The Rat King’s Tale Continues
Greetings, Rat Friends! When last we met, the Rat King had been taken under the angelic wings of angelic beings and whisked away to the gilded cage that is the sewers beneath Rome. But let’s take a look at Annette’s little adventure in the meantime. The Mad Doctor Baron...
The Mouse Is Roaring
It just keeps happening! The #BROSR: Giving you tomorrow’s D&D headlines…today! Several months ago, friend of the blog Mike DiBaggio interviewed friend of the blog Rick Stump on YouTube to discuss the latter’s 42-year old AD&D campaign. It’s a great interview. So great I’m posting it here for your...
Thar’s Doin’s Afoot
The #Trollopulous MegaVerse is the most interesting thing to happen to D&D in decades. Those glorious edgelording bastards in the #BROSR found a way to reinvigorate a hobby that had plateaued and they did it by taking a game everyone owns but doesn’t play and, for the first time...
This Is Huge – Gamechanging
The full ramifications of this little fact have yet to be explored. Probably because the bulk of the D&D crowd plays linear, story-line chasing, games that think too small to include such concepts as player-created megadungeons. In Brian’s case, the dwarven faction is mining in the hopes of finding...
Now That’s What I’m Talking About!
Bradford Walker steals a march on me by laying out in detail some thoughts that have only been drifting, half-gestated through my mind lately: RPGs are a wargame derivative. It’s time to explain why this is so, and in so doing expose what the appeal of the medium is...
Not the Flex You Think It Is
Continuing thoughts about Rule Zero and yesterday’s post about Theseus’ RPG. Item #1: If you only ever used a third of a game, have you ever really played the game? You might have been playing something, but was it really the game you say it is? How much of...
Rule Hero > Rule Zero
The problem with Rule Zero: Is not that it isn’t true, it’s that it guards an army of lies. How many planks can you remove from AD&D before you’re not really playing AD&D any more? No one talks about this....
Not Even Joking
Inspired by a deeply cogent comment left at “The Joy of Wargaming”: Tabletop role playing games, properly played, ARE wargames. Let me take my troll face off and address your comment with more sincerity. When RPGs branched out from the wargame hobby, they left a lot of money on...
[More Than You Know] Cha’alt: Fuchsia Malaise
Discussing a book as creative and original as Cha’alt (a setting written and designed by Venger Satanis for use with whatever iteration of the D&D tabletop RPG) presents a number of challenges for the reviewer. Specifically, the marketing hype used within the tabletop RPG market has devalued the meaning...
Ten Foot Pole – The Best Adventure Site Around
Like many writers, my first real storytelling experiences came about through tabletop RPGs. Like many gamers, I found the fiction sections included with most RPGs to be wasted space. Even worse were the needlessly convoluted backstories to otherwise simple adventures, and despite (or perhaps because of my) owning and...