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Grim Weaponry
The other day I goofing around on heroforge.comand I decided to knock together a quickie Grim Reaper.That's when I thought of this visual gag, which I call"New Reaper Shows Up to 1st Day of Work Having...
View ArticleRest in Peace, Dave Hoover
[This is not about the comic book professional Dave Hoover.]Yesterday I learned that Dave Hoover passed away. Dave was a key person in the Champaign-Urbana, Illinois rpg scene for decades. He GMed lots...
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Bidding into Danger
I've posted about the James Bond 007 game morethanonce in the past. Today I want to talk about one mechanic that I suspect could do a lot of good in other games, but that I don't recall seeing...
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X-Cards
The X-Card emerged from the indie/storygamer side of the hobby maybe ten or so years ago. Originally taking the form of an index card with a simply X drawn it with a Sharpie or something like that,...
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egghead reports research, weirdos pissed off
So if you haven't heard, last week a researcher named Dr. Clio Weisman published an article on Medium called "The Worst People You Have Never Met, or, What I Learned During A Four Year Academic Study...
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A thing I need to do better
by Jon HodgsonYou know what rules? Sections of the dungeon where bigass party-wrecking monsters roam, but smaller places where the PCs can escape them.
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New edition of Starmada! Huzzah!
So Daniel Kast's Starmada has a new, 30th anniversary edition out. You can get the pdf from WargameVault (the wargame store of the DriveThru people) or print, print-with-map-and-counters, or pdf from...
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Enter Era Four
There's a newly-formed gaming/education group at work and they recently hosted a game jam on itch.io. Although the organizers of the jam were mostly interested in video games, board games were also...
View ArticleOpaque Mechanics
There are plenty of times when transparentmechanics are good for roleplaying games. For example, I generally like to give the dice chances for any escapade not encompassed by the rules. I also usually...
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I tap my BFG 9000
So the other day I stumbled across a paper in arXive called "Magic: The Gathering is Turing Complete." I don't know enough about either MtG or computer science to get more than 11% of the gist of the...
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a pretty clever alternative to 3d printing
In the Star Fleet Battles facebook group there's a guy named Larry who has been using a laser cutter to make pretty decent looking flat minis. Dig it:The hexagons are custom bases, presumably the two...
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Bro! Beowulf!
At last year’s Philly Zine Fest I bumped into a cool Temple University faculty member who recommended Maria Dahvana Headley’s newish (2020) translation of Beowulf to me. I had heard that she was a bit...
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I saved the timeline!
One of the other participants in the game jam I joined produced a Game Boy adventure called OuttaTime. You can try it yourself in your browser here: https://jhample.itch.io/outta-time.It’s a short...
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Draft Two-Step Status rules
Hey, we're trying to remove a saving throw penalty in here!The basic deal here is that the first status of each pair has no direct mechanical effect. Gaining that status is a warning to the player that...
View ArticlePresenting... Professor Power!
So this guy came to me in a dream last night.Professor PowerThaddeus Bauman, a.k.a. the Amazing ThaddeusFighting: Good (10)Agility: Good (10)Strength: Good (10)Endurance: Excellent (20)Reason:...
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