Saturday Sorcery - Shadows to Lead

This spell idea came from my friend James. We were out on one of our hikes in the woods ruminating over various fantasy and sci-fi related geekiness, when we started on the topic of magic. This was the coolest idea that came out of our long meandering conversation.

I am going to try and write it up in fairly generic terms, with an old school D&D slant

Shadows to lead

Casting Time: 1 round
Range: Max 500'
Duration: 3 Turns + 1/ 3 levels of the caster
Save: Spells or Will or whatever is applicable.
Components: The material component for this spell is lead shavings covered in black ink.

Description: When cast this spell makes the victims shadow the weight of a giant mass of lead weighing 600lbs + 50lbs per level of the caster. If the victim can actually carry/lift this type of weight the spell acts only as a slow spell. But if the vitim cannot bear the weight they are pulled down to the ground and held there under great duress. The victim must make a strength check (or equivalent) every turn or suffer 1d6 in crushing damage.

Greatest Hits

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

Image
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&#
Read more

10 Zombie Survival Intro Scenarios

Image
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
Read more

Is This A Good Idea - Part II

Image
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. >
Read more

The Walking Dead Role-Playing Game

Image
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
Read more