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Giveaway: 1st Edition AD&D “Unearthed Arcana” Reprint

February 28, 2013 by
unearthedarcana

Wizards of the Coast is awesome enough to provide us with five copies of the new 1st Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Unearthed Arcana reprint book to giveaway to our readers! We haven’t really done a giveaway or contest in quite a while, so I’m keeping this nice and simple – all you have to do in order to be entered to win one of the five copies is leave a comment on this post!

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Review: “Cosmic Patrol” RPG

January 17, 2013 by

Cosmic Patrol is a retro-futuristic roleplaying game published by Catalyst Game Labs that focuses on storytelling and building a narrative from various cues provided by each player/character around the table and an overall adventure structure chosen by the players. I’ve had the main rulebook for a long time, but finally had a chance to sit down with some friends and play a session in late 2012. The game has a very evocative setting introduced throughout the rulebook and with short stories that highlights a very pulp, “golden age” style of science fiction space exploration featuring rockets, laser pistols, and asteroids infested with lizard men.

Filed Under: Reviews, Roleplaying Games, Science Fiction & Fantasy Genre Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Interview: Tracy Barnett, Designer of School Daze and One Shot

November 2, 2012 by

Tracy Barnett is a good friend of ours that has waged a one-man war on his own spare time. With his second KickStarter game, One Shot, ending in just over two days I offered to chat with him a bit about his projects and his thoughts on designing open to the public as he has made a habit of doing. You can also read more of Tracy’s thoughts on that subject in posts he wrote for us earlier this year, Game Design and Openness and Designing in Public.

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The Architect DM: Structural Dungeon Design

July 25, 2012 by

Back in one of my earliest Architect DM posts I said that structure was one of the most overlooked elements of dungeon design. These days most of the published dungeon maps that I see are not bad with regards to structure, but from what I’ve heard this is still something that a lot of people would like to learn about for their personal, hand drawn dungeon designs.

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D&D: Advantage vs. Flat Bonuses

June 11, 2012 by

There are a lot of people talking about the D&D Next open playtest, and one of the subjects I hear about a lot is the way Advantage/Disadvantage are currently working. The general opinion I’ve heard is that it is overpowered when compared to the +2/-2 bonus we’re used to from previous editions of D&D. My gut reaction to hearing that something is overpowered isn’t to jump into the mob and swing my nerf-bat around, it’s to look at as much data as I can and figure out if I agree or not. So that’s what I’m going to do!

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What Classes Should be in D&D?

May 25, 2012 by

For me, choosing a class has always been one of the most fun and important decisions to make while playing Dungeons & Dragons. I can still remember the feeling of pure excitement I had when I first cracked open the 3rd Edition Player’s Handbook and saw that Monk was a core class. I also remember our friends all having multiple discussions about what exactly the Sorcerer class was and how it was different from the Wizard. With the next edition of D&D now in open playtest, I felt it was a good time to discuss the varying levels of class distinction in D&D.

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The Architect DM: The Ise Grand Shrine

May 9, 2012 by

I’ve sat through more hours of architectural history classes than seems reasonable for a human being, everything from the crude Dolmen tombs of early Europe to weeks of studying the various gothic cathedrals that all look pretty much the same. I never got the chance to take an asian architecture course, but one of the most memorable asian structures that I learned about was the Ise Grand Shrine.

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The Architect DM: Call for Questions

March 29, 2012 by

For those of you that don’t know, there hasn’t been an Architect DM post in several weeks because my wife and I welcomed our first child into our lives in early March and she’s been running things ever since! What this means is that I have a lot of small periods of free time on the internet at random points throughout my day. What I’d like to do in the meantime is help you, yes YOU, with anything you might need help with in your roleplaying games.

Filed Under: Random Encounters, Roleplaying Games Tagged With: , , , ,

The Architect DM: Seven Wonders of Your World

February 15, 2012 by

Whenever I get a chance I make a pointed effort to read about or look at a map of other DM’s and GM’s roleplaying game worlds. I find it fascinating to look at them both objectively and subjectively, to see things that I may never have come up with or elements that are similar to things in the worlds I’ve created. Over the last few years, I’ve noticed a handful of elements that pop up in the majority of people’s fantasy game worlds and these elements have been some of the inspiration for earlier world building posts in my Architect DM posts.

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Cure Selfish Wounds

February 1, 2012 by

Today’s D&D Next post at the Wizards site by Bruce Cordell is titled Time to Heal and discusses the role of the Cleric class and how it relates to healing through the life span of Dungeons & Dragons. There’s a nice little recap of how healing and the Cleric class have both worked in previous editions, and then there is a poll asking how people prefer the mechanics to be handled. Reading about how healing worked in previous editions brought forward some experiences that I am dying to share with you.

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