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A Birthday Weekend Part II
Birthday weekends have a way of creating memorable moments, and last night was certainly one of them. As part of my birthday celebrations, I was treated to dinner at the Lockmaster’s Taphouse (and Patio), one of my favourite spots in town. Before we even got to the main event, however, my eldest had a surprise waiting for me. She handed me a gift package, and it quickly became clear that a lot…
A Quiet Birthday Well Spent
This weekend marked another trip around the sun for me, and while it wasn’t a big celebration, it was exactly the kind of day I needed. Like many birthdays, it started with a bit of reflection. This one felt different from last year. Around this time last year, my faithful boy Rory was still by my side. Since then, he has crossed that Rainbow Bridge, and his absence was certainly felt. Birthdays…
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A Tale of Pop Culture's Comic Con
This past Saturday, I decided to check out Pop Culture’s Comic-Con in Smiths Falls. The event was held at the Youth Arena this year, which provided a much larger venue than previous years. From the moment I walked in, it was obvious the extra space was being put to good use. The doors opened at 10:00 a.m., and I arrived about half an hour later. After handing over my very reasonable $10…
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To Stream or Not to Stream
The other day my daughter suggested that since I’ve been doing a lot of video gaming lately, maybe I should start a streaming channel. My first reaction was, “Why?” Not because I think it’s a bad idea, but because I’ve never really understood the appeal of watching other people play video games. When I sit down with a game, it’s because I want to play it myself. The idea of spending hours…
Sometimes the Dice Take a Back Seat
Saturday evening’s game session turned out to be a little different than expected. While the plan was to dive into our latest adventure, the reality was that we spent much of the evening waiting for Chance, Mikayla, and Darryl to arrive. Brad, Mark, Finn, and I were all set to go with our next Star Wars: Edge of the Empire session. Character sheets were ready, dice were on the table, and…
A Weekend of Dark Alliance and Darker Worlds
The original Nightspawn before it had to Nightbane. There’s a certain kind of satisfaction that only comes from finally beating a boss that has been sitting in your way for weeks. That was me this week with the Spirit of Kelvin in Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance. After more attempts than I care to admit, I finally managed to put that spectral menace down for good and now the road ahead in the…
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My Storyboard Method for Tabletop RPGs
One of the questions I get asked a lot when running tabletop RPGs is: “How do you actually write an adventure?” The funny thing is, I rarely sit down and write a linear beginning-to-end story. Instead, what I do looks more like a detective’s conspiracy wall than a traditional outline. There’s usually a notebook, loose papers, maybe index cards, and a bunch of arrows connecting scenes, NPCs,…
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What’s On My Gaming Plate This Week
This weekend’s gaming plate has been a weirdly satisfying mix of digital hack-and-slash comfort food, mobile word addiction, and old-school tabletop brainstorming. First up, I’m still grinding away in Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance and honestly? I’m having a grand ol’ time with it. Yeah, I know the game gets a lot of criticism for being repetitive and mechanically simple, but sometimes that’s…
Critical Miss: When Game Day Becomes Bed Day
Normally, this is the post where I’d be coming down from the high of CanGames—talking about the games I ran, the ones I played, and laying out a spread of loot like some kind of dice-fueled dragon showing off its hoard. There’d be photos, a few impulse buys I’d justify as “essential,” and probably a story or two about something going hilariously off the rails at the table. That’s not this…
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The Morning Revolt: A Short Story in Nausea
There’s a particular kind of morning that doesn’t ease you into the day so much as shove you out of bed and dare you to deal with it. Today was one of those. I woke up feeling off—nothing dramatic at first, just that vague, unsettled sensation that something wasn’t quite right. Within minutes, though, it became very clear this wasn’t just a rough start. My stomach was churning like a storm…
Game On: A Week of Mayhem
This week’s gaming docket has a nice, satisfying rhythm to it—equal parts digital carnage and tabletop anticipation. I’ve been deep into Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance, and it’s hitting exactly the right notes for me right now. It’s unapologetically a hack-and-slash looter, but there’s something honest about that design. You jump in, carve through waves of enemies, scoop up gear, and…
Lands of Adventure is a 1983 RPG written by Lee Gold and published by Fantasy Games Unlimited. Folks who go nuts for Bill Willingham’s D&D art will be shocked to learn that his very best piece of RPG art is on the cover of this game. (I kinda don’t go in for Willingham generally, but man, this box is worth it for his cover art alone). Worth mentioned that Lee Gold is the editor of Alarums & Excursions, the RPG amateur press association that has been going non-stop since 1975(!).
Anyway, Lands of Adventure was envisioned as a vehicle for semi-historical roleplaying. In the box was a book called a “Culture Pack” that covered ancient Greece and Medieval England. I assume the idea was to expand this modularly, which anticipates those neat green book campaign settings TSR did for 2E D&D. Gold’s culture packs are shockingly detailed for their length, packed with historical, folkloric and cultural info.
The game itself is…it doesn’t feel like a cohesive game to me, honestly. More like a collection of mechanical experiments taped together. A lot of them are interesting! There are three pools of health, for instance — one for “energy” (which makes sense, since one of Gold’s first designs was a magic point system for D&D), one for health (traditional hit points) and one for life (that deplete after you run out of health). This is rather reminiscent of the way the Palladium system works. The magic system verges on free form, with spells designed by the caster and reminiscent of superpowers in Champions while at the same time deployed in a larger context that makes me wonder if Tweet and Rein-Hagen were playing this while developing Ars Magica.
There are other nifty ideas in here, too, ripe for mining. And it is cool they are part of the historical record. It is easy to see, though, why this system (with 11 attributes!) didn’t take off — the industry had largely moved on from this sort of complex experimentation and was already flirting with more narrative-focused play (this came out the same year as Ravenloft!).
The Tale of Eric and the Dread Gazebo [original version]
by Richard Aronson, as printed in the Fall 1987 issue (#13) of “The Spell Book”
…Let us cast our minds back to the early days of Fantasy Role Playing, back when ye Dread Gygax was loose upon the land. Funny how humor and horror can start out so alike. Let us go still earlier (yes, it is permitted to breathe sighs of relief) to the days before Gygax (and the courts) thought that he owned FRP. In the early seventies, Ed Whitchurch ran “his game,” and one of the participants was Eric Sorenson, a veritable giant of a man. This story is essentially true: I know both Ed and Eric, and neither denies it (although Eric, for reasons that will become apparent, never repeats it either). If my telling of it does not match the actual events precisely, it is because I’ve heard it many different ways depending on how much of what type of intoxicants Ed had taken recently.
The gist of it is that Eric, well, you need a bit more about Eric, or else I won’t fill quota. Eric comes quite close to being a computer. When he games, he methodically considers each possibility before choosing his preferred option. If given time, he will invariably pick the optimum solution. It has been known to take weeks. He is otherwise in all respects a superior gamer, and I’ve spent many happy hours competing with and against him, as long as he is given enough time.
So, Eric was playing a Neutral Paladin (why should only Lawful Good religions get to have holy warriors was the thinking) in Ed’s game. He even had a holy sword, which fought well, and did all those things holy swords are supposed to do, including detect good (random die roll; it could have detected evil). He was on some lord’s lands when the following exchange occurred:
ED: You see a well groomed garden. In the middle, on a small hill, you see a gazebo. ERIC: A gazebo? What color is it? ED: (Pause) It’s white, Eric. ERIC: How far away is it? ED: About fifty yards. ERIC: How big is it? ED: (Pause) It’s about thirty feet across, fifteen feet high, with a pointed top. ERIC: I use my sword to detect good on it. ED: It’s not good, Eric. It’s a gazebo! ERIC: (Pause) I call out to it. ED: It won’t answer. It’s a gazebo! ERIC: (Pause) I sheathe my sword and draw my bow and arrows. Does it respond in any way? ED: No, Eric, it’s a gazebo! ERIC: I shoot it with my bow (roll to hit). What happened? ED: There is now a gazebo with an arrow sticking out of it. ERIC: (Pause) Wasn’t it wounded? ED: Of course not, Eric! It’s a gazebo! ERIC: (Whimper) But that was a plus three arrow! ED: It’s a gazebo, Eric, a gazebo! If you really want to try to destroy it, you could try to chop it with an axe, I suppose, or you could try to burn it, but I don’t know why anybody would even try. It’s a *)@#! gazebo! ERIC: (Long pause. He has no axe or fire spells.) I run away. ED: (Thoroughly frustrated) It’s too late. You’ve woken up the gazebo, and it catches you and eats you. ERIC: (Reaching for his dice) Maybe I’ll roll up a fire-using mage so I can avenge my Paladin.
At this point, the increasingly amused fellow party members restored a modicum of order by explaining what a gazebo is. It is solely an afterthought, of course, but Eric is doubly lucky that the gazebo was not situated on a grassy gnoll.
That is the story of Eric and the Gazebo. It’s funnier when I tell it in person. Isn’t it always, though. Be seeing you…
[source]
Dark Alliance, Kowloon, and the Weird West
Lately, my gaming menu has had a really satisfying mix of digital dungeon crawling and tabletop chaos—honestly, exactly the kind of balance that keeps the hobby feeling fresh. On the video game side, I’ve started digging into Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance on the PS5, and I’ve got to say, I’m enjoying it more than I expected. Going in, I had pretty tempered expectations—I’d seen some of the…
Neon Ghosts in the Walled City: A Feng Shui One-Shot
Tonight’s session of Feng Shui hit exactly the kind of high-octane, neon-soaked chaos the system thrives on. We ran a one-shot titled “Neon Ghosts in the Walled City”, and from the jump it had that gritty, kinetic energy—half crime thriller, half supernatural urban legend, all style. Chance stepped into the role of Jack Heart, a Maverick Cop with just enough authority to get things done and just…
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Days Gone, Again—and What Comes Next
There’s something oddly satisfying about finishing a game for the second time—especially one that didn’t just hold up, but actually felt richer on the replay. That was my experience wrapping up Days Gone Remastered on the PlayStation this past week. The first time through, the game was all tension and discovery. Every encounter with a horde felt like barely controlled chaos, every fuel stop a…
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The Best Cover Story We Ever Had - Star Wars EotE Session
It always starts the same way. A quiet table. Character sheets that haven’t been touched in weeks. Dice sitting idle like they’ve been waiting just as long as we have. And then—chairs scrape, books open, someone cracks a joke—and just like that, we’re back in it. After a few weeks away from the galaxy, we finally got the crew back together to continue our Star Wars: Edge of the Empire campaign…
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