Monthly Archives: February 2012

This week we’re talking about Getting Excited and Making Things in various forms. Enjoy the links and let them inspire you to explore and create!

At Home

Articles posted here on The Gamer Assembly.

• March’s Blog Theme at The Gamer Assembly is “Gaming in the Modern Age”. Have an RPG article idea set in Information Age earth? Contact us for guest blogger opportunities!

• Campaign Season is upon us. Sign Up for our military-themed RPG Blog Festival hosted here at The Gamer Assembly. It runs from 19-26 March 2012.

• Only 39 Gaming Days Until PAX East! If you’ll be in Boston on Easter weekend April 6-8, you owe it to yourself to attend the best gaming con. Three-day passes have sold out, but you can still pick up day passes. We’ll be there running the “Fix Your RPG Problems with the RPG Doctor and Gamer Assembly” panel on Saturday, April 7 at 12:30pm in the Merman Theatre. Will we see you there?

• The Call To Assembly, Volume 1, our collection of the first 2 months of Gamer Assembly posts is now available as a free PDF at RPG Now and as a not-free printed magazine at Lulu!

• Useful Charts: Treasure by Party Level and Sly Flourish’s DM Cheat Sheet by Chris Dundon provides a Google Docs version of the handy random treasure table from the 4e Essentials DM’s Book and a link to Sly Flourish’s monster stats cheat sheet.

• Do Something Original by Brent Newhall challenges us to come up with something new for our games that hasn’t been done to death.

Away

Content from people involved with The Gamer Assembly posted elsewhere across the Internet.

• 4e as Lame Duck by T.W.Wombat at Wombat’s Gaming Den of Iniquity urges people to keep on creating all the way through this between-editions gaming lull.

• The Call to Assembly Is Here by Brian Liberge at Suffer Shack gives a shout out to the Call to Assembly.

• What Are Retroclones Good For? by Brent Newhall at Troll in the Corner delves into why he decided to write Dungeon Raiders in the first place.

Notes From Abroad

Other interesting articles and cool links.

Wizards of the Coast went public with their announcement about the next edition of D&D on Monday 09 January 2012. We’re collecting D&D Next links in our wiki. If we’ve missed any good ones that you’ve read, feel free to let us know in the comments or join us in the chat.

• The Singer-Songwriter Uber Alles? lets us know that it’s every bit as awesome to use published materials in your home game as it is to write everything yourself.

• Win a Copy of the Marvel Heroic Roleplaying Basic Game (the PDF) from Dice Monkey by commenting and tweeting before Tuesday February 29th! Be sure to check out the review of the game while you’re there.

• And speaking of Marvel, check out Fred Hicks’s post about Accidentally Designing Marvel’s Action Order System. Great preview for those who haven’t read the system, plus insight on strategic uses of the “you next” initiative system.

• You can also check out examples of Marvel play posted at the rpg.net forums: Post 1 and Post 2.

• A Richer Tapestry of Sexual Expression from Sarah Darkmagic encourages further discussion about sexuality and sexual privilege by talking about the “male gaze”. Also be sure to read her tips on finding a group in her Joining The Party column at Wizards of the Coast.

• The Days Of Wonder CEO explains how the iPad version of Ticket To Ride boosted sales of the board game over at Penny Arcade. Interesting thoughts about they synergy between the digital and physical forms of a single game.

• Steve Winter starts a series of articles analyzing D&D magic over at Kobold Quarterly in his Howling Tower: Magic is Ruining My Game. Also check out his entertaining story of how the players define the campaign at his personal blog, entitled It’s Out of My Hands.

• If you like Fourthcore, go download the free Anniversary Edition of Revenge of the Iron Lich to get all the edits, clarifications, and layout improvements to the first Fourthcore adventure.

• Goons: One Line Monsters at Daily Encounter inserts a level of complexity between D&D 4e’s Minion and Monster descriptions by describing a monster in a single line of text.

• Nukemap will show you just how far the fireball from a 350 kiloton nuclear warhead will extend from ground zero. Ideal for modern doomsday games or Twilight: 2000.

• Classic RPG Realms has been doing some D&D analysis and navelgazing lately. Check out the insights and ideas in If D&D Ain’t d20, Then What Is It? and Spreadsheet Comparisons of D&D Systems, followed by a jaunt into GURPS with The Second Most Popular RPG of All Time.

• Strange Magic offers some quick optional rules for Heavy Arms and Armour in B/X D&D.

• Undead: I Don’t Like Level Drain at The Other Side gets rid of powerful undead creatures’ level drain abilities in favor of straight ability drain.

• Somehwere Between Living and Dying discusses an alternative way to handle the Dying condition in 4th Edition, allowing for some player action below 0 hit points.

• Over at The Forge there’s an interesting thread by Ben Lehman talking about his experience producing ANIMAL CRIME that should interest potential game publishers.

• Given the resurgence of OSR topics lately, How to Publish a Fanzine by Mike Gunderloy published by Loompanics might be of interest.

• Jared von Hindman paints us an instant classic jpg from the ongoing Pirate vs. Ninja battle.

MetaRoundup

A roundup of roundups featuring links of interest to the tabletop RPG community.
Please let us know about other weekly roundups in the comments!

• Game Knight Reviews comes out with News From Around the Net articles on Fridays. Check out this week’s roundup to see evil GM tricks for over-resting PCs, an opinion piece about Kickstarter projects, and a free downloadable compass rose.

• Roving Band of Misfits publishes their Weekly Roundup column every Sunday. This week’s First Special Ops Gameday Edition gives us what AD&D got right, Inception-style skill challenges, and 10 psionic rituals for Dark Sun.

• Critical Hits aggregates their Twitter feed and publishes it on Sundays under Critical Bits. This week’s Critical Bits mentions D&D’s PAX East schedule, making a stained glass d20, Marvel links, and Rich Burlew’s interview about the $1.2M Kickstarter for Order of the Stick.

You’d think that the gaming would slow down over a school vacation week with so many students on vacation. While it feels like things have slowed down here at the Gamer Assembly, it looks like blogging has picked up across the ‘Net. We’re always looking for guest bloggers if you want to give us a shout. I’ll be putting together a post about that soon, so stay tuned. Meanwhile, enjoy the links!

At Home

Articles posted here on The Gamer Assembly.

• March’s Blog Theme at The Gamer Assembly is “Gaming in the Modern Age”. Have an RPG article idea set in Information Age Earth? Contact us for guest blogger opportunities!

• Campaign Season is upon us. Sign Up for our military-themed RPG Blog Festival hosted here at The Gamer Assembly. It runs from 19-26 March 2012.

• Only 45 Gaming Days Until PAX East! If you’ll be in Boston on Easter weekend April 6-8, you owe it to yourself to attend the best gaming con. Three-day passes have sold out, but you can still pick up day passes. We’ll be there running a panel on Saturday, April 7 at 12:30pm in the Merman Theatre. Will we see you there?

• Modern Assembly: A 4e Hack by Brian Liberge announces Gamer Assembly’s ruleset for modern roleplaying based on D&D 4e. Stay tuned for more articles in this series over the next few weeks!

• Campaign Season: Delayed Action announces the new dates for the Campaign Season RPG Blog Festival: 19-26 March 2012. Sign up now!

• How’d You Like a Print Tabletop RPG Magazine? by Brent Newhall premieres the first printed collection of Gamer Assembly articles available now from Lulu.

Away

Content from people involved with The Gamer Assembly posted elsewhere across the Internet.

• On Keeping Time by T.W.Wombat muses about timekeeping methods without clocks. Bonus pics of the proposed Trainhenge project at Stockton-on-Tees.

• Love and Hate of Epic Tier by Brian Liberge gives a perspective of what Wizards nailed and missed in 4e’s Epic Tier.

• Schrödinger’s Gun GMing: Agile RPGs, Scrumming Players by T.W.Wombat looks at stealing some ideas from Agile development methodology and applying them to running RPGs.

Notes From Abroad

Other interesting articles and cool links.

Wizards of the Coast went public with their announcement about the next edition of D&D on Monday 09 January 2012. We’re collecting D&D Next links in our wiki. If we’ve missed any good ones that you’ve read, feel free to let us know in the comments or join us in the chat.

• PAX East will be in Boston for another 10 years. Plus, PAX East is donating $25K per year to MassDiGI, the Massachusetts Digital Games Institute.

• Wizards is looking for DMs for PAX East and offering free badges and free hotel rooms in payment.

• The Best of 2011 Podcast at RPG Countdown counts down the top 100 best-selling gaming items of 2011. Take a listen, then buy one from your local game store. If you mail your receipt to RPG Countdown, you and your FLGS are both in the running for $2011 (cash for you, online ads for your FLGS).

• Playing D&D With Mike Mornard at Blog of Holding recounts a recent OD&D play session with a GM who played D&D at the very beginning (1971). Great insights into the origins of the game in this series of articles.

• Moldvay – Dungeon Mastering as Fine Art gives us some great DMing insights from 1e D&D. Check out the rest of the Moldvay article series on Beyond the Black Gate.

• Where I Learned to Stop Doubting Myself and Just Hit Things at Troll in the Corner details one journey of moving your character out of your comfort zone. “True to your character” doesn’t always equal “fun”.

• Weem waxes philosophical about Epic and Immortal D&D play in I Want To Move Mountains.

• The One That Got Away: The Coachman’s Inn gives a mini-hook involving an elven necromancer extracting memories from the dead. The whole series on Occult Moon entitled The One That Got Away has some great mini-adventure ideas to steal for your game.

• In Places Deep has an ongoing Monster Monday series including this week’s twisted Treant variant, The Groan. It’s written for AD&D, but it’s another great series to mine for ideas to use in any system.

• Map Fu gives us some mapping tips from Chris Perkins to make your Battlemat downright attractive at your game table.

• The Dragon Age Set 3 Playtest is available for download. Don’t choke the Green Ronin servers all at once, OK?

• You can buy the Marvel Heroic Roleplaying Basic Game from Drive Thru RPG. Superheroes under the Cortex Plus rules, hot of the virtual presses!

• What Is A Role Playing Game? from Intwischa provides an intro to role playing games intended to help you explain the hobby to non-gamers.

• Piracy’s antidote involves customer service: giving the customer what they want for a decent price. The Oatmeal tried to watch Game Of Thrones and this is what happened.

MetaRoundup

A roundup of roundups featuring links of interest to the tabletop RPG community.
Please let us know about other weekly roundups in the comments!

• Game Knight Reviews comes out with News From Around the Net articles on Fridays. Check out this week’s roundup to see the seven wonders of your game world, finding great names, and modeling terrain at your game table in new ways.

• Roving Band of Misfits publishes their Weekly Roundup column every Sunday. This week’s New Homebrew Campaign Edition gives us Revenge of the Iron Lich’s first birthday, actual play with a solo monster built in 10 seconds, and Steve Winter’s article at Kobold Quarterly about lethality in D&D.

• Critical Hits aggregates their Twitter feed and publishes it on Sundays under Critical Bits. This week’s Critical Bits mentions Marvel RPG launch parties, Kickstarting the Vampire 20th Anniversary Edition Companion book, and Fiasco-style relationships in D&D.