Mixed Signals

Straight-forward gaming

I'm rewatching every episode of the Man from UNCLE series from start to finish. This review may contain spoilers.

A leading scientist returns from somewhere in the Pacific to deliver some footage of volcanoes. He's attacked at the airport, and THRUSH successfully captures a film reel of...a Japa...

I'm rewatching every episode of the Man from UNCLE series from start to finish. This review may contain spoilers.

This one's a very cool political intrigue episode that revolves around a boy genius. For me, the real story in this episode is the glimpse at amateur electronics in the 1960s. Of cou...

I've written about the RPG metagame debate before, and one contributing factor to what I'll call "metagame anxiety" is familiarity with an adventure. For the record, I don't usually mind the metagame. I believe it can be a fun and valuable part of the game. But some people get concerned that a pla...

I picked up Fizban's Treasury of Dragon and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter. In this post, I discuss Chapter 1: Character Creation.

There are three ancestries in Chapter 1, each one an alternative to the Dragonborn ancestry listed in the Pl...

Dragonlance Chronicles starts at the end of the 5-year personal quests of the book's heroes. It's an intriguing start, because you know that the quests happened, but you don't know anything about them, aside from a few hints from Flint Fireforge. The Preludes series provides some specific storie...

I picked up Fizban's Treasury of Dragon and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter.

In true Dragonlance tradition, the first section of this book is a poem. The poem is called Elegy for the first world, and it's the vehicle the book uses to push...

I've been reading through the Starfinder source book, Pact Worlds. It's a small book, but fits a lot of information into it, so I'm going to post about sections as I finish them.

Chapter 4, the final chapter of the Pact Worlds book, contains player options. This includes character archetypes,...

Shadowrun's character build process is explained in the 5th Edition Core Rulebook, but there's a lot to filter out because there are so many possibilities. This post describes a linear build process for a Shadowrun adept, and is designed to help new players.

Note that this post is for Shadow...

The way I've always played D&D was that when your character was dead with no chance of resurrection, you built a new character and came back into the game at level 1. That's just the way me and my gaming groups have done it. Recently, I've started to pick up on the fact that not all gaming groups pl...

The 5th Edition book for the Dragonlance setting has turned out to be less a setting book and more an adventure with some setting data. In an attempt to make up the difference, I recently purchased two Dragonlance books written by fans from DMs Guild. In this post, I'm reviewing Dragonlance Compani...

The 5th Edition book for the Dragonlance setting has turned out to be less a setting book and more an adventure with some setting data. In an attempt to make up the difference, I recently purchased two Dragonlance books written by fans from DMs Guild. In this post, I'm reviewing Tasslehoff's Pouche...

I've been reading through the Starfinder source book, Pact Worlds. It's a small book, but fits a lot of information into it, so I'm going to post about sections as I finish them.

Chapter 4, the final chapter of the Pact Worlds book, contains player options. This includes character archetypes,...

There's a lot of overlap between D&D and Pathfinder. Pathfinder was, originally, the D&D 3rd edition rule set copied and pasted, with a few nominal adjustments, into a book labeled "Pathfinder". This was legally permitted by the Open Game License. With D&D on its 5th edition (and heading toward it...

The Pathfinder Companion book series are short books of in-depth lore about a single subject. I recently read the Gnomes of Golarion, and now I know everything about gnomes, or at least the gnomes as they appear in the default setting of the Pathfinder roleplaying game.

In the Golarion setting...

I usually enjoy environmental effects in D&D. It adds variety to each game session, and it keeps the players on their toes. For instance, when I run games in Barovia, I have players roll a d6 every new day (as long as Strahd is in power.) They get a penalty to the corresponding attribute during that...

As is often the case, the 5th Edition books for the Dragonlance setting leaves out a lot of detail. In the page it provides for the Kender race, it doesn't mention the culture's fondness for the topknot hairstyle, the use of the hoopak, pouches and pockets, or maps. One of the defining traits of the...