Circle of Dar Janix

OK, bar applications are done, moot court is finished, and I just did my oral defense for my research paper. I still am without a job for after the bar, but I should be back to posting on a regular basis now that I am through hell month. Both my long-running Stonehell game, and my Castles and Crusades game on Wed. nights continue.

I'll admit that the title and the picture were a trap. At the urging of The Underdark Gazette, I am hoping to attract lapsed gamers back into the fold. If you used to play D&D as a kid, and ever stop to wonder what happened to that game, welcome home.

Last night I ran my first Castles and Crusades game at All Things Fun in Berlin, NJ. I only had one player show up, but we had fun anyway. I set the game in The City State of the Invincible Overlord, in the same campaign world as my OSRIC Stonehell game. The adventure kicked off with the player waking up shackled to a wall. He had no memory of how he got there, but was sure he had been tortured. After a few minutes a jailer came in to take him back to his cell. After he was unchained he charmed the jailer and convinced him to let him go. During his conversation with the jailer he learned that he was being held for the assassination of the Invincible Overlord and that the City was in chaos. He made his way out of the tower and on to the wall. When he heard guards and dogs approaching he jumped from the wall onto the roof of a building in a shanty town that had grown up along the outside of the wall. He fell through the roof but was not seriously hurt in the fall. He quickly made his wa...

If you like old school D&D, or just well written blogs you need to check out The Tao of D&D . The first thing I do when I fire up Reader every day is rush to read Grognardia, Torch, Pole, and Rope, LotFP, Greyhawk Grognard, and flip through the various video game blogs to which I subscribe. Tao of D&D is different, I save it. It isn't something I can read while I am in class, it is something I like to take my time and think about while I read. I do not always agree with Alexis, but he has one of the most thought provoking blogs in RPGs. He also goes into insane (the good kind) detail. You will walk away from his blog with good ideas for your game, and probably having learned something new about history, or geography.

I recently offered a game of D&D as an item to bid on for my law school's charity auction. I think I am going to cheat a little bit and actually run Castles and Crusades for the winner of the auction. It is just much easier to teach a total outsider.

My wilderness rules saw their first use in play tonight. I was pretty happy with the results, they moved fast and made the travel just tense enough. They also gave the players plenty of choices on how to spend their two main resources, time and food. I am going to continue to revise these rules through play, and I have only completed the arctic environment tables (all I need right now). These are not especially original, but they do make wilderness exploration fun. I am heavily influenced by the Wilderness Survival Guide, but I have no interest in its unwieldy nature. My goal was to develop a streamlined wilderness system that still has enough depth to present the players with interesting choices. I am aiming for something like the fun of Oregon Trail. I am pretty happy with my turn structure. This is my Wilderness Turn (1 day): Food Phase Travel Phase Travel Phase Camp Phase Food Phase Rest Phase Food phase: Characters must eat 2 meals a day. If they only eat 1 meal they suffer a -1 t...

One of my favorite purchases at GenCon this year was James M.'s Shadow, Sword & Spell. Rogue Games has just released a preview of Shadow, Sword and Spell: Expert . I am looking forward to this. Edit: Forgot to mention that I appreciate that the cover is blue in the Expert book

When I was talking about running a game that would look like '70s sci fi I was thinking of something more like this: And less like this: See the excellent Space 1970 blog for more examples