A long time ago… No. Even longer ago than that. Yes. That far back. We’re going to change reality for that long ago, and that change is going to ripple forward into the current time. I’m not talking about going back in time to kill someone we all consider the epitome of evil....
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About a year and a half ago, I was in one of my local used book stores searching for ancient tomes. While perusing the shelves, I stumbled across a large collection of books by the same author: David Eddings. He hit it big in the 1980s and had quite a prolific career through the 1990s and into the...
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I recently tried to launch a new gaming group, and for the first time in a long time, I failed to get the group off the ground. Well, that’s not entirely true. We had a session zero for The Expanse and then a first session where an introductory game was played. However, it took me about...
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I got a text message a few weeks ago letting me know that my good friend Jim was moving back to town, after 20 years. Jim was the first gamer I met when I moved to Buffalo in the mid-’90s and we played a number of great games together. Then, one day Jim moved away for work, and he never came...
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I’ve never been a fan of when players just say they want to use X skill, such as, “I want to use Perception to check for traps”, or “I want to make a Diplomacy check with the town guard to find out what’s going on with the prisoner.” Technically there’s...
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Life is funny. Last month I was hacking up a John Wick game, and today I am here to tell you about work I am doing for Things from the Flood. As it turns out, my player who was going to be out for his new baby, was ready to come back sooner than we expected. So the next thing I knew, I was...
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Want to write better adventures? Want to prep more efficiently? Sick of players skipping all of your best content? Prep Smarter, Not Harder, with Encounter Theory Encounter Theory: The Adventure Design Workbook is a fresh way to look at adventure design by Ben Riggs, the voice of the...
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With this being Friday the 13th, I figured I’d roll with a post about curses. There are a multitude of reasons (some with more legitimacy than others) on why we’re so afraid of Friday the 13th. The historical event that I think makes the most sense is the capture and eventual downfall...
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In the fifth edition of the world’s most popular roleplaying game, the concept of “downtime activities” has been fairly well codified. Of course, there are “interludes” in Green Ronin’s AGE and in Savage Worlds. GURPS has had downtime activities for decades. So...
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Whether you use a plethora of painstakingly painted figurines or the classical theater of the mind for your games, you’ll often find yourself with more space than you know what to do with. Part of fleshing out the game world is filling up the scene with details that make the world come...
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