Robot Viking

In the middle of a Cube draft the other week, I had a weird brainstorm for a new Magic mechanic. At first I called it, “Ghost Card,” which is fine as a working title, but ultimately too close to a terrible Bill Cosby movie. The idea is to give a card an advantage by making [...]

The Id DM has become my favorite RPG blog. Any fool can write about RPGs (like me), but it’s something else altogether to conduct scientific analysis of actual statistics and quantify the concepts the rest of us talk about. His latest effort, analyzing the complexity creep of Fourth Edition D&D, is a tour de force.

Wizards of the Coast announced last week that they’re bringing back Planechase as the multi-player format for this coming summer. It’s easily my favorite summer format since it’s so much fun, blends well with other formats and is easy for new or casual players to grasp. Plus, the new Planechase sets will have some goodies [...]

This week, Paizo announced that they’ve licensed their Pathfinder RPG to a company called Goblinworks, with plans to produce a MMORPG. This wouldn’t seem like big news, with the MMORPG so glutted that most games that aren’t called World of Warcraft are actually free to play. But there was a key word, easily overlooked, in [...]

Gamers, by and large, tend to grouse and complain a lot. We love to scream, “Doooooom!” and bemoan the slightest of changes to our beloved rules systems. Instead, let’s talk about all the fantastic things going on in the tabletop gaming world these days. Happy Thanksgiving!

Thanksgiving is this week and I’m leaving soon for a long weekend with my family. In my down time, I plan on doing some reading. I thought I would share with you the Jon Brazer Enterpises Thanksgiving reading list.

We had an exclusive Gen Con playtest report of an in-development card game called Ghost Pirates earlier this summer. You can help the designers get game finished and ready for market.

What if you were the champion of a god, constantly sent on deific errands at the bidding of an angelic messenger? And what if you didn’t really worship that god, but regretted with every fiber of your being the day you begged her for help, binding your fate to her forever after? That would kind [...]

Scott Fitzgerald Gray has a bunch of high-profile RPG writing credits under his belt, including the 4E version of the classic Tomb of Horrors. He recently did an interview with one of my favorite gaming blogs, The Id DM, that touched on the necessity of being a renaissance man in the gaming business, how awesome [...]

I read Gary Ray’s Quest for Fun blog frequently. I find his insights into the world of the game store very insightful. Last month I was reading one of his posts (Adventure is Key) and it brought into crystal clarity a number of ideas that I had in my mind. It made me change a [...]

Paizo has packaged the basic rules for the Pathfinder RPG into an easy to use box that comes with everything a D&D newbie needs to play. We took it for a serious test drive to find out how well it introduces game concepts, how fun it is to play and if the introductory adventure works [...]

Too early for a holiday gift guide? Hey, I didn’t say what holiday. Maybe this set of five pre-painted dragon minis would make a perfect belated Halloween gift for that special someone.

By now, RPG publishers have the campaign setting guide down pat. Slap together a few gazetteers covering the region, detail some important NPCs, add a few plot hooks and subversive organizations and you’re done. The Neverwinter Campaign Setting takes a different angle. This is so much more than a list places to visit and people [...]

At his blog of general geekery, Greywulf’s Lair, Greywulf himself lays out some of the missteps Wizards has made in the creation and promotion of the D&D brand, comparing them to the things Games Workshop does right in promoting Warhammer 40K.