Tag: Game Play

We’re going to do something a little different this time around. If you’ve been following me on social media, you may have seen some of this, but I’ve been looking at Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen a chapter at a time, and I’m pulling all of my social media thoughts together in one place, here on the blog.

Looking Through Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen

I am slowly reading a chapter at a time in Shadow of the Dark Queen, so I don’t go totally off the rails on other projects that I’m working on. It’s interesting to me that while the One D&D rules-language is getting less “natural,” the language in this adventure is less formal.

Even compared to earlier D&D 5e adventures, it feels like some of the language in this adventure is a little more careful not to assume that people reading the book have…

The Palladium Fantasy Roleplaying Game fascinated me as a teen gamer, and I have avidly collected the entire range of sourcebooks over recent years. Today, the last two tomes arrived all the way from the USA and my collection is complete!

This is a classic-style fantasy world which offers some interesting twists on common themes. In truth, the game rules for Palladium flavour the game world and these old mechanisms are pretty archaic. But there are great ideas in these sourcebooks and I would love to run a game set in the Known World of Palladium.

As a teenager, there were many ideas that I first encountered in these pages: the Summoner, the idea of magical Circles of Power, my first encounter with Hermetic magic (even if it is just a taste), and the use of prophecy to drive mystery in a fantasy world. I also love the many…

This is now part three (or, more accurately, attempt number three) at this thing that started out as somewhat of a bonus post on a few favourite sights in gaming which, the more I thought about it, quickly then evolved into a top ten and more. That was around two years ago as I write, but after that initial flurry it’s been something that’s captured my imagination quite a lot and as a result has been given a great deal more thought ever since, and while I can’t promise it’s now a final and comprehensive list, it is now an awful lot bigger than ten and more, so I thought it was a good time to share it again! No more countdowns though, even though at least nine of my last top ten probably still stand; no, this time I just want to take you on a tour of some…

As the world’s most flaky GM, I have a reputation for starting games and bailing out on them. This is partly a feature of my neurology but mostly due to my total lack of process. As a GM, you need to develop a methodology not only for the table, but also for preparation.

The best way to become consistent with any behaviour is to develop habits that support it. What most people don’t tell you is that habits form as part of the larger context of your life. Your life, of course, is probably built around processes. Routines are strongest when they are part of wider process-driven sequences of action.

As an example, I have a process at work for creating and delivering lessons to students. It has been developed over time and honed to fit the specific context in which I work. As I change roles and schools, so…

The Mechanical Mirage is a 10 to 20 hour adventure for a party of levels 3 to 5 by the Action Economists.

It’s been a while since I did some Old School Dungeons & Dragons on Twitter, but I’ve finally gotten myself back into the rhythm! (I am now also posting the threads on Mastodon, given the instability of Twitter.) Hopefully I’ll keep up the routine. So let’s get started…

X10: Red Arrow, Black Shield (1985), by Michael S. Dobson. This is one I wanted to get my hands on some time ago!

Time for our regular roundup of quick-fire reviews and impressions of everything under the spotlight at Retro Arcadia this week, old and new and a bit of both…

The very first game I played this week was Atari’s Batman arcade game from 1990. Side scrolling jumping and beating affair based on the wonderful movie from the year before, with 3D rail-shooting bits between levels in your Bat-vehicles… Sounds a bit like the best Batman game ever but unfortunately I didn’t really click with it like I did a very long time ago with the Atari ST game of the same movie! Its Hollywood presentation just didn’t compensate for some really shoddy platforming and combat, and no amount of fancy distractions are going to turn the main courses into Rolling Thunder in my eyes. Glad I got to finally spend a couple of hours with it after all this time though!

I really do not like free-to-play games. I don’t know that I’d go as far as to say that I hate them, but I certainly hold a lot of animosity toward them. Not blind rage, mind you. I’ve no interest in being yet another furtburgler who decries them as some kind of gaming Satan, but I wouldn’t invite them over for dinner either.

As it stands, I’ve played a fair number of free-to-play titles. Hell, not all them were even bad. One of them was though. It was so bad in fact, that it’s painted my perception of the business model for over a decade now. That said, today we’re talking about MapleStory.

Good lord – you can’t be serious? MapleStory? Really?

Yes, really.

I think I’ve mentioned before that I used to play MapleStory. It was my go-to title back in college. It had two major…

I remember going to Blockbuster as a kid and seeing the N64 they had in their lobby. Often, I would try and get a few rounds of something in before I was carted back home and sent to bed so my parents could watch a movie without me. However, one day it all became Pokemon Snap stuff.

This mysterious Pokemon game that I had never heard of that allowed you to have face-to-face interactions with the creatures that I had seen in my GameBoy.

I was mystified for a time, but it wouldn’t be until my sixth birthday that I would get the chance to really sink my teeth into it. It took me years to beat because I had a dumb baby brain, but when I did I felt so accomplished for figuring out all the little puzzles in the game. 

Seeing as the new Pokemon Snap game has…