Mixed Signals

Straight-forward gaming

While traveling, I picked up the first installment of the first official Starfinder adventure path: Incident at Absalom Station. I wanted to read through it in anticipation of running it with some friends because I have, so far, only run a homebrew Starfinder adventure (and a homebrew Interface Z...

I play D&D 5e as well as Pathfinder (1), and my players are mostly oblivious to which one we use for any given game. We build the characters together, or else I provide pregens, and they reference their character sheet when rolling. It works well, but switching between character sheets every few mo...

The second edition of Pathfinder (P2) is out, and along with it Paizo has released a free conversion guide so you can use P1 material with P2 rules and, in theory, P1 characters in P2 games. At least, that's what you'd imagine a conversion guide would provide. But Paizo's conversion guide clarifi...

In my previous posts about converting monsters from 2e and 3e to Fifth Edition, I mention that many monsters have been converted already. I mentioned that to dissuade you from feeling like there's a need to sit down and struggle through the math to convert your favourite monster, at least not b...

I got a lot of great feedback about my previous article, How to Convert D&D monsters to 5e, so it's obviously time for the same article for Third Edition (or 3.5, realistically).

For the longest time, I never really bothered converting from 3.5 to 5e, because I found them to be relatively...

D&D is often called the world's oldest RPG because, well, it literally is. With a history of over 40 years, if you're a player of D&D, you have decades of material at your disposal. Thanks to digital technology, the bulk of that history is available in electronic form, so you don't even have to r...

Originally developed as a random table for Blue Planet, this is a generic random table for any cyberpunk or sci-fi setting. Terminology can obviously differ between game worlds. In Blue Planet, it's body comp, in Shadowrun it's a deck, in Starfinder it's just computer, and so on; adju...

The Evil Dead film series is a collection of [arguably] loosely-connected horror movies (and a TV show and comics...) that helped define both modern horror and modern fantasy. If you have never seen the original masterpieces of cinema (Evil Dead, Evil Dead 2, and Army of Darkness), then you s...

At the start of their turn during combat, a player may choose to have the GM to foll on this table for a potential benefit (or impairment).

  1. You are motivated by desperation. Take an extra move this round.
  2. You have quick reflexes. Take half damage.
  3. You are hit by shrapnel. Take 1 point of dam...

This is a d10 random event table I made as a going-away gift for my Blue Planet game group. I've removed the inside jokes and content specific to Blue Planet. Half-way through game night, roll on this table for a random event.

  1. A small spy drone malfunctions overhead and crashes into a par...

Because I'm moving house, I'm parting ways with my Blue Planet gaming group. As a parting gift, I left them with a small collection of random tables they could roll on when they thought of me.

There's nothing specific to Blue Planet in this version, so use it in whatever sci fi or cyberpunk...

Do you or your players get overwhelmed by the Pathfinder character sheet? For some people, the Pathfinder character sheet holds nostalgia for the D&D 3rd Edition days gone by. For others, it's a logical and structured view of a character build. But for some, it's a spreadsheet, and nobody ever accu...

In 2014, probably not on April Fool's day, Frog God Games released the Book of Dirty Tricks, a sort of DMG (Dungeon Master's Guide) addendum containing advice for dungeon masters on how to make a game more challenging.

It's a fairly small book, being only about 78 pages, but it's packed...

It's Pi day today in the USA and any nation that expresses dates in the backwards format of day/month. In honour of over-thinking numbers, I present to you my efforts to map human ages to RPG levels.

I'd always meant to generate myself as a character in a game, but since I often play fantasy...