I think the heist story may occupy a special place in my gamer heart as a tale I greatly enjoyed in media such as television and movies, and yet wasn’t high on my list of adventures to attempt to emulate in tabletop gaming. When I was a fledgling gamer, a lot of cyberpunk and espionage games were...

My first brush with 7th Sea was to see all the 1st edition books on the shelves of one of the local game stores when I was getting back into roleplaying after my brief, early adulthood hiatus from the hobby. It looked interesting, but at the time, I was still locked into the mindset that if it...

Last year at Gen Con, I was given a slew of things by Josh Wardrop at Arc Knight Publishing to review for the Stew. I was in the middle of a move, a new job, and closing out my old web development company. The Spell Templates, Maps, and Flat Plastic Miniatures got stuck in a box and only unearthed...

Esper Genesis is an ambitious project that is attempting to utilize the 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons based OGL to create a space opera counterpart to D&D’s fantasy implementation. Like Dungeons and Dragons, the Esper Genesis rules aren’t fully encompassed in a single volume. Just as...

When I was younger, my older siblings continually conspired to scare me. They would hide around corners and jump out at me, force me to watch scary things on TV, and — my favorite — pretend to be dead, waiting for me to run screaming to my mom. I guess what I’m saying is, I’m pretty sure I’ve been...

Many classic, imaginative worlds came from the dawn of the tabletop RPG era. For anyone that was around in that time, the names of some worlds were well known, even without personal experience with the products. It may not seem quite as impressive in the modern information age to be aware of a...

Roleplaying games have been tied to fantasy literature since the original Dungeons and Dragons boxed set started to circulate in 1974. Many people see the heroic fantasy influences of Tolkien’s Middle-earth books, but the original play style (adventurers trying to get rich, famous, and powerful)...

I’m stepping into Jared’s shoes as the “review gnome” for the day and doing my own style of dance. You’ll learn very quickly that his style of reviewing and mine are quite a bit different. I am, by no means, saying my method is better. It’s just a different approach at accomplishing the same goal....