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Wyatt Ferris #PlayForWyatt

Wyatt Ferris Inspires Gamers to #PlayForWyatt

It’s truly a testament to how awesome the gaming community is that when tragedy took an awesome person from our nerdy world, and his mom reached out, gamers around the globe answered the call.

Hello Awesome Crafters, Last week my 17 year old son Wyatt Ferris took his own life after suffering a traumatic brain injury. He was very active in the gaming community, both as player and GM. In order to show our endless love for Wyatt and to honor his countless hours at the gaming tables, we’re asking GMs and storytellers around the world to add Wyatt as an NPC in your games. Wyatt was a paladin, cavalier, war priest, rogue, swashbuckler, investigator, Hellknight bodyguard, and more. Please see the photos here of Wyatt and use the hashtags #Play4Wyatt #WyattNPC so we can follow his continued adventures. Thank you for helping this broken hearted mother mend after this tragic loss. I love the gaming community for starting this for my son. My Twitter is @baddicebad. Please Like, Comment, Share and Subscribe!

Marvelous Phile: Popularity in Marvel Super Heroes RPG

Hey, guys, Professor Bill of Comic Book University (where tuition is always free) and I’m bringing you the fifth article of the Marvelous Phile, an homage to the excerpt in Dragon Magazine back in the ’80s. FASERIP game mechanic - popularity In the previous adventure (season 2, episode 5)...

NaNoWriMo writing

Quick and Dirty Writing Tricks for NaNoWriMo

Salutations nerds! It’s November, and that means National Novel Writing Month is in full swing. I’m willing to bet if you clicked on this article you already know what that is, but permit me a brief recap on the off chance you aren’t already in the know.

Basically, NaNoWriMo is a word marathon where a bunch of crazy people decide to attempt to write at least 50,000 words in the 30 days of November. The rules are simple. You aren’t allowed to actually start writing your story until November starts (but really you’re only cheating yourself if you do), and it has to be 50,000 on the same tale. Typically, you’re looking at writing about 1,667 words a day to be able to finish on time, but there are some even crazier people out there who shoot higher.

Mists of Ravenloft Engulf D&D Online

Mark your calendar for Dec. 5, 2017 and stock up on garlic and wooden stakes – Dungeons & Dragons Online delves into darkness with the Mists of Ravenloft expansion release! Featuring 12 new quests, a new raid, new wilderness area, two new public areas, a brand new saga and more, Mists of Ravenloft has been a long-rumored addition to DDO players will finally be able to enjoy…if they dare.

Count Strahd von Zarovich casts his shadow over the lands of Barovia from Castle Ravenloft. Are you brave enough to face him?

MARVEL RPG

Marvelous Phile: Marvel Super Heroes RPG Live Game Play Chat is Good Karma

Hey, guys, Professor Bill here and it’s time to start off the Marvel Super Heroes Roleplaying Game the right way by revamping the old Marvel Philes that used to run out of Dragon Magazine. We’re going to call this the Marvelous Phile (to avoid copyright).

So let’s talk chat participation (because my editor, Doug, is the boss and he promised torture if I didn’t obey. (Do you think he reads these?) [EDITOR’S NOTE: Yes, Prof. He does ;)] 

Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms is Free to Play Dungeons and Dragons in Early Access on Steam and it’s Awesome

Idle Champions Dungeons and DragonsSalutations, nerds! And good news for fans of idle games like Cookie Clicker and AdventureQuest Dragons. Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms is a Dungeons and Dragons game in early access on Steam right now, free to play, and I have to say it’s exactly what I needed.

It’s an idle game, and if you’re not already aware of what that means I’ll give you the run down: you don’t have to do a whole lot for the game to do what it does. You click a couple of times and get it started and then watch the numbers go up and get ridiculously high as the story progresses and in this case, as your heroes do more damage.

Chartopia, Part 4: Rollable lists

 

Unique results with Chartopia lists, tables and charts

Chartopia list

Any of these and more sewer encounters could take place in a setting just like this. [Art by Alexlinde from deviantart.com]

Hello friends! We’ve already brought up the Rollable List feature on Chartopia – a semicolon-separated list of items/words/phrases within square brackets. It adds diversity to results without needing to call upon multiple tables. But there’s more to it than a single dice roll. Let’s look into what else it can do for you. In the sewer combat encounter table discussed in the second Chartopia article, one possible encounter for players was adventurers. To mix it up we added some variance in how…

[they mistakenly believe you’re hostile/cultists/etc; they attack because they think you’re after the same treasure they’re searching for; they’ve been hired by an enemy to kill the party]

So what else can you do with a rollable list?

Chartopia talks random tables and RPG charts with Nerdarchy

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBm_bmFBsUQ&w=560&h=315]

A hallmark of roleplaying games, charts and tables are woven into the fabric of Dungeons & Dragons and every other tabletop RPG. They’re a way to inject spontaneity and randomness into adventures. Thanks to diligent work by Scott Beccard and Glenn McCord in developing Chartopia, GMs have a quick and easy way to create and access charts for anything they can imagine.

‘Dice, Camera, Action’ never waffles on D&D fun

How can your game go wrong when the lead story designer for the team behind creating Dungeons & Dragons runs the campaign? In “Dice, Camera, Action,” Wizards of the Coast’s Chris Perkins leads a core party of adventurers along with several guest players through a live streaming season of the official published campaign Curse of Strahd in season one. The second season continues the party’s adventures with Storm King’s Thunder.

The TitansGrave role-playing game show is a top-notch production

Returning readers might make me eat crow for the RPG encounter planned for this session. D&D is hiding in shadows and moving silently this week while the Fantasy Adventure Game Engine sets the stage for Geek & Sundry’s TitansGrave: The Ashes of Valkana. There is a huge variety of live streamed and recorded RPG play sessions out there. The merits, value and impact are debatable among many, but not me – I enjoy them as entertainment and believe they add value to the hobby. For those reasons, I’m taking a closer look at my favorite programs and sharing not only what makes each program fun to watch, but what gamers can take away and bring back to their gaming tables.

The C Team innovates live streaming roleplaying games

As promised last week, I’ll be taking a closer look at the myriad online roleplaying game programs that I enjoy to offer some reviews and analysis as well as any tips or pitfalls therein. The criteria for me as a gamer, fan, audience member and for the purposes of this series are the entertainment value and the takeaways I can bring back to my own game group.

C Team

Most of these shows (okay, all of them on my initial list) are Dungeons & Dragons games. In keeping with that spirit, I’ll rate where each program has a Success or Failure along with where it scores a Critical Hit or a Critical Fail, and wrap up with a Perception Check for miscellaneous observations and standouts as a viewer.

The art of collaborative adventure design

Taking a break from the usual musings on nurturing a tabletop gaming habit amidst the time demands of busy adult lives, this week I’d like to share some insider thoughts on a Nerdarchy project I’m involved with. “Floshar’s Fate” (title subject to change) is a free Dungeons & Dragons 5E one-shot adventure in the works from several Nerdarchy writers in honor of Geek & Sunday’s International Tabletop Day 2017 on April 29. Don’t worry – there’s no spoilers here, so whether you’re a DM looking forward to running this adventure or a player hoping to experience it at your table, there’s no secrets or details here that will sully it for you.

adventure