Mixed Signals

Straight-forward gaming

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.

Castrovel, the second planet from the Sun in the Golarian solar system, was featured in a module of the Dead Suns...

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'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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

As a DM, one of my self-appointed tasks during the initial reading of an adventure is to identify the major plot points. These are vital because they're the "map" for what I can emphasize to make the adventure feel coherent. It's also the map for how the characters make progress.

If I forget t...

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...