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Aces and Eights: Character Creation

This weekend I sat down in the player's chair again. After an extended and glorious fight two weeks ago, the D&D game reached a "chapter break" and we picked a new game to play for a few months while my brain recovers from high level D&D 3.5 prep. The game we selected is Aces and Eights. We have played around with it a couple of times in the past-- ...

Star Wars Saga: Reflections

Over the last couple of years, I have been lucky to play in two linked series of Star Wars Saga games. My experience with the system has been as a player, but my GM and I have discussed the system quite a bit. He'll chime in with comments in italics throughout the article. Katana Geldar wrote a nice post about the recent announcement by Wizards of the ...

Dread – Play It This Halloween (Trust Us)

Recently fellow gnome John Arcadian and I attended “Con on the Cob” where we hung out with the crew from Windmill Game Co. They are the creative power behind the new Dread: Tales of Terror series which are supplements that provide wonderful scenarios and questionnaires for the fabulous game Dread. Now every year I run a very simple RPG for non-gamers around Halloween time. In the past I have ...

GM Spotlight: What Fantasy Craft Brings to the Table

One of the most fun things for me to do at GenCon is to wander the Dealers Room and check out the new stuff. GenCon is a natural place for RPG Publishers to launch new books and this year was no exception. One of the books that caught my eye was Fantasy Craft by Crafty Games. After the con, I received a free copy of Fantasy Craft for this ...

GM Spotlight: What Pathfinder Brings to the Table

This past GenCon, Paizo Publishing released the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. Now if you've been a GM (or DM, I'll use the generic here since it's what the Open Game Content and Pathfinder uses) for more than a couple of weeks then you probably know that Pathfinder is a refinement of the previous (D&D3.5) version of Dungeons & Dragons. Today's article takes a look at Pathfinder from a prospective ...

Spotlight Review Follow-Up: EpicWords

On May 13th, 2009 (I suggest that you read that article first if you have not already) I posted a review of the EpicWords web site and service. I gave the site a solid “C”, and I mentioned that the site was constantly improving. Well I believe that it has improved in enough ways for me to revisit my original review and to add this follow-up. Hey! ...

A look at Dogs in the Vineyard

Dogs in the Vineyard is a popular roleplaying game, published by Vincent Baker's Lumpley Games. It won the Indie RPG of the Year and Most Innovative Game awards way back in the 2004 Indie RPG Awards. I'll tell you all about it-- but if you're looking for multiple opinions, other gnome comments are scattered throughout. So what are Dogs and what do they do? The characters that the players make ...

Spotlight Review: EpicWords

Are you one of those gaming geeks who loves to mix your RPGs with your technical savvy? Like to have all of your resources available to you from anywhere in the world via the Internet? Do you like loot? Then this review is for you. EpicWords is a content management system (CMS) designed for GMs and their gaming groups. EpicWords offers both a free account plan and ...

Meeting The Corporate Mastermind: An Interview With James Norbury

Yesterday, I gave a review of the Corporation RPG, and today, we I present an interview with Corporations lead designer, James Norbury. I Recently got a chance to ask James some questions about Corporation, as well as GMing, in general. About James James, can you tell us a bit about yourself, and your RPG background. I’m James Norbury. I live with my fiancée Ruth and my herd of animals in ...

Without which not

Here's something that is important for the whole group to pay attention to: Character Roles. The best description of the problem I have read came from Fang Langford when he was working through his description of Scattershot a few years ago. At the time he called it Sine Qua Non, Latin for "without which not". [The current version is here.] It is important to clearly label the ...

Time Preservers: Primetime Adventures in Play

We recently completed a five episode (plus pilot) season of our first Primetime Adventures game. Here's a rundown of how we did it and what was involved. The group We founded our group a little under a year ago after playing together at the game store meetup group. Our goals were to enjoy games together and try out more indie games and techniques. Primetime Adventures (PTA) was ...

Spotlight Review: Fudge is Tasty!

One of the great characteristics of our hobby is that there is so much variety amongst game systems. Some gamers play every system that they can get their hands on, while others stick to a core system that suits their particular styles. Yet no matter what system is your favorite you can always get fresh ideas by exposing yourself to a new system. Sometimes just learning about a ...

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