Month: February 2020

The Life of a Game Designer – Part 3: The Game Makers Guild (almost)

Game Night Blog

I want to talk about the Game Makers Guild, but apparently I need to write about some buried sh!t from the past.

PAX Purple Banner

I was still in a whirlwind when we left PAX Unplugged in Philly and flew home to Boston. My mind was abuzz with questions and possibilities, fears and doubts. Could this work? What the hell was I doing? Where do I start? Why should this be any different than any of my other failed attempts at a creative life? What makes me so damn special?

All my life I’d been told time and time again that I was destined for mediocrity. As the immortal Dread Pirate Roberts proclaims, “Life is pain. Anybody who says otherwise is selling something.” So to be painfully blunt, after my mother died I was raised by an alcoholic father and an abusive grandmother. Both of whom hated their lives so much that they…

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Syp’s gaming goals for March 2020

Bio Break

February 2020 in review

  • This was both a busy month and a weird month. I had a vacation, ordination exams, and a lot of other stuff packed into a shorter time span. So while I didn’t get as much game time overall, I did manage to spread out more as the month went along.
  • Neverwinter remained a daily activity as I shot up into the 40s, plowed through questing areas, and started in on my first two campaigns with my Chaos Warlock.
  • I found it hard to resist the lure of Star Trek Online, especially with all of the 10th anniversary giveaways and new missions. I started up a new Federation captain and had her piloting a tier 6 science ship from the start.
  • After about a month of no activity in Lord of the Rings Online, things started to move forward once more thanks to the release…

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Iyesgarten Regional Map Update (February)

Dyson's Dodecahedron

I posted the Iyesgarten regional hexmap at the beginning of the year and it has been used for a few adventures since. As we explore the region, I’ve been updating the map with little details and labels that we learn about or explore as the game proceeds.

Iyesgarten Regional Update Iyesgarten Regional Update

Most of these labels correspond to other maps on the blog:

As play continues, I may need to reduce the size of the various labels so they don’t overwhelm the map itself.

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The maps on Dyson’s Dodecahedron are released for free personal use thanks to the support of awesome patrons like you over on Patreon. Every month 400 patrons come together to make these releases possible. You can help too in order to keep the flow of maps coming and to…

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Raids week 162

Micki's Delirium

I was away on Saturday, so my raids 162 were only Wednesday Feb 19. The guildies did some runs on Saturday, but since I wasn’t there I won’t post about them.

1. Project Nemesis LH

I posted on Orien Raiding Discord 1 h before the raids and again when the lfm was up. There was some interest, but we ended up with two empty spots so Osi brought in a couple of pikers. I believe I asked Osi to kite Rudus, Drexnan to place Gish and Torimi was on laser. Completion time: 25 min, 30 s. Loot: 84 nemesis runes, 30 threads of fate, Ethereal Gaze, Radiant Ring of Taer Valaestas and Attunement’s Gaze.

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Conjured food and drink

GamingSF

Although I’m sure it doesn’t taste that great, and the lack of variety could get on my modern-sensibility nerves, in MMORPGs I do enjoy playing with classes and items that can conjure food and/or drink. I suppose it’s less of a thing in most modern games, as your character having to equip food and drink is a distinctly old-school mechanism. It seems I’m spending a good amount of my gaming time in old-school games at the moment, so it’s a mechanic I’ve encountered more of late.

In Everquest 2, my main is an Inquisitor (a type of Priest) and as such can summon food and water. Sounds a bit unappetising, but needs must and all that. It saves him ever having to obtain normal sustenance, though I suppose that’s self-defeating in that it’s never encouraged me to get on with levelling my provisioning (a k a cooking) alt…

Abandoned…

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Roadside Tales of Desperate Adventure – Session 1

Dyson's Dodecahedron

Now that I’ve been running Warhammer FRP 1e for a year and a half with the Sunday Enemy Within crew, the Monday Night Doomslakers asked me to pull out the game to give it a spin for them. As this is likely to be episodic and may or may not be revisited in the future, I grabbed “The Restless Dead” which is really a collection of mini-adventures published in White Dwarf over the years and then tied together. Having each short adventure be self-contained works great for a short-game or episodic game group.

Our Cast of Adventurers

Drorheim Frothgar the Fearless – A dwarven soldier recruited into the Baron’s levies as a footman as opposed to the elite gunnery squads.

Hartflower – A halfling hedge wizard’s apprentice who worked as a cook and sometimes medic in the baron’s levies.

Matthias Derverzund – A rough and suspicious soldier from the Baron’s…

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A Few Thoughts on the Xbox Series X

VIRTUAL BASTION

With the next gen looming, and while Sony has kept things close to the chest with the PS5, earlier this week Microsoft released some new bits of information about its latest flagship console, the Xbox Series X. In an Xbox Wire post titled What You Can Expect From the Next Generation of Gaming, Phil Spencer laid out the power and promise of this beast of a black box that can play games and more. If there’s one sentence from the post that sums up Microsoft’s mission with the Xbox Series X, it could be: 

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Running D&D for Kids

Alex Kammer Writes

As a dad and an avid gamer, I guess it makes sense that I have ended up running a lot of D&D games for kids. I am also the Director of an increasingly large tabletop gaming convention. A feature of our show, Gamehole Con, is our flourishing Kids Track. These are games specifically for kids run be vetted GM’s that have experience running kids’ games.

More generally, I volunteer frequently at my kids’ schools and am a youth sports coach. I just flat out really enjoy working with kids. For all of these reasons, I have spent more than a bit of time thinking about the best ways to introduce roll playing games to kids. So, I thought I would pen my thoughts here on running D&D for kids, your own kids and others, with the hope that something I write here might prove useful.

Before I launch into my…

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