I've been running dnd for a long time. The number of times I've asked a female player what class she'd like to play and she's answered "witch" is not insignificant. For a long while, this was solved pretty easily by just using Pathfinder, which I appreciated because it was a great excuse to run Path...
I'm reading The Hobbit again, as I live-action roleplay as a Tolkien scholar in an attempt to understand Middle Earth, its lore, and its effect on modern gaming. I'm reviewing each chapter of the book as I read, and this is my review of Chapter 13: Not at home.
This review contains spoilers....
Every time I play a complex board game, I think about crafting an organiser tray for all the game pieces. This imagined tray would have compartments for cards of varying sizes, tokens, dice, and so on, for several player characters, to help me manage and preserve the state of an ongoing game. A lot...
For the past year, I've been running Tales of the Valiant (ToV) for my local gaming group's weekly game session. The campaign started with Princes of the Apocalypse but after several side quests, the players have become thoroughly distracted and it's now a mix of Princes, Saltmarsh, and random K...
I love a good solo or co-op game, but I also happen to play a few board games with programmed "game masters". Sometimes it's a book, sometimes it's a deck of cards (as with Fallout the Board Game), and sometimes it's an app (as with Mansions of Madness). When something's programmed, it's essen...
When you hear the term "wargame", you probably think "big" because a war is big. It's not a skirmish, it's not a battle, it's not an operation or a sting or astrike, it's a war. Because a war is big, there's a general admiration and excitement in the wargaming community for an expansive game board...
You don't have to see many games of Dungeons & Dragons in movies or TV shows to know that media doesn't understand how D&D works. But with the innovation of homemade videos and podcasts distributed over the Internet, we've all gotten access to "live play" shows of real people actually playing tabl...
I was shopping at my favourite local used bookshop recently and stumbled upon A Guide to Tolkien by David Day. Originally published by Mitchell Beazley of Octopus Publishing Group in 1979, and then republished by Chancellor Press in 2001, this 260 page book is an endlessly useful reference book fo...
My introduction to miniatures was through D&D. When I started out, miniatures weren't generally found in board games (or at least, not any I'd been exposed to) and I didn't know about wargaming, so miniatures were a thing for "pen and paper" RPGs. By the time I started buying them for myself, the ea...
I'm reading The Hobbit again, as I live-action roleplay as a Tolkien scholar in an attempt to understand Middle Earth, its lore, and its effect on modern gaming. I'm reviewing each chapter of the book as I read, and this is my review of Chapter 12: Inside Information.
This review contains sp...
In wargaming, there's an interesting struggle of wanting to play with your toy soldiers while also wanting to see your toy soldiers die in a blaze of glory. The problem is, obviously, that once a toy soldier is dead and removed from the game, you don't get to play with it for the rest of that game s...
While I couldn't manage to find it in a theatre near me, I finally got to see The Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim and I loved it. This article contains minor spoilers about the lore of Middle Earth, which includes some well-known events that the movie also covers. If you want to see the mov...
Despite using miniatures in roleplaying games for years, it wasn't until I started playing wargames that I learned about miniature bases. And boy was I not prepared. A miniature base is the little plastic disc (or square or hexagon) that wargamers glue to the bottom of their models. To my great surp...
I'm reading The Hobbit again, as I live-action roleplay as a Tolkien scholar in an attempt to understand Middle Earth, its lore, and its effect on modern gaming. I'm reviewing each chapter of the book as I read, and this is my review of Chapter 10: A warm welcome.
This review contains spoile...
I'm reading The Hobbit again, as I live-action roleplay as a Tolkien scholar in an attempt to understand Middle Earth, its lore, and its effect on modern gaming. I'm reviewing each chapter of the book as I read, and this is my review of Chapter 11: On the doorstep.
This review contains spoil...
Battle at the Farm is the first Warhammer 40,000 scenario ever published, way back in 1987 as a sample adventure in Rogue Trader. Back then, it was assumed that you'd have a Games Master (GM) running the game, and the game system was basically just Warhammer Fantasy dressed in space suits. To...