Mixed Signals

Straight-forward gaming

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...

I picked up the Anniversary Edition of Rise of the Runelords, the very first Pathfinder adventure path. This is my review of the first module, Burnt Offerings.

Swallowtail festival

If you've played enough starter Paizo adventure paths, you may recognise the opening formula. The players fi...

The Pathfinder Companion book series are short books of in-depth lore about a single subject. I recently read the Elves of Golarion, and now I know everything about elves, or at least the elves as they appear in the default setting of the Pathfinder roleplaying game.

From the lore presented...

I picked up the Anniversary Edition of Rise of the Runelords, the very first Pathfinder adventure path. This is my review of the first module, Burnt Offerings.

Player's guide

When you've been invited to a D&D or Pathfinder game, it can be difficult to know what to plan for. You can build...

I've written about one shots before, and one of my tips for a successful quick game of D&D is to bring prebuild characters. However, there are two potential problems with that advice:

  1. Somebody needs to build those characters

  2. A player may want to build their own character just for the...

Some time ago, I picked up the Anniversary Edition of Rise of the Runelords, the very first Pathfinder adventure path. It's 428 pages containing six modules, starting with Burnt Offerings. Over this Waitangi Day's weekend, I finally had the chance to sit down, kick my feet up, and start reading...

This is Part 11 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 10 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:...

I picked up a hardcopy of Black Monastery (you can also purchase it as a PDF), which I'd purchased once before as a PDF in a Humble Bundle and found to be slightly overwhelming as a digital-only module. The module, such as it is, consists of 87 pages of a single mega-dungeon, with no particular...

Over the past few weeks of the New Zealand summer, a friend and I decided to speed run through the D&D 5e module Out of the Abyss. There was only two of us, so I played the DM and Sophia played a dragonborn cleric. We decided to play a chapter a day, so we estimated it would only take about two w...

This is Part 09 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:...

The Ghosts of Saltmarsh module is a Fifth Edition re-release of several old AD&D adventures. It includes all three of the U series (The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, Danger at Dunwater, The Final Enemy) by TSR, and several from Dungeon magazines. In the introduction, the book is posit...

This is Part 08 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:...

I don't always use battle maps in my D&D games, but when I do, I often use whatever I have lying around for miniatures. I've used Lego figures, glass game tokens, cheap wooden beads from a thrift store, and coins. I lead a pretty minimalist lifestyle, and D&D miniatures just haven't been high on th...

This is Part 07 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:...

I love feats in D&D 3.5. The concept capitalizes on the excitement of exception-based game design such that each player gets to one-up their opponents, or else be one-upped by them. It mirrors a game like Magic: The Gathering, in which one lucky combo attack can win the game. How much do I love f...