Rule of the Dice

BRAAAAAAAINSSS!!!! In honour of Halloween and the second season of the Walking Dead (not to mention the soon-to-be-released Issue Three of d6 Magazine featuring material by yours truly), I thought it was time to revisit d6 Horror and share with you some of my designs for everyone's favourite brain-devouring, drooling masses of near-human monstrosities... ZOMBIES!!! You thought I was talking about YouTube comment writers, didn't you? I love zombies and horror survival games.  So much so that I broke my own rule to never buy another Kevin Siembieda game and picked up DEAD REIGN when it came out a couple of years ago.  It was a ton of fun, though admittedly I had to tweak the hell out of it to make it playable (when my players realized that the zombies had the strength of Superman, and kept coming after being shot in the head four or five times, it really killed the excitement for them).  All that tweaking eventually led me to the d6 system, which I also mangl...

I was walking past a FLGS* last week and noticed a new Resident Evil board game in in the window. Now, I am a huge Resident Evil fan, (at least of the original and RE: Zero for GameCube) so I had to check this out. Turns out it wasn't a board game so much as a card game, but it was reasonably priced and I was intrigued so I picked it up.  I got the "Alliance" intro set because it specifically said it had rules for single-player, which is always a plus for me. *Quick Aside: It actually not "my" Friendly Local Gaming Store.  I was downtown visiting my real estate lawyer (man, that feels weird to say, but we bought a house, so I had to get a lawyer) and I walked past Fandom II , a popular gaming store here in Ottawa.  The shopkeeper wasn't particularly "friendly," but they have a good selection and a strong customer base.  My FLGS is actually the Comic Book Shoppe , which has some of the best prices on gaming stuff in town.  One of these days I wil...

A few weeks ago (yeah, I'm really behind on my blogging) there was some debate floating around in certain dark corners of the Onling Gaming Blog Community (which I affectionally like to call the Ogbloc) about how closely role-playing games (and by extension, "fiction" and "history" in general) should or should not adhere to historical accuracy.  A quick glance at these blog posts - here and here , paying special attention to the comments sections - will either make you laugh with the absurdity of the argument, or cause your blood to boil with unbridled academic nerd-rage.  Not writing for a while gave me the advantage of time to mull over my response to this phenomenon (or maybe just made me miss the boat completely). Originally I wrote a scathing, satirical argument about the whole thing (I won't tell you which side I took), but the light of reason (ie, my wife/editor) showed me the way back up out of the hole where the Internet trolls ply their trade,...

Everyone seems to have enjoyed the free map I posted a while back. It's made the rounds, been awesomed up and found a place in the Dragonsfoot forums . So I decided I may as well post another one. I was going for a kind of comic book style with this map. It was an experiment, mostly hand drawn on a wacom tablet in photoshop. It turned out pretty good. You could pretty easily use it for some northern wilderness setting thing, at least that's the vibe I was going for, but feel free to use it for whatever you want. If you use the map let me know. Both of the maps are free for anyone's personal use at the game table or for anyone's free DIY RPG products - I only ask for a link back or a credit as the maps creator.   ......................................... 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 c...

Microlite20 , the ultra slim version of the d20 SRD, has been available for some time now, and it has been modded up and down so many ways that you can find a hundred different games using the same basic ideas, from westerns to space operas. It's nice, I've played it, but it wasn't until I sat down this last weekend and gave a version called Microlite74 a try that I truly appreciated its flexibility. Designed by Randall Stukey, Microlite74 is a game with the familiar d20 conventions, but with an old-school flavor. Coming in three distinct booklets, each with a small overall page count, you can enjoy Microlite74 Basic, Standard, or Extended, each playing under different assumptions. In Basic, you can play as Humans or the classic three Demi-Humans (Elves, Dwarves, Halflings) and there are three character classes, the Fighter, Cleric, and Magic-User. That's right, no thief (or rogue for those politically correct 3e players). Or Bruce Campbell, as my players like to say. ...

So a few weeks ago, after much debate and discussion, we finally introduced my father-in-law to the intricacies of Dungeons & Dragons.  He's played World of Warcraft for several years, and he loves anything fantasy-related (I've often said he will read anything with a sword or a dragon on the cover), so he was long overdue to be initiated.  He's been listening to us talk about table-top RPGs for awhile (my regular gaming group consisting of his two adult daughters and their husbands, so he's heard plenty about it), and he's seemed plenty interested. The question was, what to play?  We taught him to play Munchkin and Magic: The Gathering a few years ago, both of which he enjoyed but struggled with the rules (probably because we didn't play regularly enough, and to be fair, MtG has a lot of stupid fucking rules). We were unsure of asking him to join because our experience with MtG.  Not to mention we were playing 4E at the time, and I wouldn't wish t...