As I mentioned earlier, my gaming group’s planning on attending MEPACon Fall 2009 in force and true to my word I’ve volunteered to run three events at the con: The Antares Run (Star Wars: Saga Edition), The Ruins of New York (Savage Worlds/The Day After Ragnorak), and Risk 2210. The convention is being held Nov. … Read more
Recently Chris Youngs at Wizards of the Coast wrote an editorial pointing out that people can role-play in D&D 4th Edition just fine without any rules actually governing said role-playing:
Fourth edition doesn’t include some of the mundane mechanical elements of character building that 3rd Edition did. For example, certain skills (I’m looking at you Craft and Profession) enabled a player to feel like his character had some sort of grounding in the “real world” of the campaign. Odds were good that you never made a Craft or Profession check in your game, but having ranks in that skill made you feel connected to your character’s background. In 4th Edition, those skills are gone. Why? Because we feel like a character’s statistics don’t represent the absolute truth of a character’s story. That’s right — one of the reasons those skills (and other such elements from other editions) are gone is that we felt they hindered roleplaying.
This elicited some “Hear! Hear!”-style posts from gaming blogs:
In the waning days of World War II, the Nazis awoke the world-strangling Midgard serpent, nearly triggering the Norse end of days known as Ragnarok. Their plan was foiled by the Americans, who flew an atomic- bomb-laden aircraft into the Serpent’s miles-wide eye, slaying it in blinding flash of nuclear fire.
In a post about which game systems he’d love to own, my friend (and fellow Dire Paladin) Dr. Checkmate offered this throwaway line: “I would like to see more stuff in the square format of WotC’s Star Wars books and the smaller still format of SWEX. I’m not getting any younger and these books keep … 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
Nuke(m)Con is coming back with guns blazing. After a one-year hiatus, my gaming group’s homegrown convention returns September 19-21 with a slate of western-themed role-playing games. We’ll be playing Serenity, Dogs in the Vineyard, Aces & Eights and Deadlands: Reloaded. We’re also running two high level Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 adventures on Friday and Saturday. During … Read more
One of the things I’ve always envied about the folks working at Wizards of the Coast is their ability to have a lunch-time game. In thinking about it, the single biggest challenge in running a lunch game is not time, but players. If you can find enough co-workers to get a game together, then time management, rather than time, becomes the challenge.
So the question becomes … how do you run a game in only an hour?
Our first full-blown session of Savage Worlds took place last night as our Weird Pulp campaign got underway. The game began with the characters gathering at the Gotham Museum of Art and Antiquity as part of the National Exploration Society to learn of a planned expedition to British Honduras. As we were being briefed, German … Read more
The year is 1936 and there are strange happenings afoot in the world. Corners of the map that remain unexplored. Creatures from out of legend that hunger for human blood. Artifacts of great power that could change the shape of the world. There are those who would exploit these strange things to rule over the … Read more
Our long-discussed, long-delayed Weird Pulp campaign should invade our gaming table sometime this month or next. The game will feature myself and occasional Nuketown commenter Erilar team-GMing a 5-6 episode campaign set in the mid-1930s. The Nazi threat is only just beginning to rear its head, and full-out war still hasn’t broken out in Europe. … Read more