Category: Gaming

  • 30Days of GMing, Day Five

    30 Days of Game Mastering continues! Stealing like an artist: what inspiration have you drawn from other games, books, movies, etc? It might be easier to list sources I haven’t used as inspiration. To the best of my knowledge I haven’t drawn on the Etruscans for anything, but I could be wrong. In seriousness, though,…

  • 30 Days of GMing, Day Four

    I feel like you guys should know what’s going on by now, so I’m just jumping right in. Do you use pre-published adventures or write your own? These days it’s about an 70/30 split between pre-published and the fruit of my own fevered brain. It has been many years since I have run a campaign…

  • 30 Days of GMing, Day Three

    Day three of 30 Days of GMing, and I’ll get to the question in a moment. I just want to take a moment to remind folks I am taking part in the Extra Life fundraiser this year. Along with a bunch of friends I am a member of Team Knifeshoes, and we’re raising money for…

  • 30 Days of Gamemastering

    No, I’m not GMing every day for 30 days. That would be amazing, but no. Instead, I’m taking part in the 30 Days of Gamemastering Challenge over at Triple Crit. Every day I’ll answer the GMing question of the day, and I’ll try to keep my answers concise. Since I’m a day late to the…

  • Brent’s Dragon

    Since I was a kid playing my first role-playing games, I thought about writing my own gaming material. And of course I did; I still have binders of stuff I’ve written for campaigns, seen by no one but me and the occasional player. But I always had the idea I could maybe write gaming material…

  • Card Hunter

    Largely because of Facebook I became a fan of browser based games. Something about there simplicity tapped into both my mildly obsessive-compulsive tendencies, and my love of the simple arcade games of my misspent youth. I try not to take on too many at once, however, because, well, obsessive-compulsive. If I have things to get…

  • The State of the Tabletop Industry, and Why It Really Doesn’t Matter

    Maybe it’s because fall is coming, and the threat of winter right behind; maybe it’s because the latest burst of game releases are behind us. But this is the time of year, it seems, when every game blogger and vlogger wants to speculate on that age-old (in this case, age-old would be defined as 39…

  • Review: Mythic Adventures

    I was a big fan of D&D 3.5, right to the end. Even when they were shotgun releasing to get product out the door before announcing 4.0, I liked most of the source books that came down. One of my biggest disappointments, though, was the Epic Rules system WotC put out for 3.5. While I…

  • Canadian Kickstarters

     I wrote a little something a while back about Kickstarter and how it might impact tabletop gaming. Recently, Kickstarter continued its friendly march to world domination by expanding its service to Canadian creators. As one would expect there are a number of interesting and odd projects that appeared out of the gate. So I want…

  • From my Brain: 50 Random NPCs

    Monday I talked about what to do if game night came around and you had nothing, and I suggested having some pre-made NPCs on hand to make your life easier. Looking through my GM’s binder (you don’t have one? Oh, they’re brilliant! I’ll tell you all about mine sometime) I noticed my stock of NPCs…