Rule of the Dice

I don't buy a whole lot of new games every year, at least not in printed form, but PDFs are another story. For me, dropping ten bucks on a game I may or may not enjoy is a heck of a lot better than doing the same thing on a forty-dollar and up scale. So Drive Thru RPG is one of the big stops on my digital shopping sprees. I've picked up good and bad alike from there, but thankfully it seems that the cream rises to the top. Cheap little adventures, supplements, and even game systems. Especially older systems that still play beautifully (I'll save a rundown on some of the best, and worst, PDF purchases for a later date). Being a cheapskate New Englander, I also like free. Free is good. Often, a free game is just a little afternoon time waster, good with beer and pretzels, but not much else. And then there are the quality games that exist in a free form. The well-known Risus (the rules-litest game ever?), Labyrinth Lord , Basic Fantasy , OSRIC , and Swords and Wizardry . Thes...

When I was a kid, my favorite toys were the simplest. You could have handed mini-Joe an action figure and a toy gun and he would have spent hours, if not days, coming up with elaborate and increasingly violent hallucinatory adventures. So I suppose it's little surprise that I have grown to love generic gaming systems now that I'm older (we won't delve into the ludicrous possibility of being wiser). By generic system, I am referring to a system largely devoid of setting or fluff material. A system I could use to play in any number of fictional universes that fit in the mold of the genre; from Tolkeinesque fantasy, to Star Trek style sci-fi. The system and the setting are separate things in my mind. I compartmentalize to the point where playing a Forgotton Realms game using Hackmaster or even D6 Fantasy sounds interesting. But there are games where the line between setting and system are hopelessly blurred, to the point of being inseparable. 4th Edition D&D is a good exam...

 A little horror themed Saturday sorcery this week. I have a notebook dedicated to write ups for all the various undead monsters that lurk in the dark corners of my campaign world. The following is gathered from the notes I had on ghouls, or more precisely notes on how one becomes a ghoul. Ghouls - The eaters of the dead A ghoul is perhaps the most hideous of all the undead. In life this person was obsessed with death, usually exhibiting abnormal perversions such as the desire to drink blood, collecting corpses of animals or the recently deceased, and possibly necrophilia. When their unwholesome and unholy obsession finally reaches fevered pitch their desires can only be satiated by killing. At first it will just be simple murder, but this soon graduates to cannibalism, and finally to necrotic cannibalism. Now the dark powers start to beckon, whispering terrible secrets in their deranged ear. The downward spiral into hellish oblivion is almost complete. At some point the person...

In a recent article , C.D. talked about some of the best games he's never played. We all have them, of course. Those games we wish we could play but, for one reason or another, do not. I have a large pile of them sitting either in PDFs or on my desk, but the one that has bothered me the most deserves a mention today. The game is Traveller . I've always been a Star Trek fan. There's something about the Space Opera genre that I love, even more so than fantasy, and finding a truly good system to use for those kinds of star-spanning adventures isn't nearly so easy as it is to find one of the billions of fantasy-based systems. So when I finally broke down and got the classic Traveller rules from Drive Thru RPG, I was pleasantly surprised to find that here was the ultimate set of Space Opera roleplaying rules. Everything, all in one self-contained little package of awesome. Truthfully, I probably ought to have splurged and got the Mongoose edition, as I hear it's basicall...