Michael Iantorno PhD Candidate, Game Designer, and Writer

CategoryHearth and Blade

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...

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:

The Elephant in the Room: Feat Taxes in Pathfinder (Full Rules Document)

In September of 2012, my brother and I released a blog post discussing the issue of feat taxes in the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. Although the post was intended to be a one-off thought experiment based on our experiences building characters for organized play, it gained an inexplicable amount of traction on Reddit, Facebook, and the official Paizo forums. It is responsible for 90% of the traffic...

Hearth & Blade: Fan-Made Map

It seems that, despite not having an official release yet, the Hearth & Blade Pathfinder campaign setting has its first piece of fan-art. Russian artist Mark Kamyshin was kind enough to send us his interpretation of the world map (which turned out about 100 times better than my meager efforts). You can see the full-sized image on Mark’s DeviantArt page. Many thanks go out to Mark for...

Hearth & Blade: P6 Monster Bestiary

I’ve mentioned it on the blog a few times before, so I’m sure you’re all familiar with the Hearth & Blade (formerly Yavmir) campaign setting that I’ve been working on with my brother over the last few years. We hit a pretty big milestone on the project this week with the completion of the bestiary: a collection of monsters specifically designed for the setting. As with...

Feat Taxes in Pathfinder: P6 Feat Tree

NOTE: This feat tree is completely and totally out-of-date (and likely soon inaccessible). Instead, please consult the Full Rules Document. Many years ago, Matt penned the article The Elephant in the Room: Feat Taxes in Pathfinder, which provided an alternate take on feat progression in the Pathfinder RPG. This write-up was surprisingly popular, and eventual became the most visited page on this...

4 New Classes for Pathfinder P6

I think it has been evidenced about a hundred times before on this blog, but my brother and I are pretty big fans of the Pathfinder RPG. As part of our quest to create a campaign setting for the game, we decided it would be a good idea to create some new classes. Although borrowing heavily from existing sourceds – and in some cases, simply re-skinning core classes – these four new...

Yavmir: Interactive Map

As I have mentioned on the blog a bunch of times before, I’ve been slowly working away at a new, interactive map of Yavmir. This map will eventually be used for a homebrew campaign setting entitled Hearth & Blade (formerly World of Ruin), which is steeped in rich Slavic folklore. Anyways, I finally have an interactive of the map online. You can take a look at it on the MashupForge page...

Michael Iantorno PhD Candidate, Game Designer, and Writer