A year ago, my life was fairly simple. I was single, had a part-time day job, and was building up some work as a freelance writer. I had a robust social life, but that didn’t require a lot of planning and tracking. It was just me, my studio apartment (“the Lair”), and a Hipster PDA. … Continue reading
One problem I’ve encountered with various groups over the years is that either none of the players takes notes, including tracking things like treasure, XP, and the names of important NPCs they’ve met, or select players keep notes and don’t share. This leaves it up to me, as gamemaster, to keep track of everything, to … Continue reading
Continuing from last session, the party runs out the back of the Silk Scabbard into an alley, where they find a gang of duergar and their pet monitor lizard beating up a kobold merchant. The party beats the gang fairly easily, and heads to the Cartways black market following a clue to find a person … Continue reading
My wife Katie found this giant foam d20 in an educational supply store and bought it for me. I love my geek wife! I kept it hidden from the players until an important roll came up (it could have killed a player character) and I said “let me roll this one in plain sight”. Then … Continue reading
When I was in 7th and 8th grade, I took algebra. While I was an honors student and eager to learn new things, I still questioned the value of learning this as most kids do. Sure, the teacher provided real-world examples of how algebra was used, but I planned on doing none of those things … Continue reading
One of the cardinal sins of blogging is to not post for a long time, then return to write a post making excuses for why you haven’t been blogging. Okay, technically, that’s what I’m doing here, but I’ll argue that it’s a bit different. I have been blogging; it’s only been less than a week … Continue reading
In a reversal of my usual report, I’m going to start with some notes and then give you the plot-and-play synopsis. The reason is because this was the first session where I took over as gamemaster, and I wanted to give you an idea of how I prepped, along with a couple of caveats. Notes … Continue reading
As I was going through the photos on my phone, making sure I’d saved everything I wanted, I came across the shot on the left. It was taken about a month ago. I had been having an absolutely horrible time that day. I didn’t feel well, nothing was going right, I was stressed out, the … Continue reading
Suvudo.com has an article about bad neighborhoods in fantasy fiction, accompanying the release of Daniel Polansky’s debut novel Low Town (which looks good, and I look forward to reading as soon as I can carve out some time). I contribute a bit on Lankhmar, and am attributed as a “Leiber scholar”. Woohoo! Read it here.
