I'm working on the 13th Age Bestiary today with 13th Age's developer, Rob Watkins. Whenever the two of us say "Yes yes yes!" while working on monsters you can be sure it's going to be entertaining trouble for PCs. Or maybe just trouble, given that we're working on mechanics for red dragons and rust monsters.
I haven't been blogging lately and want ( Read more... )

I'm figuring out what I want to do with my rpg campaigns now that I'm back on the mainland. Haven't settled on the plan yet, but I did bundle quotes and incidents from the Fey Team D&D campaign to compose a hypothetical five-track playlist. 4e D&D knowledge aids enjoyment of this would-be tracklist from Prone in the Tree, the Fey Team Players' ( Read more... )

 I just read The Seal of Karga Kul by Alex Irvine. I've enjoyed other D&D novels, but there hasn't been another D&D novel that I immediately bought as a gift for a friend to explain what D&D is all about. What has it got? A sense of adventure, a sense of humor, and a sense of wonder.

The book's fast-moving combat scenes are full of fantastic ( Read more... )

 Last Wednesday Keith Baker came North and ran his 'Have Dice Will Travel' D&D adventure for my D&D group. It was a blood barrel of fun. I'd love to say more about the characters and the adventure, but that seems like a tacky spoiler for people who haven't played it yet. So I'll just mention that the funnier moments were mostly provided by by the ( Read more... )

 One standard roleplaying group dynamic pivots upon a player's moment of weakness, a moment in which they reveal a chink in their chutzpah, a target spot that the other players can home in on with black-arrow precision whenever they sense that the guard is down.

The Feyteam campaign had one such moment early-on when Mike Fehlauer decided to start ( Read more... )

I got into GenCon a little early this year, in time to play some fun D&D before the con goes into full swing. I'm playing in RPGA games organized by Rob Watkins and his friends in the Bloody Mummers company. So far I've played an 11th level Dwarf warden designed by fellow Seattleite Chad Brown (who I have somehow still not met) and an 11th level ( Read more... )

I haven't seen the finished Dark Sun books yet. That didn't stop me from running the opening Dark Sun encounter of the current RPGA D&D Encounters arc on Wednesday at an ice cream shop. Friends of friends recently opened an ice cream shop named Full Tilt on Rainier Avenue; 5101 Rainier Ave S #105 to be precise. Pinball machines sit alongside ( Read more... )

This week I finally gave up on natural healing and went to the doctor for antibiotics to handle the illness that took out my voice and most of my energy for something like three weeks. I saw a new doctor. He recognized D&D as something his children used to play for week-ends at a time. He remembered one element of their games, one piece of D&D that ( Read more... )

Once upon a time about three years ago, we were working on D&D 4th Edition. We didn’t call it that, we called it ORCUS, its super-secret hush name, and believe it or not we usually didn’t even talk about ORCUS outside of meeting rooms because it’s not that smart to go around talking about code words that get people interested in figuring out what’s ( Read more... )

This week at lunch in a Filipino restaurant I’m not sure I want to visit again, Fleetwood told the story of what happened when Michael Chabon tried to join the Science Fiction Writers of America as a goodwill gesture to the genre. Over the phone, the secretary at SWFA wanted proof that Chabon was actually a writer, asking him to fax over a copy of ( Read more... )