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...
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...
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...
The One Page Dungeon Contest returns once again! As we are wont to do, my brother and I crafted an entry for the competition – our fourth submission in the last six years! We decided to keep things a little looser this time around, incorporating gnomes, squid, and pseudo-science into our adventure. Following a total system failure, Captain Huxley recruits a team of adventurers to salvage...
A few weeks back I mentioned that Matt and I had entered the One Page Dungeon Contest, an annual competition that challenges amateur designers to create the ultimate single page role-playing adventure. After a month-long judging process, the results are finally in! Matt and I managed to sneak into the 3rd place category with our entry, Vesna’s Refuge. In celebration of this win, I am...
This is part two of a three part series where Michael reviews his experiences as ConBravo. I actually didn’t get a chance to play any of the multitude of table-top games available at ConBravo. Sad but true! However, former Spellstorm organizer Dominic Amann was running a newbie table of D&D Next and let me sit in for the first hour to learn the rules and get a feel for the system...
So, the new D&D Next logo was unveiled, and it really isn’t that great. Not a completely terrible design by any stretch of the imagination, but the chrome and red seem to clash in a way that makes the whole thing feel a bit awkward. You can check out the original logo below. Luckily, both RS and I have arts degree and are eager to put them into use (for perhaps the first time in our...
Dungeons and Dragons had just about as awkward an adolescence as its legion of fans did. In the 1980s, the budding roleplaying game was tangentially linked to a handful of high profile teenage suicides. Fueled by spur-of-the-moment hysteria, pocketed movements arose across the country to ban Dungeons and Dragons, claiming that the game taught witchcraft, satanism, homosexuality, necromancy...