I got into role-playing games (RPGs) when I was 10 years old. In the years since, they’ve served me both as a hobby and a part-time profession. No other form of entertainment has the same capacity for joy, camaraderie, and creativity. Moreover, the history of the industry itself is a very fascinating thing to examine.
This section features rants, reminisces, and some rules material for various RPGs. Most of the material is focused around Dungeons & Dragons and its offshoot Pathfinder, as those are my two favorite games. That doesn’t mean that other RPGs get completely ignored, as I love most of what the industry has to offer.
- Gaming Stories: In which I recount some of the more unusual events in my games.
- A Contract with Mind Flayers
- Curse Your Sudden but Inevitable Betrayal!
- Escape from Zanzer’s Dungeon
- The Evil Tree Spirit
- The Evolution of Claude the Clydesdale
- Hubris and the Deck of Many Things
- The Ignominious Death of Machiavelli
- I Put the Dragon in a Sack
- Pirates of the Astral Sea
- Plastic Explosives in the Mattress
- Pick a Card
- Ride of the SS Stupid
- Rise and Fall of the Red Mage
- Pathfinder Fantasy Adventures: Details about my initial attempt at using Pathfinder as an educational tool.
- The Pathfinder Playtest: Some thoughts on the Pathfinder RPG‘s first edition change.
- AD&D’s Freedom and the Curse of the Media Tie-In: If you run the adventure Freedom, your players will experience anything but.
- Delving into the Book of Erotic Fantasy: Wear Protection: A look at one of the weirdest d20 products ever created.
- In Defense of Good-Aligned Drow: Seriously, they can be pretty cool characters.
- D&D and Pathfinder: What’s the Difference?: An examination of what separates these two popular but similar games.
- The History of Dungeons & Dragons: What goes around comes around.
- The Many Faces of Elminster: Alternate takes to give the well-known Elminster the Sage some new life.
- The Most Head-Scratching Demon Lords in D&D: Some demon lords ooze evil. Others are just evil ooze.
- On Character Death: There are many ways to create a compelling game without relying on total party kills as a threat.
- Paizo’s Controversy, Bad Behavior, and the Dilemma of Ethical Consumption: What do customers do when a gaming company clearly doesn’t care about its employees?
- The Return of TSR: What the Hell Just Happened?!: That time in 2021 when somebody tried to resurrect TSR and wound up poisoning the brand so badly that two separate companies had to drop the trademark.
- Super Mario Pathfinder: In which I re-skin the Pathfinder RPG for adventures in the Mushroom Kingdom.
- Weird Magic Items I Wish I’d Used: From the crab mecha to the mayonnaise jar, a look at some of the weird magical oddities in D&D.
Image: Jeff Easley
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