Robot Viking

There is an unavoidable sense that things are changing in the RPG department over at Wizards of the Coast in the last year, an inexorable feeling that Fourth Edition is running out of steam, slouching toward some inevitable finish line where edition partisans have already staked out holy ground. Things are being canceled, departments are [...]

No free fiction today, but I do have news of some fiction I wrote being published, something I’m, frankly, pretty excited about.

Thanks to some new sponsors, the Iron GM contest at Total Con will award some seriously lavish prizes to both winning GMs and participating players.

Mythic rarity has driven the prices of certain Magic cards completely out of control. $50 Baneslayer Angels. $80 Jace, the Mind Sculptors. There’s no way to argue that those prices aren’t completely ludicrous. But Event Decks, in addition to being a brilliant way to introduce new players to tournament Magic, also offer Wizards a sneaky [...]

Are you interested in getting into Magic: the Gathering, getting back into it after some time away, or want to get more of your friends into it so you have a good play group? Here are some great ways for newbies to become Magic players.

Sir Reimund’s Tale continues on Fiction Friday here at Robot Viking. In Chapter 2 — Homecoming, Sir Reimund returned to his family estate to find it vexed by raiders, possibly giants. Bent on vengeance for his brother’s death and hoping for a permanent claim to his family’s holdings, the landless knight learns that Norse raiders [...]

There are bad GMs, good GMs, even great GMs. But then there are the best of the best: Iron GMs.

They stood peering through the secret passageway that lead to their destination. Beyond the threshold, strange flickering fissures of light beckoned them into the unknown Godless Zone. Roughly five months of weekly D&D sessions lead the players and their characters through the twisting passages of the Underdark, through an ancient underground city, across the misty [...]

DDI gave limited beta access to the new Monster Builder a few weeks ago. Here’s a quick look.

D&D Fortune Cards may have been a bit of a let-down, but to be honest, I didn’t have very high hopes. I knew they were going to be mechanical “crunch” cards instead of something a whole lot more interesting. Here’s my pitch for what Fortune Cards coulda shoulda woulda been.

D&D Fortune Cards give you the chance to add a random combat ability drawn from a deck of cards to your 4E D&D encounters. Because we all know the one thing 4E really needs is even more combat-oriented powers.

Last year, Wizards of the Coast dove into the high-end board game market with the massive Ravenloft box. The second in the series, Wrath of Ashardalon, continues and expands the fun with tight rules and a metric ton of odds and ends that will keep you replaying it for years.

Not every useful magic item is going to be legal in every fantasy RPG city. So where do player characters buy outlawed artifacts? Probably from Krazy Kragnar’s Black Market Magic Items!

Reading Robot Viking (or even just saying the words) causes brain damage.