Tuesday, January 12, 2016

A Few Bits of Magic

More magic items are always a good thing, right? Here are a few things the party in my Wilds game found during their adventures. I thought I'd already posted these, but I don't see them anywhere. I did write up some of the older items, the Sword of Bees, the Steadyhand Ring, and the Dwarf Kettle a while back. Without further ado, here are three new items that can be used in most any OSR-style game.

Wednesday, January 6, 2016

A (Late) 2015 Recap

Looking back over the blog's post history, I see there's been well over a month of silence here. Even though the end of 2015 was quiet, I think a (belated) year-end wrap won't be a bad thing. Three major blog topics all came to an end within a few weeks of each other in November:

  • My Labyrinth Lord play-by-email game, the Wilds came to a bloody end when the party found themselves caught in a complex ambush in Blackpool Maze.
  • I finished the 100th Dungeons in Blue geomorph in my Tile of the Week series and decided that was a good ending point, at least for the moment.
  • My Minecraft city building project died a slow death, the victim of the ennui that I often feel after playing vanilla Minecraft for a couple of months.

Of course, there were a few side posts here and there in 2015 too. I did a first look at the PC video games Skyforge and GRAV and did a write up of the deadly Cold Shades that killed off several of party followers in the Wilds. I also wrote a short piece on using the Mythic GM Emulator for NPC decisions, and posted regular updates on new PBE Games products -- more on that in a minute.

One of the good things about having a couple big, focused series to write about is you always know what you're going to have on the slate. The bad thing is, when they end, it leaves a hole. In this case, it left three big holes. I don't think I'm done with the blog, but I find myself struggling to write. At the very least I should cull through some of the magic items that are now in the hands of the Necromancer in Blackpool and post them up here. Beyond that, we'll see. RPGs are in a holding pattern at the moment, and my list of current video games, Diablo III, Mechwarrior Online and Minecraft with the FTB/Direwolf20 mod pack are all fairly well-trod ground. I guess we'll see what the next month brings.

As for PBE Games, well, the end of the year was quite busy. I've published 17 new titles since the last update. I'm not going to do an item-by-item list, it'd be embarrassingly long, but here are the highlights:


As you can see, I wasn't a total slacker in December. I'm sure something new will come along, or I'll start a new game that will spark the desire to write about RPGs. Until then, not dead, just resting.