Forbidden Lands is the first RPG I bought this year and I ended up with two copies: one in English … and one in Swedish. The Swedish one arrived first due to a shipping mishap. Now granted, my family is Swedish – my grandfather and grandmother came to America as teenagers – so I’ve always … Read more
Vince Hendricks was my first RPG game master. There were other game masters before him, but Vince ran the first real, ongoing, sustained campaign I played in. Vince was my first college roommate – a senior when I was a sophomore (I transferred in that year) and he introduced me to a ton of gamers … Read more
My first RPG played this year was Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, but that’s almost always the answer. I started 2023 by pitching my Elemental Apocalypse game to the Blackrazor Guild (my Sunday online game). The campaign asks the question: “What if the Temple of Elemental Evil rose … and the World of Greyhawk fell?” Eight months … Read more
I’m going to GenCon! For the first time since 2014, I’ll be in Indianapolis, Indiana playing games and geeking out with gamers, fans, and publishers. I’ll be tag-teaming the event with David Moore, my co-host at the Lair of Secrets podcast. In previous years, I focused on playing as many games as possible. This year, it’s … Read more
After the move to online gaming during the pandemic, I found that our virtual battle maps shrank. At first glance, it’s confounding – after all, it was our real-world battle maps that were constrained by either the size of our gaming tables or the size of our Chessex battle maps. Online, though, the horizons are … Read more
On this special edition of Radio Active, we venture to the Zine Scene, that mystical, half-remembered place of photocopied pages and hand-stapled booklets, in its 2023 iteration.
Dice.Camp is a Mastodon-based alternative to Twitter built around role-playing games. With Elon Musk’s chaotic neutral leadership style playing havoc with Twitter on a daily basis, many of my online friends have migrated to this and other Mastodon-based social media alternatives. You can find me there as @nukehavoc. I also post frequent updates for the … Read more
Mothership is a rules-lite, science fiction horror RPG inspired by the likes of Alien and similar creature features. I backed the 2021 kickstarter, and while I wait for the boxed set to arrive, I searched for introductory Mothership RPG adventures to run with my friends (or at my local convention, MEPACon). Thanks to the Mothership RPG Discord, I … Read more
We’re approaching the New Year, a traditional time for resolutions. But frak that – December is my birthday month, and I’ve got some goals for my 51st year. One of them is to play four new games, some of which have been on my gaming bookshelves for years because of the pandemic. Now that the … Read more
I began playing Dungeons & Dragons in grade school, and I used Apple computers almost as long. I started writing up adventures on my Apple II and printing them on an dot matrix printer, took a brief sojourn into the world of Windows PCs during and after college, and then returned to the Mac with the release of Mac OS X.