Keith Baker is organizing a Gen Con event called the Tower of Gygax, which will be a 80 marathon session of 1st edition D&D to honor the late great Gary. I won't be at Gen Con this year, but I'd still like to be a part of this, so I e-mailed Mr. Baker and requested the submission guidelines, which he promptly sent to me. Now all that's left to do ( Read more... )

This video was from the NY Comic Con this year, apparently. As sketches go, I've seen funnier, but felt puppets = instalaugh in my book.

Got together this weekend and played some more D&D. Two players didn't come this time. They were spending time with an old friend, and who can begrudge that, right? Unfortunately, one of the missing players was the party tank, so she had to be NPC'd. The other player was a 5th man striker, so his presence was not missed (at least in terms of party ( Read more... )

Green Ronin announced yesterday that they would not be signing the GSL on the grounds that it "does not treat third party publishers as valued partners". At this point, it seems that all the big boys are sticking with the OGL, mostly because they have their own brand names to fall back on. Necromancer Games announced that they would produce 4e ( Read more... )

Apparently this film was made by a couple of guys as a college assignment, and now one of them works for Blizzard. If I ever see a Forgotten Realms movie half as cool as this, I'll be happy.

In general, I don't like killing PC's. When I run an ongoing campaign, I tend to get a little attached to the individual player characters myself. After all, they are the protagonists in the grand tale that I've been weaving for months. For this reason, yes, I sometimes fudge the die when I know that that crit hit will annihilate a party member, ( Read more... )

I've been thinking a lot on role-playing versus roll-playing, the difference between immersive RP and powergaming hack-and-slash. I recently played in a 3rd edition game at a local gaming club with a DM I'd never played with before. I rolled up a 4th level human fighter with an axe that I thoroughly intended to kill stuff with. As the adventure ( Read more... )

Saturday was our first full session of my 4e campaign. Getting started was a little slow, since we had a new player who needed to make a character, but once that was done we were ready to roll. After the single encounter with kobolds that I was able to work in last time, the PC's managed to find their way to the village of Brambleshire, a tiny ( Read more... )

Since the release of 4th edition, the Dungeon and Dragon e-zines have improved tremendously. Already we have great articles from Mike Mearls, Nicolas Logue, and other industry greats that present both intriguing fluff and solid crunch that I could see myself integrating into my games. Not only that, but both magazines are presented in an easy-to- ( Read more... )

I'm enjoying making homebrew versions of things that are missing from 4th edition. Since Tieflings are now a PC race, it only seems appropriate that Aasimar have a place in 4e as well. With that in mind, I give you the Aasimar:

Aasimar

Descendants of mortals born with the souls of angels, Aasimar are the most devoted mortal servants of the gods.
( Read more... )