Blog Archives

Jon Peterson at Playing at the World has posted Bruce Sterling’s homebrew samurai class from 1978. It’s quite good, actually. The restrictions of the Samurai Code will force the player character to commit seppuku if he’s wounded and retreats without returning a wound to his opponent. The class’s special abilities are doled out in a similar […]

It’s time to recognize the best gaming blogs of the year. Of course, most any day is a good one to recognize a great gaming blog as far as I’m concerned. That’s why I link to stuff over at Jeffro’s Space Gaming Blog all year long. But of all those blogs I link to, which […]

You know I really hesitate to look into this style of game. It’s not just that this kind of game seems to attract exactly the wrong kind of people. And I get that it’s maybe not fair to stereotype. But my impression of these sorts of games… it’s like people get ahold of these things, they […]

This is the game that got me back into gaming. I mean just look at it… that sleek, understated cover. There’s a space combat game in the back. Its loaded with pictures of aliens and starships. The possibilities are endless… and combined with the imposingly long history of this gaming franchise you have a game […]

For as long as I can remember, I have assumed that AD&D was practically unplayable. TSR just never really demonstrated to me that they had a grasp of either editing or blind testing– or any kind of playtesting, really. And while companies like Steve Jackson Games would painstakingly maintain errata and carefully fold in developments […]

This was for many years just about the only complete role-playing game rule set in my collection. I was simultaneously smitten with the very idea of rpg design and mystified by the concept of game mastering. Thus, periodically I would settle down to read my favorite game cover to cover in the hopes that I […]

This game has been the talk of the town this past year with a great many people lighting up Google+ with comment and fanfare about it. It’s a relatively big deal as far as the rpg scene is concerned, however… I have to say up front that I am not in the target audience of this […]

Good golly, did this game ever cause a splash when it came out. The full color spread in Dragon magazine was positively riveting. It didn’t hurt that my generation was totally primed for this one, either. With Road Warrior coming out in 1981, War Games in 1983, and then both this game and Red Dawn […]

Okay, this game has been the talk of the town this past while. Several people that are into the same sort of stuff that I am have bragged on this one, so I bit the bullet and grabbed a copy of the PDF. I open it up, though and it goes straight into to the […]

The new edition of the classic Tunnels & Trolls game arrived in my mail box last week. Weighing in at 367 pages long, it is a positively monstrous tome. It is far from imposing, however. The core rules are simply not terribly different from the earliest editions. There are many refinements, but the spirit of the […]