I picked up Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter. Chapter 3 covers over 30 domains, so I'm posting about it as I work my way through the different domains.
The first domain described is also the most famous. B...
Recently, I've purchased some wargames, like Reign in Hell, Space Station Zero, and Mechaforce, and they all require miniatures. I knew they needed miniatures when I made the purchase, but they're all intentionally indifferent to what miniatures you use. My plan was to use RPG miniatures, and...
I picked up Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter.
Chapter 2 is about creating your own domain of dread. I love story starters, plot seeds, and D&D and horror, and that's mostly what this chapter is. I have to...
I like to treat painting miniatures as a craft project, not as an artistic one. Thinking about my process of painting in an objective and purely functional activity makes me less precious about it. I don't feel the weight of my own expectation. I don't sit staring at the unprimed miniature in dread,...
I picked up the Horror Realms Pathfinder source book in a Humble Bundle, and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter.
Chapter 1 is called Searchers after horror and it's all about player options. The first section of the chapter acknowledges that...
Painting miniatures is hard, and I'm no artist. Before miniatures, I'd painted walls, and that was my experience with paint. That was pretty intimidating, honestly, and it was a significant block for me to start painting as a hobby.
Once I started painting miniatures, I discovered something I hadn...
I picked up Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter.
Chapter 1 provides new player options, including new races, subclasses, backgrounds, some "dark gifts", and some horror-themed trinkets. It opens with another...
I picked up the Horror Realms Pathfinder source book in a Humble Bundle, and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter.
Because I started reading Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft recently, I figured I'd also read Horror Realms for Pathfinder so I...
I picked up Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter.
Ravenloft is a D&D setting named after a very particular castle just outside of a land called Barovia. You have to separate the name "Ravenloft" from "Castle R...
Miniatures are small.
Impossibly small.
So it's no surprise that you might think that painting miniatures would be a nearly impossible task. I have poor eyesight, and terrible eye-hand coordination. My hands tend to shake, I usually have an abundance of nervous energy, and my depth perception is...
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 6: Bestiary.
I say it about almost everything in D&D, from spells to magic items to player options, but I'll say it now about Dragon...
For the longest time, I had no interest in painting miniatures. In an RPG, miniatures aren't essential components of the game. I've probably played as much tabletop RPG with miniantures as I have without. I've never played with miniatures in Shadowrun, for example. So when I did buy miniatures, I bo...
It's annoying that the Open Gaming License 1.0a is under attack, but it's not actually detrimental. As many people (and in fact possibly most people) recognize, you don't need anybody's permission to play a game at home, nor to write an adventure that happens to work with D&D™ 5th Edition. Don't c...
Many RPG rulebooks start out speaking in the bizarrely theoretical future tense, addressing the reader as if they were going to build a character: "First, you will choose a race, and then you will choose your skills." Then, over the course of the next few chapters, these player guides describe t...
At the time of this writing, Wizards of the Coast was attempting to unjustly, and probably unlawfully, revoke the Open Gaming License. They've recently agreed to stop that attempt, and as a sign of good faith they've released the System Reference Document (SRD) into Creative Commons. That's a minor...
Before I knew it was supposed to be hard to do it, I converted adventures from one RPG system to another on a regular basis. It started innocently enough. I'd play in someone's Tunnels & Trolls campaign, and then go home and run the same story as a D&D adventure for my friends. It never occurred t...