Michael Iantorno PhD Candidate, Game Designer, and Writer

CategoryPen & Paper

Book Review – Game Wizards

My book review for Jon Peterson’s Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons is now live at Press Start! Press Start is an open-access, peer-reviewed journal for multidisciplinary game studies. You can read the full article for free, but I’ve also included a short excerpt below: No disrespect toward Jon Peterson’s prior work, but his latest foray into the history of...

Background Checks: Disentangling Class, Race, and Gender in CRPG Character Creators

I am happy to announce that a journal article I co-authored with Mia Consalvo has just been published in Games & Culture! Background Checks: Disentangling Class, Race, and Gender in CRPG Character Creators is now available as an open access article, and represents months of research we conducted on Dragon Age and Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura. The paper is one of many outputs of...

One Page Dungeon Anthology Released

The One Page Dungeon Contest is a yearly competition where aspiring game designers create a role-playing-game dungeon within the space of an 8.5×11 sheet of paper. Dozens of participants compete with one goal in mind: to create the ultimate single page adventure. After having competed for a number of years, we’ve decided to offer our 4 previous entries for free on the Mammoth Island Itch.io page...

Hearth & Blade (Version 1.0 Release)

After years of on-and-off development and 18 months of open beta testing, the Hearth & Blade core rulebook is now released! Folks can pick up a copy (PWYC) on the Mammoth Island itch.io page. Hearth & Blade is a campaign setting and homebrew ruleset for the first edition of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. Explore Yavmir, a frozen realm steeped in rich Slavic folklore. Delve into ancient...

So We Printed Our Game Book

Last week, I finally picked up the first print run for The Elephant in the Room: Feat Taxes in Pathfinder. Printed by RapidoBooks in Montreal, and designed to mimic the Dungeons and Dragons splat-books of the 1990s, each book is 40 pages long and features all of the rules presented in our online document. Why a print run? My brother and I undertook this little book-making endeavour as both a...

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...

Interview with The Loot Bag

I recently was featured in the Bag of Loot podcast, The Game Maker’s Guide, where I spoke about a few of my Pathfinder game projects (all of which were co-developed with my brother Mathew). You can listen to the whole thing on YouTube!

The two projects I talked about about are available (for free) on this website and at Mammoth Island Games:

Mammoth Island Games

After years of sharing tabletop game projects on this website (and a smattering of other strange locales), my brother and I have decided to create an itch.io page under the banner of Mammoth Island Games + Words. It currently contains only our most popular projects – The Elephant in the Room: Feat Taxes in Pathfinder and Hearth & Blade – but we’ll be adding some additional...

Michael Iantorno PhD Candidate, Game Designer, and Writer