Jeffs Gameblog

So this guy came to me in a dream last night. PROFESSOR POWER THADDEUS BAUMAN, A.K.A. THE AMAZING THADDEUS FIGHTING: Good (10) AGILITY: Good (10) STRENGTH: Good (10) ENDURANCE: Excellent (20...

http://jrients.blogspot.com/2024/05/presenting-professor-power.html

Hey, we're trying to remove a saving throw penalty in here! The basic deal here is that the first status of each pair has NO DIRECT MECHANICAL EFFECT. Gaining that status is a warning to the ...

http://jrients.blogspot.com/2024/05/draft-two-step-status-rules.html

a blog about games and stuff

http://jrients.blogspot.com/2024/04/bear-wisemans-gathering-of-geeks-ft.html

One of the other participants in the game jam I joined produced a Game Boy adventure called OuttaTime. You can try it yourself in your browser here: https://jhample.itch.io/outta-time . It’s...

http://jrients.blogspot.com/2024/04/i-saved-timeline.html

At last year’s Philly Zine Fest I bumped into a cool Temple University faculty member who recommended Maria Dahvana Headley’s newish (2020) translation of Beowulf to me. I had heard that...

http://jrients.blogspot.com/2024/04/bro-beowulf.html

In the Star Fleet Battles facebook group there's a guy named Larry who has been using a laser cutter to make pretty decent looking flat minis. Dig it: The hexagons are custom bases, presuma...

http://jrients.blogspot.com/2024/04/a-pretty-clever-alternative-to-3d.html

a blog about games and stuff

http://jrients.blogspot.com/2024/04/joe-bob-briggs-thoughts-on-censorship.html

So the other day I stumbled across a paper in arXive called "Magic: The Gathering is Turing Complete." I don't know enough about either MtG or computer science to get more than 11% of the gi...

http://jrients.blogspot.com/2024/04/i-tap-my-bfg-9000.html

There are plenty of times when TRANSPARENT MECHANICS are good for roleplaying games. For example, I generally like to give the dice chances for any escapade not encompassed by the rules. I also u...

http://jrients.blogspot.com/2024/04/opaque-mechanics.html

There's a newly-formed gaming/education group at work and they recently hosted a game jam on itch.io. Although the organizers of the jam were mostly interested in video games, board games were al...

http://jrients.blogspot.com/2024/03/enter-era-four.html

So Daniel Kast's Starmada has a new, 30th anniversary edition out. You can get the pdf from WargameVault (the wargame store of the DriveThru people) or print, print-with-map-and-counters, or pd...

http://jrients.blogspot.com/2024/03/new-edition-of-starmada-huzzah.html

a blog about games and stuff

http://jrients.blogspot.com/2024/02/last-day-of-big-sale-why-you-should.html

by Jon Hodgson You know what rules? Sections of the dungeon where bigass party-wrecking monsters roam, but smaller places where the PCs can escape them.

http://jrients.blogspot.com/2024/02/a-thing-i-need-to-do-better.html

a blog about games and stuff

http://jrients.blogspot.com/2024/02/james-raggi-on-gaming-osr-origins-of.html

So if you haven't heard, last week a researcher named Dr. Clio Weisman published an article on Medium called "The Worst People You Have Never Met, or, What I Learned During A Four Year Academic S...

http://jrients.blogspot.com/2024/01/egghead-reports-research-weirdos-pissed.html

http://jrients.blogspot.com/2024/01/updated-snail-quarter-map-for.html

The X-CARD emerged from the indie/storygamer side of the hobby maybe ten or so years ago. Originally taking the form of an index card with a simply X drawn it with a Sharpie or something like t...

http://jrients.blogspot.com/2023/11/x-cards.html

  I've posted about the James Bond 007 game more than once in the past. Today I want to talk about one mechanic that I suspect could do a lot of good in other games, but that I don't recall...

http://jrients.blogspot.com/2023/10/bidding-into-danger.html

Yesterday I learned that Dave Hoover passed away. Dave was a key person in the Champaign-Urbana, Illinois rpg scene for decades. He GMed lots of local campaigns (I played mostly Feng Shui and ...

http://jrients.blogspot.com/2023/10/rest-in-peace-dave-hoover.html

The other day I was goofing around on heroforge.com and I decided to knock together a quickie Grim Reaper. That's when I thought of this visual gag, which I call "New Reaper Shows Up to 1...

http://jrients.blogspot.com/2023/09/grim-weaponry.html

a blog about games and stuff

http://jrients.blogspot.com/2023/09/an-old-fave-from-1981.html

STEVE: Hi, Jeff! I'm preparing to run Broodmother Skyfortress and trash my 20+-year campaign, played annually with good friends since university in the 90s. Per your kind  p5 invitation, ch...

http://jrients.blogspot.com/2023/09/an-email-exchange.html

If your sessions are anything like mine, a lot of ludicrous stuff gets said by the participants. RPGs put people into imaginary situations via dialogue. That means people will say things in an RP...

http://jrients.blogspot.com/2023/09/the-cosmic-purpose-of-role-playing-games.html

  Last December I posted a message asking if anyone knew what the heck this four-armed three-eyed weirdo was and today I noticed someone had an answer. An anonymous commenter has recently ...

http://jrients.blogspot.com/2023/09/mystery-solved.html

The Starmongers Guild is the closest thing to an operational magic-user's organization in the Kingdom of Drazbin. The main guildhouse is in the city of Yowat, but there's also a large contingent ...

http://jrients.blogspot.com/2023/09/starmongers-guild.html