Games that Changed Everything: Feng Shui

First in a series!

One of the things I really like talking about is the history of the hobby of RPGs, since I was brought up in Wisconsin and played with some of the people responsible for creating the hobby.

As I get older, I see a lot of newer players (AKA “kids”) who don’t have the same history that I do, and I feel that there’s a duty to talk about the hobby and how it came to be. Or in other words:

We needs to do the tellin’ so we ‘member who we was.
(Yeah, that was a Beyond Thunderdome quote, so sue me…)

Sometimes work calls

Just a quick update for those of you who faithfully read OnTheDie. Work has called for a moment, so I had to miss last Friday's post.

I'll be back tomorrow and this Friday: never fear!

See you tomorrow... until then Stay 20.

13th Age Campaign Session II: The Ratsmashers Very. Bad. Day.

13th Age Session II -- The Ratsmashers Have a Very Bad Day

… or “Watch out for the Purple Haze”

Note: this entry is going to be a long one, but we had a fun session, and I’d love to hear what you think about the direction of the game.

The second session picked up right where we left off: in the middle of Hawk’s Square. One of the survivors who had witnessed the fight, Elsa Whiterose, gave Alarendel quite a bit of information about what had happened. Elsa is a priestess of the Lady of Light, a member of the God’s of Light Pantheon, who runs the Lost Hope Mission in Eldolan’s Warrens or tenement district. Elsa thanked Alarendel for his quick work, as it had doubtless saved the two student’s lives who were initially attacked by the zombies. She also told Alarendel that the bite of a zombie might require attention from a priest of the light to avoid a terrible transformation into undeath and a fall into darkness.

Alarendel was greatly upset by this, and fled the area.

Toolkit: The Truth of the World

Mrs. Sith and I recently saw Evil Dead the Musical, which we very thoroughly enjoyed.

Yes, there will be blood!

Yes, this is an actual thing. What, you were thinking after telling you about the Mike Tyson Mysteries that I'd make something like this up?

September and the Discerning Nerd

Fall and what you, the discerning nerd should do about it

The beautiful fall colors you won't ever see because you're too busy watching TV

With September comes the beginnings of fall. The happy voices of parents who have children back in school, the arrival of football and the advent of beautiful autumn colors.

At OnTheDie we aren't concerned with any of that.

With September comes the fall TV shows, and gives you a chance to enjoy new programming, some of which will doubtless not make it to Halloween.

There are a lot of new shows coming, and many of them are targeted at the nerd demographic. How can you hear about everything before it’s gone? Well relax: I've done the work for you this year. Take a look at the OnTheDie Fall Nerd TV preview.

13th Age Campaign Session I: Arrival at Eldolan

13 Age Campaign Session I -- Arrival at Endolan

I just started a new 13th Age game that will be running every other Sunday for my Pegasus Games group. I like 13th Age a lot, and as of now it’s going to be my go-to replacement game for Dungeons and Dragons. I’m working on a review of what’s available for the new 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons at the moment, and you’ll see why I’m not going with it at that point. It’s going to be much like the new edition’s artwork: not very pretty.

If you’d like to see a much more positive review for 5E, head over to Vorpal Chainsword, where Cory may ask you to get off of his lawn.

But let’s keep things light and positive. I’m not sure how many of you out there are familiar with 13th Age: it’s an OGL game (which I like very much) and it’s written by Rob Heinsoo and Jonathan Tweet, who worked on Fourth Edition Dungeons and Dragons. That means there’s more than a little influence from the “indie” and “story games” movements, but also without the grid and miniatures.

I’m going to do a separate review of the game itself, after I finish with the one for 5E, so you can directly see the differences between the two games.

But, let’s talk about my actual game here since that’s the point of this blog post. When I specifically talk mechanics, I'll format things like so.

A Quick Note on update day changes

Blog posting day changes

Just a quick note for everyone: I will have to change the days for updating the blog. Mondays are just a bad day for me (I guess I have a case of the Mondays every week) and so I'll be updating the blog every Tuesday and Saturday.

Tuesday will still be RPG content, while Fridays will remain general nerd content.

Yes, this means there will be an update TODAY, Stay tuned, True Believers!

Review: One Bright Star to Guide Them

Book Review Time: One Bright Star to Guide Them

Get One Bright Star to Guide Them at Amazon or Castalia House.

Final Rating: 5/5 or “I’ll sleep when it’s done”

For this entry, I’m going to tackle a review of John C. Wright’s novella, One Bright Star to Guide Them. When I do reviews, I don’t just review the work, but I’m also going to tell you how I came to the work and why I’m bothering to write about it. Some of you don’t like that, so if you like, you can skip down to the review proper...

Shadows of Brimstone II: this time with 1000% more review action

The Shadows of Brimstone Review

Shadows of Brimstone is a new boardgame that (as of this review) is just on the cusp of being released. Since the game has a lot of similarities to Warhammer Quest, I’m going to be making a few call-outs in this review. They’ll look like this.

Shadows comes from a little company called Flying Frog Productions. FFP makes some great, highly thematic games like Last Night on Earth, A Touch of Evil, and (Vorpal Chainsword Favorite) Fortune and Glory.

Shadows of Brimstone part I: Warhammer Quest

I want to talk today about the new game Shadows of Brimstone, but in order for me to do that I really need to talk about another game first, and that’s Warhammer Quest.

(Because this post actually turned out to be so long, and have so little to do with Shadows, I’m actually going to break it into two sub-entries. Not what you were looking for? Well … it is my blog after all. Tune in tomorrow for the actual Shadows review.)

We need to step into the WABAC Machine and set our course for 1995. I remember it as if it were yesterday: meeting with my fellow Sith every Wednesday for Shipwrecks and to talk about this new show called Babylon 5… it was a golden age,

It was the year that Games Workshop released this amazing game to the world that pretty much took over our gaming group for the summer. So what was it?