Last two: 30. Favorite RPG playing celebrity. Colbert. 31. Favorite non-RPG thing to come out of RPGing. I’m torn between two answers, so I’ll give them both. The first is the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon. It started shortly after I discovered D&D, and while I was still young enough to watch cartoons without it being…
Favorite Fantasy RPG “Fantasy” is a pretty broad category, so I’m going to assume the typical gaming definition of “Sword & Sorcery and/or Elves and Shit.” In that case, the best fantasy game I’ve ever played is the Sword & Sorcery game that the Hex staff plays once every year or two when we can…
I just found out about the #RPGaDay2015 meme that’s going around. Since I’m coming in halfway through (and since a lot of my answers to the early questions are very short), I’m going do the first 14 of them today, start doing the “A Day” part tomorrow with #15 and post a new one every…
Last week, I set out to answer a question we get periodically, “when are you guys releasing more Qerth books?” but kind of got sidetracked explaining what happened with Qerth (and our company, and the game industry) between the time we started writing it in 1997 or 1998 and the book’s eventual release in 2006….
Except for last week’s blog about running con games, I’ve been doing a lot of shameless self-promotion here recently. I’m going to continue the trend again this week, but at least this time I’m using it as a sloppy segue into the main topic of the column. But first, the whoring: Brainfart Press (which is…
Last week, I talked about the need (or lack thereof) of special rules for magic in settings with flash-bang magic. The tl;dr version is that if everyone has a good understanding of how magic works in the world and and what a particular type of wizard can do and there are no setting conventions that…
Before I get into this week’s blog, I forgot to mention last week that I recently the newest installment of my series of role-playing articles on HubPages, “Seven Rules Every RPG Player Should Know.” Also, just yesterday Hex released our first novel, Carter Newton’s Suicide’s Run: A Tale of the Hobomancers. Carter does a great…
It’s not unusual for RPG players to find themselves in situations where, if they’re being honest, the character they’ve established would make a choice that the player knows is a bad one. In these cases, a good role-player acts according to his character’s established background, goals, and personality even when it isn’t the most advantageous…
I’ve mentioned numerous times that my usual method of planning for a game involves deciding what conflicts are going on in the world and then trying to figure out ways to get the characters involved in those conflicts. I haven’t really gone into the “get the players involved” part of the equation, so I’m going…
A recent post on a gaming blog I follow mentioned an online tool called inklewriter, which basically lets you write your own Endless Quest books. The author had started using the site to make a tool to help new players make their D&D character and announced a contest where people make a gaming tool using the…
