Alternative for Gaming Mats

So recently I came across a company named Banners on the Cheap.  Basically, they make those giant, vinyl, sale banners that people put out in front of their stores for you to see.  I saw here that someone had used them though to print out a battle mat.  Being the resourceful sort, especially since their prices are much lower then Chessex, I figured I would give it a try and see if I could acquire a battle mat for cheap.

Vinyl Banners
See the results after the jump!

Class Look: Fighter

Okay...so I'm lame. Took me a while, but I finally got the fighter class look finished. It mostly took this long because I was having a hard time coming up with some good archtypes to use for the fighter. Mostly it had to do with...well, let's just get into the review, shall we?

I'm back!

Alright, so finals are over and I passed all my classes! That means we will be getting back on track here and getting you more updates and articles on a regular schedule again.

I did want to talk quickly about the Dungeons and Dragons Next Playtest. I signed up for it a while ago, thinking it might be fun and enjoyable to see how much worse Wizards of the Coast is being forced to make the game I love. I mean, I really didn't enjoy 4th edition at all. I don't really blame Wizards of the Coast for that though, I personally think it has more to do with Hasbro then anything else.

Class Look: Druid

Welcome back, good gamers! This time we will look at another class from the game that I love to play, Dungeons and Dragons. Continuing our look at the base classes, we will be moving on to the Druid. I've played the druid a total of once before, and she died really fast (stupid Tojanida). However, the time that I spent playing her was a lot of fun and I wouldn't mind another chance to do so again.

Without further preamble, the Druid!

Class Look: Cleric

The cleric is one of those classes that seems to have a love/hate relationship with players. Everyone wants to have one in the party, but no one typically ever wants to play one. I personally enjoy clerics, though I do dislike how many people think of them as mere heal bots and nothing else. Clerics have a wide range of spells and abilities that can be utilized, well beyond mere healing.

Class Look: Bard

Bards...ah Bards. The second Dungeons and Dragons class that I ever played (my first was a paladin). I've always enjoyed them because I just always thought they were the most bad ass of adventurers. Think about it. Look at what the rest of the party is entering the dungeon with: fighters with sword, armor and shield, clerics with the power of their gods, rogues with skill and cunning, wizards with a wealth of magical knowledge and spells to protect them from danger. What does a bard go in with? A song and a lute.

Hey, the bard wants his money pouch back. It's the one with BMF on it.

Class Look: Barbarian

Greetings! Today I am starting a new series I've been working on for a while now. Part of loving Dungeons and Dragons is being able to play the various classes. Being a part of a team and delving into the depths of a dungeon is absolutely the best part of the game for me.

Some of you may be new to the game and may be asking, “What class should I start with?”. Or you may be a veteran who is feeling tired of playing the core classes and wanting something different. You don't need to reach for that supplemental book quite yet, good sir! The core classes in my opinion will always be the best and most enjoyable to play and I rarely ever stray from them when picking a class for a campaign.

Today, we are going to look at the Barbarian. Over the next several entries, I'll go over the other core classes. I plan to lay out not just why the class is fun to play, but will also list the difficulty of playing a certain class, good race combinations, and various arch-types that you can use while playing the class. One other note, I will be using the Pathfinder versions of the various classes, since that is the rule set that that my group is currently using.

Baldur's Gate, Getting Hit by a Car and My Childhood

Yesterday, some interesting things happened.  The main one being the announcement of a Enhanced edition of Baldur's Gate I and II by a company called Overhaul Games.  I'm not going to go too much into what my thoughts are about the enhanced version today because today I just want to wax nostalgic about Baldur's Gate and how important it was to me in my formative years.  Oh yeah, and I got hit by a car while I was taking a walk.

Don't worry, it'll all tie together after the jump.

And now for something completely different

Today I'm going to give you guys a glimpse into a story I started.  This was written years ago, and it was mostly to serve as a background for Mantarok as a character in my table-top DnD game.   Then I kind of shelved it and created other characters I wanted to expand on.  The problem now is that almost all of those people are NPC's in my home-brew world and all current stories that I write take place in that world.  The next couple of entries you should consider as stand alone little tales.  I may incorporate them into actual canonical stories eventually, but for now just enjoy the story as-is.

Shiny New Toys!

So I created a couple of items for my game.  Some are generic magic items with just a lot of various abilities, but a couple are world specific artifacts or just powerful items that I figured I would share with you all today.

Timeline for the world of Therotan

So I've been working on a home-brew world for Dungeons and Dragons.  I'm hoping to eventually try to get it published, but for now I'm just running it for my tabletop game.  But I have put together a rough time-line for the history of the world.

Please keep in mind that this is a rough draft of the time-line, I may be changing or filling in more information as time goes on.  For now though, this is a pretty good idea of what I'm going for in my world.  All the stories that I've put up here about individual characters are set in this world, usually taking place in the timeline during the most recent era, Broodan.

Also included is a map of my world, with the current set up of countries and nations.  I know I don't get a lot of comments on here, but I am going to say that any comments (critical or otherwise) would be immensely helpful as I'm working on this project currently and would like to see it come through to fruition.  So please, leave a comment and enjoy!

My Top Favorite Monsters

Okay, so I've taken you through the first Monster Manual showing you all my favorite monsters.  However, there are four that I left out because they are just so damn cool and fun to run that I had to give them their own entry.  Seriously, if you ask my players they will tell you that I will almost always throw these monsters up against them.  They also will be ranked in order of awesomeness in my opinion.

Here are my top favorite monsters:

Monsters I Will Use Until I Die (Pt. 2)

Okay readers, I'm just going to dive right in and get to the fun monster mash!  I will only preface this with the statement that next week I will be posting my top three favorite monsters.  Then we will be going into the Bestiary series of monsters from the Pathfinder series.

Monsters I Will Use Until I Die

I know I've taken three posts up with complaints about really stupid monsters that Wizards of the Coast used for the 3.5 edition of Dungeons and Dragons.  But there are a lot of monsters that I do enjoy using, and usually I end up using them over and over because I just love them so damn much.

I'm going to list them here now...they aren't in a particular order other then alphabetical.  Though there are a few select favorites that I'll be putting in the next post after this one.  Now, I limited myself to just the first Monster Manual.  Not that there aren't any monsters that I love from the other books, I just have had the first one the longest and, damn it, most of the best are in it.  Also, I left out a lot of the really low CR monsters (such as goblins or kobolds) not because I don't use them, but just because you are kind of forced to use them at low levels.  And I do love me some goblins and kobolds...it just doesn't fit with the theme I was going for.

So here we go, my favorite monsters from Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 Edition!

Monsters I Don't Use 3

Cause I'm just so filled with hate I've got to go another book in.  Sorry for not posting this sooner, but I've been out for two weeks with some chimeric death plague that I got from work.  Got to love working in a place my doctor nicknames "Germs R Us".  So this post is a little late and I apologize.

I was going to also take some monsters from Monster Manual 4, but after looking through it I decided to skip it.  Seriously, most of the book is actually just ecology entries for monsters that they've already published in previous books.  And the monsters that are leftover doesn't give me enough to work with to make an effective list.  So I'm going to instead place my last 3.5 entry and give you some of my favorite monsters from the first Monster Manual.  I'll then be moving on to Pathfinder Bestiaries and their stupid monsters!  Yay!

But for now, enjoy the Monster Manual 3 and it's fail monsters!

10 Monsters I Don't Use (Monster Manual 2)

What is that?  Oh yes, it is more monsters I don't understand or don't care for.  As these books progress, these charts get relatively easier to fill.  By the next two, I may need to increase the size of the lists.  Oh well, sit back and enjoy reading my impotent nerd rage.

10 Monsters I Don't Use

So I decided to do another list!  Basically I was looking through the Monster Manuals and thinking, "Man, some of these are really dumb."  So I figured I would put them together for you to read.  I'm going to go through all the Monster Manuals for 3.5 1-4, then go through the Pathfinder Bestiary 1-3.  Now, this first one was a little hard cause for the most part the monsters in here are pretty well written and make sense.  Once I finish this series, I'm going to move onto the next feature of which monsters make no sense in terms of evolution and ecology.

For now, enjoy the list and feel free to comment or argue why a monster I included is the most important monster ever.

That Poor, Poor Protagonist Flash Fiction

 Well, I seem to fail at the whole 1000 words a day thing...but I do have my submission to the newest flash fiction challenge over at Terrible Minds.  This time the challenge was to torture your protagonist and I decided to focus on one of my favorite characters, Mantarok.  He is the main character in quite a few of the short stories I've written and this is just a little peek into what happened when he was a boy.  I hope it is sufficiently torturous for the challenge.

Tips for Infusing More Roleplaying in Your Games

So, yesterday I talked about roll-playing versus role-playing and my discontent with how modern gaming has kind of lent itself towards players sliding into simply roll-playing without much creativity.  One of the points I mentioned is of course that with older games, you had to be creative and imaginative (no lie, it even says it in the old white box rule book as a requirement) and in the newer systems you can rely more on using your dice rolls to get out of a spot.

This does not have to be the way.  Now, granted, if you are the kind of person who enjoys roll-play, I'm not saying there is anything wrong with that.  But if you are in a game that you feel lacks some sense of role-play, be you DM or player, I'm going to be offering up some tips to kind of help infuse your game with some more little bits of role-playing.  These can be put in to pretty much any game type, and can be used as much or as little as people feel comfortable using.

Tomb of Horrors, an Overview

Well, it is finished.  We killed the bad guy and got our treasure.  Though of course we know that it doesn't really end here, since there is "Return to the Tomb of Horrors".  Though apparently that one is only available to play in previous editions, though I heard rumor of a 4th edition version.  Which means I'll never play it since my current group hates 4th edition.  I'm a man who likes to hold out and actually play it before passing judgement.  Though I will say it's biggest detriment is of course in the fact that Wizards of the Coast has admitted that it is supposed to be a compromise between MMORPG's and table-top gaming.

More after the break!