Posts Tagged by dnd
| March 28, 2012 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
In preparation for the release of the upcoming DCC RPG from Goodman Games, I recently acquired a set of GameScience dice. If you’re not familiar with GameScience, Col. Lou Zocchi, or why these dice are different from the dice you’re probably used to, these two GenCon 2008 video sales pitches by the colonel himself are a good place to start: part 1, part 2. Here’s the short version: GameScience is most famous for making precision-edge dice — razor-sharp, very lightweight, and with flat faces. The…
| March 12, 2012 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
Ever since Troy’s article about running red box D&D for his kids at the end of January, I’ve been immersing myself in the OSR (Old School Renaissance). It’s been a ton of fun, and one aspect in particular has been some of the most fun I’ve had as a GM in years. Even though I started gaming with the Mentzer red box, I never fully experienced old school play in the most classical sense (a group of treasure hunters/tomb robbers go on dungeon crawls to…
| February 27, 2012 | Posted by Guest Author |
Today’s guest article was written by Lord Byte, and it looks at a worldbuilding technique that doesn’t get much attention as some other approaches. His lens is D&D 4e, but the advice can be applied to a wide range of RPGs. Thanks, LB! The dwarves live in the mountains to the north, the elves in the forest, the humans in cities along the coast… I’m willing to bet that pretty much every first campaign world started like that. And the second. And third. (Guilty!) Every…
| February 20, 2012 | Posted by Guest Author |
Today’s guest article was written by Gnome Stew reader Adam Meyers, the Modern Bard. Adam is starting a third party Pathfinder supplement publishing company, but he took the time out to write this passionate piece on how RPGs can be more than just games. Thanks, Adam! Warning: This article gets into the philosophy of RPGs and mentions the ’80s. You have been warned. I’m not a first generation D&D player, but I’m a pretty close second. Back when I was a kid my dad taught…
| December 6, 2011 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
If you’ve ever played or run just about any edition of D&D, but especially 3.x or 4e, imagine this scenario: Your party of 1st-level PCs all start the game with +5 weapons and 9th-level spells (or for 4e, 20th-level powers). In the context of the average D&D game, those characters are essentially gods. Sure, they’re fragile, inexperienced gods, but boy are they going to be able to make up for those deficiencies in short order. For most D&D campaigns, this would present a problem —…
| September 13, 2011 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
Martin’s note: This is the 1,000th article on Gnome Stew! We went live on May 12, 2008; here are our initial welcome article and all of our launch day articles. Thank you for reading the Stew, spreading the word, and supporting the site for the past three years! We love sharing GMing advice and we love our readers — happy gaming to you all! And now, on to today’s article… In styles of play where the PCs start out as relatively low-powered or inexperienced nobodies,…
| February 16, 2011 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
Most editions of D&D have featured a spell called speak with dead (which I’ll call Speak with Dead for readability) that allows the caster to, for the span of a brief conversation, talk to a corpse. In D&D, it’s a pretty minor spell — cool, but it’s got nothing on flinging fireballs and waving around your finger of death. Except here’s the thing: Speak with Dead would change the world. And not just a little — it would change the world a lot. Changing the…
