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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 ...
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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 whi...
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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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Three Simple Rules

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I am gearing up for a new campaign and in the process of finishing all the fun bits and pieces. This is my favorite time, just before the show starts and the lights come on. I am trying very hard to create a campaign that will execute maximum awesome with minimum stress. I try to follow three simple rules when I create a new campaign and get ready to throw my players into it. 1) Your players are your campaign - Make the campaign for your players, not for you. Its that simple. 2) Create stories, not a story - Its always a temptation to go all Lord of the Rings with a campaign. DON"T.... you are not Tolkien and this isn't Middle Earth. Creating an epic over-arching super story that binds the characters into an amazing epic adventure is almost always doomed to fail. Create many stories for your world and let your players own ambitions create the epic story. 3) Make the campaign intriguing not cool - If everyone is an uber-cool ninja gangster, and there are a thousand co...
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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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Old Map of Awesome

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So yesterday I was digging around my RPG stuff. I don't have a lot of books or anything, I mainly have an extensive collection of things I've created over the years. Most of what I've written looks like the scrawling of a madman and only makes any coherent sense to me, and the vast majority of my maps and dungeons have unfortunately been lost or destroyed. But then I found this... Click to embiggen I had thought that this map was lost for sure. I made it when I was around seventeen or so, and It's the first real campaign world I ever created. The names are mainly rip-off's from the Forgotten Realms or pseudo-Tolkien in nature, but it was my first real attempt to create a game world of my own. The map itself is hand drawn in ink and coloured in watercolours. My friend James and I played off and on in this world for nearly three years and many of the seeds for my later ideas were first planted here. It's always nice to find something that reminds you why yo...
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The 1e ADnD Dungeon Masters guide may be the best DnD book ever written

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I have been re-reading the 1e ADnD Dungeon Masters guide for the umpteenth time. To me this book represents all that is good and fun about our hobby. There is hardly a page that doesn't have something interesting, fun or just plain weird on it, and even now the sheer bulk of information found in this tome staggers my imagination. I feel sorry for anyone who hasn't read this book, but I feel especially sorry for those who disregard it as some primitive relic of gaming past not worth the read. You are missing out on some of the best work ever written in RPG history, and even if you play 3e or 4e the advice and ideas from the DMG can still enlighten and inspire. Although the ADnD DMG may not fully represent the golden age of the hobby, to me it represents the hobby at its best and loftiest. It still astounds me that I can open this book to any random page and find something that I can use in my campaigns, or find something that is just plain awesome . So if you've read 1...
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