Author: Matthew J. Neagley

Almost every gamer has seen Lou Zocchi’s classic pitch for GameScience dice, and if you haven’t yet and have the 20 minutes, click that link. It’s worth a watch. About 4 minutes into the first video, Zocchi references his picture of stacked dice, seen to the right. This picture has long been the major piece of proof that GameScience fans point to as proof of the superiority of their favorite dice. We can date that picture between 1981 and 1991 because the far left stack…

Once again January has snuck up on me and dealt extra backstab damage, so it’s time to pretend that my B-string campaigns are something anyone else would ever actually run and re-“gift” them to you. As usual, I expect the real gift will be the comments section where everyone else piles on with their backburnered campaign ideas. These ideas are great for a new game for the new year, or for spare parts for inclusion into an existing game. Enjoy! Garden Gnomes: Gone are the…

Here’s a simple random dungeon generation method that uses only a sheet of graph paper, a pencil and the bucket of dice every gamer already owns. Lay out your paper, dump your bucket of dice on it, and remove all the dice that didn’t roll their max, while being careful to move those that did as little as possible. Wherever you had a die roll max, draw a room of that size. Thus rolling a 4 on a d4 results in a room of size…

Here’s a cool tidbit of verified historical fact that you can include in your espionage game, or in an espionage type scene in any other game: During World War 2, Waddington, England’s licensee of Parker Brother’s popular game Monopoly, were approached by Britain’s defense department to produce maps printed on silk, a much better alternative to paper maps, and for which Waddington already had an established, high quality production facility. Not content to stop at just producing maps for British airman who were risking being…

One of the  ways to craft good dungeon description is describing to appeal to the senses. Mentioning the sights is common, but including smells, sounds, feels and tastes can greatly contribute to immersion. However, it can be difficult to remember to feature sensory input and to come up with good descriptions on the fly. To that end it can be useful to make a brief set of descriptions, one for each sense that represent common, or typical sensations in a particular themed area in your…

Recently I had the pleasure of corresponding with the customer service division of Chessex. Their representative, Dustin, had the fastest response time of any customer service team I’ve ever dealt with, taking only ten minutes to respond to my query and responding even more quickly after that.  Here’s what Dustin had to say, and I admit it rather took the wind out of my sails: “Chessex was named such because the owner was an old Chess player.   He was nationally ranked at one point.  Thus…

So, this is a completely horrible idea for several reasons, but it’s not without it’s own twisted charm: Why not as a group, decide that everyone should be able to cheat as much as they want, provided that they don’t get caught? Of course, the first question is: “Why in hell would you want to do this?” For the most part, we’ve all played with the guy who constantly cheats and no one ever likes it, so why would I suggest that everyone cheat? The…