From io9 - How Playing Dungeons & Dragons Makes You A Better Author


With all the recent silly hysteria about D&D, its nice to read an article that's positive and inspiring.

How Playing Dungeons & Dragons Makes You A Better Author

 and check out the original article here...

Writers reminisce about Dungeons & Dragons


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&#
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Why Clerics (Still) Suck

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There are some jobs that are just terrible. Cleaning industrial septic tanks. Being that kid with the drum at the front line of those old army battles. Even working on a porno set, which one would think is the best employment in the world, has at least one position that downright sucks (pardon the pun). Seriously, would you want to be the guy that has to mop up/towel down/hose off the actors and set afterward? Depending on the genre of movie being filmed, you may have some seriously screwed up stuff to deal with. Know what’s even worse than all of those things? Being the cleric for an adventuring party. It used to be worse. Through third edition, clerics were treated like a walking first aid kit. You were one of those little boxes with a red cross on them like in Wolfenstein or Doom, but with sexy legs that stick out of the bottom (that’s how I always pictured clerics, anyway). Your job was to cast healing spells, and if you ran out of healing spells you got out of the way
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The Walking Dead Role-Playing Game

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The Season 5 premiere is not until late October, but news broke this week that The Walking Dead has just starting filming the upcoming season. In a few short months our favourite band of post-apocalyptic undead-fighting misfits will once again grace our TV screens, but until then we have to entertain ourselves somehow. And since going around pretending people are zombies and stabbing them in the head is frowned upon (for some reason), we'll have to find some other way to get our zombie-killing fix. Why isn't there a role-playing version of The Walking Dead yet?  There are numerous board games, none of which are very good . The video game by Telltale is excellent and very story- and RP-based, but it's one-player and pretty linear (Don't kid yourself - the multiple-path narrative is just an illusion. It always ends the same). A property like The Walking Dead is simply begging for an open-world, sandbox-style RPG. You have a group of survivors working together
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Why Star Wars is the Best RPG Ever

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Everyone has some event in their adolescent years that shapes their lives and their outlooks as an adult. Perhaps it's a particularly bad breakup, or your parents’ divorce, or witnessing the horrifying murder of your father and vowing to avenge him. For me, I can name three things that made me the man I am today: 1) Robotech 2) The Swords of Power books by Fred Saberhagen 3) Star Wars : The Role-Playing game The first two are topics for another day, but Star Wars is always an acceptable topic for any conversation. I'm referring here to the original Star Wars RPG that was written by Bill Slavicsek and published by West End Games back in the late-eighties/early-nineties. The d20 by Wizards of the Coast was pretty good, but it doesn't deserve to hold the black felt, satin-tipped Sith cape of the original. In fact, I can't think of any other game that can compete with this masterpiece. You have to be really badass to get away with a head this shiny.
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