The many names of spells and how to change them: Tenser’s Floating Disc. Bigby’s Crushing Hand. Mordenkainen’s Mansion. Named spells defined Dungeons & Dragons from its earliest days while hinting at a greater world. Jeremiah McCoy talks about how to bring the magic of such signature arcana to your campaign.
If You’re Gonna Fail, Fail Spectacularly: Troy Taylor talks about his new bard, Spindle, and his propensity for failing, and failing BIG. His point? You can pout when the dice don’t go your way, or you can own it. He (and Spindle) decided to own it.
Tabletop RPGs That Aren’t Dungeons & Dragons Part 1: Fantasy Age: Geek Tyrant kicks off a series looking at alternatives to alternatives to Dungeons & Dragons with the Dragon Age RPG. They run down the advantages of Dragon Age (dice mechanics, attributes, armor, etc.) as well as its limitations (three classes, lack of source material).
As someone who works in technology and as a big science fiction geek, I’m very interested in the future and how it might unfold. After attending a national education technology conference last fall, I went looking for new futurists to add to my professional Twitter feed. As I did so, I found that many of the people I was already following were male, which is unsurprising given that many of the science fiction writers I read also tend to be male. This page helped expand my feed, and it’s better for it.
How I Learned to Stay Organized: The D&D Box: I’m on a quest to organized my role-playing game supplies … and I’m not the only one. The Learning DM got there before me; this post explains how to use a Plano case (originally intended as a fishing tackle box) to organize game supplies. It’s a great post and I ended up doing something similar with my gear. That said, I’m still looking for a decent case and/or travel bag for my RPG books. Right now I have them in a milk crate, which is clunky an hard to transport.
Roll20: Linking to Tokens from Journals: I’m using Roll20 as a virtual tabletop for my lunchtime campaign. It serves its purpose, but aspects of the interface can be clunky. Case in point: figuring out how to link a character to a token, so whenever you add a token to a page, it has that character’s stats. It took me far too long (and carefully reading through this article) to figure out how to do it.
Savage Star Frontiers: Star Frontiers is one of those games that I loved but never really got to play. I’ve long thought of porting it to Savage Worlds, especially after the Science Fiction Companion and The Last Parsec came out. Now I don’t have to – Seawolf’s Den already did it, creating a primer, setting rules, character races, and a bunch of different kinds of equipment.
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Cover art for Dragon Age: Boxed Set 3. Credit: Green Ronin.