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.

This one's a wholesome episode. A revivalist preacher (played by Eddie Albert) named Brother Love is gathering followers and spreading the Good Word around America. With a name like...

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.

Aballon is the first planet in Golarian's solar system, and it's home to a race of intelligent machines called anac...

I mostly play Pathfinder and 5e D&D, but if asked, I do also consider myself an AD&D 2nd edition player. In fact, emotionally I consider 2nd edition "my edition" because it for that edition I rolled my first characters (which I then never played, because my parents forbade it), and I read Dragonlanc...

Quick reference is invaluable during a D&D game. Even when you know the page numbern of important tables by heart, sometimes the book you need is in use by another player, or you're already elbows deep into 3 other books as it is, or you just don't have room on the table or your lap for another book...

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

In most TV shows, there are "budget" episodes. The ones that take place in a relatively confined area, and have a pretty simple story, and a limited cast. In Star Trek, they were the...

Have you ever thought about how teleportation works? Because it's imaginary, we don't often wonder about the details. It's magic, and that's good enough. Usually. Unless, that is, you're playing a game relying on a series of logical connections to render a predictable and repeatable result. In real...

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 1 is titled The Worlds, and it covers each of the 14 significant bodies in the Pact World system. As with...

Lately I've been playing a lot of D&D online, and the games often only last for the duration of a single module. Groups come together to play through a 20 or 30 page adventure, the game lasts for a few sessions, and then ends. (My current online gaming group, admittedly, was only supposed to game to...

I was reading through a published adventure a few days ago, and noticed something odd about the way it got started. As written, the player characters are meant to wander into the game world individually, and then meet one another as they travel. The module tells the Dungeon Master to prompt each pla...

A few years ago, I purchased the Pact Worlds source book for the Starfinder RPG, and read a good portion of it on flight DL508 from Atlanta to San Diego. I know this because my boarding pass for that flight was used as a bookmark. I'd read enough of the book to give me a general idea on the sett...

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...

The back of Magic: The Gathering cards are iconic. Mimicking, more or less, the leatherbound cover of a spellbook, it has five gemstones inset in the center, and the words "Magic The Gathering" at the top. Mysteriously, there's also the word "Deckmaster" at the bottom. It's very much an artefact o...

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

This episode is set in Hong Kong, which feels especially exotic given that so far most UNCLE episodes have been set in either the US or Europe. The plot is entirely about a MacGu...

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...