One of my favorite movie quotes is from Real Genius—Chris Knight, when asked about a gadget he built, states, “It’s yet another in a long series of diversions in an attempt to avoid responsibility.”
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Another gut-busting episode of Acquisitions Incorporated has come to an end at PAX East 2016, and coming this June: Acquisitions Incorporated, the web series.
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Just like a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, two great things, Acquisitions Incorporated and ‘Card Hunter,’ have come together to form something awesome.
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If the Worldbuilders Party is going to be a recurring part of Emerald City ComicCon in Seattle, it will be one of my yearly must-do events! Where else can I spend the evening playing games with half of Acquisitions Incorporated while helping Heifer International feed the hungry?
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Table Titans follows a group of D&D players in two worlds — the ‘real’ world and the adventuring world. The online comic moves back and forth frequently, touching on the real lives of the players and their table antics as well as diving into the world of the D&D characters they play.
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Wizkids, the industry leader in pre-painted plastic miniatures, has announced a new line of unpainted plastic miniatures sets featuring more than 150 new sculpts.
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Your D&D party finds themselves drawn into a world of gothic nightmare and sanguine stains. With little knowledge of the realm of Barovia, the party must find a way to escape the evil grasp of Strahd von Zarovich, the dread vampire lord of the land.
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My memory is a bit fuzzy when it comes to ‘D&D’ adventures I played at a young age, but I’m 90% certain that one of the adventures I played came from a company called Judges Guild. It was famous for being the first to create adventure “modules” that were basically pre-generated adventures for the DM to run, providing maps, visual aids, and, of course, traps, loot, and new monsters. It would be a while before TSR (owner of ‘D&D’) would release its own modules, starting with the pastel cover versions, so Judges Guild gets the full credit for developing the idea of pre-packaged adventures.
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A few weeks ago, I posted an article about 2D terrain products, both old and new. During some of my research, I found some interesting photos of a large DM screen made by OldSchoolDM. I reached out to its maker, and that in turn opened up another discovery — a leather-bound tome containing five Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (1e) books.
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Paizo and Humble Bundle have teamed up for an enormous offering of ‘Pathfinder’ PDFs at an insanely low price. If you’ve ever had any interest in ‘Pathfinder,’ this is your chance to get almost everything you need to play for just one dollar!
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For quite a few weeks now, I’ve been enjoying spinning some fun tales and leading my boys through some fun adventures with the ‘Adventure Maximus’ RPG. As kids will do, they constantly surprise me with their creativity for dealing with obstacles. (Rather than fight a dragon hiding in The Dump, they sweet-talked him into joining their group because they are always looking for treasure like dragons and figured he’d rather be looking for treasure than fighting.) But yesterday, my youngest son asked me something that made my heart swell… he said, “I want to be Maximus Master.”
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If you’re into Dungeons & Dragons and enjoy using miniatures, you might be interested in the history of 2D terrain products, both old and new. For over 40 years, players have enjoyed the extra bit of realism that miniature dioramas and terrain have brought to the game, so here are some examples of what has been used in the past and what is available today.
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Zombie Orpheus, is seeking funding for the third season of their epically hilarious series following Perf, a wizard so incompetent he’s actually useful, his dysfunctional companions, and a sarcastic-wise-cracking talking sword on their hero’s journey through the world of Fartherall.
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It’s been a while since I wrote up about any of my DMing for Wednesday night’s Adventurers League. For the past five months, my players have been experiencing the Underdark via the ‘Out of the Abyss’ adventure book.
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PaizoCon 2016 tickets just hit the street and are available for this four day gaming convention in Seattle Washington. PaizoCon is put on by Paizo the makers of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game.
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When I started my latest ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ campaign back at the beginning of the year, my goal was to reduce the amount of time I spent preparing for each session. I’d burned out on building crazy complex combat encounters and over-plotting with hundreds of wiki articles linked together like some nutcase’s string-smothered pegboard.
I needed simplification, so I made a vow to keep it to 30 minutes of prep for every weekly session.
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It’s widely known that ‘Dungeons & Dragons,’ created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, was the successor of Gygax and Jeff Perren’s earlier work titled ‘Chainmail.’ But this week an interesting find was shared by wargame historian Jon Peterson over on his blog, ‘Playing at the World,’ and it’s definitely a bit of disruptive news…
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Ravenloft returns in a new ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ adventure: ‘The Curse of Strahd.’
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Every five or six sessions, I like to do something different and special for my players. And three times this season, I’ve found myself relying on Fat Dragon Games.
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I was recently chatting with a fellow ‘D&D’ 5e player (Hey, Tyler!), and he was asking me all sorts of questions about DMing–time demands (in terms of preparation), the need to improvise, coming up with new material, etc. He wants to be a DM, but he was understandably hesitant to jump in. I told him that he could always go with the pre-generated content books that have been released for 5e–‘Hoard of the Dragon Queen,’ ‘Elemental Evil,’ and the most recent book, ‘Out of the Abyss.’ He told me he was looking for shorter adventures similar to the old ‘D&D’/’AD&D’ modules that were so popular in the ’80s and ’90s but they seemed to be in short supply. WHAT?! Short supply? Not true!
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It’s that time again… the end of the year where I give a look back at my geek-related work and home life and try to grade myself (always on a curve and with extra credit tossed in before averaging) on my various endeavors. 2015 was a great year for me for many reasons–there were the inevitable potholes and detours and complete traffic shutdowns, but, all-in-all, I have to say it was a pretty straight road for me personally and professionally.
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Get your very own Baba Yaga’s Walking Hut with this independently run crowdfunding campaign from Dungeon Crawler Miniatures.
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No one can learn it all overnight, and sometimes, you won’t have a teacher. D&D for Young Players and DMs is a journal of the lessons our family learned while introducing my kids to D&D.
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Learn how to create your own reusable modular dungeon tiles using Hirst Arts molds.
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In my prior post, Dungeon Casting Part 1: Creating Dungeons With Hirst Arts Molds, I showed you how to create the crypt from ‘Pathfinder’s Crypt of the Everflame’ game module. The key feature of the crypt is Kessen’s sarcophagus. This sarcophagus lid is cast from a custom mold that was surprisingly simple to create. In this post, I will show you how to create your own molds that can be used to cast your own pieces similar, or identical, to Hirst Arts stones. One reason you may want to do this is to create a custom piece otherwise not available, such as this sarcophagus lid.
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See how easy it is to create fantastic dungeon terrain using Hirst Arts molds.
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Love ‘Dungeons & Dragons,’ ‘Lord of the Rings,’ and humor? Check out ‘DM of the Rings’ by Shamus Young.
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In this episode, our first after a long summer vacation, we discuss those moments in role-playing games—video and tabletop—that made us stop and think. As young players, the idea of character dilemmas and a satisfying story were the stuff of gaming legend. Now that we’re all growed up, we realize that it can happen, but it takes a special group and a GM willing to let go of a little control.
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Books such as Jon Peterson’s ‘Playing at the World’ and the recent four-part book series ‘Dungeons & Designers’ by Shannon Appelcline fill in a lot of the details about Gary Gygax and how he, along with Dave Arneson, helped develop the ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ game that so many of us enjoy today. There’s so much information out there on the history of D&D and how it came to be… but up to now there really hasn’t been much in the way of a biography of Gary Gygax. And author Michael Witwer is trying to change that.
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I love being a DM. It scratches a creative itch for me. Creating an adventure, running it, improvising when necessary to counter whatever craziness the players throw my way–these are all aspects of the job that I absolutely enjoy. Toss in the smiles and laughs of my players at the end of a session as they recall one or two significant events from the night, and there are moments when I could be convinced to actually pay to sit in that chair.
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