Shortly after graduating from college, I tried starting a gaming club in the Lehigh Valley, Pa. I was fresh off having helped create the Role-Playing Underground when I was a student at Lock Haven University, and I was desperate to get a new campaign up and running.

It failed. We had a few meetings, and I was able to find enough people to get my own campaign off the ground, but in the end I didn't understand the fundamental difference between a college game club, and a real-world one. In college, the club was about recruiting people for your game. In the real-world, it was about playing games

Quick note: for those who might have been drawn to this post by the casino going up Bethlehem, Pa., I'm talking about role-playing, card, board and war games, not gambling.

Ultimately, I was able to patch together enough players from the club and some local cons. Once I had a group of my own, the need for the club faded. So did the club.

My good friend (and geeky partner-in-crime at Knights of the Dinner Table) Mur Lafferty launched her the print edition of her superhero novel Playing for Keeps today.

Go buy the book.

Initially released as a podcast, Playing For Keeps tells the story of Keepsie, a bartender with third-rate superhero powers that kept her out of Seventh City's equivelent of the Justice League. Other "Third Waves" -- those who have minor or seemingly inconsequential powers -- frequent her bar. These Mystery Men-style also-rans suddenly become important though, when villains and heroes battle in the sky, and a certain something falls into Keepsie's posession...

A web site dedicated to chronicling every aspect of the Stargate continuum, from the original SG-1 series to the new Stargate Universe spinoff. The site includes upcoming TV air dates, episode guides for SG-1 and Atlantis, interviews with series' creators and stars, an extensive image archive, fan fiction, forums, and a massive omnipedia of Stargate facts.

OgreCave is a multi-person blog offering news and commentary about tabletop gaming in all of its myriad incarnations, from board games to role-playing games to card games. It's also home to an occasional post, the OgreCave Audio Report.

An index of Dragon Magazine upto and including its final print issue, #359. Includes article list by spells, characters, monsters, magic items and more. It's an essential resource for anyone trying to remember exactly when a particular article appeared in the the magazine, and has helped me mine my archive for adventure ideas and background material.

Now that it looks like my gaming group's long-proposed Knights of the Old Republic campaign may actually be coming to fruition, I've been stocking up on source books.

The first of these is Star Wars: Threats of the Galaxy, which I hoped would provide me with a toolbox of non-player characters, monsters and other challenges that I could throw at my players.

The book doesn't disappoint.

Reprint: This article was originally published 4/18/2008

I write too much.

This is not a new or sudden revelation. I've known since college that I could fill a notebook with ideas when preparing for a night's game of Dungeons & Dragons. I might write 12,000 words to describe a three-story arc adventure, and use 1/4 of what I'd written. That’s grossly inefficient, but it was no big deal. I had the time, what I wrote would eventually get recycled into some other adventure, and even if it didn't, that was ok too. After all, it's about journey, not the destination right?

Except now I don't have the time. The hours I used to spend crafting my Dungeons & Dragons campaign are gone, devoured by two fun little monsters for whom quiet time is the villain and bed time the enemy. What I used to spend three weeknights putting together must now be accomplished in an hour, two if I'm lucky. My initial solution to the problem wasn't a solution at all: I simply stopped game mastering.

Analog is a tremendous publication, a long-running flagship of science fiction that never fails to impress and inspire me. It combines excellent fiction -- often with hints of libertarian thought sprinkled in -- with well-written, understandable science stories. This is hard SF at its very best. The Web site reprints some of the magazine's monthly columns, and features the full-versions of those stories nominated for speculative fiction's top honors. Like its sister magazine Asimov's, Analog's Web page isn't tremendous, but it works.

I'm doing the bachelor dad thing while Sue's away at a PowWow this weekend, so I figured it'd be a good thing if we started off our day with some exercise. I packed some zucchini bread and milk for the kids, loaded up the wagon our baseball mitts and Lucas, then walked to the Cosmic Cup for morning coffee while Jordan road her bike. Coffee in hand, we walked back home, deposited the bike in the side alley, then walked down to Nevin Park for breakfast under the trees.

After that the kids and I ran around on the playground equipment and swung on the swings, taking occasional breaks to play catch. All in all, a good start to the day, the only downside to which was the whining from Jordan about how tired she was on the walk back home.

It wasn't a hard work out, as things go, but it got my heart pumping climbing the hill back from the park, and tired out the kids so I think we can declare mission was accomplished.

It’s appropriate that the Pathfinder RPG Beta would be released while my gaming group’s taking a two-week break from our D&D 4th Edition playtest. During the hiatus we’re tying up some loose ends in our D&D 3.5 Dark City campaign, which is a role-playing intensive, urban campaign set in the World of Greyhawk.

Dark City’s been running on and off for about three years, and the characters in it range in levels from 5 to 7. As such, it’s not a bad yardstick for judging conversion to other rule sets, namely D&D 4th Edition and Pathfinder. Most people are playing single class characters from the PHB, though there are a few variant base classes (favored soul, warmage) so recreating these characters in other games should be straightforward.