We Belong Dead: Monsters That Should Never Be

GROGNARDIA: My Least Favorite Monsters beat me to it, but here’s a list of my 10 monsters that I never want to use or see in a campaign: Ear Seekers. Despite my abiding affection for things like the Rust Monster, Ear Seekers cross the line between challenging the player and punishing smart play. Even if […]

How Long is Your Campaign

Twenty Sided » Blog Archive » How Long is a Campaign? writes: The games I’ve run last a few months. Ten to twenty sessions seems ideal. The last one I ran was fifteen sessions. I know some people have settings and characters that they play for years and years, their tale spooling ever onward as […]

Procession of the Psychopomp

Game Summary for 2/22/09, a somewhat abbreviated due to the presence of Rock Band The Party (Idariel 7, Twonkey, Josepi, and Stan McStan ) made its way back from the SludgeWorks, with their captured Zombot-ratipede corpse and a bunch of the Thaumivorous Ghost-Moths that they had discovered. They boarded the platform and were being winched […]

You Say Po-tay-to, I Say Po-tah-to

Scott, of World of Thool, writes, in Dropping out of the Old School JimLotfP has written an “us vs. them” opinion piece over at Lamentations of the Flame Princess. Jim’s blog is one of my daily early-morning Google Reader destinations. From what I’ve seen, I genuinely like him, I suspect we’d get along just fine […]

Monsters I Have Loved

Following the lead of Monsters and Manuals: Top 10 Monsters, here are my Top Ten D&D Monsters, in no particular order: Gelatinous Cube: I love these guys. They’re creepy as all get-out, particularly when they’ve got a partially digested skeleton or something suspended in them, they’re not so dangerous as to be unfair and they’re […]

What is Role-playing?

The Fine Art of the TPK asks A short question, but by no means easy… Instead, I have a question. An open call, if you will. Can somebody PLEASE define role-playing? Somebody will be a wise-ass and link the wiki stub, so I’ll just get it out of the way. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Role-playing Specifically, I’d like to […]

Power Creep…and Things You Can Do About It

One problem some campaigns run into is Power Creep. Whatever the power-level the PCs started out at, they have gained in capabilities until not only are the opponents they originally faced beneath them, but opponents that would challenge them strain the verisimilitude of the setting. This dilemma is practically designed into D&D, but it can […]

Sure, Why Not?

Memes will kill us all and replace us with robots (or let me tell you about my characters) « tenletter This meme was stolen from here.Step 1: List 10 of your characters. Step 2: Answer these questions! Nike -(D&D home-brew) Cleric of the Spirit of Feet and Legs. Killed when a party-member decided the protective […]

Microlite20

I don’t know much about this, except that it seems generally well-regarded, and it might satisfy Russell as a 3e-like system without all the cruft. I’ve read the Microlite74 rules, which take this and trim it down still further to make it more like a 0e retro-clone, and they seem pretty solid, though you still […]

Scribefire

While I’m on the topic of useful software for RPGS (though more for RPG bloggers than GMs and players), I find Scribefire really useful. It’s a Firefox plugin that lets you quickly highlight something on a web page or blog post and write and publish a blog post to your own blog quoting it. I […]