Awesome Pic of the Week

This weeks picture comes from artist John Howe. He is best known for his Tolkien art, but his other works are pretty awesome as well. His depictions of Middle Earth are some of my all time favorites. I find his vision of Tolkien's world somewhat darker than most artists, which is probably what I like most.

This is one of my favorite pictures of his, and also the current desktop picture on my computer:

Check out John Howe's art for yourself and get some good ol' inspiration for your game.


Greatest Hits

Top 4 Bands That Write Songs Based on Their D&D Campaign

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There are many bands out there who like to play loud, ass-kicking, speaker-bursting music with thrashing guitars and pounding drums. Surprisingly, or perhaps not, most of them are total geeks. They may look like hard-ass biker leather fetishists, but in reality they're just D&D and Lord of the Rings nerds who hope that if they sing about dwarves and elves loud enough, people will think they're tough and not pick on them anymore. He was almost cool. Then he opened his mouth. Although I'm sure we could list thousands of bands that could fall into the genre, I'm just going to list The Top 4 Bands That Write Songs Based on Their D&D Campaigns. Actually, they're just my 4 favourites, but whatever. 4. Iron Maiden Seriously, how many kids back in the 80s ran home after school to play D&D and listen to Iron Maiden? Well, probably not THAT many, but if you're reading a blog about role-playing games and you're over 30 years old, you know what I'm
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10 Zombie Survival Intro Scenarios

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Can you smell Halloween on the air? Smells like non-toxic face paint and burnt pumpkins. In case you weren't aware, I've been playing around with a zombie/horror game based on the Dungeon Crawl Classics Funnel system - basically you send in a gang of 0-level schlubs, hoping that at least one survies to become a level 1 character in an on-going post-apocalyptic survival game. It uses basic d20 rules that everyone is pretty familiar with. To keep the game as chaotic as possible, in our first playthrough I just rolled the scenario out randomly as we went along - determining encounters, locales, etc purely by a toss of the dice - and I plan to continue doing the same thing. Partly this is to keep my prep work down, partly it's to keep the tension and suspense high as the party never knows what to expect. Sometimes the group meets 1d4 stray dogs, sometimes they meet 1d4+1x100 roaming zombies. I've been using the many tables in Palladium's DEAD REIGN ™®© books (a
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Is This A Good Idea - Part II

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I have been working on the outline for a new campaign world and I will have the first drafts ready in about two weeks. I would like to thank  Zzarchov , Tyler and  seaofstarsrpg for their comments from my previous post . They helped a lot in gaining some perspective on a somewhat muddled idea . I am looking for people to collaborate with on this project. I have plans to publish it, and already have a few other people on board and would love to have more. I don't want to go into too much detail here, but if you're interested email me at: jack(at)ruleofthedice(dot)com and we can talk. >
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10 More Zombie Survival Intro Scenarios

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Last year I shared a list of 10 Random Zombie Survival Intro Scenarios based on my ad-hoc zombie survival/horror game (which is kinda like a DCC Funnel but set in the modern world, and with zombies). It was actually one of the most popular posts I ever wrote on this site (people still really seem to like zombies , go figure) so I thought it was time for a sequel. Last time the set-ups were pretty standard fare. Scenarios you've seen in many zombie movies, games and books. A rag-tag bunch of strangers, thrown together in an every day situation (a crashed bus, locked in a mall, hiding in a cabin in the woods) and they must survive the overwhelming onslaught of the undead. Death is rampant and expected (each player begins with four 0-level characters), and only the best (or more likely luckiest) will survive. This time a few of the scenarios are quite a bit weirder and may take some more prep work. If you don't want them, don't pick them, or if you roll them randomly,
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