A Game I Regret I Wont be Attending

Quick repost of the game Joethelawyer will be running tomorrow in Manhattan (lifted from the TARGA site and The Mule Abides) .  This is the 2nd Annual Dave Arneson Memorial Gameday tomorrow, March 27, 2010.

Thanks to the generous support of the Compleat Strategist, we will be meeting in the gaming space of   their New York location:
11 East 33rd Street (between Madison and Fifth Avenue)
New York, NY 10016
212-685-3880
Games will begin at noon and wrap up at 5, to allow time for cleanup before the store closes at 6.

I had planned to attend, but it appears that events (vacation) are going to preempt the attempt.

I need someone to roll some dice it my stead ;)

Thankfully I do get to play in my monthly FG2 Castles & Crusades  game tonight... small consolation, but still better then no gaming at all this weekend.

One a Positive Note

It seems that the loss of quality bloggers has increased my blog's traffic immensely.  Damn fools ;)

Anyhow, I need to cheer myself up, so I think I'll do a review.  As the vast majority of my reviews are of products I actually like and enjoy, they make me feel good when I write them.  Come to think of it, my negative reviews are cathartic in their own way... so all the reviews I write make me feel good.   

I just loves me some OD&Dities.  OD&Dities Issue 14 to be exact.

Now, it is a thief themed issue, and I've never been all that keen on playing thieves let alone bring their Guilds into the campaign as anything more then a distant backdrop.  Suffice to say the articles on Thieves Guilds I could take or leave, but that is a personal prejudice.  The article on Thief Skills however, was an excellent read.  Some decent ideas I'll need to keep in mind when DM'ing.

Worth the price of admission alone is the article on the not so lowly Magic Missile spell.  Very nice, useful and probably not all that balanced variations of the basic spell.  Keeps the PCs off guard with one of these choices.  Very well done.

A new class, or sub-class of Magic-User is introduced:  The Puppeteer.  Just as Illusionists specialize in illusions, Puppeteers specialize in charms and mind control.  Having given the class a quick read thru, I expect it would play better as an NPC (nice reoccurring Bad Guy type) but proof is in the play.  I've already have ideas coming to me as to making a nice party nemesis with this at the template.  Mmmmm... brains!

Those are the highlights.  There are a few other articles for your enjoyment.  I've been thinking that the one page QUALITY article was the thing of the past (I'm looking at you Crusader) but the Unusual Enemies one pager is good.  A thinking man's article (or woman's).

2 bucks for 25 pages of Labyrinth Lord goodness.  Well worth the price.

Three Down

I have my count of lost, or soon to be lost, OSR blogs at three.

Chgowiz's Old Guy RPG Blog  was the first to tap out.

 

The Old School Ranter is wrapping up on Friday apparently.

The Rusty Battle Axe will be leaving at the end of the month, for reasons dissimilar to the first two, but a damn shame none the less.

Three damn good blogs, not because of the topics they posted, but because of the people that did the posting.  The damn 'net is a double edge blade. 

Shit's getting damn depressing.  Tomorrow I'll sneak in a review.  I need something to cheer myself up.

Was it a Full Moon last Weekend?

I only ask because of the lunacy that prevailed in the little corner of the web I like to relax in.

After all this is said and done, do we have to redefine what constitutes "Old School Gaming" and by its very nature, what is "Porn"?

Because the gaming in the video in question might have loosely hit upon old school gaming, but I certainly missed the porn  (really, as in "WTF!  Where is the T&A in this vid?)

Chgowiz  has left the building.  Dude, don't EVER leave in anger.  More importantly, don't let an ASSHOLE dictate your actions.  'Nuff said.

TARGA - leaner?  smaller? larger? unfocused?  more focused?  tastes great?  less filing?  Did you even know about it before The Old School Rant up and ranted the mother of all rants? 

More people probably knew about Zak and his weird as all shit Pornstar filled gaming group.  Weird as in "what kinda pornos do they star in" kinda weird.  As a gaming group goes... fairly normal composition... except that its full of girls.  That stuff NEVER happens in real life. (Well, according to one reviewer this was played by an all girl group - she also insinuated I lacked brains... which might be true, but the product still sucked)

Okay, I'm getting off topic it seems.

Then again, the whole weekend of Ranting was off topic.

Listen, if there is one thing I've learned having a 16 y/o son is that he will find the porn no matter the method I try to block it.  Kids are smarter then most give them credit for, and if they want to find it on the web odds are they will find it quicker then you ever could.

Besides, I'd expect he'd be very disappointed in Zak's little video ;)

It's a Classic Two-Fer Tuesday!

I'm always looking for adventures written for the Classic D&D / AD&D rulesets.  Sometimes I find two on the same search.  This time I found 2 in 1.  Yep, its a damn flipbook, which is annoying as a PDF, but cool in the "it's got 2 short low level AD&D adventures in 1" sort of way.

I'm talking about the Dungeon Crawl Classics Flip Book from Goodman Games.  Now, I'm sure the flipbook format works great in print, but as a PDF the presentation is less then ideal.  Get ready to use the rotate button in your PDF viewer.  Still, for less then 5 bucks you get two quality adventures that can be easily used with any Old School system without much work.

Figure 2 sessions of gaming for less then the price of a Subway's Footlong.  

Isn't that better the Classic Rock Two-Fer Tuesday on the local rock station?

Random Monday Madness

Sigh.

Spent the weekend going thru bouts of food poisoning.  Not fun. 

Still, I'm home and I'm finally able to appreciate Fight On! #8.  Is it just me or is the artwork getting better and better?  7 bucks for the PDF is a steal for the amount of material that is packed into this issue.  I do have one little quibble... hyperlinks... why are there no hyperlinks in the PDF?  Yeah, I can copy and paste the link, but a hyperlink makes it effortless.  No biggie.  More curious then anything.

Nice.  Thunder and Lightning here in NYC at the moment. 

Just got the complete Little Rascals DVD collection delivered earlier today.  Hmmm, that could make for the setting of a simple and silly RPG at some point.  Backburnering that ;)

Trying to track down my sources of free and cheap old school RPG material.  Might take a wee bit.

See, I told you it was going to be random.