The Seven-Sided Die

Wizards of the Coast has released the Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide. There’s a review at RPG.net that is less than glowing. Judging from the material mentioned in that review, I think my opinion would be even worse.
The 4e staples have been introduced: Dragonborn, Tieflings, the Shadowfell, Elemental Chaos, and so forth. To accomplish that they [...]

Out in the wilds of Suburban Onterrible, life-giving internet connections are hard to come by. Nonetheless, I managed to discover, under a scrap of driftwood, a review of Shock not written by me. I have managed to stuff it into the narrow straw through which I am accessing the webbernets, just for you: Jono DiCarlo’s [...]

I just received my copy of Shock: social science fiction in the mail this morning. I’d forgotten that I’d bought it some time ago, so I can’t praise the shipping time. However, at US$24 shipping included, it’s relatively cheap for a complete game. (For someone used to paying nearly twice that after tax for a [...]

For the Edge of Empire campaign I’m using 1st edition AD&D rules, but with some tweaks.
First, we’re using stone weight encumbrance from Delta’s AD&D house rules. This reduces the amount of calculation immensely, and results in numbers that are easy to visualise. A knight wearing 3 stone of armour, carrying 1-½ stone of weaponry, and [...]

Since I got so much interest in and suggestions for the area I’m working on with the last WIP map, I thought y’all might like this: Cities and towns of the Iron Valley.
I’ve only written anything for Cantos yet, but I’ll be adding more as inspiration strikes. There is some undercity to Cantos that I [...]

I’m almost finished the map I was working on using this tutorial. It still needs a compass rose, title banner, nice border, and other finishing touches like that, but the natural and societal geography is done. For some reason, when I export to PNG it gets a shade darker than what I see in the [...]

[Rules] help ‘inspire’ things you might not create on your own. — Fang Langford
I always intuitively felt that D&D, as a game of creative imagination, was intensely flavoured by its rules. I didn’t really understand what this intuition meant when I was a high school–aged DM and I was trying to figure out why I did and [...]

I’m no artist, but I’ve always wanted to make nice-looking maps on the computer. That’s why this mapping tutorial for the GIMP is awesome. Using it I’ve managed to take this:

And turn it into this:

Rheall should recognise it, since it’s the land I used for the solo game I ran for her recently. (Actual play [...]

Old school gaming gets defined differently depending on who you ask.
The two most common definitions—that an old game is “old school”, or that the earliest edition of a ruleset is “old school”—aren’t what do it for me. I don’t think that Everway is old school, nor do I think that 1st edition Vampire: The Masquerade [...]

Just last week Microlite74 was released. It’s a d20 variant designed to have modern rules (based on Microlite20) that enable an old-school play experience. It manages to get character creation, task resolution, spells, and more than 80 monsters into a mere 4 pages!
But my purpose in posting is to quote this paragraph on skills in [...]