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See More »The company that I work for, MFV (née Icarus Studios), has begun a Kickstarter project so that we can create a video game of MageKnight. I am one of the designers on this project, and I am hugely, overwhelmingly excited about potentially getting to make this game. If you can […]
In many live-action games, there exists a mechanic to represent the players’ actions between events, since otherwise players can only take part in the world and its goings-on for maybe twelve (for some games, as many as twenty-four) days out of every year. Since the plot committee is dedicated to […]
A long while back, I posted a comparison of the treatment of religion, divine magic, and worship in seven different settings. This is relevant in that today I want to talk about the problems I have with clerics in fantasy gaming, particularly the various editions of D&D. These problems, I […]
There’s been a good bit of information distributed on spellcasting in D&D Next, most recently this; the broader ENWorld aggregation of information on wizards and spellcasting is found here. These pieces of information might or might not contradict one another, depending on how you want to interpret them. Today I’d […]
So, for Dust to Dust, we have introduced a number of games-within-the-game. I’ve commented at some length about Wizard Dueling before. This works well in LARPs, because even when things are scheduled well and everything is on time, there will be downtime that could stand to be filled. It’s just […]
On Memorial Day, I ran a session of the D&D Next playtest with Kainenchen, Stands-in-Fire, Samhaine, and two more friends. If, like my players and me, you have never before played through the Caves of Chaos, then either turn back or be comfortable with some minor spoilers. This will be your […]
This post will be something relatively close to liveblogging my reactions to reading through the D&D Next (I still think of it as 5th edition) material. Note that I haven’t played or run any of it yet, and won’t until Monday. Also, I can point to things here that contradict […]
I enjoyed writing the first two warrior societies so much that I thought I might do two more. I also left out any clear indication of fighting style for the Iron Temple in the last post, so I thought I’d mention it here. I mostly see these guys fighting with […]
A conversation about magic in the Marvel universe over in Google Plus today has me thinking about the greater role of magic in storytelling and games. A ton of different sources factor into my thinking here, starting with Merlin and the wizard-heroes of the Kalevala, continuing through the Wizard of […]
Creature design has always been tough for me. When I run tabletop games, I mostly use monsters out of the books. I can take credit for only a small number of the monsters in Dust to Dust. On the other hand, I’ve found that in almost every creative endeavor, the […]
