Please Welcome The New Guys

At the beginning of the new year I posted that I was looking for additional writers to join me here at Rule of the Dice. This is partially because I want to expand the blog and have some different contributors post cool articles. But it's mainly because I'm a lazy and don't want to have to write or work very hard (and I also need time to practice my cage fighting). Luckily some real great chaps volunteered their services as henchmen. Now I'll just sit back while they do all the work and I reap the benefits of being an RPG blog tycoon... it's a thing, it's a real thing.

Please give a very warm welcome to...

The New Guys

C.D. Gallant-King

C.D. Gallant-King has been playing and GMing role-playing games for 20 years, but he would still describe his skills as “fair to moderate.”  He has been a game designer even longer, his first game created in honour of the 1988 Calgary Olympic Games, which featured players racing across the country with torches.  There was also an option to slow your opponents down with oil slicks.  He still doesn’t quite understand how the Olympics work.

He has written eight novels you’ve never read, and has fuzzy d20s hanging from his rear-view mirror. Though it may come as some disappointment (or surprise) to all the ladies reading this, he is happily married.

Joseph Nelson
Joe is still an acolyte among the gaming elite and his sense of wide-eyed wonder has not been crushed (yet) by the harsh realities of the gaming world. He deeply enjoys the old-school games and the new wave games, considering them both part of his dysfunctional little RPG family.

He lives in the Northeast United States, where even the Frost Giants fear to tread.


Andy (aka. Carpe Guitarrem)

Andy, a regular poster at The Player's Side of the Screen, is a relative newcomer to RPGs. He picked them up a few years ago, with a few sessions of D&D, and now he's diving into the world of RPGs with a voracious abandon. He likes studying different game mechanics, and how they shape players' experiences. On top of that, he's multiclassed into a billion different things, like music and art and computers and...a lot more.
So please give these guys a very warm welcome, and most importantly check out their posts.

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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 talkin…
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Steal this New Map

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After watching these videos , I started playing around and drawing up some topographical maps in photoshop. They aren't my typical style, but I think my first effort turned out pretty decent.

So, here you go. Key up this map and use it for your game. The only thing I ask is that if you post it on your blog/Twitter/Google+/Facebook that you link back to here, or my Twitter, my Google+, or my Facebook page. Have fun.


The picture is quite large, so don't forget to zoom in to see the details.
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Several people have inquired whether they could my maps in their commercial (for profit) projects. The answer is: No, you cannot use these maps for any commercial project. Read the creative commons copyright below.

But, if you are a DIY RPG person, with little to no money, and really want to use one of the maps for something that you're working on, that might earn you a bit of money, let me know. We can talk, and if I like your thing, I will mos…
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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'sDEAD REIGN™®© books (about the …
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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, then ju…
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