Mixed Signals

Straight-forward gaming

Earlier this week, I wrote about how much I love spells. The obvious tag line to a book of 708 new spells is you can never have too many spells. While that's definitely true, it wasn't [entirely] the need for more spells that drove me to purchase the Book of Lost Spells from Frog God Games. Wha...

You can never have too many spells. That's what they say. And I guess they're right, because it seems I never tire of looking through spells.

Spells as untold stories

Even if I never have the occasion to use a spell, reading a spell is like reading a story that has yet to be written. In order...

This is Part 05 of a series wherein we talk about generating an entire campaign, on-the-fly, for your favorite fantasy role-playing game(s). In the future, it might have a tighter focus on either D&D or Pathfinder, but for now, let's consider this material more-or-less generic.

NOTE:...

While traveling, I picked up the first installment of the first official Starfinder adventure path: Incident at Absalom Station. I wanted to read through it in anticipation of running it with some friends because I have, so far, only run a homebrew Starfinder adventure (and a homebrew Interface Z...

I play D&D 5e as well as Pathfinder (1), and my players are mostly oblivious to which one we use for any given game. We build the characters together, or else I provide pregens, and they reference their character sheet when rolling. It works well, but switching between character sheets every few mo...

The second edition of Pathfinder (P2) is out, and along with it Paizo has released a free conversion guide so you can use P1 material with P2 rules and, in theory, P1 characters in P2 games. At least, that's what you'd imagine a conversion guide would provide. But Paizo's conversion guide clarifi...

This is Part 04 of a series wherein we talk about generating an entire campaign, on-the-fly, for your favorite fantasy role-playing game(s). In the future, it might have a tighter focus on either D&D or Pathfinder, but for now, let's consider this material more-or-less generic.

NOTE:...

This is Part 03 of a series wherein we talk about generating an entire campaign, on-the-fly, for your favorite fantasy role-playing game(s). In the future, it might have a tighter focus on either D&D or Pathfinder, but for now, let's consider this material more-or-less generic.

NOTE:...

This is Part 02 of a series wherein we talk about generating an entire campaign, on-the-fly, for your favorite fantasy role-playing game(s). In the future, it might have a tighter focus on either D&D or Pathfinder, but for now, let's consider this material more-or-less generic.

NOTE:...

This is the first part in a series, where we'll be talking about a concept for generating an entire campaign on-the-fly for your favorite fantasy role-playing game. In the future, it might have a tighter focus on either D&D or Pathfinder, but for now, let's consider this material more-or-less generi...

I used to play a lot of AD&D back in the old days. Then I didn't for a long time. Now I'm trying to get back into it in a rather hardcore way, and I'm finding it a challenge.

Why is that?

Age might be an answer, along with its associated distractions and responsibilities. Yes, age, but not so...

We all know that the person running an RPG game like D&D is called the Dungeon Master (DM) or Game Master (GM). But what are the other people at the table called?

The obvious answer is player. After all, the other people in the game each run a player character (PC), so surely they must be t...

In my previous posts about converting monsters from 2e and 3e to Fifth Edition, I mention that many monsters have been converted already. I mentioned that to dissuade you from feeling like there's a need to sit down and struggle through the math to convert your favourite monster, at least not b...

I got a lot of great feedback about my previous article, How to Convert D&D monsters to 5e, so it's obviously time for the same article for Third Edition (or 3.5, realistically).

For the longest time, I never really bothered converting from 3.5 to 5e, because I found them to be relatively...

If I had a gold piece for every time a game has been derailed because two players stop to discuss whether they're guilty of accidental "metagaming", I'd be a as wealthy as a brass dragon (not that brass dragons are any richer than any other dragon, necessarily, but they are my favourite dragon)....

D&D is often called the world's oldest RPG because, well, it literally is. With a history of over 40 years, if you're a player of D&D, you have decades of material at your disposal. Thanks to digital technology, the bulk of that history is available in electronic form, so you don't even have to r...