Game Columns

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

Game Day: Changing Times

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One of the great challenges in running a campaign in your 30s and 40s finding the time to game. Our group’s been lucky in this regard as we’ve been able to pick schedules that worked for most of the group, and still let us game on a weekly basis.

For most of our 16 years as a group we’ve followed a weekly schedule — first Mondays, then Fridays — that was role-playing game heavy. Originally we played all Dungeons & Dragons, all the time, but as our appreciation for board games grew we split the schedule to one board game session for every three RPG sessions. Or something like that. We found it was hard to stick to that schedule because people’s time got crazy, and suddenly we were sacrificing board games in the name of advancing the campaign.

As we enter our late 30s and early 40s, we’ve found the schedule must change again. Weekly RPG sessions are no longer possible given folks work and home schedules, so we’ve switched to biweekly games. The plan is to alternate RPGs and board games on a weekly basis.