Michael Iantorno PhD Candidate, Game Designer, and Writer

CategoryPen and Paper

Mammoth Island Adventure Club Released

Today, Mammoth Island Games debuts its Adventure Club! Each season of the Club offers a bevy of postcard-sized, system neutral, TTRPG adventures. The current season theme is Islands and features five entries. After Hearth & Blade and The Elephant in the Room, my brother and I shifted our focus toward smaller TTRPG projects. This is for three reasons. First, scoped-down TTRPGs allow us to...

The Elephant in the Room: Feat Taxes in Pathfinder (Third Printing)

The Elephant in the Room v3.0 (Download) In 2018, my brother and I published a PDF version of our Pathfinder feat tree, designed to encapsulate and expand upon the modifications suggested in our original blog post. Entitled The Elephant in the Room: Feat Taxes in Pathfinder, the document features a re-imagined version of the entire feat section found in the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Core...

Risk Legacy: In Defense of a Disposable Board Game

Risk Legacy is a $50 board game that you’ll probably only play 15 times. If I had tried to sell you on that concept twenty years ago you probably would have laughed in my face. Board games have long been vaunted for their replay value and durability. If you grew up in the burbs, it’s likely you knew someone with a venerable iteration of Clue or a well-worn Monopoly set from fifties...

HyperBound on Twitch (October 14th)

Just a heads up to all you hacking junkies out there: HyperBound was featured as part of Starmen.net’s Hacktoberfest last Tuesday. Why the late update? Well, originally the game was suppose to be played live on Twitch on Thursday, October 16th @ 8:00pm, but it was bumped up two days at the very last moment due to some logistical issues. You can still check out the archived broadcast...

HyperBound: Play Online

Hey everyone! In lieu of an Unearthed update this week, I just have a bit news regarding HyperBound, the game hack I made waaaaay back in 2007. Apparently the folks at Vizzed have made a version of the game that is playable in your browser. You can check it out at the link listed below: Play HyperBound Online   You will need to install the Vizzed RGR plugin to make things work, but it does...

State of the World 2013

Brief Overview Some things happened, but not as quickly as I would have liked. Better Overview 2013 was an odd but productive year for the website, Unearthed, and myself. I had some grand ideas for Unearthed when the year began, including aspirations for a playable demo to be release by the summertime. Obviously that didn’t pan out the way I wanted it too… but perhaps it worked out...

HyperBound featured in Rise of the Video Game Zinesters

I’m not usually one to toot my own horn, but I thought I’d share this little tidbit of news with all of you. In March 2012, Anna Anthropy released her book Rise of the Video Game Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Drop-outs, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form and my hack project HyperBound was given a three page write-up! This...

Have you played HyperBound?

I was skimming through my YouTube the other day and noticed that my “HyperBound Review” video was closing in on 10,000 views. It seems that a lot of people have shown an interest in the game over the last couple of years! But what, you may ask, is HyperBound? HyperBound was a part of my thesis project at Ryerson University back when I was a 4th year new media student with game-making...

Michael Iantorno PhD Candidate, Game Designer, and Writer