Mixed Signals

Straight-forward gaming

Paizo's Book of the Dead is a source book about both the dead and the undead, describing the ecology, lifecycle, ethics, advantages, and dangers of time spent after all your time is spent. I picked up a copy at my game store, and I'm going to review it chapter by chapter. This post covers the chap...

Years ago, Alderac Entertainment Group (AEG) published a few "splatbooks" for 3rd Edition D&D, and one of these books was titled Undead (with Mike Mearls as a credited writer). I've been reading it lately, because I play Pathfinder and I love player options. This is my fourth post about the book...

What RPG nerd doesn't want their very own copy of the Necronomicon? Paizo's Book of the Dead doesn't go so far as to claim that it's exactly the Necronomicon, but if you've ever wondered what the Necronomicon would contain, you can easily imagine this being dangerously close to it. I've sequestere...

Years ago, Alderac Entertainment Group (AEG) published a few "splatbooks" for 3rd Edition D&D, and one of these books was titled Undead (with Mike Mearls as a credited writer). I've been reading it lately, because I play Pathfinder and I love player options. This is my third post about the book,...

In a previous post, I demonstrated how to do a quick D&D 5e character build with new players. The advantage to this idea is that you get a new player into the game within a quarter of an hour. They might not understand everything about the process, but a quick build gives them a taste of what's...

Years ago, Alderac Entertainment Group (AEG) published a few "splatbooks" for 3rd Edition D&D, and one of these books was titled Undead (with Mike Mearls as a credited writer). I've been reading it lately, because I play Pathfinder, which is essentially 3rd Edition with revisions, and I love pla...

Way back at the turn of the century, Wizards of the Coast decided to adopt open source methodology by developing the Open Game License (OGL). This marked not just the 3rd Edition of the game, but also the opening of the market for supplementary D&D material. After the 3rd Edition was released, there...

I picked up the Anniversary Edition of Rise of the Runelords, the very first Pathfinder adventure path. This is my review of the fourth module, Fortress of the Stone Giants.

This is an exciting and brutal ending to an exciting adventure path. The plot is simple: get to the tippy-top of a mo...

I play 5e every week, and I absolutely love it. So it may seem strange that I simultaneously believe that the 3rd edition (specifically 3.5) of D&D remains the definitive incarnation of the game.

You might think nostalgia's to blame, but in fact I have nostalgia for 2nd edition DragonLance and Pla...

I picked up the Anniversary Edition of Rise of the Runelords, the very first Pathfinder adventure path. This is my review of the fifth module, Sins of the saviours.

The penultimate module in the Runelords adventure path, this is a relatively straight-forward dungeon crawl. Before they can...

In a previous post, I explained why I love alignment in D&D, but I acknowledged that it doesn't have to work for everyone. I also admitted that I'd recently discovered an alternative to the system, but I didn't say where I'd found it.

When I bought the book Guildmasters' Guide to Ravnica, I w...

I picked up the Anniversary Edition of Rise of the Runelords, the very first Pathfinder adventure path. This is my review of the fourth module, Fortress of the Stone Giants.

This module, in a way, is the turning point of the Runelords adventure path. It's in this module that the players lea...

I picked up the Anniversary Edition of Rise of the Runelords, the very first Pathfinder adventure path. This is my review of the third module, Hook Mountain Massacre.

Mountain raid

In the third module of the Runelords adventure path (chapter 3 in the Anniversary Edition), the players go u...

I picked up the Anniversary Edition of Rise of the Runelords, the very first Pathfinder adventure path. This is my review of the second module, The Skinsaw Murders.

Serial killer on the loose

I'm a great fan of slasher flicks like Friday the 13th. Strangely, though, I have no interest i...

I'm a big fan of the alignment system in D&D, and have been since I learned about it in the original DragonLance Adventures book. I used to think that there could be nothing to lure me away from it, especially not in the context of D&D. I'll admit that recently there's been a system that has appe...

The world of Golarion is the default setting for Pathfinder, the famous fork of D&D 3.5 edition. While former Dragon Magazine publisher, Paizo, was able to inherit all D&D rules, the OGL didn't enable them to inherit all the lore, as laid out in decades of novels, magazine articles, video games...