Game News

The Griffin’s Crier Re-launched

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The redesigned version of the Griffin’s Crier, my gaming group’s web site, is now up and running — you can check it out at www.griffcrier.com. The GriffCrier has been around for more than a decade; our Blackrazor Guild gaming group first launched the site in 1998 as an archive for our World of Greyhawk campaign. Over time, our gaming group’s evolved and added new web apps — we now have a dedicated forum for in and out of game conversations, the archival D&D content has been moved to a Greyhawk wiki, and we’ve spawned several additional blogs and wikis in support of the other RPGs we play

Over time, the role of the Griffin’s Crier diminished, and it was time to bring it back. Four of us are blogging now, and even more are using Twitter. We’ve got two campaign blogs and two corresponding wikis, all of which are producing RSS. In recent years, the home page of the Crier had been static as content was updated elsewhere; I wanted to change that by pulling in headlines from across the Blackrazor blogosphere.

Exploring D&D Battlefields with Microsoft Surface

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Ever since Chewbacca defeated R2-D2 in holochess, geeks have wanted a virtual table top for their games. Things have taken a major step in that direction with SurfaceScapes, a proof-of-concept app for Microsoft surface created by students at Carnegie Mellon University. It’s based on the D&D 4th Edition rules, and those who’ve seen it are suitably impressed:

For those who haven’t seen it before, Microsoft Surface is a sort of digital coffee table; it’s got a large, flat touch sensitive screen (kind of like an upsized and hard-to-move iPhone. SurfaceScapes puts an interactive map on the Surface, which you can interact with by moving around specially designed miniatures. All of the rules you need to run the game (e.g. movement, powers, etc.) are built into the game, and you can interact with your character through a handheld device (e.g. an iPod touch or smart phone).

Gamers Helping Haiti

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OneBookShelf, the company that runs the virtual RPG storefronts DriveThruRPG and RPGNow, is offering a $20 mega bundle as a fundraiser to help the survivors of the Haiti earthquake. Donate $20 to Doctors without Borders through the web site, and you’ll receive $1,500+ worth of PDFs. View complete list of products in the bundle, broken … Read more

The Tome Podcast #121: Revenge of the Giants reviewed

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My gaming group recently returned to D&D 4th Edition with a megashot of the Revenge of the Giants supermodule. I talk about our experiences with Wizards of the Coast’s homage to the original 1st Edition Against the Giants tournament modules on Episode #121 of The Tome Podcast. I’m joined by Quinn Murphy of the excellent … Read more

Happy Game Master’s Day 2009!

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Game Master’s Day is one of those great ideas that never quite seems to get enough love. It’s held on March 4th (“March Fourth for Game Master’s Day”), which means this is the first year I’ve actually had a post up about it on the day it was happening. The idea is that today’s the … Read more

Gamers Need More Game Reviews!

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The RPG Bloggers Network has been a tremendous success, sparking plenty of cross-blog traffic and comments. I’ve read lots of great articles and discovered a bunch of new sites, but I think there’s one area where the community can improve: game reviews.

Simply put, there aren’t enough of them. There’s plenty of speculation, analysis and debate but there aren’t nearly enough reviews (or, if they are there, they are quickly lost among the flurry of other posts). The RPG Bloggers guys are working on improvements to bring order to the chaos by adding new categories, but even then I think there will be a need for bloggers to knuckle down and review games.

I have as much work to do as anyone else. It shocked me earlier this week when I looked at my own RPG reviews category and discovered that five months had passed between my Battlestar Galactica RPG review and my new one for Star Wars: Threats of the Galaxy. Now granted, my sense of what I’ve written is distorted by all the writing I do for SCIFI, and I’ve certainly posted a bunch of quasi-reviews in the form of playtest reports, but still … there need to be more.

RPG Bloggers Launch Time-Devouring Portal

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RPG Bloggers Network When Wizards of the Coast decided to kill the ill-fated (and ill-named) Gleemax project before it got out of alpha, a bunch of role-playing game bloggers stood up and said … who needs Gleemax? You want a gamer community … well we’ve got your community right here! Or words to that effect.

They formed the RPG Bloggers Network, which is aggregating the RPG-centric posts from more than 30 gaming blogs including Critical Hits, Musing of a Chatty DM and Uncle Bear.

And yeah, Nuketown is there too.

One of the things I like best about the site is how it aggregates content — it’s pulls in stories into its home page and incorporates a rating mechanic as it does so. I haven’t found a page that aggregates those ratings into a big list, but I imagine that’s coming.

Gleemax is Dead

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Wizards of the Coast is killing Gleemax. WotC is refocusing their efforts after the fumbled launch of the D&D Insider initiative (ok, I say “fumbled” you say “catastrophic failure…”), which failed to include the over-promised and much coveted online gaming table and character generators for D&D 4th Edition and the painful Magic Online v3 upgrade … Read more

First Round Free RPG Day ’08 Sponsors Announced

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Free RPG Day will be held Saturday, June 21, 2008. The event, inspired by the extremely successful Free Comic Book Day, features the following sponsors this year: Countess Games Goodman Games Mongoose Publishing Q-Workshop Skirmisher Publishing White Wolf Publishing Wizards of the Coast Green Ronin Publishing Troll Lord Games Chessex Manufacturing (Custom “Free RPG Day” … Read more