Category: RPG

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...

A Note on Random Dungeons

Long time internet based D&D dungeon designers know all about Dyson Logos and his brilliant series of dungeon geomorphs.  They also know about Dave Millar’s amazing contribution to our little hobby, Dave’s Mapper, which builds a random dungeon using geomorphs created in Dyson’s style.  The Mapper has geomorphs created by...

Sneak Peek at a New Series: Treasure Maps!

After three long years, the mini-Megadungeon in finally complete.  That means it is time for a new series.  This time we’re going in the complete opposite direction: short scalable adventures that you can drop into just about any campaign*.  The kicker here is that, in addition to the standard...

Complete Mini-Megadungeon

Just in time for DMs day, here’s my present to all you hard working, handsome, and under-appreciated DMs out there in internet-land.  With all 14+ levels of the Mini-Megadungeon are complete, I went ahead and bundled all of the relevant posts into a single PDF document for ease of...