Robot Viking

A few years ago, we started a Halloween tradition with our gaming group. Every Halloween, we get together and play an appropriately themed game for a few hours, often with some kind of house rule that lets the players earn the right to eat candy. If we can manage it, we play on Halloween night, [...]

If your D&D 4E chgaracters have been following along the original set of adventures (starting with H1), the grand finale has finally arrived. Prince of Undeath is the final battle, the ultimate adventure that will bring your characters up to 30th level. At this point, the PCs are basically little gods themselves, so you might [...]

Proverbial Monsters is a World of Darkness sourcebook from White Wolf that takes nine oft-repeated aphorisms, wives’ tales, sayings — proverbs, by any other name — and constructs nine fiendish creatures out of them, with nine scenarios for storytellers to drop their hapless players into. Just remember to take anything I say in this review [...]

What if your battle mat was interactive? What if you had a virtually infinite set of map tiles and 3D miniatures? What if the your playing surface automatically tracked line of sight, range and movement? What if a team at Carnegie Mellon peered into our gamer dreams and made this all actually happen?

It’s a phrase heard at game and card shops around the world, typically when someone with deeper pockets buys some ridiculously overpriced card or miniature: “It’s just paper and ink. There’s no way I’d pay that much!” That may be true, but somebody would. Here’s an essay on why the things we love cost as [...]

As we mentioned last week, Dungeons & Dragons Online is a free to play MMORPG. We’ve been organizing an adventuring group on the Robot Viking forums, and tonight we’re trying to schedule our first official meet-up. We haven’t picked a specific mission or raid or whatever, we can figure that out when we see who [...]

The new Primal Power handbook for D&D 4th Edition has exactly what you’d expect, namely a ton of new options for characters who use the primal power source. It also has some interesting material to help you tie your character concept to an aspect of nature, and some metaphysical explanation of what primal power actually [...]

Fantasy Flight Games is known for their lavish, detailed and (though I risk abusing the word) epic board games. Twilight Imperium, Descent, World of Warcraft — epic is really the only word that fits. So it’s not a big surprise that they’re the company behind Runewars, a truly epic fantasy board game coming out sometime [...]

Dungeons & Dragons Online has been around for a few years, garnering somewhat mixed reviews and not really making much of a splash in the world of massively multiplayer online role-playing games. Lately, however, the game has seen a huge spike in membership and a lot of buzz on Internet gaming sites. Why? Because they’ve [...]

One of the secrets to effective and efficient GMing is the ability to incorporate elements from many different sources into a role-playing adventure or campaign. If it’s a twisting plot full of unusual characters, melodramatic surprises and high-tension action you want, you need look no further than your comic book collection (or the back issue [...]

Arcane Legions, the new mass combat miniatures game from Wells Expeditions, officially released yesterday. We’ve got some new details on the game’s “insider’s club” and unit creator. If you’re into alternate history, fantasy battles or fast (yet tactically rich) miniatures games, you might want to take a look.

Fantasy stories often involve vast wars, grand conflicts of elves, men and dragons. Whether they fight for territory, freedom or to destroy the One MacGuffin To Rule Them All, fantasy war stories can be exhilarating and capture a truly epic feeling like few other scenarios. Handling a war in an RPG campaign can be difficult, [...]

When the bizarre magical world of Changeling bleeds over into the mortal realm, fairy tales and urban legends take shape as living, breathing beings. Most of them aren’t especially friendly.

Two new sponsors came aboard at Robot Viking this week, and I’d like to take a moment to thank them and point out why I think they’re pretty awesome (aside from the fact that they help keep Robot Viking chugging along). Arcane Legions is a collectible mass combat miniatures game from Wells Expeditions. The premiere [...]