GenCon 2014 Gaming Round Up

A cross section of the RPG source books, card games, and bumper stickers I got at GenCon.

I’m back from GenCon 2014. As always it was an exhausting-but-fun four days of gaming, preceded by a few days visiting with my wife’s relatives relatives in southern and central Indiana. Adventuring with D&D 5th Edition My Dungeons & Dragons 5e events were decent — I played a pre-gen wizard who I was able to … Read more

Game Day: The Weird Pulp Website

A tentacled horror emerges from a well. A male hero is caught by tentacles while another male hero shoots a gun at the monster. Further afield, a female investigator casts a spell against the creature.

I’ve been creating campaign websites for most of the Blackrazor Guild websites since 1996. We have an extensive wiki for our Greyhawk campaign and experimented with blogs for our Mutants & Masterminds and Star Wars campaigns. Blogs had been difficult to use because they’re oriented more towards serial writing and less about publishing (and extensively … Read more

New Releases Bolster The Day After Ragnarok

The apocalypse is back on. Ken Hite’s The Day After Ragnarok is a campaign setting for Savage Worlds and Hero System that in which the Nazis’ managed to summon the Midgard Serpent in the waning days of World War II, only to see the Americans slay it with a nuclear bomb. The original campaign book, … Read more

Achtung! Cthulhu Kickstarter

A few years ago I picked up Weird War II by Pinnacle Entertainment Group to supplement my The Day After Ragnarok book with World War II Savage Worlds rules. The rules were fine — it helped with the demolitions skill and gave me access to an armory of guns and vehicles — but just wasn’t weird enough for my taste. The history of the weird war was pretty much the same as the history of our war; the weirdness was at the edges and never infected the larger narrative in the way that, say, Delta Green did.

Game Day: Ragnarok Revisited

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.

Necessary Evil: Explorer’s Edition

A masked villain holds a large gun.

Aliens. We always knew they were out there, ready to invade our planet, enslave the population and strip mine its resources. But we also knew that if they should try it, Earth’s greatest superheroes would rise up and save us. We were wrong. When the V’Sori came they slaughtered our super-powered defenders just as easily … Read more

MEPACON Spring 2011 Events: Savage Worlds, Dragon Age, Pandemic

An elven archer, dwarven warrior, and human mage fight off dark spawn.

MEPACon Spring 2011 is being held Friday, April 8 through Sunday, April 10. It’s the 10th anniversary of the convention, and they’re going to be having a special reception Friday night. As always I’m looking forward to the convention, but this time around I’m taking my own advice and only running two RPGs. Given that … Read more

Vancian Magic in Savage Worlds

I love Savage Worlds. Half of the guys in my group love Savage Worlds. But part of what keeps the other half from jumping on board, at least for a fantasy campaign, is the lack of a Vancian magic system (aka the “fire and forget” memorization system from Jack Vance’s Dying Earth series and popularized … Read more