In 12 years of adventuring in Greyhawk, our group built up a number of legends, told, but never experienced. The recovery of the soul-devouring sword Blackrazor is one of them. Brant Bladescream, warrior, adventurer and conman, recovered Blackrazor from the volcanic dungeon known as White Plume Mountain and used its notoriety to found the Blackrazor Guild. … Read more
Megadungeons, epic character deathtraps that have made or broken a thousand RPG campaigns, are staging a comeback. While it’s been upwards of 25-30 years since we first crawled into Castle Greyhawk and Undermountain, the Oughts saw the release of Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, World’s Largest Dungeon, Castle Whiterock, Maure Castle and now … Read more
One area where Star Wars: Saga Edition could use some help are its creatures. There are certainly a number of them out there, particularly the iconic ones from the movies, but the system tends to come up a little short with more mundane critters. After my third session of Star Wars, I thought back our … Read more
Skill challenges were one of the best things to come out of our D&D 4th Edition playtest. Building on earlier versions that appeared in Spycraft and Unearthed Arcana, skill challenges provided an in-game mechanic for resolving non-combat conflicts and complex tasks. We used it to handle the exploration a lava tube complex leading to a … Read more
Nuketown Radio Active #72 contemplates the best way to organize a geeky bookshelf, takes another turn at chess with kids, finds out that Neutron Lad has a lot to talk about, and asks questions about Nuketown’s long-dormant RADIATIONS newsletter. Finally I review Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, the latest edition of the venerable role-playing game by … Read more
Like a twister carving its way through a Midwestern cornfield, Nuke(m)Con has come and gone. My gaming group held its annual (well, almost annual) home-grown convention over the weekend. In a break from previous years, which typically saw a mix of Dungeons & Dragons and board games, this year’s Nuke(m)Con had a western theme. We … Read more
There’s an old Star Trek acronym called “IDIC”, which stands for “Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations”. Dungeons & Dragons Third Edition was all about IDIC, with infinite combinations of characters played out across thousands of campaigns and dozens of different game systems. Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition is about FDFC — Finite Diversity in Finite … Read more
Since I mentioned last week that I thought the RPG blogging community should do more reviews, I thought it might be a good idea to follow-up on that and see what’s available this week. It turns out it’s a good week for reviews, with a slew having been posted for the new D&D 4th Edition … Read more
Rather than just complain about how difficult high level combat is in D&D 3.5, my gaming group’s decided to do something about it. We’ve created a playtest group who’s willing to put in the extra effort it takes to play a high level game … and to figure out what, if anything, we can do … Read more
We ran our last D&D 4E session on Friday, concluding the playtest campaign that ran all summer. Since this was our last hurrah (at least for a while) we decided to level our characters up from 2nd to 9th level to see how they played. Here are a few random observations that popped up during … Read more