Apropos of nothing whatsoever to do with gaming, but growing up as a kid in the 1970's, reruns of the Monkees were a staple part of life, and part of my age group's shared cultural experience as surely as Bugs Bunny and Star Trek.Davy Jones, the British representative of the Monkees, died today at age 66 of a heart attack. He was quite an entertainer in a variety of venues; stage, television, and of course music. His was one of the voices of my formative years, and I'll forever regret never having seen him in concert. Goodbye, Mr. Jones....
Wednesday, 29 February 2012
So a few new trailers have hit for films that I'm getting more and more excited about.First off we have Disney's John Carter hitting theaters on March 9.Then we've got Marvel's The Avengers on screens everywhere on May 4.I'm more enthusiastic about the Avengers movie than I am about John Carter, but they both definitely look good. Then there's G.I. Joe: Retaliation on June 29, which I'm also looking forward to as I found the first to be enjoyable (hey, I wasn't exactly expecting Casablanca):<p>&amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;gt;Th&amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;gt;</p>There...
Tuesday, 28 February 2012
For my final thoughts inspired by this year's Dreamation convention, I wanted to pay a little attention to the way that companies view and deal with the people who play their games. This was a subject that was talked about at some length in the seminars run by Scott Douglas, both in the specific realm of organized play and the more general realm of companies growing their revenue streams.Scott, having been head of the RPGA for quite some time, naturally...
Monday, 27 February 2012
At this year's Dreamation 2012 convention (click here for my overview after-action report) I got to run the Ogre Miniatures scenario I'd been working on for the last few months for the first time "officially". It turned out pretty darned good (unlike my photography using my Blackberry; apologies for some of the fuzzy pictures). As usual, click to embiggen the pictures.The basic scenario is thus: the Combine is staging a raid on the PanEuropean spaceport...
Sunday, 26 February 2012
Well, the Dreamation 2012 convention is history now, and I had an absolute blast. More than previous conventions, this one has elicited a lot of thoughts in my mind, so I'll be splitting things up into several manageable chunks. This post will be an overview of the whole thing.First and foremost, I have to heap enormous praise on Vinny and the rest of the Dexposure staff for a thoroughly enjoyable and exquisitely well-run convention. I only experienced...
Saturday, 25 February 2012
Once more I turn to you, dear readers, to help me find something.I'm looking for a game that covers naval battles in the Medieval and/or Renaissance period. I'm going to be using miniatures to play it, but something that's counter-based would be fine and easily adaptable. Nothing abstract or card-based, though. The problem is that the big players in the field of pre-modern naval combat skip over the Medieval and Renaissance periods. Avalon Hill's Trireme game covers the ancient period up to the 4th century, and Wooden Ships and Iron Men covers...
Friday, 24 February 2012
I collect 80's "Satanic Panic" pamphlets and books, but I never heard of this gem from 1990 (two parts, and well worth listening through both for the sheer hilarity):http://ia600402.us.archive.org/34/items/CastlesAndCauldrons/AdventuresInOdyssey-CastlesAndCauldronsPartI.mp3 http://ia600402.us.archive.org/34/items/CastlesAndCauldrons/AdventuresInOdyssey-CastlesAndCauldronsPartIi.mp3 Ohhhhh man. I've been playing the wrong game all this time! Descriptions...
Thursday, 23 February 2012
Monday, 20 February 2012
Back in high school, I read a book about the American Revolution, whose thesis was that the British officer corps was inclined to "throw" the war because many of them were Freemasons who in some cases shared lodges with their American counterparts, and actually agreed with the Enlightenment ideals espoused by the rebels and encouraged by international Freemasonry, even if they couldn't say so in public. Despite the premise, it wasn't an hysterical conspiracy theory book, but an honest-to-goodness historical analysis. I remember getting it through...
Sunday, 19 February 2012
The master index of events has now been posted for Dreamation, one hell of a gaming convention next weekend in Morristown, NJ. They run the gamut of everything from RPGs to miniatures to board games to video games to LARPs. I'm running the following:Ogre Miniatures: Raid on Frederikshavn: Thursday 8 PM - 12 PMThe Joy of Older Games (Seminar): Friday 1 PM - 2 PMAdventures Dark and Deep: Castle of the Mad Archmage: Friday 2 PM - 6 PMAfrika Korps: Friday 2 PM - 6 PM (He's here, he's there, he's running two games simultaneously in two different rooms!...
Friday, 17 February 2012
Glad to finally be back in the ruins of the dwarven city of Glitterdark, the party decided to explore in a direction they had hitherto avoided. This led them pretty directly into a very large chamber with a number of goblins. While the majority of the goblins were forming ranks, two of them were turning a pair of ballistas to face the intruders. Curiously, the ballistas were facing north originally, protecting a northern passage which had also been barricaded.While the player characters proceeded to make short work of the 8 or so goblins in the...
Thursday, 16 February 2012
One of our standard go-to games when I was in high school was Avalon Hill's Diplomacy. This is a game that has very deep roots in both the wargaming and RPG community, as one of the few ways back in the 1960's and 1970's that gamers had to communicate with one another en masse was in the context of newsletters centered around the game.One of the unique things about Diplomacy is the ease with which it can be played by mail (or email, nowadays). That's...
Tuesday, 14 February 2012
Several attempts have been made to produce a runecaster class, or rune-carver, or something similar. Most have fallen short, to my estimation, because of something inherent in the traditional (A)D&D magical system. That is, magic-users are not differentiated by the means used to produce their spells. Where differentiation exists (in sub-classes such as the illusionist and, in the case of Adventures Dark and Deep™, the savant), it is in the emphasis...
Q: How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb?A: THAT'S NOT FUNNY! So there's been a bit of a brou-ha-ha over at the WotC website, because they included gender-based ability limits in one of their online polls, asking whether or not it should be kept. Well, the Politically Correct excrement hit the atmospheric agitator, and then Wizards was forced to backtrack and say that it was all a joke, they never would THINK of including gender limits on ability scores because it's obvious that anyone who would dosuchathingisamisogynisticbastardwhoprobablywantstokockwomynontheheadwithaclubanddragthemintoacavebytheirhairandblargwarbleaaaaaarrrggg...Ahem....
Thursday, 9 February 2012
Wednesday, 8 February 2012
My own posting is going to be very light for the next week or so, as (real-world) work is severely kicking my keester (yay, SOX audit season!). But I did want to point out this excellent series of posts over at Blog of Holding, asking venerable Lake Geneva alumnus Mike Mornard about his early experiences with the game as Gary and they played it. Well worth reading for students of D&D history. Enj...
Monday, 6 February 2012
Now the news can be told! As announced on the Jennisodes podcast...I am pleased to be able to announce that the summer of 2012 will see the release of Adventures Dark and Deep™: A Curious Volume of Forgotten Lore, published by BRW Games and available exclusively through RPGNow.com. This book will not be a stand-alone game, but will be a rules supplement intended for use with AD&D, OSRIC, S&W, and any similarly-compatible games. It will feature much of the new material that will be included in the stand-alone game, including the bard, jester,...
Sunday, 5 February 2012
Saturday, 4 February 2012
I've got to say, this post over at ENWorld is quite insightful. The upshot of it is that there are two distinct schools of thought as to what constitutes combat as it should be in D&D. It's long, but well worth reading the whole original post and the ensuing thread. Here's the idea in a nutshell:The "Combat as War" faction (which would include most of the OSR) revels in unbalanced combats. They want to eke out every possible advantage, even to the point of so subverting and sabotaging the enemy that they don't even get to the point that combat...
So you want to learn the secrets of magic from me, eh, boy? Well, then. Imagine you are an ant living in the courtyard of a castle. And you have a horn that, when you blow it with all of your might, so hard that it sucks the life out of you, you might, just might, attract the attention of one of the men moving about the courtyard. You keep blowing the horn, and one of those men might be amused enough to drop a crumb of food in front of you. More likely, he'll just smile and keep walking, or ignore you altogether. If another ant is trying to take...
Thursday, 2 February 2012
One of the great things about the World of Greyhawk is that it isn't just one setting. It's multiple settings, all of which are adjacent to, overlap with, and/or interact with the others. Over the many years I've been using the setting, five stand out to me either as regions that I have used myself, or seem to cry out for treatment unto themselves, because they work so well as self-contained sub-regions of the whole. Region 1 is the Sheldomar Valley....
When they're done right, the glossy looking historical (or, in some cases, fantasy) drama series are really great things to behold. Rome was absolutely terrific, and it was a shame that it was so expensive to produce that it only made it to two seasons. The way they managed to insinuate Titus Pullo and Lucius Vorenus into the affairs of the mighty, but also kept them well-grounded in their own mundane world, was a model for how such things could be handled in an RPG.I loved The Tudors as well, and it's really colored my notions of how a campaign...
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