The Dread Gazebo Logo Contest
As it turns out working all day and then coming home to play video games is much easier than coming home and designing logos. It also turns out that my…
Crafting the next generation of role players starts with rpgKids
Let me start by saying up front that rpgKids is probably the best 3$ you can spend in beginning to foster the love of RPG’s in a child. Mr. Enrique Bertran (aka @NewbieDM) sent a call out to fellow gamer dads on twitter a few weeks ago, so I felt complied to answer him. After speaking to him I was given the honor to play test some of this delightful project before it came to the masses. I had been familiar with his rpgKids system only vaguely before this, having glanced over it a time or two. When it came to “playing D&D” with my son before it had always been some malformed abbreviated form of 4th edition I hacked up on the spot, no consistency. Thankfully with rpgKids that’s now a thing of the past and he has a simple yet understandable system to play with rules anyone can pick up within minutes.
This evolution of the system (1.5) is somewhat of a re-vamping of his rpgKids system he’d release a year or so ago. He’s made additions, changes, and clarifications as well as extra optional rules for magical items and bonuses/penalties during combat only to name a few. Also added in are special non-combat abilities for each of the 4 class archetypes which are the Sword Fighter, Healer, Archer and Wizard. The system is so simple and so easy to pick up I believe it could be used as a gateway not only for kids but even those non-gamer adults we all have in our lives.
The rpgKids rulebook is 24 pages, comes with everything you need to begin playing immediately and also provides printable grids for creating your own maps and tokens for heroes and monsters. Therein he’s also included a full blown adventure entitled “The Lair of the Frog Wizard” which is a sizable little adventure complete with flavor text and ready to print maps of the locales within the story.
Posted inDungeons and Dragons (D&D) Humor
A Guide to Heroic Tier Parenting: Ages 0-6
After many a silly yet somehow profound conversations with my wife, I’ve decided it’s time to turn our D&D references to parenting into a post for your reading pleasure. Granted some of this may all seem silly at first but I have hidden some true wisdom within these lines. I’ll be doing a 3 part series of posts each one focusing on one of the parenting “Tiers”. So let’s get this thing started, enjoy.
UPDATE:This got published at Kobold Quarterly as a Friday Funny. Woot!
Heroic (Ages 0-6): This tier of parenting is simple yet dirty business and somebody has to do it! It’s not glorious when you first start out, though after all it is unavoidably the foundation you’ll build the rest of your adventuring career on. You start out battling one dirty diaper at a time and your party has no real sense of cohesion or tactics just yet. It’s all fly by the seat of your pants no matter how well you think you’ve prepared, that cleansing ritual will not keep the diapers of eternal stench at bay no matter how many times or how loudly you repeat it’s canticle. Sleep deprivation is going to sap away most of your healing surges, what’s left may be consumed by that soured milk breath weapon, hope you’ve got a high fortitude defense. Oh and all those torches you packed… they aren’t going to help your reflexes any against toys you trip over when waking up in the middle of the night due to nightmares or having to prepare an alchemical concoction for the little one.
By your “party” I do mean your child(ren), yourself and your significant other of course, if you’re lucky enough to have one that is. Some adventurers aren’t so blessed and must quest alone. So keep in mind If you’re a single parent the encounters don’t scale down and doing even the most mundane tasks can seem trying at times. You have even less time for short rests but the rewards are fantastic – bragging rights, double XP and hoarding all the loot for yourself! After a while you obtain a rhythm and things seem to get easier, challenges you face are easily overcome with at-will’s and encounter powers. You’ll have to break out the dailies when certain situations arise, such as questions like what happens when you lose all your HP, or what that funny dance is that they saw you doing in bed with mommy/daddy the other night. Not all situations are so trying however, which in this case feel free to use minor actions to make some shit up and those curiosities drop like minions.
Posted inDungeons and Dragons (D&D) Updates
Readying an action
So it’s been over a week without much of an update here, gotta admit it seems the past month life has really had me by the dice bags. I’ve been caught in a swell of creating stuff for castle ravenloft, planning a new campaign for the fall, reading the rules compendium front to back and making arrangements to expand my website and put some flyers around FLGS’s in my area. Couple all this with a wishy washy desire to get back into LOTRO and my newly re-acquired lust for playing Halo till the wee hours of the morning and the end result is an absence of blog content!
I’m working on fleshing out a lot of projects at the moment, all gaming related of course so fret not loyal readers. If you poke around the site you might notice some subtle changes to the layout, I’m also toying with a new theme but I may decide against it. What do you think? It’s been an adjustment getting used to making posts for myrpgame.com as well as my own, I’m never really sure what to post here and what to post there and so on. I must say though ThadeousC has been great with me about 
post content and deadlines, and he’s super fun to work with. I think I’ve finally gotten a game plan together though and in the coming months you’ll be seeing a lot more usable content here along with my usual stories, reviews and editorials.
Another thing I’ve been working on is creating some content for submission to WoTC and perhaps a few other sources, the anxiety that comes with the thought of submitting my work is much more overwhelming than I had imagined. Turns out I’ve got a pretty bad case of internet stage fright, I know it seems silly for a guy who runs a blog and tweets all day but that is so much different than putting your name on something to have industry professionals scrutinize. It’s one thing to write a review of a product or a blurb about this and that, but creating something to be presentable at your absolute best is daunting, at least for me.
Posted inRaventloft
Belmorn: Minotaur Paladin for Castle Ravenloft
I’m completely obsessed with the Castle Ravenloft board game, and if you read my previous post then you know what this one is all about! If not then you should know I’m going to be creating custom additional classes for play with the game, starting with this Paladin.
I’m hoping this first one came out as professionally as I’d hoped so please let me know what you think of the of the design and overall quality of my work. Get out there and playtest this bad boy!
Those of you wondering “why a Minotaur paladin” it’s because I didn’t want to add a 3rd human or 2nd dwarf into the mix and I thought this would put a unique 4e twist on things, being that that’s the spirit of the game and all. You can hit the “keep reading” jump for the full profile and there is also a downloadable version (PDF) over in the Downloads section of the site so please share and enjoy!
Posted inRaventloft
Adding another brick to Castle Ravenloft’s Walls
So this Sunday happens to be the season finale of Trueblood on HBO, and right now you may be wondering “well what the hell does that have to do with D&D, and why am I reading this?”and in fact it has a lot to do with it, at least in my world.
I take a lot of inspiration for my D&D games from movies, games, and television – particularly from the horror genre as it’s my favorite, and my gaming group regularly gets together to watch this show before our D&D game.
So I’m inviting my group over early for a day of vampires and good times and I figure what better way to kick that day off than with a game of Castle Ravenloft! Problem is, my group of friends including myself totals to six, and Ravenloft being a DM-less game only accommodates for 5 players.