot. I’ve got other adventures too, so I could be persuaded to let you in to the Tower of Crowan the Conjurer (RIP Pamela), or we could try [...]

I had the pleasure of GMing a zero-level DCCRPG session for most of the Skyland Games regulars on last Wednesday, and it was some of the most fun I’ve had playing RPGs, period. The picture attached to this post probably appears to be a complete non sequitur, but it will make sense in moment. I created my very own zero-level adventure, The Tower of Crowan the Conjuror, since some of the guys had already played Portal to the Stars. We’ll probably release it in one form or another soon, but it’s currently being revised and polished up a bit. Minor [...]

Skyland Games is proud to present an ongoing weekly series for Pathfinder Society play.As a group, we have been enamored with both Pathfinder Society and the extensive character creation options in Pathfinder.This is probably why we love games with unique character creation systems such as Traveller, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Dungeon Crawl Classics.Having a well fleshed out character can make the difference between fun and flop at any event, whether it be gaming with your buddies or a table at an organized play event.Sometimes we just do not have time to create a character with the complexity that we [...]

This comes up a lot. Player skill vs. Character skill. I think about this way too much sometimes and it seems like, at the end of the day, it is the most important question for me when I sit down to philosophize about gaming (which despite two and half years of this blog is not [...]

This quarter-of-an-hour clip shows the final round of the jousting from Sherwood Forest Faire - as featured on HeroPress earlier in the week - for the big cash prize.

Again, we have YouTuber GnonplussedGnome to thank for the footage.

Guess what? The full release of the 2d6 Roleplaying System is at hand!

To download the PDF File of the Full Release Core Rules, click this link.

Major changes from Delta:

• Stat costs now scale the way skill costs do, and you get more points with which to buy them
• Armor grants rerolls on results of 2, 3, or 4 depending on the type instead of 1, 2, or 3 times per day
• Magic is now based on Resolve (which is now the combination of Toughness and Willpower, similar to Initiative)
• Cast and Resolve are no longer skills
• Cinematics cost 2XP and can no longer grant an [...]

Children of the Revolution tells the stories of noteworthy or notorious Kindred of the modern nights whose Embraces came intimes of unrest, rebellion, or open revolution. The circumstances of these revolutions might have been mortal or undead, martial or cultural. These Kindred joined the ranks of the Damned under tides of war or cultural upheaval, and their blood bears the mark of change from one paradigm into another. Sometimes they are the agents of change. For others, their revolution drags them in its wake.

The world of the Kindred is always fraught with blood and danger, and Embrace amid the fires [...]

THIS IS SCENE #5 IN A PLAY-BY-POST D&D GAME
Many elements of it are unique and innovative, with several key twists that will catch the players by surprise. The adventure is deadly and devious, with victory going only to those clever enough to take it. Though it may not be a traditional Fourthcore deathtrap dungeon, I assure you, dear reader, that it holds many of the ideals of Fourthcore close to its heart.
I will keep these posts easily collapsible, so that readers may easily skip past them if they wish. Although, really, you'd be missing out.

Read more

At long last, another in my series of Darlene-style maps covering western Oerik. This time, we cover the Tharquish Empire and the remainder of the Tharquish Dominions. I envision the region as a Greco-Roman type place (which is attested to in the Chroniques de la Lune Noire, which shows a decidedly Classical Tharquatis about to get taken out by a tidal wave; but that's okay, because it's no more canonical than Tharizdun destroying Oerth in the Gord the Rogue books), with lots of hilly terrain broken up by smallish woodlands.

I also made a few changes to the Free [...]

Those fine folks at RPGNow/DriveThruRPG have the latest set of discounts up, you can get any of the following items at 20% off (until 14 June) with the secret code at the bottom of this entry:

• Savage Worlds Fantasy Companion [Pinnacle Entertainment]
• Realms of Cthulhu [Reality Blurs]
• Karma Roleplaying System Core [Bards and Sages]
• FantasyCraft [Crafty Games]
• Fat Dragon's Dragonshire Deluxe [Fat Dragon Games]
• Paths of Power (Pathfinder System) [4 Winds Fantasy]
• Spycraft: Real AmericanH.E.R.O.es[Crafty Games]
• Fellowship of the White Star Campaign Book [Thenodrin Presents]
• Ninja Burger RPG (2nd Edition) [aetherial FORGE]
• Heavy Gear Blitz! Locked & Loaded [Dream Pod 9]
• Hero's Handbook: Dragonborn [Goodman Games]
• Splicers RPG [Palladium Books]
• Noir Knights (Savage [...]

The Vistani come from Ravenloft. If you are ripping of Dracula or Eastern Europe for Gothic horror, you need gypsies. Ah, the Tarokka deck; did you know this year it is 20 years old? I have a deck, and looking at the back of the cards I saw that 1992, and just blinked.

Anyway, a “tradition” is different from a grimore and an overlay template; it is a pool of talents that have restrictions on who can take them that, together, represent a body of lore among an oppressed and marginalized people. (It is no more complicated than that.)

One of my [...]

Before my reflections get totally out of hand, here’s something delightful for you.

The Purifier

I have very conflicted feelings about this template. See, the whole Warhammer Empire concept (my inspiration in this case) is designed to justify a Neo-Nazi worldview. Knowledge, open-mindedness, and embracing of diversity are cardinal sins that will bring the end of the world as you know it. So basically, what I believe in personally is antithetical to the concept of the witch hunter (and a setting specifically designed so that everybody has ample reason to fight everyone else.)

In my D&D setting, characters made treaties with goblin tribes, [...]

Tentacle Bento raised more than $30,000 in half the time set aside for a $13,000 request total. The project was set up by Soda Pop, the copany behind Super Dungeon Explore and Relic Knights.

The concern? Kickstarter hasn’t said publicly but the implication is the funding site wasn’t happy with a game based around hentai tentacle action. Soda Pop haven’t addressed the issue head on either but in a Facebook post they say;

“To all our friends and new supporters from Kickstarter, and those who wanted to Tentacle Bento come to fruition, we are working on a solution to get us back [...]

Random monster encounters played an important role in character advancement in early editions of D&D and in many video RPGs, as this assortment of random monsters for Nintendo’s Dragon Warrior game illustrates. Image copyright strategywiki.org.

While perusing some old .pdfs of legacy editionDungeons & Dragonsmodules, I was struck by how common random monster encounter tables were in the old adventures, and was reminded of the prominence ofrandom encounters in the rules themselves. The first edition (1e)Dungeon Master’s Guidehad an entire appendix devoted to such encounters, and the 1e Monster Manual II included an index that groupedcreatures from three monster volumes by [...]

I suspect that my players will wrap up the current adventure this Saturday. They've already accomplished much of the current scenario and have indicated a desire to move up the game's start time - as 4 hrs of gaming was a hard place to stop last week. The next session will last as long as it needs to last I suspect.

So, afterwards, it will be time to lift the curtain, so to speak, and allow my players to explore more than just the initial surroundings of their starting town.

Initially, my plan was to use Christian's HEX 000 Series as is, but I think it will serve my purposes better to break the hexes up and use them where I [...]

I usually like a bit of backstory for my own player characters. Player backstories can provide powerful game ideas; I partucularly like the idea in Mouseguard of having 'enemies' so that in the players' turn (the sandbox portion of a Mouseguard game) you have something to springboard off of. Backstories have some problems though:

• As a GM though, I don't usually have time to read the long (2 pages or more) backstories some people write.
• Not all players like to write long backstories.
• Some players can't devote time outside of the game to create backstories.
• Without backstories, background information like 'how did we meet' [...]

Over at The City of Bones, the tour of the city continues with the Merchants Quarter.

In a rapid turn of events, but not completely out of my control, our Friday night Skype game was changed from AD&D to Burning Wheel. Yes, I know. It was not supposed to be but I came to the conclusion our group, as a whole, is more into games where they have a larger degree of narrative control and where story trumps random events.
This was barely noticeable in our first sessions, but as  time went by, I become more and more aware that they enjoyed the game while they were at the Keep on the Borderlands than when they were fighting [...]

Random monster encounters played an important role in character advancement in early editions of D&D and in many video RPGs, as this assortment of random monsters for Nintendo’s Dragon Warrior game illustrates. Image copyright strategywiki.org.

While perusing some old .pdfs of legacy editionDungeons & Dragonsmodules, I was struck by how common random monster encounter tables were in the old adventures, and was reminded of the prominence ofrandom encounters in the rules themselves. The first edition (1e)Dungeon Master’s Guidehad an entire appendix devoted to such encounters, and the 1e Monster Manual II included an index that groupedcreatures from three monster volumes by [...]

I have to say I'm far more jazzed about The Amazing Spider-Man than The Dark Knight Rises, but then I don't really hide my passion for the Marvel Comics Universe.

Now just to get Peter Parker into a film with The Avengers (and Ghost Rider, Blade, The X-Men etc) and my head would truly explode!

On Saturday, we headed to the Wisconsin Bat Festival where we not only learned about bats, why they are endangered, and why that’s bad for the environment — but we got to see a few live and in person as well. Here are some pictures of bats from the festival!

The Bat Festival featured live bat programs with bats from around the world, including Wisconsin's backyard bats. Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources experts were on-hand with information about bat habitats, predators and white-nose syndrome.

Several authors were also at the event, including Brian Lies, author of the children’s books Bats at the [...]

I’ve been asked a few times by various people quite recently what I’m playing, what I have and what I wish I had. So, I took some not-to-terrible photos of my collection using my phone’s camera. Here’s most of what I have (a few games are on loan). As for what I want? Well, everything else of course! I’ve written up a very, very, very brief review/brain-dump on each game pictured that isn’t a kid game or Toys R Us game.

Click any picture to make it vastly larger.

Top Shelf

Talisman is the original Black Isle version, of which that one is [...]