Happy New Year to everyone. May your 2013 be better than your 2012, in whatever way it mig...
Monday, 31 December 2012
I've got a pretty full plate when it comes to gaming stuff in 2013...I'll be attending the Dreamation convention (Morristown, NJ) in FebruaryMy adventure module "The Village of Welthorp" is due out NLT March (this is the stretch goal for the Curious Volume of Forgotten Lore kickstarter that ties in with both that book and James M.'s Dwimmermount kickstarter, which should be shipping then)The Black Blade Publishing edition of Castle of the Mad Archmage is due out NLT MayThe Adventures Dark and Deep Players Manual is due out NLT JuneI'll be attending...
Wednesday, 26 December 2012
I ask because I have never been in a game with That Guy. Apparently, many other people have, and given that I've never encountered That Guy at conventions or campaigns in over 35 years of playing RPGs, I have to ask if it's just me.We've all heard the stories about That Guy. He's the killer DM who revels in TPKs and devising entire dungeons whose sole purpose is to obliterate the player characters with no real hope of either escape or-- perish the...
Well, perhaps there's our third. Gerry Anderson, creator of the "Supermarionation" film-making technique using marionettes and other puppeteering skills, died today at the age of 89. Many might remember such shows as the Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet, Supercar, and Firebird XL5. But he was also known for his live action work with shows such as Space: 1999, UFO, and films such as Journey to the Far Side of the Sun. While I wouldn't go so far as to say he revolutionized science fiction, but his shows were a staple of my television watching while...
Monday, 24 December 2012
I knew him best growing up from The Odd Couple, but I personally think his greatest performance wasn't a comedy, but in The Twilight Zone episode, "A Game of Pool." Also, IMHO, the best performance by the legendary Jonathan Winters. Deadpan drama.Here is the entire episode, in three parts. RIP, Mr. Klugm...
Friday, 21 December 2012
Step 1: Successful Kickstarter of Players ManualStep 2: ???Step 3: PROFIT!!!Now that the Adventures Dark and Deep™ Players Manual has been successfully funded (thanks again to all who backed it!), I thought it would be a good idea to give a little insight into where I think things are going, business-wise, and what I'm looking at for a business model and so forth.It should come as no surprise that BRW Games, LLC, the company I started to publish...
As promised, I thought I'd go through some of the details of how the Kickstater campaign for the Adventures Dark and Deep™ Players Manual went. This can be compared to the campaign for the first book, A Curious Volume of Forgotten Lore, for which I did a similar analysis after it's Kickstarter campaign concluded.I decided to do some things very deliberately differently for the Players Manual. First and foremost, I decided that I'd let the project...
Thursday, 20 December 2012
Hey, I guess that it's pretty much obligatory to do a Mayan Apocalypse post, right?For me, growing up as a child of the 70's, the end of the world was ubiquitous. Especially as a gamer and a sci-fi fan. First, there were the games. As I've spoken of before, SPI had a whole line of "future history games" that essentially played out aspects of World War III, mostly featuring a Warsaw Pact invasion of Europe. I had World War III, Invasion: America,...
First and foremost, thank you to all who backed the Players Manual project. We came in at $8,600, which is 132% of the goal. Thanks to you, we're going to have a beautiful book!The next step is to get the artists set to working. The emails to them will go out today or tomorrow, giving them their individual assignments. Their work should be back to me by February, or possibly sooner.And one piece of even better news; the editor has already gotten...
Wednesday, 19 December 2012
Looking ahead to my 2013 convention schedule, it looks like I might-- just might-- be able to hit a non-local convention this year, in addition to Dreamation, NJcon, Dexcon, and Metatopia (and possibly NEPACon, too). The question is, which one?GenCon: The big, obvious choice. But I'm not sure how much there would be for someone like me who doesn't play 4E or Pathfinder. I know there's the OSR Booth in the dealers' room (anyone know how to get hold of those guys), but is there anything else for me?North Texas RPG Con: Lots of OSR goodness...
Over at ICV2 there's a nice little article about old-time game company Flying Buffalo, along with a brief interview with founder/owner Rick Loomis, wherein the mystery of where the name of the company came from. Fascinating trip down memory lane; I was deeply into play-by-mail games in the 1980's, and naturally played a lot of FB games. Nuclear War/Nuclear Escallation remains a favorite of mine as well, and Tunnels & Trolls is, of course, one of the longest-lived games around. Enjoy!----------What would Dungeons & Dragons have looked like...
Tuesday, 18 December 2012
Well, here we are, with about 24 hours to go before the end of the Adventures Dark and Deep Players Manual Kickstarter! We're at 120% of the funding goal, and I'm seeing the usual last-minute rush to sign up.Thanks to everyone who has already pledged to the project, and to everyone else, remember this is your last chance to get your name immortalized in the book as one of the two-hundred-plus people who made the project possible!If you'd like to...
Monday, 17 December 2012
This one takes us through level 20, and includes a new adventure and monsters to support higher level play.Download --> HERE <--Enjoy!----------What would Dungeons & Dragons have looked like if Gary Gygax had been allowed to keep developing it? Please, if you haven't done so already, consider supporting my Kickstarter for the Adventures Dark and Deep Players Manual, going on now through December 19th. I need your help to make it a reali...
So what should grace my inbox this morning but a sneak peek of the contents of the upcoming first issue of Gygax Magazine, news of which leaked out not too long ago. I've gotta say I'm really, really looking forward to this, and not only do I like the fact that they've got a diverse selection of games covered, but there are more than a few names in there that should be very familiar to us. Best of luck, guys, and can't wait for the issue to come...
Saturday, 15 December 2012
I got to see the newest release in Peter Jackson's Middle Earth franchise; The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. I saw it with some folks from my Adventures Dark and Deep campaign, and we saw the plain-Jane version. No 3D, no 48 fps. Just a regular movie.I have to say I went into this having read a number of bad reviews and was expecting to be disappointed. I came out having really enjoyed it. It's not a perfect movie, but few are, and I thought it...
One of the players in my home campaign, who is also doing some editing/proofreading work on the Adventures Dark and Deep Players Manual, came up with a conceptual question regarding alignment which I thought might be of interest.Given a system where evil is defined as the belief that the powerful should be in charge, and good is defined as the belief that the strong and wealthy should help the weak and the poor, what happens in a situation where a powerful person is in charge, and wants to help the weak and the poor? Isn't that a contradiction?It's...
Wednesday, 12 December 2012
I don't often get to play Adventures Dark and Deep. I run it on a (mostly) weekly basis, but opportunities for me to actually play on the other side of the screen are few, mostly because I'm so busy acting as the GM in my game.That said, when I do play, my favorite class is the mountebank. Even going back to Gary Gygax's original article in Dragon #65, this immediately stood out to me as sounding like something I wanted to play:This sub-class of...
Monday, 10 December 2012
Over at Ain't It Cool News, Mr. Beaks gives us a teaser of the teaser of the new Star Trek film, and the L.A. Times proclaims that the villain's identity is still a mystery. I don't think so, not at all.Bear in mind that the identity of the villain was slipped inadvertently some months ago; Gary Mitchell. Karl Urban (who plays McCoy in the new films) stated (speaking of Benedict Cumberbatch, who plays the villain) “he’s a great addition, and I think...
Back on May 15, 2008, I launched this blog with no real plan or aspirations. Now, four and a half years and exactly one thousand posts later, it's really grown beyond anything I had a right to expect.Over the years, and over the course of a thousand posts, this blog has not only birthed an entire megadungeon (the Castle of the Mad Archmage) but an offhand post about a couple of old Dragon Magazine articles spawned an entire game system as well (Adventures Dark and Deep). It's presented insights into adventures that only came about as a result...
Sunday, 9 December 2012
It's something that every DM has dreamed of at one point or another; getting paid to run role-playing games. There were even a few schemes back in the 80's and 90's to set up such things; "Professional Game Master Guilds" and so forth, where one would presumably have a level of assurance that the game master would be well enough above average to justify the expense. Needless to say, such things never got off the ground.So imagine my surprise when I was contacted by a game store, which was looking to pay someone to run an old-school game for a client...
Saturday, 8 December 2012
It is rare that I have a topic that is completely appropriate to post not only to my gaming blog, Greyhawk Grognard, but also to my blog that deals with issues relating to my Heathen faith, GOPagan. However, my attention has been drawn to just such a thing by an article in the Boston Globe (h/t to The Wild Hunt blog).Let me preface this by saying I abhor Political Correctness. It's nothing but an excuse for professional offense-junkies to try...
For those who don't know, on Thursday Google+ unveiled a new feature; Communities.Basically, a G+ Community is a place where folks can post things for all the different members to see and comment on. Naturally, in the land rush that followed, I wanted to do my part, and I present to you: the Google+ OSR Community.As of right now, we have 220 members, but everyone is invited, and while I'm still sorting out all the ins and outs of the features, we...
Thursday, 6 December 2012
Today seems to be a busy day in the gaming industry.Slitherine has finally put up a pre-order page for the hard copy version of their Field of Glory miniatures rules version 2.0. FoG was very successful when it launched, owing in no small part to the outstanding design of the books themselves. When it was announced that the 2nd version of the rules would be available in electronic format only, it put off a lot of fans of the game, including myself....
One of the things that has been commonplace within fantasy RPGs since their inception is the roster of "standard" fantasy races available as player character choices. Aside from humans, we have elves and dwarves, and often (but not as often as the others) gnomes and halflings. And of course half-orcs, which are much more D&D-specific and are not nearly as ubiquitous across different game systems.Now, there are certainly exceptions to this rule....
Monday, 3 December 2012
What with James M. bragging about his daughter wanting a displacer beast t-shirt (I am envious only because my own daughter's geekdom tends towards Big Bang Theory and Twilight movies; I think she's a bit embarrassed that her old man might have beaten her to the punch on gaming geekdom and thus avoids it), and DriveThruRPG having a huge sale on kid-friendly RPGs, it must be "Teach Your Kids to Game" week! Yup, must be; even Wired has a...
I still haven't read any of the books, but I absolutely love the television show. Here's a sneak peak into the production of Season 3, which premiers on march 31 (and hey-- that's only a few months away!):The locations they find for this show are really amazing. I love the fact that the actors have an appreciation for that aspect of the production, which I think goes a long way to making the show feel real, rather than the endless parade of shows in the 1980's that all looked like they took place in southern California because, well, they all were...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
