Creating a Person in Star Trek Adventures vs. a Character in D&D
I’ve been playing Star Trek Adventures with GM Drew Murray, Doug Vehovec, and Asa Kinney. One week Doug couldn’t make it, so Drew, Asa, and I decided to have a frank discussion about the good and the bad things about Star Trek Adventures.
One of the things we talked about was how Star Trek Adventures helps you create a person, and not just a character. Dungeons & Dragons is great for creating cool characters and concepts, but it’s limited in its ability to define a person. There are still races in Star Trek Adventures, and your position on the ship acts ostensibly like a class, so it’s not like there’s no comparison between the two games. The difference really is the approach, and that all starts with the character creation system.
Flavour Shots: Light Fey Portals
A Flavour Shot is a short description of game artefacts and phenomena for use by Dungeon Masters, Game Masters and Storytellers in their games. Feel free to drag and drop these into your own games, and modify to suit. Let us know if you end up using them. Some will be portals to other realms, some will be magic items, others will be monster encounters. This time, it’s…
Kickstarter Korner for Nov. 2017, Week 3
Each week during the Quests & Adventures live chat, Saturday at 2 p.m. eastern, Nerdarchists Dave and Ted and Nate the Nerdarch hang out live with fans from the Nerdarchy YouTube channel. It’s a chance to share announcements and news, answer questions from the live chat and generally just hang out and talk nerdy with the Nerdarchy community.
DriveThruRPG Sponsors Nerdarchy and Saves You Money on RPG Stuff
Nerdarchy is proud to announce a terrific sponsorship from DriveThruRPG – the largest RPG download store! Since 2001, DriveThruRPG has been a premiere online marketplace for digital and print-on-demand roleplaying games. Even more, the expanded family of sites makes comic books, card games, fiction and more available with ease. With DriveThruRPG as a sponsor, we can now pass along great deals to the Nerdarchy community.
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)...
D&D Flavour Shot: Dark Fey Portals
A Flavour Shot is a short description of game artefacts and phenomena for use by Dungeon Masters, Game Masters and Storytellers in their roleplaying games. Feel free to drag and drop these into your own games, and modify to suit. Let us know if you end up using them. Some will be portals to other realms, some will be magic items, others will be monster encounters. This time, it’s…
Kickstarter Korner for Nov. 2017, Week 2
Each week during the Quests & Adventures live chat, Saturday at 2 p.m. eastern, Nerdarchists Dave and Ted and Nate the Nerdarch hang out live with fans from the Nerdarchy YouTube channel. It’s a chance to share announcements and news, answer questions from the live chat and generally just hang out and talk nerdy with the Nerdarchy community.
Hyperlanes Classes: Sci-Fi for D&D
Following up a live chat and offline interview with Hyperlanes creator Ryan Chaddock and a look at species from the cinematic sci-fi ruleset fueled by the fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons engine, we’re continuing on through the Hyperlanes corebook with Chapter 3: Class.
One of the best things about D&D 5E is the modular design philosophy. Stripping away all the class features, slots and so forth, D&D character classes are great framework to hang homebrew elements onto. I’ve had a lot of fun creating and playing with things like the barbarian Path of the Azure Primal Path and warlock Void Pact. There are six core classes in Hyperlanes, each with their own archetypes just like D&D. In fact, the class options in Hyperlanes are each built using one of the core D&D classes as a chassis. I’ve read through them all several times, ran a couple of sessions for players using them and certainly imagined more than one character I’d like to play.
Curious as to which ones?
Marvelous Phile: Darkness in Marvel Super Heroes RPG
Hey, guys, Professor Bill of Comic Book University (where tuition is always free) and I’m bringing you the fourth article of the Marvelous Phile, an homage to the excerpt in Dragon Magazine back in the ’80s.
D&D Flavour Shot: Druid Portals
Any Dungeon Master will be able to tell you how hectic running a fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons session can get, especially when your players go in a totally unexpected direction and you start having to make stuff up on the fly to accommodate them. To make life a little easier, I’m putting together the Flavour Shot series. They are descriptions you can drag and drop into your D&D campaigns to quickly introduce mechanics for players to make use of.
Kickstarter Korner for Nov. 2017, Week 1
Each week during the Quests & Adventures live chat, Saturday at 2 p.m. eastern, Nerdarchists Dave and Ted and Nate the Nerdarch hang out live with fans from the Nerdarchy YouTube channel. It’s a chance to share announcements and news, answer questions from the live chat and generally just hang out and talk nerdy with the Nerdarchy community.
Map Your Combat with an RPG Battle Game Mat
Maps.
Many Dungeons & Dragons players begin their journey into fantastic adventures through the allure of maps. Carefully constructing dungeon complexes on trusty graph paper, building them with digital tools like Pyromancer’s Dungeon Painter Studio or drawing them with a Wacom tablet like ENnie Award winner Elven Tower remains a vital part of the hobby for countless players.
D&D Creature to Character Conversion: Darklings
A few times in the past, I've written articles about elements of the fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons homebrew world I'm building (which I'm temporarily calling Gladius). One of my earlier D&D creations was the aatier, a half-tiefling half-aasimar race. Not to long ago, I...
Worldbuilding: My D&D Campaign Setting Approach
My usual week is taken up with many mundane tasks. Between getting my son up and ready for school, generally keeping the house and preparing materials for games, videos and articles, I keep pretty busy. One thing I try to do is keep my articles about things I think others will find interesting to read about.
A rule of thumb I go by is if someone can read my article and use something in it either in their games or elsewhere in their life (the interdisciplinary applications of the Reroll Rule Problem for example) then I have succeeded in my task.
Marvelous Phile: Fire and Flame in Marvel Super Heroes RPG
Hey, guys, Professor Bill of Comic Book University (where tuition is always free) and I’m bringing you the third article of the Marvelous Phile, an homage to the excerpt in Dragon Magazine back in the ’80s.
