Game Columns

Game Day: Rise of the Atomsmashers

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When I use the #gameday hashtag for my Sunday tweets, it’s usually about gaming groups weekly board or RPG sessions. When the rest of the world tweets #gameday, it’s usually about football. I’ve finally joined their ranks. A few guys at work got together and formed a fantasy football league of eight teams led by … Read more

Game Day: Out of Darkness

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Two adventurers battle a giant spider in an underground cave.

Second Darkness is ending. Our first-ever Pathfinder adventure path campaign, began in September 2011 and is concluding about two years later. We played Pathfinder every two weeks, the exception of the occasional schedule cratering by holidays and summer vacations. We worked our way through the entirety of the first three books in the series, but … Read more

Game Day: Dawn Over Numenera

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A sealed dome with strange alien structures inside it towers over a nearby town.

With our Second Darkness campaign on hiatus for a week my gaming group decided to try out Numenera, Monte Cook’s new game of science fantasy set 1 billion years in the future. Numenera is one of the lead contenders for our next RPG campaign, with three members of the group participating in the Kickstarter and another pre-ordering the core rule book.

Game Day: Wandering off the Adventure Path

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A massive underground city -- its towers illuminated purple -- fills a blue-green cavern.

My Second Darkness Pathfinder campaign is rapidly approaching its climax. The heroes recently started Book 4: Eternal Night but, as is often the case with my group, they quickly went off the proscribed path. Far off the proscribed path.

It illustrates one of the big lessons I learned while running an adventure path.

Writing the Game: Pen and Paper Journaling

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RPG Blog Carnival logoThis month’s RPG Blog Carnival topic is “Writing the Game”, and it got me thinking about my own efforts to get return to “pen and paper” preparation. I say “return” because most of my game prep is digital; sure I have printed books I refer to before and during the game, but even those have PDF equivalents. Going analog with my Pathfinder campaign isn’t realistic; the game is so complex, and so many resources are digital, that writing out adventure notes and stat blocks just isn’t efficient.

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Game Day: Ragnarok Revisited

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My “Lunchtime After Ragnarok” campaign has resumed after a too-long hiatus. We had to hit pause for a variety of reasons ranging from too-busy work schedules to the birth of a baby, but as summer wound down we down we finally got back to the table. As before we’re playing over lunch in Kenneth Hite’s The Day After Ragnarok campaign setting using the Savage Worlds rules. We usually get in 1-2 games a week, each lasting 45-60 minutes.

Game Day: A Nice Day for a Black Wedding

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In the real world, our gaming group’s seen numerous weddings (and will see yet another this fall), but in the game world our heroes never got hitched. Until tonight. Over the last year of our Second Darkness campaign one of the characters, Skender, has been seeing a priestess of Calistria named Carlila Zalteri at the … Read more