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Nerdarchy > Reviews (Page 8)

‘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.

D&D AARPG IS your grandparents’ Dungeons & Dragons

For this week’s look into streaming RPG programs, there’s a wonderful series put together by Geek & Sundry called D&D AARPG. In this series, writer and actress Amy Vorpahl guides a group of older players through a D&D adventure. Vorpahl handles Dungeon Master duties, while seniors Annie Coty, Bobby Reed and Art are joined by younger players Hector Navarro and Josh Flaum.

Scarlet Sisterhood is a different kind of streaming RPG

Moving closer to home this week, I’m taking a look at a live streaming RPG  show that has grown to become one of my favorites to watch. The Scarlet Sisterhood of Steel & Sorcery is streaming live every Wednesday evening at 7 p.m. EST on Nerdarchy’s YouTube channel. Each week, DM Nerdarchist Dave hosts Staff Writers Megan Miller and Samantha Karr with gamer girl and Nerdarchy fan Vex on their D&D 5E adventures in and around Gryphongaffe, Nerdarchy’s homebrew campaign setting.

Dungeons & Dragons

Sourcebook Review: Recovery Dice Options

In Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons, healing works a little bit differently. Each class, as usual, has a certain type of hit die that you can roll to get more hit points at higher levels. What isn’t quite so usual is the idea that you have a pool of these dice you can use to heal yourself during short rests. The reason for this is to allow parties to keep moving longer without having to camp inside dungeons. Spend some hit dice, recover your health, and keep moving.

Recovery Dice Options ([amazon_link asins=’1545236488′ template=’PriceLink’ store=’nerdarchy-20′ marketplace=’US’ link_id=’d4c37b80-209b-11e7-8ec2-75f53789e3bc’] from Amazon) is about alternative ways to use these dice. Conceptually, the idea of being able to use your recovery dice for things other than recovering hit points is intriguing. After all, you are quite literally using your own life force to fuel some of what you can do with this, and it is taking a resource that is, otherwise, very limited, and giving it more purpose.

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.

Comic report: Saga, Volume One

Saga

Saga

Saga: Marko and Alana

Saga (written by Brian K. Vaughan with artwork by Fiona Staples) is just one of those comics you need to read. The perfect combination of action, romance, drama and inappropriateness is definitely what makes this a story to indulge in. It’s basically like an epic space odyssey of a couple, Alana and Marko, two separate alien races (both super hot, horned, winged aliens with attitude, peoples) escaping the life they lived as military personnel to two opposing racial forces in a war between the planet Landfall  (Alana’s home) and its satellite wreath (Marko’s native moon). In order to start anew with their newly-birthed (from forbidden love) child, Hazel, they are forced to flee in secret and hopefully escape the never-ending war between their two races, which they want nothing to do with.   This world, mind you, is full of magic and strange scientific advancements similar to recent Star Wars movies, so you see a lot of creepy and strange characters which makes it intriguing and makes you want to keep reading!

Easy Roller Dice – Fantastic Dice Company

east roller diceHave you heard of Easy Roller Dice?  If not than I have a treat for you.  Happy Monday everyone.  I am taking a break this week from my normal post about board games.  If you missed last week and want to hear about Dragon Slayer Dice, you can go here.

Nerdarchist Ryan introduced us to these awesome dice this past weekend and I have to say I was impressed.  The dice are crisp and clean and seem to have a very even rolling ratio.  Admit it you all pick up dice and ‘look’ for the one that seem to be waited for higher numbers.  Well Easy Roller Dice are waited evenly assuring you get the random rolls you are supposed to.  Lets face it if you always succeed where is the challenge?

Now we have all seen the buckets or bins of plastic polyhedrals and have sifted through to find those precious few that have whatever desired quality we are looking for, so you are asking yourself by now what is so special about Easy Roller Dice?  To take a quote from their website:

Dungeon Crate brings RPG loot to your front door every month

boxThere seems to be a subscription box service for just about everything nowadays, from crafts to wines to all kinds of foods and more. There are even a number of different subscription boxes for the nerd or geek in all of us. But what about tabletop role playing gamers?

Before January 18, the pickings seemed pretty slim, but that was the launch date for Dungeon Crate, a monthly subscription box service with a focus on role players and the games we love.

What are subscription boxes?

Mutants And Masterminds — An Awesome Table Top Roleplaying Game!

I’ve been lucky enough to experience four different superhero role-playing games; two editions of Green Ronin’s Mutant and Masterminds, the original Marvel Superheroes FASERIP system by TSR, Mayfair’s DC Heroes, and Heroes Unlimited by Palladium, but Mutants and Masterminds has been my favorite by far.  It was actually during a Heroes Unlimited RPG session that I was inspired to seek out a different superhero role-playing game.