Robot Viking

If you’re a long-time D&D player, chances are you’ve had one or more characters killed by deathtraps in the classic Tomb of Horrors adventure. Ryk Perry brings us this in-depth review of the 4E update, revealing that it’s much more than just a rehash of the original, but it’s potentially as deadly as ever.

Let’s start the post-Gen Con reporting with the biggest news from the biggest company in gaming. Saturday morning, Wizards of the Coast devs gave a presentation outlining upcoming releases for D&D all the way into 2011. Gamma World, Ravenloft, rules changes, comic books, novels and more!

“Snows of an Early Winter” takes your group of Call of Cthulhu investigators on a harrowing adventure set in modern-day New York City. Someone is trying to get into city politics the easy way — if occult research, obscene rituals and human sacrifices are easy, that is. Of course, you can’t go messing around with [...]

White Wolf’s Hunter: the Vigil has always offered a twist on the usual World of Darkness dynamic — you’re a human fighting against the supernatural instead of being a supernatural being yourself. Compacts & Conspiracies twists the formula yet again, creating new levels of intrigue and mystery for hunters to unravel (or ravel further).

Your coterie of vampires has been trapped in a burning apartment in ancient Rome, a grizzled hunter determined to take the lot of you out on a suicidal vengeance trip. Seems like a simple “Vamps versus Hunter” setup, right? Sure, until everyone figures out they aren’t really the cause of each other’s problems after all.

Marge Fulton offers up some taut tales set in Appalachia, while Jason Walters takes us on a tour of the bizarre in the Black Rock Desert.

For the last year, whenever I’ve reviewed one of White Wolf’s World of Darkness books, I’ve raved about how the books were full of amazing background stories, fantastic characters and fascinating plot hooks, and how you could easily transmute them into another RPG. I’m finally putting my money where my mouth is (or my fluff, [...]

Would you like to battle other-dimensional horrors in an original sci-fi setting with battlemechs and cyborg demons? Why do I even ask these questions? Of course you would. Right now, you can download the 50-page CthulhuTech Quickstart rules for free.

In White Wolf’s Mage: The Awakening, the characters control magic. But do they really? In The Unbidden, we find proof that magic is a force of nature, and tapping into it can lead to disaster and tragedy.

I’ve become a regular contributor to sci-fi culture blog io9.com again, and while most of the time my weekly articles there will be about cutting edge science and technology, this week io9 Overlord Annalee Newitz suggested…nay, demanded that I write about gaming instead. So today I’m sending you away from Robot Viking to visit io9′s [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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.

A close brush with death, a step across the line into the Beyond, a knowing nod to What Lies on the Other Side, an unwanted familiarity with the Underworld, a strange worldwide community of dual souls with one foot in the grave: this is White Wolf’s newest World of Darkness RPG, Geist: The Sin-Eaters.