Circle of Dar Janix

I started playing 4e at release. I ran Keep on the Shadowfell and a few adventures of my own before my group moved on. I did not touch it again for a few years until I moved and it was just about the only game in town. I played in the Crystal Caves Encounters campaign and enjoyed it. Recently I was a player in a 4e campaign at my FLGS. I know there are a lot of people out there that hate 4e, I am not one of them. I see each version of D&D as a tool for running different kinds of games. 4e was a decent tool for running a lighter game than 3.x and was easier to introduce new players to. But it isn't the best tool I have for this kind of game. There were several games released in the 2000s that aimed for this same slot in my collection, and quite frankly Savage Worlds fills the slot better than 4e. I would go as far to say that Savage Worlds is better 4e D&D than 4e is. The dilemma I have is that 4e is much more popular than Savage Worlds. It is far easier to find a 4e ...

The way I have structured my Star Wars: Edge of Empire campaign at my FLGS is based on my observations about the way that in-store campaigns tend to go. I find that there is usually a large turnout for the first few weeks and then the numbers tend to drop off a bit. You may actually see all of the people who show up that first week throughout the life of the campaign, but there will be a core that will be there every week while the others drift in and out. I find that by the end of week three I have a pretty good idea who will be in that core group of players. I structured my campaign with those observations in mind. I decided that I would go fairly linear for the first few weeks to maximize action and keep a fast pace. Running a plot driven game instead of character driven game for the first few weeks also makes it easier to deal with the fairly unstable player base during that period. After a few weeks I move towards a more character driven format. I try to set up at least...

I purchased Hollow Earth Expedition a few years back at GenCon, and I have had a chance to run it a few times in the intervening years. I picked up all of the books that were available at the time, the core book, Secrets of the Surface World, Mysteries of the Hollow Earth, and the GM's Screen. I really like the Ubiquity system that it uses, the game moves fast and players have a lot of freedom to describe their actions and try off-the-wall things. That said, the actual Hollow Earth Expeditions setting is pretty generic pulp. I understand that this is on purpose, and I do not fault them for it. But, there is little here that I could not get from an hour or so on TVtropes (do not click if you do not have the time). This raises the problem that while I like the system, I have a lot of generic systems, and the setting offered is very generic here. The Ubiquity system has some clear advantages over both Savage Worlds and GURPS, it is much lighter than either. It has the same pul...

A few weeks ago I decided that I needed to reduce my RPG collection significantly. I just have way too many games, many of which I know I will never play. In fact the entire area under the stairs of my house is full of RPG books are the shelves in my office. Due to the nature of my career path, I expect to move a few times over the next few years, so we rent. This means we move on a fairly regular basis, and I am starting to haul around too much stuff. I have decided to cut my collection by at least half, but I have a feeling that I will wind up cutting more by the end. The following is a series of posts I have done on the Fear the Boot forums so far. I will be continuing the series here.

For the last several week I have been running an Edge of Empire game at my friendly local gaming store (FLGS). I am a long time fan and advocate of the West End Games (WEG) d6 Star Wars RPG from the '80s and '90s. The game was fast playing and easy to learn, and had the second greatest collection of sourcebooks in RPG history. It was obvious to me that the people putting the sourcebooks together were big fans of Star Wars, and that they had been given plenty of room flesh out the universe. I would say that WEG Star Wars was second only to Iron Crown Enterprise's Middle Earth Roleplaying Game in this respect.

Wow, It has been a year since I posted here, and what a busy year it has been. Actually the last several years have been pretty crazy. I finished law school in 2011 and started a new job. Last August my wife and I had a little girl, and I am just now slowly emerging back onto the internet. I managed to make it to GenCon this year, and had a blast. I have several things going on at this point: 1) I have returned to board games after several years of low interest. I have especially been enjoying many of the card games out there now. I really like the whole deckbuilder genre. My #1 purchase at GenCon this year was the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game. I expect I will be discussing them some. 2) I have an ongoing Edge of Empire game I am running at my new FLGS. I live in Southern Maryland now, I work at the Navy base down here. There was not much in the way of gaming the first year I was here. There was a game store, but the guy who owned it had no idea how the business worked. But n...